Famous Flyers - Zeppelin

- The Zeppelins

In the spring of 1838 an enormous iron framed ship set out from Bristol, heading to New York. The 'Great Western' was designed by the great engineer Brunel, also responsible for the Great Western Railway, the Clifton suspension bridge, Paddington railway station, and many other Victorian engineering marvels. As it turned out, the Great Western's first voyage was delayed by a fire breaking out in the engine room. Another ship, the Sirius, left Cork in Ireland ahead of the Western and headed to New York. By the time the Western was ready to set sail, most of the passengers had cancelled their bookings, with only a handful willing to take the journey. Sirius arrived first in New York, but it was a one off trip for the ship, it returned to sailing between Ireland and Scotland. The Great Western made it to New York the day after the Sirius, and in the following decade made over forty crossings of the ocean, the first steamship to regularly cross the Atlantic with paying customers. She was followed by many more Atlantic steamships over the next century. The steamer was the only way to cross between the old world and the new and the advent of aeroplanes that could cross oceans did not change this. Ships could carry thousands of passengers, planes could carry a few tens of passengers. The heroic flight of Charles Lindbergh had raised the profile of air travel enormously, but the ordinary middle class traveller was only ever likely to fly on a plane when travelling between cities or taking short hops across short stretches of sea, such as the English channel. Even by the 1930s, with over thirty years of improvements to plane designs, including a huge burst of progress during the Great War, and the heroic exploits of the Orteig Prize competitors, the most luxurious of Pan American Airlines seaplanes could carry around thirty passengers. And with such limited numbers the price of a journey on a trans-oceanic sea plane flight was huge; a five figure sum in today's money.

Seaplanes (or flying boats) came to the fore in the 1930s because they addressed two practical problems with air travel; the need to refuel on long oceanic crossings, and the lack of places to land in large cities. These were problems that had also been solved by a completely different form of airborne craft; the airship. Airships had been around for just as long as powered aeroplanes and the two forms of machine shared a great deal in common. Both used a light but strong framework - planes to form a fuselage and wings, airships to contain bags filled with lighter-than-air gases. Both used powerful piston engines to drive propellers, except that airships could steer with their engines. Planes were certainly faster and more agile than airships, but airships promised very large cargo and passenger carrying capacity. Where planes could carry a few dozen people it looked as though a giant airship might be a competitor to the huge ocean going liners. In the 1910s and 1920s it looked as though the future of travel would be shared between small planes buzzing around like insects between airfields, and giant whale-like airships carrying people across oceans.

The name that became synonymous with airships was that of a German count of the late 19th century. Ferdinand von Zeppelin spent most of his life in the German army, and was inspired by seeing hot air balloons being used for reconnaissance during the American Civil War. Airships had been a concept on many Victorian drawing boards throughout the 19th century, but like their winged counterparts were being held back from being fully developed by the limitations of materials and engines. In he 1850s a Frenchman called Henri Giffard had built a working airship, the "Dirigible" (or "directable"); it was over forty metres long, filled with hydrogen gas and powered by a steam engine. Much like George Cayley's glider of the same decade it was a beautiful piece of engineering, but of limited practical use. The Giffard dirigible could only travel at walking pace, could not fly into the wind, and was also filled with extremely volatile hydrogen gas that presented a huge danger in the close proximity of the hot steam engine.

Zeppelin took the concept of the airship seriously and left the army in his middle age to set up a company to make a practical design. It would take many years for Zeppelin to achieve something that worked. He hired an engineer called Theodor Kober to help with the design, and gained a patent on a design by Kober for a rigid airship, made from aluminium , covered in fabric, with multiple gondolas suspended underneath for carrying passengers or cargo. It would take Zeppelin a decade to muster the support, both financial and political, to build a full working rigid airship based on the design. His break came when the German Engineers Association decided to support his plan and attracted other engineers, including experts on metals, and industrial gas suppliers, both essential components of his idea.

