Page "Louis Blériot" Paragraph 2

Born in at No. 17 rue de l ' Arbre à Poires ( now rue Sadi-Carnot ) in Cambrai, Louis was the first of five children born to Clémance 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 Bacclaureat in Science and German, he determined to try to enter the prestigious École Centrale Paris.

Entrance was by a demanding exam for which special tuition was necessary, consequently, Blériot spent a year the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris.

He passed the entrance exam, being placed 74th in the list of 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, coming 113th of the 203 who graduated in his year.

He then had to perform 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.

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.

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, being so struck that the same evening, he told his mother, " I saw a young woman today.

I will marry her, or I will marry no one.

" 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.