Dover
Dover is a major ferry port in Kent, South East England. It faces France across the Strait of Dover, the narrowest part of the English Channel, lies south-east of Canterbury and east of Maidstone; the town is the administrative centre of the Dover District and home of the Dover Calais ferry through the Port of Dover. The surrounding chalk cliffs are known as the White Cliffs of Dover. Archaeological finds have revealed that the area has always been a focus for peoples entering and leaving Britain; the name derives from the River Dour. The Port of Dover provides much of the town's employment. First recorded in its Latinised form of Portus Dubris, the name derives from the Brythonic word for waters (dwfr in Middle Welsh; the same element is present in the town's French and Modern Welsh forms, as well as the name of the river Dour and is evident in other English towns such as Wendover. The current name was in use at least by the time of Shakespeare's King Lear, in which the town and its cliffs play a prominent role.
Archaeological finds have shown that there were Stone Age people in the area, that some Iron Age finds exist. During the Roman period, the area became part of the Roman communications network, it was connected by road to Canterbury and Watling Street and it became Portus Dubris, a fortified port. Dover has a preserved Roman lighthouse and the remains of a villa with the only preserved Roman wall painting outside Italy. Dover figured in the Domesday Book. Forts were built above the port and lighthouses were constructed to guide passing ships, it is one of the Cinque Ports. and has served as a bastion against various attackers: notably the French during the Napoleonic Wars and Germany during the Second World War. Dover is in the south-east corner of Britain. From South Foreland, the nearest point to the European mainland, Cap Gris Nez is 34 kilometres away across the Strait of Dover; the site of its original settlement lies in the valley of the River Dour, sheltering from the prevailing south-westerly winds.
This has led to the silting up of the river mouth by the action of longshore drift. The town has been forced into making artificial breakwaters to keep the port in being; these breakwaters have been extended and adapted so that the port lies entirely on reclaimed land. The higher land on either side of the valley – the Western Heights and the eastern high point on which Dover Castle stands – has been adapted to perform the function of protection against invaders; the town has extended up the river valley, encompassing several villages in doing so. Little growth is possible along the coast; the railway, being tunnelled and embanked, skirts the foot of the cliffs. Dover has an oceanic climate similar to the rest of the United Kingdom with mild temperatures year-round and a light amount of rainfall each month; the warmest recorded temperature was 31 °C and the coldest was −8 °C, but the temperature is between 3 °C and 21.1 °C. There is evidence. In 1800, the year before Britain's first national census, Edward Hasted reported that the town had a population of 10,000 people.
At the 2001 census, the town of Dover had 28,156 inhabitants, while the population of the whole urban area of Dover, as calculated by the Office for National Statistics, was 39,078 inhabitants. With the expansion of Dover, many of the outlying ancient villages have been incorporated into the town; the parishes of Dover St. Mary's and Dover St. James, since 1836 Buckland and Charlton have become part Dover, Maxton, Kearsney, Temple Ewell, Whitfield, all to the north of the town centre, are within its conurbation; the Dover Harbour Board is the responsible authority for the running of the Port of Dover. The English Channel, here at its narrowest point in the Straits of Dover, is the busiest shipping lane in the world. Ferries crossing between here and the Continent have to negotiate their way through the constant stream of shipping crossing their path; the Dover Strait Traffic Separation Scheme allots ships separate lanes when passing through the Strait. The Scheme is controlled by the Channel Navigation Information Service based at Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre Dover.
