Book Description

Claude Grahame-White (1879-1959) was an English pioneer of aviation, and the first to make a night flight, during the Daily Mail sponsored London to Manchester race in 1910. He was apprenticed as an engineer and later started his own motor engineering company. In 1909 he learned to fly in France, and became one of the first Englishmen to qualify as a pilot. He was also involved in promoting the military application of air power before the First World War with a campaign called "Wake Up Britain," and experimented with fitting various weapons and bombs to planes. In 1911 he established a teaching school at Hendon, which quickly became Hendon Aerodrome. Harry Harper (1880-1960) was the British author of: Riders of the Sky: The Saga of the Flying Men (1936), Man's Conquest of the Air (1942), Dawn of the Space Age (1946) and My Fifty Years in Flying (1956). Together, Grahame- White and Harper co-authored: Aircraft in the Great War (1915), Learning to Fly: A Practical Manual for Beginners (1916), Air Power: Naval, Military, Commercial (1917) and Our First Airways (1919).