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There was Farman's mile, there was the flight of the Comte de Lambert over the Eiffel Tower, Latham's flight at Blackpool in a high wind, the Rheims records, and then Henry Farman's flight of four hours later in 1909, Orville Wright's height record of 1,640 feet, and Delagrange's speed record of 49.9 miles per hour.
The launching skids of the Wright biplane gave place to wheels on Farman's machine. One great advantage, however, possessed by the early Wright biplane over its French rivals, was in its greater general efficiency. The power of the engine was only about one-half of the power required in certain of the French designs.
The Voisin biplane is fashioned after the manner of a box kite and therefore presents vertical surfaces to the air. Farman's machine has no vertical surfaces, but there are hinged wing tips to the outer rear-edges of its surfaces, for use in turning and balancing. He also has a combination of wheels and skids or runners for starting and landing.
THE FARMAN AILERONS. Farman's disposition is somewhat different, as shown in sketch 3. The wings are hinged to the upper planes at their rear edges, and near the extremities of the planes. Operating wires lead to a lever within reach of the aviator, and, by this means, the wings are held at any desired angle, or changed at will.
In October of that year he flew the machine from Toury to Artenay and returned on it this was just a day after Farman's first cross-country flight but, trying to repeat the success five days later, Bleriot collided with a tree in a fog and wrecked the machine past repair.
His attitude was that the flight was something, yet not a great deal, and that very much more remained to be done; a perfectly right and proper attitude, one which was just as it should be, yet one encountered very rarely under such circumstances human nature being what it is. Farman's patience, his perseverance, were in the very early days what gave him his first success.
Farman's world record, which won the Grand Prix de Champagne, was done with a Gnome Rotary Motor which had only been run on the test bench and was fitted to his machine four hours before he started on the great flight. His propeller had never been tested, having only been completed the night before.
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