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The main results of the day were that the Comte de Lambert flew 30 kilometres in 29 minutes 2 seconds; Lefebvre made the ten-kilometre circle of the track in just a second under 9 minutes, while Tissandier did it in 9 1/4 minutes, and Paulhan reached a height of 230 feet.
Paulhan calls writers of this type rich in the prédominance des sensations visuelles. Disconnected by his constant abuse of the dash he must have studied Poe not too wisely infinitesimal strokes of colour supplying the place of a large-moulded syntax, this prose has not unity, precision, speed, euphony.
It was purely a case of engine failure, for, with full power, he would have passed over Paulhan just as the latter was preparing for the restart. Taking into consideration the two machines, there is little doubt that Grahame White showed the greater flying skill, although he lost the prize.
Punch offered a similar sum to the first man who should swim the Atlantic and also for the first flight to Mars and back within a week, but in the spring of 1910 Claude Grahame White and Paulhan, the famous French pilot, entered for the 183 mile run on which the prize depended. Both these competitors flew the Farman biplane with the 50 horse-power Gnome motor as propulsive power.
On the next day, Paulhan on his Voisin biplane took the air with Latham, and Fournier followed, only to smash up his machine by striking an eddy of wind which turned him over several times.
The first L10,000 prize was offered in November, 1906, for a flight by aeroplane from London to Manchester in twenty-four hours, with not more than two stoppages en route. In 1910 two competitors entered the lists for the flight; one, an Englishman, Mr. Claude Grahame-White; the other, a Frenchman, M. Paulhan. Mr.
Chief among the competitors were Henry Farman, who took the distance prize, Rougier, Paulhan, and Latham, who, by a flight in a high wind, convinced the British public that the theory that flying was only possible in a calm was a fallacy. A meeting at Doncaster was practically simultaneous with the Blackpool week; Delagrange, Le Blon, Sommer, and Cody were the principal figures in this event.
It was not until July 18th of 1909 that the first European height record deserving of mention was put up by Paulhan, who achieved a height of 450 feet on a Voisin biplane. This preceded Latham's first attempt to fly the Channel by two days, and five days later, on the 25th of the month, Bleriot made the first Channel crossing.
The British War Office, by the end of the year, had bought two machines, a military type Farman and a Paulhan, ignoring British experimenters and aeroplane builders of proved reliability. These machines, added to an old Bleriot two-seater, appear to have constituted the British aeroplane fleet of the period.
White knew that his only chance of catching Paulhan was to make a flight in the darkness, and though this was extremely hazardous he arose from a small field in the early morning, some hours before daybreak arrived, and flew to the north.
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