This is a very detailed account of the very early days of aviation, continuing with the Great War and ending with the confusion of the post war years and the death of Bleriot in 1936. What a wonderful life he had! He was born in 1872 son of a wealthy industrialist father, was well educated and made a fortune of his own by the age of twenty four, in inventing and producing better lighting for automobiles, which were just then becoming common. Indeed, he set up the first firm in the world to specialize in the production of headlamps. He used his considerable fortune to achieve mechanical flight, not only by learning to fly as a pilot, but also by developing a practical aeroplane. The first ten of his designs were at best weird and at worst hopeless, but the eleventh became the first to fly across the English Channel and into history. Indeed it has been said that this, and not any contemporary Wright, Voisin, Farman, Antoinette or Santos-Dumont, was the machine which settled the question of what the aeroplane was going to be like.

As a result of his hugely publicised flight in 1909, before which he was on the brink of financial disaster, he took orders for and sold 900 aircraft and became the largest manufacturer in the world, and immensely rich. He also set up flying schools and trained 1000 pilots. But it was the Great War that defined what aircraft were for - before they had been the playthings of the rich - and by the end, their fighting capabilities were defined, and their commercial future in peacetime foreseeable. Bleriot played a major part and made another fortune by buying SPAD after it's originator, Armand Deperdussin, was arrested for fraud and eventually bankrupted. At the end, he was the largest aircraft manufacturer on the Allied side.

With this fortune he was able to develop passenger carrying aircraft which he had always seen as the true destiny of the aeroplane. But survival as a constructor in the twenties and thirties became harder and harder; he became obsessed with transatlantic flying and invested massively in a large flying boat which was a technical success but a commercial disaster. He died aged sixty four, partly from stress which was aggravated by an injury he had sustained in Istanbul in a flying accident thirty years earlier.

This book is a fascinating account of the life of the man, as well as a detailed history of the aviation world and it's personalities at the time. Bleriot was intensely brave - he learnt to fly partly so that no one else would have to risk their lives in his machines - and crossed the Channel in agony from a burnt foot which he had sustained when the lagging on an exhaust pipe, against which he rested his leg, fell away on an earlier flight. He was happily married to a supportive woman, and he had a lot of fun. He had the ability to choose colleagues who were able and tireless. It is worth reading for the description of the excitement of the Cross Channel Race alone, but I learnt a huge amount about aeroplane engines, designs and people as well.

Excellently produced with a wealth of pictures, this filled for me a gap in my knowledge in a most enjoyable way.