ng him with thirteen as the number of his machine, experienced
his usual bad luck and came to earth through engine trouble after a very
short flight. Captain Ferber, who, owing to military regulations, always
flew under the name of De Rue, came out next with his Voisin biplane,
but failed to get off the ground; he was followed by Lefebvre on a
Wright biplane, who achieved the success of the morning by rounding the
course--a distance of six and a quarter miles--in nine minutes with a
twenty mile an hour wind blowing. His flight finished the morning.

Wind and rain kept competitors out of the air until the evening, when
Latham went up, to be followed almost immediately by the Comte de
Lambert. Sommer, Cockburn (the only English competitor), Delagrange,
Fournier, Lefebvre, Bleriot, Bunau-Varilla, Tissandier, Paulhan,
and Ferber turned out after the first two, and the excitement of the
spectators at seeing so many machines in the air at one time provoked
wild cheering. The only accident of the day came when Bleriot damaged
his propeller in colliding with a haycock.

The main results of the day were that the Comte de Lambert flew 30
kilometres in 29 minutes 2 seconds; Lefebvre made the ten-kilometre
circle of the track in just a second under 9 minutes, while Tissandier
did it in 9 1/4 minutes, and Paulhan reached a height of 230 feet. Small
as these results seem to us now, and ridiculous as may seem enthusiasm
at the sight of a few machines in the air at the same time, the Rheims
Meeting remains a great event, since it proved definitely to the whole
world that the conquest of the air had been achieved.

Throughout the week record after record was made and broken. Thus on
the Monday, Lefebvre put up a record for rounding the course and Bleriot
beat it, to be beaten in turn by Glenn Curtiss on his Curtiss-Herring
biplane. On that day, too, Paulhan covered 34 3/4 miles in 1 hour 6
minutes. On the next day, Paulhan on his Voisin biplane took the air
with Latham, and Fournier followed, only to smash up his machine by
striking an eddy of wind which turned him over several times. On the
Thursday, one of the chief events was Latham's 43 miles accomplished in
1 hour 2 minutes in the morning and his 96.5 miles in 2 hours 13 minutes
in the afternoon, the latter flight only terminated by running out of
petrol. On the Friday, the Colonel Renard French airship, which had
flown over the ground under the pilotage of M. Kapfarer, paid Rheim