MRCC Dover is charged with co-ordination of civil maritime search and rescue within these waters. The Port of Dover is used by cruise ships; the old Dover Marine railway station building houses one passenger terminal, together with a car park. A second, purpose built, terminal is located further out along the pier; the ferry lines using the port are: to Calais: P&O Ferries, DFDS Seaways. to Dunkirk: DFDS Seaways. These services have been cut in recent years: P&O Ferries sailings to Boulogne were withdrawn in 1993 and Zeebrugge in 2002. SNCF withdrew their three train ferry sailings on the opening of the Channel Tunnel. Regie voor Maritiem Transport moved their Ostend service of three sailings daily to Ramsgate in 1994. Stena Line merged their 20 Calais sailings into the current P&O operation in 1998. Hoverspeed withdrew their 8 daily sailings. SpeedFerries withdrew their 5 daily sailings. LD Lines ceased the Dover-Dieppe service on
Rolls-Royce 10 hp
The Rolls-Royce 10 hp was the first car to be produced as a result of an agreement of 23 December 1904 between Charles Rolls and Henry Royce, badged as a Rolls-Royce. The 10 hp was produced by Royce's company, Royce Ltd. at its factory in Cooke Street, Hulme and was sold by Rolls' motor dealership, C. S. Rolls & Co. at a price of £395. The 10 hp was exhibited at the Paris Salon in December 1904, along with 15 hp and 20 hp cars and engine for the 30 hp models; the 10 hp was a development of Henry Royce's first car, the Royce 10, of which he produced three prototypes in 1903. This was itself based on a second-hand Decauville owned by Royce which he believed he could improve. In particular, Royce succeeded in making his car quieter than existing cars. Unlike the Royce 10 which had a flat topped radiator, the Rolls-Royce 10 hp featured one with a triangular top which would appear on all subsequent cars; the engine is a water-cooled twin-cylinder of 1800 cc enlarged to 1995 cc on cars, with overhead inlet and side exhaust valves, based on the original Royce engine but with an improved crankshaft.
The power output was 12 hp at 1000 rpm. The car has a top speed of 39 mph. There is a transmission brake fitted behind the gearbox operated by foot pedal and internal expanding drum brakes on the back axle operated by the handbrake lever. Springing is by semi-elliptic leaf springs on rear axles, it is a small car with a track of 48 in. Rolls Royce intended to make 20 of the cars but only 16 were made as it was thought that a twin-cylinder engine was not appropriate for the marque; the last 10 hp was made in 1906. Rolls-Royce did not provide the coachwork. Instead, the cars were sold in chassis form for the customer to arrange his own body supplier, with Barker recommended. Four are believed to survive: the oldest, a 1904 car registered U44, chassis 20154, was sold for £3.2 million to a private collector by Bonham's auctioneers in December 2007. A fourth car, chassis 20159 is believed to be in a private collection. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars accessed 2 February 2006
Bournemouth
Bournemouth is a large coastal resort town on the south coast of England, east of the 96-mile-long Jurassic Coast, a World Heritage Site. At the 2011 census, the town had a population of 183,491. With Poole to the west and Christchurch in the east, Bournemouth is part of the South East Dorset conurbation, which has a population of 465,000. Before it was founded in 1810 by Lewis Tregonwell, the area was a deserted heathland visited by fishermen and smugglers. Marketed as a health resort, the town received a boost when it appeared in Augustus Granville's 1841 book, The Spas of England. Bournemouth's growth accelerated with the arrival of the railway, it became a town in 1870. Part of Hampshire, it joined Dorset with the reorganisation of local government in 1974. Since 1997, the town has been administered by a unitary authority independent of Dorset County Council, although it remains part of that ceremonial county; the local council is Bournemouth Borough Council. From 1 April 2019 it will be part of the new Bournemouth and Poole Council.
The town centre has notable Victorian architecture and the 202-foot spire of St Peter's Church, one of three Grade 1 listed churches in the borough, is a local landmark. Bournemouth's location has made it a popular destination for tourists, attracting over five million visitors annually with its beaches and popular nightlife; the town is a regional centre of business, home of the Bournemouth International Centre or BIC, a financial sector, worth more than £1,000 million in gross value added. The first mention of Bournemouth comes in the Christchurch cartulary of 1406, where a monk describes how a large fish, 18 feet long, was washed up at "La Bournemothe" in October of that year and taken to the Manor of Wick. "La Bournemowthe", was purely a geographic reference to the uninhabited area around the mouth of the small river which, in turn, drained the heathland between the towns of Poole and Christchurch. The word bourne, meaning a small stream, is a derivative of burna, old English for a brook.