By the turn of the 20th century the Zeppelin company had built it's first prototype rigid airship, the LZ1. The LZ1 was built in a factory in the town of Friedrichshafen, on the shores of Lake Constance in Bavaria. This factory would come to produce the famous Zeppelin ships of the 1930s, but only after a very shaky start for the Zeppelin company. The LZ1 was a very impressive sight floating over the shores of the lake, but it turned out to be a total fiasco. On it's first flight it's structure was found to be severely insufficient to cope with the stresses of the wind turbulence, some of it's controls jammed, and one of it's engines failed. After repairs it was flown two more times but only on short journeys. Investors were not convinced and Zeppelin had to sell off his company and dismantle the LZ1 for scrap. Six years later the indomitable Count von Zeppelin was back with a second airship, LZ2, the first product of a new Zeppelin company and a new designer. Kober had given way to a long time Zeppelin engineer called Ludwig Durr. Durr would design all the subsequent rigid airships of the company.

The structural problems with the LZ1 were caused by the rectangular girders in the frame buckling under stress; Durr changed the design to a triangular girder frame that was much stronger. He also discarded the idea of using moving weight ballast to control the ship's pitch and adopted aeroplane-like ailerons. LZ2 crashed on it's second flight after it's engines failed, but it's design had proven much more airworthy than the first Zeppelin airship. A replacement, LZ3, was quickly built and proved to be a success; it had more stability than LZ2 and successfully flew for hours at a time. The German government was won round to the airship and awarded money to the company, no doubt swayed by German royalty taking journeys on the LZ3. During the winter of 1906 a new problem arose; while the airship was more airworthy, it's floating hangar on Lake Constance wasn't, and the ship was damaged when a storm blew the hangar into it. Ironically yet another setback would seal the future successes of the company. The next Zeppelin, LZ4, was destroyed by a fire; the burnt out shell of it's frame laying crumpled on the ground looks, to modern eyes eerily like the wreck of the Hindenburg twenty years later. LZ4 had flown over many cities and been seen by thousands of people in person. As a consequence huge donations were made from around Germany to the Zeppelin company to continue their work.

Although the German army had bought the LZ3 for military evaluation, the airship was also being considered for civilian use. In 1909 the first ever passenger airline was founded by the Zeppelin company under the rather unromantic name DELAG. The star-crossed history of the airship continued - DELAG's first Zeppelin was destroyed by a hangar fire, the second one crashed after being caught in a thunderstorm, the third was broken in two after being caught by gusts outside it's hangar, the forth also burnt down in a hangar fire. Amazingly none of these incidents resulted in any deaths, or any obvious lack of interest from the public. But the passenger flights were halted by the outbreak of war in 1914. They were replaced by something much less wholesome; bombing raids. Initially these were directed against cites in Belgium but late in 1914 the German navy drew up plans for dropping bombs on English cities, partly as a way of destroying military targets but also as a way to terrorize and demoralise the British public.

The German commanders hoped that airships would become a whole new weapon of war; giant bomb carriers that could fly up to any enemy city and rain down quantities of bombs that aeroplanes could never possibly carry. Nearly one hundred Zeppelin airships were built during the four years of the Great war, and they took part in over fifty raids on British soil. The raids would not be a success from a tactical point of view; by 1916 British air defenses had developed enough to be able to shoot airships down, although for all the advance in technology, quite often it would be the British weather that would thwart the airship menaces. The first attempted raid on London in 1915 had to be called off because of strong headwinds. Zeppelin's could carry a lot of ordnance but were terribly inaccurate. One raid intended for London was instead carried out on the docks of Hull - over two hundred miles away. The airships had a much larger impact from a psychological point of view; this was the first time since Medieval times that the English civilian populations had to worry about a war coming to their doorsteps. Bombing raids on England in 1915 caused great alarm - almost two hundred lives were lost, factories, warehouses, railway stations, and even theatres were destroyed or heavily damaged. Gun emplacements were put up in cities but proved frighteningly impotent against the giant Zeppelins far above them.  Only when explosive incendiary bullets were improved could aeroplanes begin to combat the airships, and when they did the great fear they generated began to be eroded. When the first German airship was downed over London much of the city could see what had happened.

