Le
Bris manipulated his levers to give the front edges of his wings a
downward angle, so that only the top surfaces should take the wing
pressure. Having got his balance, he obtained a lifting angle of
incidence on the wings by means of his levers, and released the hook
that secured the machine, gliding off over the quarry. On the glide he
met with the inevitable upward current of air that the quarry and the
depression in which it was situated caused; this current upset the
balance of the machine and flung it to the bottom of the quarry,
breaking it to fragments. Le Bris, apparently as intrepid as ingenious,
gripped the mast from which his levers were worked, and, springing
upward as the machine touched earth, escaped with no more damage than a
broken leg. But for the rebound of the levers he would have escaped even
this.

The interest of these experiments is enhanced by the fact that Le Bris
was a seafaring man who conducted them from love of the science which
had fired his imagination, and in so doing exhausted his own small
means. It was in 1855 that he made these initial attempts, and
twelve years passed before his persistence was rewarded by a public
subscription made at Brest for the purpose of enabling him to continue
his experiments. He built a second albatross, and on the advice of his
friends ballasted it for flight instead of travelling in it himself. It
was not so successful as the first, probably owing to the lack of human
control while in flight; on one of the trials a height of 150 ft. was
attained, the glider being secured by a thin rope and held so as to face
into the wind. A glide of nearly an eighth of a mile was made with the
rope hanging slack, and, at the end of this distance, a rise in the
ground modified the force of the wind, whereupon the machine settled
down without damage. A further trial in a gusty wind resulted in the
complete destruction of this second machine; Le Bris had no more
funds, no further subscriptions were likely to materialise, and so
the experiments of this first exponent of the art of gliding (save
for Besnier and his kind) came to an end. They constituted a notable
achievement, and undoubtedly Le Bris deserves a better place than has
been accorded him in the ranks of the early experimenters.

Contemporary with him was Charles Spencer, the first man to practice
gliding in England. His apparatus consisted of a pair of wings with a
total area of 30 sq. ft., to which a tail an