umont and Vedrines, both of whom scorned weather conditions in their
determination to win. Beaumont made the distance in a flying time of
22 hours 28 minutes 19 seconds, and Vedrines covered the journey in
a little over 23 1/2 hours. Valentine came third on a Deperdussin
monoplane and S. F. Cody on his Cathedral biplane was fourth. This was
in 1911, and by that time heavier-than-air flight had so far advanced
that some pilots had had war experience in the Italian campaign in
Tripoli, while long cross-country flights were an everyday event, and
bad weather no longer counted.

XVII. A SUMMARY, TO 1911

There is so much overlapping in the crowded story of the first years
of successful power-driven flight that at this point it is advisable to
make a concise chronological survey of the chief events of the period of
early development, although much of this is of necessity recapitulation.
The story begins, of course, with Orville Wright's first flight of 852
feet at Kitty Hawk on December 19th, 1903. The next event of note was
Wright's flight of 11.12 miles in 18 minutes 9 seconds at Dayton,
Ohio, on September 26th, 1905, this being the first officially recorded
flight. On October 4th of the same year, Wright flew 20.75 miles in 33
minutes 17 seconds, this being the first flight of over 20 miles ever
made. Then on September 14th 1906, Alberto Santos-Dumont made a
flight of eight seconds on the second heavier-than-air machine he had
constructed. It was a big box-kite-like machine; this was the second
power-driven aeroplane in Europe to fly, for although Santos-Dumont's
first machine produced in 1905 was reckoned an unsuccessful design, it
had actually got off the ground for brief periods. Louis Bleriot came
into the ring on April 5th, 1907, with a first flight of 6 seconds on a
Bleriot monoplane, his eighth but first successful construction.

Henry Farman made his first appearance in the history of aviation with a
flight of 935 feet on a Voisin biplane on October 15th 1907. On October
25th, in a flight of 2,530 feet, he made the first recorded turn in
the air, and on March 29th, 1908, carrying Leon Delagrange on a Voisin
biplane, he made the first passenger flight. On April 10th of this
year, Delagrange, in flying 1 1/2 miles, made the first flight in Europe
exceeding a mile in distance. He improved on this by flying 10 1/2 miles
at Milan on June 22nd, while on July 8th, at Turin, he took up Madame
Peltier, the first wo