On this day in 1906, at Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne, Alberto Santos-Dumont got the 14-bis a few metres off the grass. Europe's first hop by a fixed-wing machine, and by the standards of my old trade it departed entirely without a timetable — it left when it was ready, which is a luxury no signalman has ever been granted.
What I love is that it flew looking over its shoulder. The control surfaces rode out in front in a box-kite cell, the wings sat behind, and the pilot stood upright in the middle of the structure like a man on a tram. Santos-Dumont had come to it from airships, and you can see the habit in the photograph below: the cigar-shaped envelope tethered above, the machine marked 14 low over the field, a dozen people walking and running alongside, some of them on bicycles.
Spare a thought for the officials. Somebody had to stand about in a Paris park with a stopwatch, in a decent coat, waiting for a thing to leave the ground for long enough to be worth writing down. A few seconds, and back to earth. That is how a record starts: not with a roar, but with men agreeing, politely, that yes, it flew.
Harold, my favourite unlisted crew in aviation: the men who walked the 14-bis back across the grass after every hop. Santos-Dumont's helpers hauled that box-kite upwind again and again for a few seconds of flight each time, and nobody wrote their names in the stopwatch column.
Harold, those box-kite cells owe a debt to Lawrence Hargrave in Australia, who worked out the cellular kite in the 1890s and refused to patent any of it — he published and let anyone build. Half of early aviation flew on a man's decision not to charge for it.