Calais to Dover (WHTM) — The very first heavier-than-air flight, on December 1903, covered a total of 180 feet. Six years later airplanes, aeroplanes, or avions, were traveling miles at a time-and prize were being offered to daring pilots who could push their primitive aircraft to ever greater distances.

In 1908 the British newspaper The Daily Mail offered a prize of £1,000 (about £83,108.01 today) for the first person to successfully fly across the English Channel. French aviator Louis Blériot accepted the challenge.

Louis Charles Joseph Blériot  (1872-1936) was not only a pioneering pilot, but a pioneering engineer and inventor. He devised the first working automobile headlight and used the profits from manufacturing them to bankroll his interest in aircraft. From around 1905 to 1909 he worked his way through a series of aircraft designs, some of which worked reasonably well, and some of which almost killed him. Along the way, he invented the combination of a joystick controlled by hands and arms, combined with foot pedals to control the rudder, which is used in airplanes to this day.

By 1909 he had designed a reliable aircraft (at least for the times)-The Blériot XI. With wide wings and a long tail section, it looked somewhat like a giant dragonfly. It was powered by a three-cylinder engine built by the Anzani Company, which could generate 25 horsepower, giving the airplane a maximum speed of about 47 mph.

The rules of the prize were that the flight had to be made between sunrise and sunset. On July 25th, 1909 at 4:41 a.m.-precisely at sunrise-Blériot took off from a site near Calais. Escorting him was a destroyer, the Escopette, on which Blériot’s wife was traveling. But the airplane quickly overtook the ship and cruised ahead-just as visibility deteriorated. With no ship to guide him and no compass, he started to drift to the east. Fortunately, the weather cleared, he spotted the English coast and was able to correct course to bring him to Dover, ultimately landing at Dover castle, having traveled a distance of 22 miles in about 36 minutes.

(The touchdown was one of those “any landing you can walk away from is a good one” affairs. Wind gusts caused him to “pancake” into the ground, breaking a propeller blade and damaging the undercarriage.)

The success of the crossing made the Blériot XI one of the most popular airplanes of the time. Hundreds were purchased by private owners and the military of many different companies. They stayed in use well into World War One.

The Blériot XI that made the crossing is preserved at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. At this point only two of the original planes are still flying, one in Great Britain, and one at the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome in New York. (The one in Rhinebeck is undergoing some restoration work as of this writing.) A number of replicas have been built over the years.

And in 1927 Louis Charles Joseph Blériot was at Le Bourget field near Paris to greet Charles Lindbergh when he became the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic from New York to Paris.