Charles Kingsford Smith and Those Magnificent Men (9 page)

One who watched from afar the stunning reaction to Blériot’s feat was the famous magician Harry Houdini, who decided on the instant that he needed to incorporate flying into his own shows. And if France was where Blériot was from, well, then that was where he would go to get lessons…

And still, the reaction to the Frenchman’s cross-Channel dash was just warming up! For as soon as both the thrust and the detail of the feat had spread across two lands, it really was
tout le monde
that was caught up in celebrating it. That, at least, was how it seemed to Blériot when, on his return from London the next day, he arrived at Gare du Nord station to find a stunning 100,000 wild Parisians waiting to cheer him to the echo. ‘
Vive Blériot!
’ they cried.’
VIVE Blériot!
’ There were so many people, and so much tumult, that the five goggle-eyed Blériot children who had been taken by their nanny to the station to meet their parents, simply couldn’t get near them.

Songs had been penned to Blériot’s greater glory, street peddlers were hawking his image, and the now great man was taken by open horse-drawn carriage up the Champs Elysées to another luncheon, where the Aéro-Club de France awarded him a gold medal.

Just two days later, Blériot was visiting the offices of the great French newspaper
Le Matin
—which had so overcome its scepticism of the previous year that it now had the successful aviator’s plane suspended outside its window for all the world to see—when the editor asked him if he would step out onto the balcony to greet the crowd gathered there to acclaim him. Blériot obliged, only to be near deafened by the almost aggressive,
hungry
roar of the multitude that sprang forth upon his first sight. There were people as far as the eye could see, along the boulevard, straining out of windows, clambering over the top of each other, just to get a better look at him. Roaring, and roaring, and roaring. On and on and on…

‘It’s too much,’ the bewildered Blériot murmured to the editor, his once sleepy moustache now wide awake and quivering. ‘Never, ever, not even the other day in London did I feel anything like this. It’s wonderful and it’s frightening…’
²³

Just what was going on? It was a question worth contemplating as he waved at the crowd, glancing a little at his frail plane, its fin now covered with the signatures of the English people who had been in front of Dover Castle that morning and had decided to leave their own mark on history…

Other men, most notably the Wright brothers, had already covered much greater distances than his 24 miles (flying off course added another few miles to the Channel crossing), and had stayed in the heavens for much longer than his mere thirty-seven minutes. And yet even the famously taciturn Wilbur Wright himself, when woken in the middle of the night by a reporter to be told of the news, had professed himself impressed, and thanked the reporter for telling him! Wilbur couldn’t resist, however, adding a rider: ‘Mr Blériot is very daring in his work, too daring, really, for flying. His feat is the greater when the machine he used is considered.’

Do you think it would have been less remarkable if he had used a Wright aeroplane, the reporter asked.

‘Well, of course,’ replied Wilbur. ‘We think we have the best aeroplane in the world.’
²⁴

Which was as may be, but the fact that Blériot had vaulted such a famed natural barrier between two countries in one magnificent hop had so totally captured the imagination of both populaces that it was felt nothing would ever be the same again, either for him, or the world.

And it never was.

Within a couple of months, a survey of French schoolboys found that the man they most admired, well ahead of someone called Napoleon Bonaparte, was Louis Blériot.
²⁵
Suddenly Blériot was awash in the money he needed to make a lot of planes, and the fame he needed to sell them.

As to forthcoming changes to the world, some of these were picked early by journalists rhapsodising over the significance of Blériot’s flight. Gaston Calmette in
Le Figaro
posed the question: ‘What will become of men’s laws, their customs, barriers, the vain efforts of their industrial protectionism, their commercial exchanges, their defences, their relation, their intercourse, on the day when man can, by the action of his will alone, pass in a few hours beyond all horizons across all the oceans and above all the rivers…? Within the foreseeable future, the conditions of human life will be profoundly changed…‘
²⁶

Even in faraway Italy—although now, suddenly, a lot less faraway than it had been before—an ambitious journalist by the name of Benito Mussolini wrote in a regional paper that there was only one word that could possibly sum up this new century: ‘
Moviménto
’. ‘Movement towards the icy solitudes of the poles and towards the virgin peaks of the mountains; movement towards the stars and towards the depths of the seas. Movement everywhere and acceleration in the rhythm of our lives…The dream of Icarus, the dream of all the generations, has become a reality.’
²⁷

In Australia, a keen observer of the leap forward made by aviation was George A. Taylor, the Hononary Secretary of the Aerial League of Australia, who, just two days after Blériot’s feat, wrote an appeal in the columns of the
Daily Telegraph
for greater effort to be made towards ‘the aerial defence of Australia’. Among other things he noted, ‘To England is credited the steam railway engine, to France belongs the honour of producing the automobile, to Australia belongs the credit of giving the world the key to the problem of flight, by inventing the aeroplane fifteen years ago, and leaving it for the rest of the world to develop.’
²⁸

As to Lawrence Hargrave, he made no public pronouncement, but was quietly thrilled at the progress that was being made in the field of aviation, and certainly felt a great deal of satisfaction. That satisfaction was lifted a few notches further when, at the Reims International Air Meet held in France, the star of the show was Henri Farman’s eponymously named
Henri Farman III
, which won the distance competition by flying 111.8 miles in three hours, four minutes, and fifty-six seconds using a 50-horsepower air-cooled Gnome Omega rotary engine, which owed its inspiration to the design of the rotary engine Hargrave had released into the public domain many years before. A veritable revolution in aviation had begun—and again, it had Hargrave’s name on it.

