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