Dr. Hurlbutt notes a centenary

Posted on Saturday, July 25, 2009, at 7:20 am, by Dr. Allardyce Hurlbutt.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the first airplane flight across the English Channel. On July 25, 1909, French aviator Louis Blériot coaxed his fragile wood-and-canvas monoplane to cover the distance from Les Baraques, near Calais, to a field near Dover Castle (where it crash-landed) in under thirty-seven minutes.

In response, the Russian imperial secret police quickly formed a “Special Commission on the Means of Battling the Possible Implementation of Criminal Designs with the Assistance of Aeronautical Machines,” with an eye to thwarting air-minded revolutionary terrorists.

Source: Scott W. Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (Cambridge, 2006), 11, 15-16.

Comments (closed):

Karla wrote on August 21, 2009, at 11:08 am:

Blériot was much celebrated by French avant-garde artists, however!