Background
Louis Blériot was born to Clémence and Charles Blériot in Cambrai, July 1, 1872.
Louis Blériot was born to Clémence and Charles Blériot in Cambrai, July 1, 1872.
In 1882, aged 10, Blériot was sent as a boarder to the Institut Notre Dame in Cambrai, where he frequently won class prizes, including one for engineering drawing. When he was 15, he moved on to the Lycée at Amiens, where he lived with an aunt. After passing the exams for his baccalaureate in science and German, he determined to try to enter the prestigious École Centrale in Paris. Entrance was by a demanding exam for which special tuition was necessary: consequently Blériot spent a year at the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris. He passed the exam, placing 74th among the 243 successful candidates, and doing especially well in the tests of engineering drawing ability. After three years of demanding study at the École Centrale, Blériot graduated 113th of 203 in his graduating class. He then embarked on a term of compulsory military service, and spent a year as a sub-lieutenant in the 24th Artillery Regiment, stationed in Tarbes in the Pyrenees.
After experimenting with a flapping-wing design from 1900 to 1903, he built a glider and several experimental airplanes, each better than the preceding one. Blériot held the first aviator's certificate issued by the International Aeronautic Federation. He concentrated upon monoplanes after 1906, and piloted his Blériot XI monoplane, powered by a three-cylinder Anzani engine, across the English Channel from Calais to Dover on July 25, 1909, winning the £1, 000p Daily Mail prize offered by Lord Northcliffe for this flight. His monoplanes were among the most advanced available. The swivel-wheel crosswind landing gear was standard equipment on Bleriot airplanes until about 1912. During World War I his plant built ten thousand airplanes for the French Army, including the famous Spad fighter. Bleriot produced many military and civil airplanes and seaplanes up to 1935, when his manufacturing business was closed. He died in Paris, France, on August 2, 1936.
In October 1900 Blériot was lunching in his usual restaurant near his showroom when his eye was caught by a young woman lunching with her parents. That evening, he told his mother "I saw a young woman today. I will marry her, or I will marry no one. " A bribe to a waiter secured details of her identity; she was Alice Védères, the daughter of a retired army officer. Blériot set about courting her with the same determination that he would later bring to his aviation experiments, and on 21 February 1901 the couple were married.