FROM THE ARCHIVES:Quidnunc marked the silver jubilee of "mechanical aeronautics" in Britain in 1935 with this Irishman's Diary. – JOE JOYCE
In 1910 – just a year after Blériot had startled the world by his flight across the English Channel – the first aviation show was held in London. That, I understand, is considered to have been the birth of the British aircraft industry, and in August of the same year the original Irish Aero Club arranged an exhibition of flying at Leopardstown Racecourse. “Flying machines” at that time had not advanced far beyond the experimental stage (nor had they yet received a suitably adaptable appellation), and a friend who was present tells me that every successful rising and landing were achievements sufficient to draw generous acclamations from the onlookers. Officially, there were no passenger flights and now, looking at the photograph of Colonel [Samuel] Cody’s contemporary, strange, chain-driven contraption, I am somewhat surprised to hear that a number of Dubliners were aggrieved by the precautionary ban. The most successful flights were made by Bertram Dickson, Cecil Grace and Armstrong Drexel, many of whom afterwards were killed and some of whom survived to found world-famous aircraft factories.
I am told the Leopardstown aviation meeting concluded with something in the nature of an unofficial sweepstakes race, in which some of the airmen, in machines they themselves had constructed, started to fly to Belfast. The luckiest got as far as the County Louth, where he was forced to descend. That flight, I suppose, set up the first Irish distance record.
Those aeroplanes first seen in Ireland must have been shipped from England, or assembled at Leopardstown, because no serious attempt seems to have been made to cross the Irish Sea in a “heavier-than-air” machine until 1911, when Robert Loraine was pulled out of the water about two hundred yards from the Bailey Lighthouse; and the then daring feat was not accomplished until April of the following year, when Vivian Hewitt arrived from Holyhead, having flown in a Blériot monoplane at the average speed of sixty miles per hour. Now, while giving full recognition to the daring exploits of the pioneer aviators, in common with all who have developed modern modes of speed, often I wonder whether we of this generation can maintain our vaunted superiority of prowess over our predecessors. This thought recurs whenever I read that Hewitt was the first man to cross the Irish Sea by air, when all the time it is on record that as far back as the year 1817 an aeronautical display was held at Ranelagh Recreation Gardens, in Dublin, and from there Mr. Windham Sadler accomplished a flight to Anglesey Island. The fact of that crossing having been made in a balloon did not lessen the precariousness of the undertaking; nor ought it, in comparison with the advancement of knowledge and the consequent development of means available to depreciate Sadler’s great achievement.
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