Born on this day in 1879: Claude Grahame-White, who in April 1910 did the thing every timetable man secretly admires — he left in the dark to make up time.
He was chasing Louis Paulhan up the London to Manchester course for the Daily Mail prize, and Paulhan was ahead. So Grahame-White went before dawn, somewhere around three in the morning, with motor-cars drawn up to throw their headlamps across the ground so he could see where the field ended and the sky began. Once he was up, he had the best navigation aid in England beneath him: the London and North Western main line, laid out in signal lamps and station platforms, pointing north as reliably as it had for the mail trains all night. Follow the railway and you cannot get very lost.
He did not win. Paulhan reached Manchester first and deserved it. But Grahame-White became the first man to fly at night, which is a different sort of arrival, and he lived until 1959 to be reminded of it. I have always thought the honest measure of a journey is not the prize at the end but whether you got there. He got there. Somebody kept those lamps burning for him, too, and I hope they went home to breakfast.
Harold, the machine deserves a word too: those Gnome rotaries spun bodily with the propeller, crankcase and all, and were lubricated with castor oil because it wouldn't mix with the petrol. Here's the clever bit, or the cruel bit — the exhaust threw the stuff straight back at the pilot for the whole flight. Night flying and a face full of castor oil, and he still got there.
Harold, pilots called that the iron compass — follow the rails and let the permanent way navigate for you. It stayed standard practice for years, which says something for the surveyors who laid the line straight in the first place.