Blériot, Louis

SUBJECT AREA: Aerospace

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b. 1 July 1872 Cambrai, France

d. 2 August 1936 Paris, France

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French aircraft manufacturer and pilot who in 1909 made the first flight across the English Channel in an aeroplane.

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Having made a fortune with his patented automobile lamp, Blériot started experimenting with model aircraft in about 1900. He tried a flapping-wing layout which, surprisingly, did fly, but a full-size version was a failure. Blériot tried out a wide variety of designs: a biplane float-glider built with Gabriel Voisin; a powered float-plane with ellipsoidal biplane wings; a canard (tail-first) monoplane; a tandem monoplane; and in 1907 a monoplane of conventional layout. This last was not an immediate success, but it led to the Type XI in which Blériot made history by flying from France to England on 25 July 1909.

Without a doubt, Blériot was an accomplished pilot and a successful manufacturer of aircraft, but he sometimes employed others as designers (a fact not made known at the time). It is now accepted that much of the credit for the design of the Type XI should go to Raymond Saulnier, who later made his name with the Morane-Saulnier Company.

Blériot-Aéronautique became one of the leading manufacturers of aircraft and by the outbreak of war in 1914 some eight hundred aircraft had been produced. By 1918, aircraft were being built at the rate of eighteen per day. The Blériot company continued to produce aircraft until it was nationalized in 1937.

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Principal Honours and Distinctions

Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur. Daily Mail £1,000 prize for the first cross-Channel aeroplane flight.

Further Reading

C.H.Gibbs-Smith, 1965, The Invention of the Aeroplane 1799–1909, London (contains a list of all Blériot's early aircraft).

J.Stroud, 1966, European Transport Aircraft since 1920, London (for information about Blériot's later aircraft).

For information relating to the cross-Channel flight, see: C.Fontaine, 1913, Comment Blériota traversé la, Manche, Paris.

T.D.Crouch, 1982, Blériot XI, the Story of a Classic Aircraft, Washington, DC: National Air \& Space Museum.

JDS