d developed a machine
of the monoplane type, with a long tail. But he was too far from the
resources of Paris, and when, on the 13th of January 1908, Henri Farman
overtook his records and won the Deutsch-Archdeacon prize for a flight
of one kilometre in a closed circuit, Santos Dumont lost his leading
position in the world of aviation, after a brief and meteoric career
which has stamped his name on history.

During these early years the Voisin brothers had the foresight and
wisdom to put themselves wholly at the service of others. The promise of
flight had taken hold of many minds in France and there was no lack of
inventors and would-be inventors who wished to test their own ideas and
to have machines built to their own designs. If the Voisins had refused
to gratify them, these clients would have disappeared; and the work done
for them, though much of it was done in the old blind alleys of
horizontal elevating airscrews and wing-flapping machines, yet had this
advantage, that it kept the workshop active and made it self-supporting.
Inventors are a difficult and jealous people; they received every
indulgence from the Voisins. The machines built for them were named
after them, though most of the skill and experience that went to the
making came from the factory. In the same way M. Archdeacon gave up all
practical experiment after 1905 and was content to play the part of the
good genius of aviation, presiding at the Aero Club, offering prizes for
new achievements, bringing inventors together and encouraging the
exchange of ideas. The rapidity of French progress was not a little due
to this self-effacing and social instinct, so characteristic of the
French spirit, which kept the patron and the engineers in the
background, and brought order and progress out of the chaos of personal
rivalry.

Progress was slow at first. The experiments made in 1906 by Bleriot in
conjunction with the Voisins were made, for safety, on the water of the
Lake of Enghien, but it proved impossible to get up sufficient speed on
the water to rise into the air. In 1907 a greater success attended the
experiments made at Vincennes, at Bagatelle, and at Issy-les-Moulineaux,
where Henri Farman had obtained permission to use the army manoeuvre
ground and had built himself a hangar, or shed, for his aeroplane. On
the 30th of March, at Bagatelle, the Delagrange aeroplane made a flight
of sixty metres. A few months later, Farman, on a similar machine fitted