An engine named after a girl

On holiday in the summer of 1902, the engineer Léon Levavasseur told the industrialist Jules Gastambide that powered flight would need light, powerful engines, and offered to build them. He suggested naming them after Gastambide’s daughter, Antoinette. Gastambide paid, and that year Levavasseur patented an engine with its cylinders in a V. His first V8 of 1903 weighed 157 kg for 80 hp. Racing boats came first: by 1904 most prize-winning speedboats in Europe ran Antoinette engines, and the Antoinette III of 1905, at 600 hp, was called the most powerful motor boat yet built.

Powering everybody else

The company was incorporated in Puteaux in 1906, with Gastambide as president, Levavasseur as technical director and Louis Blériot as vice-president. Its business was selling engines to aviators, and almost everyone bought. Santos-Dumont’s 14-bis flew on an Antoinette in 1906; so did Paul Cornu’s helicopter and the Voisin biplane in which Henri Farman completed Europe’s first 1 km circle in January 1908. The 50 hp V8 had an aluminium block, fuel injection and evaporative cooling, and weighed 190 pounds running. More than 200 of the later type were sold in three years.

The most beautiful monoplane

When Antoinette decided to build aircraft itself, Blériot warned the board that it would be competing with its own customers, and left when they ignored him. From 1908 Levavasseur produced a line of slender monoplanes with knife-thin triangular fuselages and boat-like noses, widely thought the most elegant machines of their day. The Antoinette II made the first French monoplane flight with a passenger on 31 August 1908. At the military camp at Châlons the company ran a flying school whose half-barrel on a universal joint, the Antoinette trainer, was one of the earliest flight simulators.

Smoking on the water

Its star was Hubert Latham, a rich, chain-smoking adventurer and a cousin of Gastambide. On 19 July 1909 his Antoinette IV’s engine failed eight miles out from Cap Blanc-Nez and he made the first landing of an aeroplane on the sea, lighting a cigarette while he waited for rescue. His team slept through the calm dawn of 25 July while Blériot flew over. Two days later Latham’s Antoinette VII came down about a mile short of Dover. At Reims that August he took the altitude prize, and in 1910 he set world records for altitude and speed.

The Monobloc that would not fly

Success did not make money. Levavasseur and Gastambide left in November 1909 and returned in March 1910, and the cheaper rotary Gnome engine was taking the market. For the 1911 military trials at Reims Levavasseur built the Monobloc, years ahead of its time with cantilever wings, an enclosed fuselage and spatted wheels. It was far too heavy for its 100 hp engine and could not take off, despite two attempts by Latham. That failure finished Antoinette. Latham was killed in Africa in 1912, and Levavasseur died poor in Puteaux in February 1922.

Fabrikalar

• Puteaux works · 10 rue des Bas-Rogers, Puteaux — Engine and aircraft works from 1906
• Mourmelon school and workshop · Camp de Châlons, Mourmelon-le-Grand — Flying school and military trials base from 1909

İnsanlar

• Léon Levavasseur · co-founder, engine and aircraft designer — Patented the V8 layout in 1902; Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur 1909
• Jules Gastambide · co-founder and president — Industrialist who financed the venture; father of Antoinette
• Louis Blériot · first vice-president — Left when Antoinette began building aircraft
• Hubert Latham · chief pilot and instructor — Two Channel attempts in 1909; world altitude and speed records
• Charles Wachter · Levavasseur’s brother-in-law, flying school head — Ran the Mourmelon school

Rekorlar ve ilkler

• First landing of an aeroplane on the sea, Hubert Latham, 19 July 1909
• World altitude record 155 m at Reims, August 1909; 1,384 m at Reims, July 1910
• Official world airspeed record 77.548 km/h in an Antoinette VII, Nice, 23 April 1910
• First French monoplane flight with a passenger, Antoinette II, 31 August 1908