Blériot crosses the Channel
In 1908 the London Daily Mail offered a prize of one thousand pounds to the first person to fly across the English Channel. Several competitors prepared machines on the French coast near Calais. One of them was Louis Blériot, an engineer who had made a fortune by selling car headlamps and had spent most of it on aircraft.
Blériot's Type XI was a small monoplane with a three-cylinder engine of about 25 horsepower. At dawn on 25 July 1909 he took off from the coast near Calais. He had burned his foot on the exhaust a few days earlier and flew with a crutch in the cabin.
Without a compass
He had no compass. For a few minutes in mid-Channel he was out of sight of land on both sides. He found the cliffs of Dover, was blown off course, and made a rough landing in a field near the castle. The crossing took about thirty-six minutes.
The flight made Blériot famous overnight, and he received orders for more than a hundred aircraft within weeks. It also startled the British press, who had long assumed that the Channel protected the island. The aircraft is preserved in Paris at the Musée des Arts et Métiers.