From the latter half of the 16th century "Bourne Mouth" seems to be preferred, being recorded as such in surveys and reports of the period, but this appears to have been shortened to "Bourne" after the area had started to develop. A travel guide published in 1831 calls the place "Bourne Cliffe" or "Tregonwell's Bourne" after its founder; the Spas of England, published ten years calls it "Bourne" as does an 1838 edition of the Hampshire Advertiser. In the late 19th century "Bournemouth" became predominant, although its two-word form appears to have remained in use up until at least the early 20th century, turning up on a 1909 ordnance map. In the 12th century the region around the mouth of the River Bourne was part of the Hundred of Holdenhurst; the hundred became the Liberty of Westover when it was extended to include the settlements of North Ashley, Muccleshell, Iford, Pokesdown and Wick, incorporated into the Manor of Christchurch. Although the Dorset and Hampshire region surrounding it had been the site of human settlement for thousands of years, Westover was a remote and barren heathland before 1800.
In 1574 the Earl of Southampton noted that the area was "Devoid of all habitation", as late as 1795 the Duke of Rutland recorded that "... on this barren and uncultivated heath there was not a human to direct us". In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Borough of Bournemouth would grow to encompass a number of ancient settlements along the River Stour, including Longham where a skull thought to be 5,500 years old was found in 1932. Bronze Age burials near Moordown, the discovery of Iron Age pottery on the East Cliff in 1969, suggest there may have been settlements there during that period. Hengistbury Head, added to the borough in 1932, was the site of a much older Palaeolithic encampment. During the latter half of the 16th century James Blount, 6th Baron Mountjoy, began mining for alum in the area, at one time part of the heath was used for hunting, although by the late 18th century little evidence of either event remained. No-one lived at the mouth of the Bourne river and the only regular visitors to the area before the 19th century were a few fishermen, turf cutters and gangs of smugglers.
Prior to the Christchurch Inclosures Act 1802, more than 70% of the Westover area was common land. The act, together with the Inclosure Commissioners' Award of 1805, transferred 5000 acres into the hands of five private owners, including James Harris, 1st Earl of Malmesbury, Sir George Ivison Tapps. In 1809 the Tapps Arms public house appeared on the heath. A few years in 1812, the first official residents, retired army officer Lewis Tregonwell and his wife, moved into their new home built on land purchased from Tapps; the area was well known to Tregonwell who, during the Napoleonic wars, spent much of his time searching the heath and coastline for French invaders and smugglers. Anticipating that people would come to the area to indulge in the newly fashionable pastime of sea-bathing, an activity with perceived health benefits, Tregonwell built a series of villas on his land between 1816 and 1822, which he hoped to let out; the common belief that pine-scented air was good for lung conditions, in particular tuberculosis, prompted Tregonwell and Tapps to plant hundreds of pine trees.
These early attempts to promote the town as a health resort meant that by the time Tregonwell died in 1832, Bournemouth had grown into a small community with a scattering of houses and cottages. The town would gr
Steam yacht
A steam yacht is a class of luxury or commercial yacht with primary or secondary steam propulsion in addition to the sails carried by yachts. The English steamboat entrepreneur George Dodd used the term "steam yacht" on 16 May 1817 albeit in describing PS Thames, ex Duke of Argyle, she was one of the five passenger steamboats under Dodd's direction, his description was used in an effort to advertise how luxurious these vessels were-for the general public. Her service on the river had first been reported on 8 July 1815 in the The Times newspaper. At that time, she had not been formally renamed, but was still sailing under the description "Thames steam yacht"; the history of the first three private steam yachts is as follows: Quentin Durward, wooden paddle steamer registered 10 June 1823 by builders Sime & Rankin, Leith,100'8" x 16'5" x 9'3", 78 tons. After being sold to R. Ogilvie & G. Crichton of Leith in 1823 and to the Leith & Dundee Steam Packet Co, Dundee in 1824, she was sold on 12 June 1827 by the English millionaire Richard Thornton,to Kaptajnløtnant Lauritz Christensen, who renamed her Dania.
