Technology and Time

On the northern tip of France you can find the celebrated town of Calais, the point where France and England are closest to each other. On the morning of July 25, 1909, the only way a man could go from one to the other was by boat. Gale force winds ripped along the channel (la manche), as they had done for several days.

In December of the previous year, Wilbur Wright had demonstrated the impossible: not only heavier-than-air flight, but a mastery of it. At Auvours in a public demonstration, he had flown for more than two hours, showing turns, banks, figure-eights, the whole conquête-de-l’air bit in his Wright flyer.

And only a few weeks earlier, the French-Englishman Hubert Latham had attempted to fly from the cliffs of Sangatte in his attempt to pilot a French Antionette across the channel. But his engine was not up to the task, and he had to be fished out.

Louis Blériot, a stocky, brush-bearded Frenchman, had quickly set up camp in a small farm near Sanglatte cliffs. Despite a painful injury to his ankle (received during a crash from a recent flight), Blériot arose at 2:00 am on the 25th on the advice of a member of his team. He took off in his Bleriot XI at around 4:00am, disappearing into the Channel fog.

Around thirty minutes and forty kilometers later, Blériot spotted a French flag violently waving in the wind, held by a journalist friend. Although not exactly a miracle of navigation (his route, pictured below, from the French newspaper L’Illusion), Blériot had done what no one else had : flown over a major body of water.

Technologically, I suppose one could remark that the flight was made with a monoplane, although they were fairly common at the time. Latham’s Antoinette was also a monoplane. We’ve already seen that it was almost sheer luck that Blériot found the port at Douvres.The crossing set neither a speed, nor distance, nor flying time record.

What it did do was cause a huge psychological reaction. Blériot was, after all, quintessentially French and gave France what it thought was a well-deserved victory in aviation history. (Latham held both French and English passports and was the inheritor of a large [British] family fortune). The world was upside down, as evidenced by this picture. Man could fly, birds could not.

Although tensions between France and Germany were up and down at the time, the flight reminded England that it was no longer the island nation it once was. A new technology linked the two countries in a new way.

I first discovered the following cartoon in a book that appeared two weeks after Blériot’s flight. At first glance, it seemed quite silly to me.

That’s the British army, defending its shores with giant boat- and land-mounted fans, trebuchet- and individual-sized bellows carried by soldiers. Now that we have a century’s worth of experience (read:wars), fighting off an aerial invasion with wind currents is obviously naive.

But thinking back on it now, I realize that it’s me that’s got the narrow view. I’m the one with the experience and the 20/200 hindsight.

When Blériot crossed the channel, airplanes were still made of wood. They were covered in fabric which was varnished to make it air-tight.They were lubricated with rincin (=vegetable) oil.

Biplanes were the rule of the day because they had to be : the engines were not particularly good, so needed lots more wing area to produce lift. Wire supports were still de rigeur. And even with two wings, the pilot had to take off and land at terrific speeds. Wings, wire, engine, pilot, even bicycle chains in many models, produced a lot of drag. The safest airplane in those days was, generously, a deathtrap. Small gusts could topple them at any time.

So maybe it wasn’t so crazy that one could think man-made air could topple a man-made aircraft. The technology is old and well-known now, but it wasn’t then.

Remember that when you hear new ideas. We’re still in the infancy of so much : Youtube is from 2005. How these things will appear in a hundred years, I don’t think anyone can predict. I wouldn’t have predicted my iPhone before I saw it.

I am, however, quite fortunate to work at a company that gives me the breathing room to puff a little air once in a while.