Blériot and Gabriel Voisin had built a flying machine aiming at winning the prize. Their machine presented an elliptical wing and a pair of trapezoidal ones. After some takeoff attempts, their flying machine was damaged. Dumont then initiated the takeoff run but damaged the landing gear. After repairing the 14bis, Dumont made six increasingly successful flights. One of these flights was 21.4-s long within a 220m path at a height of 6m, attained after taking off against the wind (Fig. 9).
Santos-Dumont had shown the world that the dream of a long-range powered flight could be a reality. In 1907 many aviation enthusiasts and experimenters tried to build on his achievement. Few of them, however, met with much success. Among them were Adolf de Pischof, Louis Blériot, and Romanian Trajan Vuia. Meanwhile, Paul Cornu and the Breguet brothers experimented with helicopter designs. In Britain, Horatio Philips got (briefly) airborne in a machine with four sets of wings, Samuel Cody began the construction of a biplane for the Army, and John Dunne was commissioned by the Government to design an airplane in secrecy. The most successful aircraft of 1907 was one made by the brothers Charles and Gabriel Voisin, now running a plant for airplane manufacturing. The FlightGlobal (1909a) stated: “The Voisin brothers and their engineer and works manager M. Colliex make no secret of the fact that they have based their work on that of pioneers such as Lilienthal, Langley, and others, and in fact they say that they never miss an opportunity of utilizing an information or data on which that can lay hands.”
A biplane elevator at the front was based on the Hargrave boxkite construction, and it carried a huge square tail assembly at the rear. Power was provided by the 50-hp Antoinette engine. It was a crude and heavy machine with no control in roll at all, but it was capable of staying in the air for several seconds at a time, and on this basis the brothers set up a workshop to its manufacture. In the summer of 1907, their third production machine was ordered by Henry Farman.
Henry Farman was bom in 1873. Henry trained as a painter at the Ecole des Beaux Artes, but quickly become obsessed with the new mechanical inventions that were rapidly appearing at the end of the 19th century. Since the Farmans were well-off, he was able to pursue this interest as an amateur sportsman, Farman had a natural flair for getting the feeling of a piece of machinery, and enjoyed considerable success. In the 1890s, he became a championship cyclist, and at the turn of the century he discovered motor racing. Driving Panhard cars he came fifth in the Paris-Berlin road race of 1901, and won the Paris-Vienna in 1902. With his mechanic, he covered the 615 miles (990 km) to the Austrian capital in just 16 hours along unmade roads. Farman himself became a casualty of the sport when he was involved in a serious accident. He fully recovered, but the experience destroy ed his enthusiasm for cars, Nevertheless, his fascination with machinery endured, He was aware of the Voisin float-glider experiments on the Seine during 1905/06, and he had flown in balloons before with his brother, Richard. When the Voisins began to produce a powered airplane for sale in 1907, he was one of their first customers. He made his first flight at the end of September and, displaying his usual sure feel for machines, was soon able to stay in the air longer than anyone else. On October 26, he flew for 771 m at Issy. For this flight, he won a cup sponsored by Ernest Archdeacon of the Aéro-Club. By early November, Farman was coaxing tums out of the Voisin, despite it being built without any roll control. This meant that all tums were a delicate skid round on rudder alone. If the outside wing picked up too much airspeed, it would rise, and if the tum was persisted in, the plane would be in danger of side-slipping into the ground lower wing first. Farman incorporated a number of modifications of his own to the Voisin during the autumn, including a reduction in the size of the tail surfaces, removing one of the forward elevators, and rigging a slight dihedral angle into the wings. Thus, the Voisin-Farman I became the Voisin-Farman I-bis. It was clear to members of the Aéro-Club that Farman would soon attempt to win the last and largest Archdeacon prize, the so-called Grand Prix of Aviation. This comprised a purse of 50,000 francs (of which half had been contributed by oil magnate Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe), for the first aviator who could fly to a marker 1,000 m.
After several successful flights of a kilometer in a closed circle made during the last few days of 1907, in which Farman managed to cover this distance, though not without the wheels of his machine lightly touching the ground at one or two places, M. Henri Farman finally, on January 11, at last made two unofficial flights without touching the ground except at the take-off and landing. Two days later (on Monday, January 13) before the officials of the Aéro-Club de France, he repeated this performance for a third time, and won the Deutsch-Archdeacon prize of 50,000 francs (USS10,000) for the first flight by a heavier-than-air machine of one kilometer in a losed circuit. The weather was perfect, there being practically no wind and the air was clear and mild. The flight was made above the parade