Since he first used her on pleasure tours on the Sound, this makes her the first private steam yacht Endeavour, wooden paddle steamer registered 28 Jan.1828 by builders Rawlinson and Lyon, Lambeth, 75’6” x 12’ x 7’2”, 25 tons with a 20 HP Maudslay patent oscillating engine with two cylinders 20in. Dia. X 2 ft. stroke and registered to the eminent English engineer Henry Maudslay, London on 21 February 1828, who used her as his private steam yacht. The eminent Scottish engineer James Nasmyth mentions a trip with her to Richmond. Swift, wooden sailing smack built in 1803 at Bridport by Good, not registered. Unknown owners at Leith in 1804 - documents missing. Converted to a paddle steamer, described as a steam yacht, registered by T. West, H. Bellingham, E. H. Creasey and others of Brighton on 21 August 1822 at Shoreham-by-Sea, 106’5” x 23’1” x 10’8”, 143 tons, they ran her as a ferry boat between Dieppe. She was sold to G. Crichton, R. Ogilvie & others in Leith in February 1824. Crichton & Ogilvie were well-known managers.
She was sold to H. Templer in London in September 1827 and to Turkey in October 1828 when she became the Sultan's steam yacht Surat taken in to the Ottoman Navy as its first steam vessel. Thomas Assheton Smith II was excluded from the Royal Yacht Club for his championship of the steam yacht, eight of which he commissioned between 1830 and 1851. In cooperation with the Scottish engineer Robert Napier, whose Govan, Glasgow yard built a number of them, Smith did much to improve the hull design of steam yachts. After 1856, when the Royal Yacht Squadron removed their edict, steam yacht building began to multiply; the term "Double Steam Yacht" refers to a type of mechanised fairground swing devised by the English fairground equipment engineer Frederick Savage. The term "steam yacht" of similar design. 1. The first is a luxury yacht in the modern sense—a vessel owned and used for pleasure or non-commercial purposes. Steam yachts of this type came to prominence from the 1840s to the early-20th century in Europe.
The first British royal yacht was Victoria & Albert of 1843. The first in the USA, Vanderbilt's steam yacht North Star, launched in 1854. Steam yachts were commissioned by wealthy individuals and heads of state as extravagant symbols of wealth and/or power, they were built with similar hull-lines to clipper ships, with an ornate bow structure and a low, smooth freeboard. Main propulsion came from one or two steam engines of compound type, or in later large yachts, triple expansion or turbines. Steam yachts carried rigging for sails as an auxiliary propulsion system, but more for show and naval tradition. Private steam yachts were capable of long seagoing voyages, but their owners' needs and habits saw most stay near to the coast. Inland seas such as the Baltic and the Mediterranean were popular areas for using steam yachts. Statistics show that Clydeside was the premier building area for steam yachts: 43 shipbuilding yards on Clydeside built 190 steam yachts between 1830 and 1935. Scotts Shipbuilding & Engineering Co Ltd of Greenock Scotland built 23 steam yachts between 1876 and 1904.
The Steam Auxiliary is a class of yacht in this category. In 1876-77 Thomas Brassey took his wife and children on a world cruise in their newly built yacht, the 532 ton Sunbeam. Brassey preferred sail as the primary source of motive power, but knew from years of experience the advantages of steam power, when wind and tide made progress difficult. Sunbeam was, designed as a "steam auxiliary", capable of covering long distances between coaling stations under her rigged sail area of 9200 square yards, but with enough fuel to steam for up to 20 days if necessary, their trip was made famous by a book written and published by his wife Annie Brassey - A Voyage in the Sunbeam, our Home on the Ocean for Eleven Months. Within a few years other yachts were built for owners with a similar sense of adventure, famously Lancashire Witch for Sir Thomas George Fermor-Hesketh, 7th Baronet and Wanderer for Charles Joseph Lambert; these sailing yachts, with steam auxiliary power, were more expensive to build and run, but gave the owners the freedom to roam the world without planning their routes via the network of coaling stations in existence at this time.
