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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
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