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an Yorkshire, has since been made famous and sacred by the battles of the Marne and Verdun and a hundred other places. Of more value for the furtherance of the art than any of these individual exploits were the series of meetings which brought aviators together in friendly rivalry, to see and to be seen. The most notable of these meetings was also the first, the Champagne Week of Rheims, which was organized by the Marquis de Polignac, and was held, during the last week of August 1909, on the Betheny Plain, near Rheims. The number of spectators day by day was from forty to fifty thousand, and the gate-money taken during the week was about L35,000. Henri Farman, Hubert Latham, and Glenn Curtiss earned among them almost L6,000 in prizes. The Grand Prix de la Champagne for the flight of longest duration was won by Farman, who remained in the air, plodding steadily round the course, for more than three hours. He also won the passenger-carrying prize in a flight which carried two passengers round the ten-kilometre course in about ten minutes and a half. Latham gained the altitude prize by flying to a height of more than five hundred feet. The Gordon Bennett Cup, for the best speed over two rounds of the course, was won by Curtiss in fifteen minutes fifty and three-fifths seconds, with Bleriot only some five seconds behind him. There were many other prizes distributed among the more fortunate of the competitors. Perhaps the greatest gain of the meeting was that it did away with the notion that the aeroplane is a fair-weather toy. There was rain and storm, and Paulhan flew in a wind of twenty-five miles an hour. The meeting witnessed the first public success of the most famous (and most revolutionary) of aeroplane engines--the rotary Gnome engine, in which the cylinders rotate bodily round a fixed crank-shaft. This engine was built by the brothers Louis and Laurent Seguin, who had a small motor factory in Paris. Most of the regular aviators looked askance at it, but Seguin offered to instal it in a Voisin biplane of the box-kite pattern which had just been won as a prize by Louis Paulhan. In the result the old box-kite flew as never box-kite flew before, and produced a great impression at the Rheims meeting. The Gnome engine was also mounted by Henri Farman on one of the machines that he flew at Rheims, and by the solitary English competitor, Mr. G. B. Cockburn, who, according to Mr. Holt Thomas, was the first to use this engin
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