The Voisin-Delagrange Biplane Flies

In the early years of European powered flight, the brothers Gabriel and Charles Voisin became among the first commercial aircraft builders, and one of their box-kite biplanes was flown at Bagatelle on the outskirts of Paris. Built for the sculptor and aviator Leon Delagrange, the aircraft was a pusher biplane powered by a roughly fifty-horsepower engine.

During its early trials the machine made short, stable hops, covering distances measured in the low hundreds of feet. While modest compared with the Wright brothers' achievements in America, these flights were significant within Europe, where pioneers were working largely independently to master controlled, sustained flight.

The Voisin firm went on to build many of the aircraft flown by France's first generation of aviators and produced bombers during the First World War. The Bagatelle flights formed part of the burst of French aeronautical activity in the years before 1910 that established France as a leading center of early aviation.