It was a pleasure to be back in Australia. It felt like home, and was home, even if young Chilla, whose language had not been fully formed when he went to Canada, had returned with an accent strong enough that the other kids would razz him a bit about it, not to mention his weird haircut, rather reminiscent of a Mohawk. No matter, it was just good to be home. On weekends and holidays the family would frequently go camping and sailing on the Hawkesbury River, with Chilla, particularly, delighting in how the wind, coming from any direction, could still propel them in almost any direction, just so long as you understood the way it worked…
²⁹

All Europe was now plane crazy. Newspapers seemed to cover little else. Science had become obsessed with understanding the laws of flight, while industry and then commerce had devoted themselves to first building flying machines and then refining them. Influential people within the establishment were agitating for Britain to develop a ‘navy of the air’, and similar movements were afoot in continental Europe, particularly France and Germany.

There were, yet, small hold-outs against all this aviation craziness. In a grand mansion in the thriving Dutch city of Haarlem, near Amsterdam, a heavily moustachioed man by the name of Herman Fokker had no doubt that the whole flying fad would pass and things would return to normal. In the meantime, he would be
damned
if he stood by and watched his wastrel son Anthony continue with his obsessive compulsion to build flying machines. For days on end, over months, and then
years
, Anthony had been in the family attic, building models of aeroplanes, devouring everything he could read about the Wrights and Blériot and
totally
wasting his time. The young man, who
Mijnheer
Fokker was sure would come to nothing, seemed to think of nothing else, talk of nothing else, do nothing else. He had even convinced himself that he knew better than some of the aircraft designers how a plane should be built—saying that, for starters, he felt the lateral stability of the Wright brothers’ plane could be vastly improved—and the precocious one had tried to demonstrate this fact to his father by virtue of his models! Well, Fokker the elder was having none of it. A practical man who had made his fortune carving out a coffee plantation in Java, he felt he had earned the right to enjoy his prosperous retirement, and wanted his son to head off into something useful in turn. He had hoped that young Anthony would grow out of his
idée fixe
, but if anything it had become worse all through his teen years until now when he was almost twenty. The boy was obsessed.

Within the British Empire, Fokker’s nearest equivalent was perhaps a young marine engineer by the name of Alliot Verdon Roe, who had also become fascinated by the mechanics of flight and was endlessly throwing paper gliders from a window in the top storey of the family home.

He did this so often that he eventually commanded the attention of an inmate in the mental hospital next door, who gravely informed his doctor, ‘I am afraid there’s another one like us in that house.’

When the doctor carefully informed him that he was mistaken, for that was a private home, the inmate was not put off.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve been watching that house. A man opens a top window and throws out a lot of bits of paper. Then he runs down into the garden and picks them up. And he keeps on for hours at a time!’
³⁰

Bother
Bess.

Ehrich Weiss, aka Harry Houdini, loved his young wife all right, but she never seemed to have the first clue about the kinds of pressures and strains that he was under. Or, if she did know, it didn’t seem to concern her unduly. In Paris, for example, just before they had left on the long voyage to Australia—where he intended to be the first man to fly a plane—he had spent all day, every day, out at the Voisin factory, getting the plane that he had purchased properly packed and put in a box, together with all the requisite spare parts, while she spent all her days amusing herself.

‘Bess out early and shopping,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Buys dresses and hats, happy as a lark, her trunks full to overflowing. She has no worries.’
³¹

And then, on the trip aboard the steamer to Australia, his wife had both drunk and danced up such a storm with the captain of the vessel during one of the interminable formal balls that she had collapsed, and Houdini had been obliged to carry her back to their cabin and put her to bed.

And where was Bess on this morning, the very morning he was to risk his life by attempting to be the first person to fly an aeroplane in Australia, at a place called Diggers Rest? Safe and sound, and no doubt asleep, back in Melbourne’s luxurious Hotel Windsor, 20 miles to the south-east. It was just the way things were between them. They had fallen in love at first sight, and been married within a week, but it hadn’t always been easy, least of all now.

But to work. Always to work…

The night before, Houdini had performed his magic show to a sold-out audience at the Melbourne New Opera House and had not got to bed until midnight. And yet, on this fine morning of 18 March 1910, he had risen well before dawn to be in this large flat paddock, talking to his French mechanic, Antonio Brassac—a man who had formerly been in the employ of none other than the great Blériot—just as the golden Australian sun began to appear.

The firm rule of flying at this point was that it was only safe to take off if the wind wasn’t strong enough to blow out a match. Nigh on three weeks earlier, on this very field, in his eagerness to be the first man aloft in Australia, an American by the name of Ralph C. Banks had ignored that rule and promptly crashed straight after take-off, but on this clear morning, for Houdini there was not a breath of wind and conditions seemed perfect.
³²

Houdini’s plane, a Voisin, looked remarkably like a couple of Lawrence Hargrave’s box kites of fifteen years earlier, for the simple reason that it was essentially just a larger version joined by thin struts, with an engine and propeller attached, atop five small wheels. In fact, so greatly did the Voisin brothers admire Lawrence Hargrave that their first commercially available aircraft had been christened
Le Hargrave
, and Houdini’s plane was simply a more refined version of this.

The small crowd of aviation enthusiasts who had been gathered for many days waiting for an attempt, now leaned respectfully closer to get a better look. The wings spanned 33 feet from tip to tip, with a ‘chord’—the width from the front of the wing to the back—of 6
¹
/
₂
feet, while the distance from the front of the plane to the back was just over 35 feet, the whole thing powered by a 60-horsepower ENV engine. Most interestingly, in terms of advances on previous aircraft, was that the Voisin brothers had made a leap forward from the Wright brothers’ system of ‘wing warping’ to bank left and right, and had installed the first primitive system of
ailerons
—‘little wings’, in French. By moving these ailerons up or down on the respective wings, Houdini could alter their shape and so make the wing rise or fall on the appropriate side.