these initial attempts, and twelve years passed before his
persistence was rewarded by a public subscription made at Brest
for the purpose of enabling him to continue his experiments. He
built a second albatross, and on the advice of his friends
ballasted it for flight instead of travelling in it himself. It
was not so successful as the first, probably owing to the lack
of human control while in flight; on one of the trials a height
of 150 ft. was attained, the glider being secured by a thin rope
and held so as to face into the wind. A glide of nearly an
eighth of a mile was made with the rope hanging slack, and, at
the end of this distance, a rise in the ground modified the
force of the wind, whereupon the machine settled down without
damage. A further trial in a gusty wind resulted in the
complete destruction of this second machine; Le Bris had no more
funds, no further subscriptions were likely to materialise, and
so the experiments of this first exponent of the art of gliding
(save for Besnier and his kind) came to an end. They
constituted a notable achievement, and undoubtedly Le Bris
deserves a better place than has been accorded him in the ranks
of the early experimenters.

Contemporary with him was Charles Spencer, the first man to
practice gliding in England. His apparatus consisted of a pair
of wings with a total area of 30 sq. ft., to which a tail and
body were attached. The weight of this apparatus was some 24
lbs., and, launching himself on it from a small eminence, as was
done later by Lilienthal in his experiments, the inventor made
flights of over 120 feet. The glider in question was exhibited
at the Aeronautical Exhibition of 1868.