Louis Blériot

Born at No.17h rue de l'Arbre à Poires (now rue Sadi-Carnot) in Cambrai, Louis was the first of five children born to Clémence and Charles Blériot. In 1882, aged 10, Blériot was sent as a boarder to the Institut Notre Dame in Cambrai, where he frequently won class prizes, including one for engineering 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 engineering drawing ability. After three years of demanding study at the École Centrale, Blériot graduated 113th of 203 in his graduating class. He then embarked 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 later 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 for headlamps 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 lunching in his usual restaurant near his showroom when his eye was caught by a young woman dining 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." A bribe to a waiter secured her identity; she was Alice Védères, the daughter of a retired army officer. Blériot set about courting her with the same determination that he later brought to his aviation experiments, and on 21 February 1901 the couple were married.