In addition the yacht masters were not reliant on the quality of the steaming coal available to them, that could at times be questionable. When not in steam, the funnel on the auxiliary yacht would be lowered and the propeller feathered
Wright brothers
The Wright brothers and Wilbur, were two American aviation pioneers credited with inventing and flying the world's first successful airplane. They made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. In 1904–05, the brothers developed their flying machine into the first practical fixed-wing aircraft, the Wright Flyer III. Although not the first to build experimental aircraft, the Wright brothers were the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible; the brothers' breakthrough was their creation of a three-axis control system, which enabled the pilot to steer the aircraft and to maintain its equilibrium. This method remains standard on fixed-wing aircraft of all kinds. From the beginning of their aeronautical work, the Wright brothers focused on developing a reliable method of pilot control as the key to solving "the flying problem"; this approach differed from other experimenters of the time who put more emphasis on developing powerful engines.
Using a small homebuilt wind tunnel, the Wrights collected more accurate data than any before, enabling them to design more efficient wings and propellers. Their first U. S. patent did not claim invention of a flying machine, but a system of aerodynamic control that manipulated a flying machine's surfaces. The brothers gained the mechanical skills essential to their success by working for years in their Dayton, Ohio-based shop with printing presses, bicycles and other machinery, their work with bicycles in particular influenced their belief that an unstable vehicle such as a flying machine could be controlled and balanced with practice. From 1900 until their first powered flights in late 1903, they conducted extensive glider tests that developed their skills as pilots, their shop employee Charlie Taylor became an important part of the team, building their first airplane engine in close collaboration with the brothers. The Wright brothers' status as inventors of the airplane has been subject to counter-claims by various parties.
Much controversy persists over the many competing claims of early aviators. Edward Roach, historian for the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, argues that they were excellent self-taught engineers who could run a small company, but they did not have the business skills or temperament to dominate the growing aviation industry; the Wright brothers were two of seven children born to Milton Wright, of English and Dutch ancestry, Susan Catherine Koerner, of German and Swiss ancestry. Milton Wright's mother, Catherine Reeder, was descended from the progenitor of the Vanderbilt family and the Huguenot Gano family of New Rochelle, New York. Wilbur was born near Millville, Indiana, in 1867; the brothers never married. The other Wright siblings were Reuchlin, Lorin and twins Otis and Ida; the direct paternal ancestry goes back to a Samuel Wright who sailed to America and settled in Massachusetts in 1636. None of the Wright children had middle names. Instead, their father tried hard to give them distinctive first names.
Wilbur was named for Wilbur Fisk and Orville for Orville Dewey, both clergymen that Milton Wright admired. They were "Will" and "Orv" to their friends and in Dayton, their neighbors knew them as "the Bishop's kids", or "the Bishop's boys"; because of their father's position as a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, he traveled and the Wrights moved — twelve times before returning permanently to Dayton in 1884. In elementary school, Orville was once expelled. In 1878 when the family lived in Cedar Rapids, their father brought home a toy helicopter for his two younger sons; the device was based on an invention of French aeronautical pioneer Alphonse Pénaud. Made of paper and cork with a rubber band to twirl its rotor, it was about a foot long. Wilbur and Orville played with it until it broke, built their own. In years, they pointed to their experience with the toy as the spark of their interest in flying. Both brothers did not receive diplomas; the family's abrupt move in 1884 from Richmond, Indiana, to Dayton, where the family had lived during the 1870s, prevented Wilbur from receiving his diploma after finishing four years of high school.
The diploma was awarded posthumously to Wilbur on April 16, 1994, which would have been his 127th birthday. In late 1885 or early 1886 Wilbur was struck in the face by a hockey stick while playing an ice-skating game with friends, resulting in the loss of his front teeth, he had been vigorous and athletic until and although his injuries did not appear severe, he became withdrawn. He had planned to attend Yale. Instead, he spent the next few years housebound. During this time he cared for his mother, terminally ill with tuberculosis, read extensively in his father's library and ably assisted his father during times of controversy within the Brethren Church, but expressed unease over his own lack of ambition. Orville dropped out of high school after his junior year to start a printing business in 1889, having designed and built his own printing press with Wilbur's help. Wilbur joined the print shop, in March the brothers launched a weekly newspaper, the West Side News. Subsequent issues listed Orville as Wilbur as editor on the masthead.
