unds of cheering and restored the crowd to
good humour. Possibly the smash achieved by Rougier, the famous racing
motorist, who crashed his Voisin biplane after Delagrange had made his
circuit, completed the enjoyment of the spectators. Delagrange, flying
at Argentan in June of 1909, made a flight of four kilometres at a
height of sixty feet; for those days this was a noteworthy performance.
Contemporary with this was Hubert Latham's flight of an hour and seven
minutes on an Antoinette monoplane; this won the adjective 'magnificent'
from contemporary recorders of aviation.

Viewing the work of the little group of French experimenters, it is,
at this length of time from their exploits, difficult to see why
they carried the art as far as they did. There was in it little of
satisfaction, a certain measure of fame, and practically no profit--the
giants of those days got very little for their pains. Delagrange's
experience at the opening of the Juvisy ground was symptomatic of the
way in which flight was regarded by the great mass of people--it was a
sport, and nothing more, but a sport without the dividends attaching
to professional football or horse-racing. For a brief period, after the
Rheims meeting, there was a golden harvest to be reaped by the best of
the pilots. Henry Farman asked L2,000 for a week's exhibition flying in
England, and Paulhan asked half that sum, but a rapid increase in
the number of capable pilots, together with the fact that most flying
meetings were financial failures, owing to great expense in organisation
and the doubtful factor of the weather, killed this goose before many
golden eggs had been gathered in by the star aviators. Besides, as
height and distance records were broken one after another, it became
less and less necessary to pay for entrance to an aerodrome in order to
see a flight--the thing grew too big for a mere sports ground.

Long before Rheims and the meeting there, aviation had grown too big for
the chronicling of every individual effort. In that period of the first
days of conquest of the air, so much was done by so many whose names
are now half-forgotten that it is possible only to pick out the great
figures and make brief reference to their achievements and the machines
with which they accomplished so much, pausing to note such epoch-making
events as the London-Manchester flight, Bleriot's Channel crossing,
and the Rheims meeting itself, and then passing on beyond the days of