ert Latham, in his Antoinette monoplane, attempted this
flight on the 19th of July from the neighbourhood of Calais, but the
failure of his sparking plugs brought him down on to the water about six
miles from the French coast, where he was picked up by his accompanying
destroyer. He was preparing another attempt when Louis Bleriot, suddenly
arriving at Calais, anticipated him. At half-past four on the morning of
Sunday, the 25th of July, Bleriot rose into the air on his monoplane,
furnished with an Anzani engine of twenty-five horse-power, and headed
for Dover. He flew without map or compass, and soon out-distanced the
French destroyer which had been appointed to escort him. For ten minutes
he lost sight of all land, but he corrected his course by observing the
steamers below him, and landed in the Northfall meadow behind Dover
Castle after a flight of forty minutes. Two other newspaper prizes, one
of ten thousand pounds offered by the London _Daily Mail_ for a flight
from London to Manchester, in three stages, the other of ten thousand
dollars offered by the New York _World_ for a flight from Albany to New
York, were won in 1910. The first of these flights was attempted on the
24th of April by an Englishman, Claude Grahame-White, who flew a Farman
biplane, but was compelled by engine trouble to descend near Lichfield,
where his machine was damaged by wind in the night. Three days later
Louis Paulhan, also mounted on a Farman biplane, covered the whole
distance to Manchester in something over four hours, with only one
landing. Paulhan had first learned to fly in July 1909; Grahame-White
had obtained his pilot's certificate from the French Aero Club as late
as December 1909. The flight of a hundred and twenty miles from Albany
to New York, down the Hudson river, was achieved on the 29th of May in
two hours and thirty-two minutes by Glenn H. Curtiss, one of the most
distinguished of American pioneers. Later on in 1910 a prize of a
hundred thousand francs was offered by the Paris newspaper, the _Matin_,
for what was called the _Circuit de l'Est_, a voyage from Paris and back
by way of Troyes, Nancy, Mezieres, Douai, and Amiens, a distance of four
hundred and eighty-eight miles, to be completed in six stages, on
alternate days, from the 7th of August to the 17th of August. This
competition was won by Wilbur Wright's pupil, Alfred Leblanc, on a
Bleriot monoplane. The eastern part of this circuit, a territory not
much larger th