Those Magificent Men

The next time you find yourself cursing air traffic control for a 30-minute delay in take-off or the airline for serving red wine straight out of the fridge, take a moment to think about Louis Blériot – who, in an improbable assemblage of wire, wood and canvas, with a sliver of polished wood for a seat, no cockpit or seat belts, and a 25 hp engine like that of a small powerboat, carried out the world’s first international and over-water flight, just over 100 years ago.

Barely five years after the Wright Brothers, Blériot was already taking air travel to its next stage, and literally into untested waters – his was a monoplane with a much smaller engine that the Wrights’, and of course he was exposing himself to an immense risk by flying over the sea, especially one as notoriously choppy and windy as the English Channel.

His plane can still be seen today, suspended by hooks and wires high above the ground in the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Paris; this seems like its best chance of either getting into the air or staying there, so unlikely and fragile a craft does it seem to our Airbus and Boeing-accustomed eyes. One can no more imagine taking to the air in it than crossing the Atlantic in a 100-foot sailing ship or riding in a covered wagon from Philadelphia to Utah under constant threat of attack from Indians – the world has changed too much, and the men and women who made those fantastically hazardous journeys were pioneers whose courage and vision we may ritually salute, but which we can’t conceive of exhibiting in our own lives.

When one looks into Bleriot’s life he turns out to have been less of a wild-eyed dreamer than one might imagine – an early and successful entrepreneur in portable flashlights, he turned to airplanes primarily as a business opportunity, and the #9 model with which he made his famous crossing was intended to be sold as a self-assembly kit. Blériot undertook the Channel flight not primarily for the prize of £1000 (equivalent to over $100,000 in today’s money) but by way of publicity for what he was convinced would become a huge money-spinner. (It wasn’t, of course – though Blériot went on to become a successful constructor of military aircraft in World War I.)

He could of course no more have foreseen or imagined the commoditization of air travel than its deleterious environmental effects. It would take 20 years before regular commercial flights between London and Paris started to convey the élite of the inter-war years, and a further 30 till the arrival of the jet plane made it the preferred means of travel for the middle classes, and if anyone – impossibly in 1909 – had raised the issue of CO2 emissions, Blériot could very reasonably have pointed at the massive clouds of toxic fumes belched out by the steam trains and boats which were the only other form of travel in those days. And while we’re about it, the huge and heavy high-speed trains which take us under the Channel today, though emission-free in themselves, consume prodigious amounts of electricity, much of it generated from burning fossil fuels.

It’s generally quite impossible for anyone to predict in detail the long-term consequences of their inventions and discoveries – Einstein in 1905 couldn’t foresee the H-bomb, nor Henry Ford the profound transformation of cities and communities which mass motorization would bring about. But that doesn’t mean that the direction in which social and technological innovations will take us can’t be glimpsed – at least by a few visionaries capable of looking beyond the immediate and everyday world which most of us inhabit.

While Blériot was experimenting with his different designs for planes, 2000 miles away in Russia the great writer Tolstoy was still leading his anarcho-Christian commune, based on the principles of self-sufficiency and equality. And of course the early Romantic poets like Blake and Wordsworth had warned about the effects of industrialization a full 100 years earlier, arguing that men were sacrificing their authentic selves, trading their souls for wealth and comfort – and blighting the landscape in the process with their factories, railways and industrial cities.

Going back still further in the history of Western culture, this idea links up with some of our deepest-rooted and most powerful myths: Dr. Faustus, who traded his immortal soul for knowledge and power, or Prometheus, who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to men, and was punished with eternal torment. Or, of course, the myth that the story of Blériot most directly recalls, namely that of Icarus, whose reckless and fatal flight on the wings his father had made for him took him too close to the sun – a warning against overreaching and over-reliance on technology which has served as a metaphor for innumerable vainglorious and unsuccessful ventures over the ages.

Yet how could Icarus not have wanted to experience the glory of those eagle-feathered wings – did he maybe even regard falling into the sea and drowning as a price worth paying for that incomparable soaring? How could Blériot not have wanted to fly across the Channel, knowing that it was within his grasp? – because of deep doubts about the soul-eroding effect of technology? Men like Blériot are hardly subject to such anxieties.

Faust, Prometheus and Icarus – and Blériot, Ford and Edison, Tolstoy, Blake and Wordsworth – remind us that we have choices, and that these choice are freighted with consequences, some of them very profound. Only small children believe that one can enjoy the one without the other; as adults we are obliged to keep the bargains that we have made – and if this means returning to Mephistopheles what’s due to him, or falling to our deaths in the limitless blue ocean, so be it.