Flying the Atlantic : 401 



In 1906 the French secured an option to purchase a Wright machine 

 and in this year also Santos-Dumont and other European aviators 

 began making first flights in machines o£ their own design. Bleriot 

 completed his first monoplane in 1907. 



The Wright brothers were continuing to extend the power of their 

 machine and the range of their flights. Interest in Europe had 

 mounted to such a point that Wilbur Wright sailed for Europe in May 

 of 1907 to demonstrate an airplane and to complete contracts with 

 Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany. 



By 1908 the United States government had relented. Orville Wright, 

 in September, staged a demonstration at Fort Meyer, Virginia, 

 making a flight of forty-five miles. A few months later Wilbur Wright 

 at LeMans in France extended the record to seventy-seven miles. This 

 was spectacular for a heavier-than-air machine, but at the same time 

 Count Zeppelin took one of his dirigibles on a flight across the Alps 

 to Italy for a distance of 235 miles and then returned safely to his 

 base. Thus, already there was a competition for public attention and 

 confidence between the two alternative methods of air travel that 

 were finally to compete for the honor of making the first transatlantic 

 crossing. 



The next few years were critical and were of great importance in 

 the history of aviation. Encouraged by the success of the Wright 

 brothers, many inventors and aviation enthusiasts who had been se- 

 cretly nursing the notion to fly began translating their dream into 

 new forms of planes and motors. Many new forms of planes were 

 developed. There was a hot contest between those who believed in the 

 biplane and those who believed in the monoplane and there were 

 experiments with triplanes and other strange devices. 



Many new fliers developed and a number of these began developing 

 their own style of ship. In France there was Henri Farman, Breguet, 

 Bleriot and Voisin. Even Santos-Dumont, who had started out in 

 the dirigibles, became a plane enthusiast and designed a little parasol 

 of a monoplane which was so small and handy that he could fly it 

 around the streets of Paris. 



In America Glenn Curtiss, at Hammondsport, New York, was 

 experimenting in the fields with a new form of plane he called the 

 "June bug" and on the lake he was developing another form that 

 would rise from water. W. Starling Burgess turned his attention from 

 designing yachts long enough to design some new planes. Many were 

 taking to the air; there was Loughhead, Glenn Martin, the Stinsons 

 and many others. Some of these learned from the Wright brothers 



