Until this time, about the only man in France who was showing any interest in aviation was Captain Louis Ferdinand Ferber of the French army, who himself had made gliding experiments as a hobby while serving in an Alpine artillery corps. As early as 1901 he had begun an exchange of letters with Chanute, after having read in the Illustrierte Aeronautische Mitteilungen, a German magazine devoted mainly to ballooning, a brief article, supplied by Wilbur Wright, about the 1900 experiments at Kitty Hawk. A little later he wrote for information to the Wrights themselves. But now after the Chanute speech, Ferber was no longer alone among Frenchmen in thinking the Wrights’ experiments might be significant. Though belief in the possibility of a successful flying machine had been at lowest ebb in France, the information now made available by Chanute caused a greatly revived interest. Heretofore the Aéro Club had devoted its attention almost entirely to balloons and dirigibles, but it considered the French as leaders in every line pertaining to aeronautics. Immediately following the Chanute address telling of the Wrights’ gliding experiments in America, several members of the Aéro Club, led by Ernest Archdeacon, decided to organize a special committee on aviation. Archdeacon also made a warm appeal in favor of organizing contests for gliders to show that the French did not intend to allow anyone to surpass them in any branch of aeronautics. He subscribed three thousand francs for the organization of such contests and for prizes. L’Aérophile, official organ of the Club, which up to this time had published little about aviation, now suddenly began to carry many articles and items of news concerning projected experiments in gliding.
But it was some months before the French actually passed from the “talking” to the “doing” stage in gliding. In the meantime a brief dispatch about the Wrights’ power flights on December 17, 1903, had appeared in French and other European daily papers. Though the reports of these power flights were received with considerable skepticism, nevertheless they created such a furore in French aeronautical circles that before the end of January, 1904, no less than six gliders of the Wright 1902 type were being built in France from data furnished by Chanute.
Ernest Archdeacon, of the Aéro Club, placed an order with M. Dargent, a model maker of Chalais-Meudon, to build a copy of the Wright 1902 glider. Early in 1904 (January 28), Captain Ferber delivered a lecture at Lyon on the subject of gliding experiments, and a young man named Gabriel Voisin, just finishing his course in a technical school, came to him to ask advice about how to get into the field of aviation. He said he wished to “consecrate his life” to aviation. Ferber suggested that he should go to see Archdeacon. Voisin did so, and Archdeacon employed him to test the glider built by Dargent. Ferber gave Voisin his instructions in gliding. Then Archdeacon employed Voisin to build still another glider like the Wright machine. That contact with Archdeacon gave Voisin his start toward becoming a famous airplane manufacturer. And it was from that glider “du type de Wright,” as the French papers called it, tested by Voisin, that grew the first Voisin machines, soon to be followed by those of other copyists. Here was the real beginning of French—indeed of European—aviation.
Articles about the Wright power flights were appearing in the French, English and German aeronautical magazines. A longer article about the Kitty Hawk event was printed in the March, 1904, issue of Illustrierte Aeronautische Mitteilungen from Carl Dienstbach,[7] a musician in New York, who as a side line was the magazine’s correspondent.
One copyist after another began to use devices and technical knowledge invented or discovered by the Wrights. When Ferber received a letter from the American publication, the Scientific American, asking for an account of his own gliding experiments, he wrote to them that he was simply a “disciple of the Wright Brothers.” But these copyists were not content to follow the Chanute revelations and build gliders just like that of the Wrights. Instead, they tried to improve upon the Wrights’ work. The “improvements” were not successful, because the builders did not have the Wrights’ knowledge and wind-tunnel data, except that used in the 1902 glider, to guide them. So great were their difficulties that some of the experimenters began to place blame on Chanute. They thought Chanute must have misrepresented what the Wrights had done—maybe purposely. That was the only way they could account for their failure to get the good results obtained by the Wrights.
Robert Esnault-Pelterie, a member of the Aéro Club, pointed out that they had not put to a fair test the information on the Wright glider that Chanute had given them, because, he said, in building their gliders they had not strictly adhered to Chanute’s description and specifications. Since they had all the data needed to reproduce the glider that Chanute had reported as having been so successful, Esnault-Pelterie said, the way to determine the value of the information was to build a Wright glider exactly like Chanute had described and then test it to see how it performed. He himself then built such a machine, in 1904, and reported that he got the same performance as had the Wrights.
While the French were carrying on these experiments with copies of the 1902 Wright glider, the Wrights themselves were busy with their power machine with which they made more than 100 starts in 1904. It was not until late October, 1906, or nearly three years after the Wrights’ first power flights, that a French power machine was flown. (This machine, piloted by Santos-Dumont, was reported to have made a hop of 200 feet, about ten feet above the ground.)
Before long, Archdeacon and another member of the Aéro Club, Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe, were offering aviation prizes, and doing all they could to encourage someone to try to build a successful power plane. But as Captain Ferber later made clear to Georges Besançon, editor of L’Aérophile, in a letter Besançon published in his issue of June, 1907, this revival of interest in aviation in France, and whatever was accomplished, was all a direct outgrowth of information about what the Wrights had done in America.
In October, 1905, reports about the long flights accomplished that year by the Wrights with their power machine were received in France. They created an even greater stir in French aeronautical circles than had the earlier reports. Just at the time these reports reached France an organization was formed there to be known as the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the purpose of which was to verify and record the truth about reported aeronautical flights. The Aero Club of America, formed at about the same time, was made the official representative of the F.A.I. in America. No flight had as yet been made in France with a motor plane. Long afterward, many uninformed persons, even in the United States, declared that the flights by the Wrights prior to 1908 really should not count, as they had not been officially witnessed by any representative of the F.A.I.—the organization that came into being after the flights had been made!
As the tempo of interest increased, the Wrights were kept fairly busy writing letters to France in reply to requests for information. At the time of the first reports of the 1903 flights at Kitty Hawk, probably the only person in France inclined to believe them was Captain Ferber. Knowing what he did, from correspondence with Chanute, and with the Wrights themselves, he was not too incredulous. If he had said at first that he believed human flight might have occurred, he doubtless would have been laughed at—especially by those who had been most busily experimenting. But as early as May, 1905, Captain Ferber had written to the Wrights, asking if they would sell a power plane and at what price. They were not ready to discuss such a project at that time and, though Ferber wrote a second letter prodding them, they did not reply until October 9, four days after they had completed their most important flying experiments for that year.