A Summer Bright and Terrible Read Online Free

Hubert Latham announced his intention of taking home the
prize.
    Latham was a twenty-six-year-old Englishman who
lived in Paris. He was rich, he was handsome, he was suave and sophisticated.
The man was famous not only for his ivory cigarette holder and charming smile
but for his society affairs, his big-game hunting in Africa, and his skill at
racing motorboats at Monaco. Within three months of learning to fly, “Le Tham”
(as he was known to the French newspaper-reading public) had established a
world endurance record of one hour, thirty-seven minutes, landing only when it
began to rain.
    Now he was on the cliffs near Calais with his
streamlined monoplane, the Antoinette IV. A French cruiser waited in the Channel
to rescue him if he failed. On
July 19, 1909, he took off cleanly, circled around the field to gain height,
and then sailed out over the cliffs, disappearing across the water to the
cheers of the crowds who saw him off.
    But airplane engines in those days were not
reliable. The same engine that had previously kept him in the air for an hour
and a half now decided to sputter to a halt in fifteen minutes, and he was
forced to glide down and splash into the sea six miles from the French coast.
Luckily the Antoinette floated until the cruiser steamed by to find Le Tham
perched patiently on its wing, smoking a cigarette in his famous ivory holder.
    He immediately sent to Paris for a new machine,
but as the days slipped by, another Frenchman, Louis Bleriot, appeared on the
scene. He had made a fortune manufacturing headlamps for the newly burgeoning
automobile industry, and then, inspired by the Wright brothers, he began
designing airplanes—without, however, the Wrights’ success. One after another
of his designs crashed and burned, and with each one went a sizable piece of
his fortune.
    But by 1909, when his eleventh design, the
Bleriot XI, had made several flights of up to twenty minutes, he decided to
enter it in the race for Lord Northcliffe’s prize. The trouble was that the
Channel crossing would take at least half an hour, ten minutes longer than his
longest flight. Another problem was that he had badly burned his foot on the
exhaust pipe that ran through the cockpit, so he could hardly walk. And most
troubling of all, he was out of money. By now he had spent all his headlamp
fortune and his wife’s substantial dowry; he was not only crippled, he was
bankrupt. He could no more buy enough fuel to fly the Channel than he could buy
eggs for breakfast.
    But on July 1, 1909, his wife was visiting some
wealthy Parisian friends in a second-story apartment in Paris. Nobody noticed
that their little girl had climbed up onto the windowsill and was leaning out,
until with a cry Bleriot’s wife sprang out of her chair and seized the child just as she slipped. In gratitude
for saving their daughter’s life, the friends insisted on financing Bleriot’s
attempt across the Channel.
    Meanwhile, Hubert Latham’s new airplane had
arrived. Several days of clouds and strong winds prevented him from attempting
the flight, but on the night of July 24, the winds began to show signs of
possibly weakening and the clouds began to break. Latham went to bed, leaving
word to be awakened at dawn if the weather continued to improve. By 2:00 a.m.,
the air was calm and the sky clear—but no one woke him. His mechanics were
asleep, and so Latham slept on.
    In the Bleriot camp, however, the mechanics
were alert. When they saw the stars coming out, they ran to wake Bleriot. The
plane was wheeled out of the hangar and checked quickly, for there wasn’t much
to check: The little airplane had no instruments, not even a compass.
    Bleriot was close enough to Latham’s camp to
see it through his binoculars. To his amazement—and relief—it was quiet and
dark. At 4:41 a.m., the sun began to rise. Bleriot took off with the sun,
swerved out over the cold waters of the Channel—quite alone, with no escorting
French naval vessel in case he