In April 1890 they converted the paper to a daily, The Evening Item, but it lasted only f
Phaeton body
A phaeton is a style of open automobile without any fixed weather protection, popular from the 1900s until the 1930s. It is an automotive equivalent of the horse-drawn lightweight phaeton carriage. A popular style in the US from the mid–1920s and continuing into the first half of the 1930s was the dual cowl phaeton, with a cowl separating the rear passengers from the driver and front passenger. Phaetons fell from favour when closed cars and convertible body styles became available during the 1930s; the term "phaeton" became so and loosely applied that any vehicle with two axles and a row or rows of seats across the body could be called a phaeton. Convertibles and pillarless hardtops were marketed as "phaetons" after actual phaetons were phased out; the term phaeton had described a light, open four-wheeled carriage. When automobiles arrived it was applied to a light two-seater with minimal coachwork; the term was interchangeable with spyder, derived from a light form of phaeton carriage known as a spider.
Meant to denote a faster and lighter vehicle than a touring car, the two terms became interchangeable. A detachable folding or rigid roof could be added before a drive in preparation for inclement weather, side curtains or screens could be installed once the roof was in place; this was temporary and partial relief rather than the more permanent, watertight protection offered by a convertible. As a result, a phaeton was weather-ready convertible. Since the body was open, it was easy to add or remove an extra row of seating where space had been left in the original construction. A phaeton differs from a convertible in having no winding or sliding windows in the doors or the body, no permanent roof, whether rigid or folding. There were double phaetons, with two rows of seats, triple phaetons, or closed phaetons. After 1912, American use of the term began to be most associated with the "triple phaeton" body configurations that had room for three rows of seats, whether all three were installed or not.
This led to the term "phaeton" becoming similar to, interchangeable with, the term "touring car". A specific use of the term "phaeton" is with the dual cowl phaeton, a body style in which the rear passengers were separated from the driver and the front passengers by a cowl or bulkhead with its own folding windshield; the phaeton and the touring car were popular up to the 1930s, after which they were replaced by the convertible, which had a retractable roof, but included side windows so that the car could be enclosed. The Willys-Overland Jeepster was the last true phaeton produced by a major US automaker, was introduced ten years after the previous phaeton to be offered by an American manufacturer. In 1952, a year after Willys last offered the Jeepster, Chrysler built three Imperial Parade Phaetons for ceremonial use, one by New York City, one by Los Angeles, one intended for the White House but used for events throughout the United States; these were dual-cowl phaetons custom-built on Chrysler Corporation's stretched Imperial Crown Limousine chassis.
In the late 1930s, Buick included a "convertible phaeton" body style, a four-door convertible, as the doors had windows in them and the car could be closed. During the 1956 model year, Mercury marketed the four-door hardtop versions of its Montclair and Monterey models as "phaetons."In 2004, Volkswagen introduced a vehicle with the name Phaeton, which has a typical four-door sedan body style
Royal Aero Club
The Royal Aero Club is the national co-ordinating body for air sport in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1901 as the Aero Club of Great Britain, being granted the title of the "Royal Aero Club" in 1910; the Aero Club was founded in 1901 by Frank Hedges Butler, his daughter Vera and the Hon Charles Rolls inspired by the Aero Club of France. It was concerned more with ballooning but after the demonstrations of heavier-than air flight made by the Wright Brothers in France in 1908, it embraced the aeroplane; the original club constitution declared that it was dedicated to'the encouragement of aero auto-mobilism and ballooning as a sport.' As founded, it was a London gentlemen's club, but moved on to a more regulatory role. It had a clubhouse at 119 Piccadilly, which it retained until 1961; the club was granted its Royal prefix on 15 February 1910. From 1910 the club issued Aviators Certificates, which were internationally recognised under the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale to which the club was the UK representative.
