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Louis Charles Joseph Blériot (1 July 1872 – 1 August 1936) was a French aviator, inventor and engineer. He developed the first practical headlamp for trucks and established a profitable business manufacturing them, using much of the money he made to finance his attempts to build a successful aircraft. In 1909 he became world famous for making the first flight across the English Channel in a heavier than air aircraft, winning the prize of £1,000 offered by the ''Daily Mail'' newspaper.〔("The New 'Daily Mail' Prizes." ) ''Flight'', Volume 5, Issue 223, 5 April 1913, p. 393. Retrieved: 25 July 2009.〕 Blériot was also the first to make a working, powered, piloted monoplane.〔Gibbs-Smith 1953, p. 239〕 and the founder of a successful aircraft manufacturing company. ==Early years== Born at No.17h rue de l'Arbre à Poires (now rue Sadi-Carnot) in Cambrai,〔Elliott 2000, p. 11.〕 Louis was the first of five children born to Clémence and Charles Blériot. At the age of 10, Blériot was sent as a boarder to the Institut Notre Dame in Cambrai, where he frequently won class prizes, including one for drawing. When he was 15, he moved on to the Lycée at Amiens, where he lived with an aunt. After passing the exams for his baccalaureate in science and German, he determined to try to enter the prestigious École Centrale in Paris. Entrance was by a demanding exam for which special tuition was necessary: consequently Blériot spent a year at the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris. He passed the exam, placing 74th among the 243 successful candidates, and doing especially well in the tests of drawing ability. After three years of demanding study at the École Centrale, Blériot graduated 113th of 203 in his graduating class. He then had to embark on a term of compulsory military service, and spent a year as a sub-lieutenant in the 24th Artillery Regiment, stationed in Tarbes in the Pyrenees. He then got a job with Baguès, an electrical engineering company in Paris.〔Sanger 2008, p. 5.〕 He left the company after developing the world's first practical headlamp for automobiles, using a compact integral acetylene generator. In 1897, Blériot opened a showroom at 41 rue de Richlieu in Paris. The business was successful, and soon he was supplying his lamps to both Renault and Panhard-Levassor, two of the foremost automobile manufacturers of the day.〔Elliot 2000, pp. 16–18.〕 In October 1900 Blériot was eating lunch in his usual restaurant near his showroom when his eye was caught by a young woman lunching with her parents. That evening, he told his mother "I saw a young woman today. I will marry her, or I will marry no one."〔Elliott 2000, p. 20.〕 A bribe to a waiter secured details of her identity; she was Alice Védères, the daughter of a retired army officer. Blériot set about courting her with the same determination that he would later bring to his aviation experiments, and on 21 February 1901 the couple were married.〔Elliott 2000, p. 22.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Louis Blériot」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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