25th July: Louis Bleriot's flight

This date in 1909 saw Louis Blériot's historic flight across the English Channel.

1. It wasn't done for the sheer pleasure of being the first person to do it - there was Money involved. The Daily Mail had offered a prize of £1,000 to the first person to fly over the Channel, in either direction. The prize money had originally been £500, offered in October 1908 to anyone who performed this feat by the end of the year. When the end of the year came and nobody had done it they doubled the prize and extended the deadline to the end of 1909.
2. Whether it was the extra money or simply because nobody wanted to attempt it in winter, this move aroused more interest. Blériot wasn't the only person who said he would try. There were others: Hubert Latham, who was the bookie's favourite to win; Charles de Lambert, a Russian aristocrat with French ancestry - one of Wilbur Wright's pupils, and Arthur Seymour, an Englishman. De Lambert got as far as establishing a base at Wissant, near Calais, but Seymour did nothing beyond submitting his entry to the Daily Mail.
3. Lord Northcliffe, who had offered the prize money, was hoping Wilbur Wright himself would do it and take the prize. Wilbur did in fact want to have a go, but was advised by his brother Orville, who was recovering from injuries sustained in a crash, not to do it without his help. In the end, both brothers decided that the prize money wasn't worth the effort or the risk.
4. Louis Blériot's day job before he got into flying was making car headlamps. In fact, he had developed the world's first practical headlamp for automobiles and was supplying them to the biggest car manufacturers of the day.
5. Blériot's most serious rival for the prize was Hubert Latham. Latham almost did it, too. On the 19 July he actually took off from Calais and would have won if his plane had not developed engine trouble six miles off the coast of England. He did, however, gain the distinction of being the first pilot to land a plane in the sea.
6. Blériot's historic flight started very early. After several days when it was too windy to make an attempt, the wind began to drop in the evening of 25 July. His friend Alfred Leblanc was too excited to sleep that night and was up at 2am assessing the weather. He woke Blériot, who at first was pessimistic, but soon came to agree that conditions were favourable enough (after he'd had a cup of coffee, maybe). At 4.15 he made a test flight, but since the rules stated the flight had to be made between sunrise and sunset, he had to wait until 4.41, after sunrise, to set off.
7. He didn't really know where he was going. He didn't have a Compass, and it's alleged that before he took off he shouted down from the cockpit, "Where is England?" At first, he simply followed the ship, the destroyer Escopette, which was escorting the flight, and bringing his wife Alice across the Channel. However, he soon overtook the ship and was flying in poor visibility. “for more than 10 minutes I was alone, isolated, lost in the midst of the immense sea, and I did not see anything on the horizon or a single ship”, he said afterwards. When the mist cleared, and he could see England, he found he'd been blown off course and had to change direction.
8. He hadn't exactly figured out where he was going to land. Unlike Latham, he hadn't been to Dover himself to check out possible landing sites. Charles Fontaine, the correspondent from Le Matin, had gone ahead and chosen a spot - so Blériot had to fly along the coast until he could see Fontaine on the ground, waving a French Flag.
9. Blériot flew at around 45 mph (72 km/h) and an altitude of about 250 ft (76 m), and the crossing took 36 minutes and 30 seconds.
10. He landed in Northfall Meadow, near Dover Castle. It was a crash landing as he'd cut the engines at 20m (66 ft). The undercarriage was damaged and one blade of the propeller was shattered, but Blériot was unhurt. Today the spot is marked by a granite outline of the aircraft in the turf.