The club is responsible for control in the UK of all private and sporting flying, as well as for records and competitions. The club established its first flying ground on a stretch of marshland at Shellbeach near Leysdown on the Isle of Sheppey in early 1909. A nearby farmhouse, Mussell Manor became the flying ground clubhouse, club members could construct their own sheds to accommodate their aircraft. Among the first occupants of the ground were Short Brothers. Two of the brothers and Oswald had made balloons for Aero Club members, been appointed the official engineers of the Aero Club: they had enlisted their eldest brother, when they decided to begin constructing heavier-than-air aircraft, they acquired a licence to build copies of the Wright aircraft, set up the first aircraft production line in the world at Leysdown. On 1 May 1909 John Moore-Brabazon made a flight of 500 yards in his Voisin at Shellbeach; this is recognised as the first flight by a British pilot in Britain. The same week the Wright brothers visited the Aero Club flying ground at Shellbeach.
After inspecting the Short Brothers' factory, a photograph was taken outside Mussell Manor of the Wright Brothers with all of the early British aviation pioneers to commemorate their visit to Britain. On 30 October Moore-Brabazon was the first to cover a mile in a British aeroplane, flying the Short Biplane No. 2, so winning a prize of £1,000 offered by the Daily Mail newspaper. On 4 November 1909, he decided to take up a piglet, which he named Icarus the Second, as passenger, thereby disproving the adage that "pigs can't fly", it moved the next year to nearby Eastchurch. Until 1911 the British Military did not have any pilot training facilities; as a result, most early military pilots were trained by members of the club and many became members. By the end of the First World War, more than 6,300 military pilots had taken RAeC Aviator's Certificates. After the loss of its Piccadilly clubhouse in 1961, the club was lodged at the Lansdowne Club at 9 Fitzmaurice Place until 1968, it moved for a short spell to the Junior Carlton Club's modern building at 94 Pall Mall.
In June 1973 the club merged with the United Service Club and moved into its premises at 116 Pall Mall. All its aviation-related activities were transferred to the Aviation Council Ltd incorporated on 15 February 1973. In June 1975, the United Service and Royal Aero Club merged with the Naval and Military Club and on 1 August 1975 the Royal Aero Club of the United Kingdom was launched and endowed with all its awards and memorabilia and took the place of the Aviation Council. By 1977, the club had ceased to be a members club but continued to carry out the function carried out by its Aviation Council, with the Secretariat based at the Leicester premises of the British Gliding Association. Today the Royal Aero Club continues to be the national governing and coordinating body of air sport and recreational flying; the governing bodies of the various forms of sporting aviation are all members of the Royal Aero Club, the UK governing body for international sporting purposes. The Royal Aero Club acts to support and protect the rights of recreational pilots in the context of national and international regulation.
The following were the first ten people to gain their aviator certificates from the Royal Aero Club: 1 - J T C Moore-Brabazon - 8 March 1910 2 - Hon C S Rolls - 8 March 1910 3 - Alfred Rawlinson - 5 April 1910 4 - Cecil Stanley Grace - 12 April 1910 5 - George Bertram Cockburn - 26 April 1910 6 - Claude Grahame-White - 26 April 1910 7 - A Ogilvie - 24 May 1910 8 - A M Singer - 31 May 1910 9 - L D L Gibbs - 7 June 1910 10 - S F Cody - 14 June 1910 - made first aeroplane flight in Britain A number of air races were organised by the club: The Kings Cup SBAC Cup The Kemsley Trophy The Norton-Griffths Cup The Grosvenor Cup The Siddeley Trophy The Air League Cup The Britannia Trophy is presented by the Royal Aero Club for aviators accomplishing the most meritorious performance in aviation during the previous year. List of pilots awarded an Aviator's Certificate by the Royal Aero Club in 1910 List of pilots awarded an Aviator's Certificate by the Royal Aero Club in 1911 List of pilots awarded an Aviator's Certificate by the Royal Aero Club in 1912 List of pilots awarded an Aviator's Certificate by the Royal Aero Club in 1913 List of pilots awarded an Aviator's Certificate by the Royal Aero Club in 1914 List of pilots with foreign Aviator's Certificates accredited by the Royal Aero Club 1910-
Works written by or about Charles Rolls at Wikisource