The war had proven that the airship would not be of much practical use as a bomber and the Zeppelin company returned to building airships for passenger use. These would not immediately be available for use by German passengers however. War reparations meant the first two post-war Zeppelin's were confiscated and donated to Italy and France. A saviour would come in the unlikely form of United States Navy. Keen to trial airships as giant floating aircraft carriers, Zeppelin LZ126 was flown across the Atlantic in 1924 to the Us Navy Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey, commanded by Hugo Eckener, the head of the Zeppelin company - the Count himself had died aged seventy eight in 1917. The LZ126 became the USS Los Angeles and aside from the name the Americans made one major change to the ship - they replaced the highly flammable hydrogen gas used in the ship with far more stable helium gas. The Germans had not used helium in their airships for the simple reason that it was far more expensive, and the vast majority of the world's helium was manufactured in America and Germany would have had to import it.

The Germans would not have their own way when it came to manufacturing airships either. The successful trials of the Los Angeles persuaded the US Navy to build another ship on home soil, in a new hangar at the Lakehurst station. The two hundred metre long 'Shenandoah' had a brief life of two years before being lost in a dramatic crash in a storm in 1925 - while flying over the state of Ohio strong updrafts pushed the ship many hundred of metres above it's design limit and it was torn apart by turbulence. Many of the survivors hung on to the sinking parts of the wreck as it came crashing down to the ground. The setback didn't dissuade the Navy, and in the 1930s two more enormous airships would be built in America. The 'Akron' and the 'Macon' were designed to patrol the coast and carry a fleet of small fighter planes to intercept any enemy threats. Like the Shenandoah the previous decade, both the Akron and Macon lasted two years before crashing in storms. The Akron over the Atlantic off New England, the Macon ditched and sank in the Pacific Ocean off California. Seventy two men died in the crash of the Akron - for all that the Hindenburg's infamous end would come to symbolise the end of the airship era, the Akron crash resulted in a far higher loss of life, and took with it the great champion of airships in the Us Navy, Rear Admiral William Moffett. The loss of the Macon in 1935 was the last straw for the Navy, who abandoned any further rigid airship projects. The British too had experimented with rigid airships; in the 1920s the British Government looked to airships to fly across Europe and Asia to India and onwards to Australia. Two prototypes were built - the R100 and R101. Both ships were commissioned in 1924, and expected to fly by 1926, but delays pushed their maiden flights to 1929. R100 was first to fly, it crossed the Atlantic in 1930 to Canada. Two months later the R101 set out for India, but it only made it as far as Northern France before smashing into a French hillside and burning down to a smouldering hulk. R100 had been designed by Barnes Wallis, the future designer of the famed 'bouncing' bomb of the Dambusters raids of WW2, and was built to a very conventional design. R101 had more innovations in it's design but was overweight and had to be lengthened to create more lift. After it's fiery crash the inquiry concluded that it's fabric covering had been torn on the nose and enough gas had been lost to cause the ship to sink into the ground. Ultimately the inquiry scathingly concluded that the R101 had been rushed into service and was not ready to embark on such a long flight. After a year of waiting the R100 was broken up for scrap and Britain abandoned any more interests in airships.

This left the Germans, and the Zeppelin company, still the only country to use successfully use airships for passenger use. Ironically this peaceful purpose would continue after Germany fell under the control of the Nazis in the 1930s. Ever keen to promote German industry, and to take the credit for any of it's successes, the Nazis poured money into manufacturing and engineering. The Zeppelin company received eleven million Reichsmarks from the government and used the money to create two giant new airships and a new airline, the DZR, a replacement for the original DELAG that had continued after the Great War. Zeppelin chairman Hugo Eckener was not a favourite of the Nazis' - he had considered running against Hitler in the 1932 presidential election. Herman Goering, the newly installed Aviation Minister, created the DZR in order to exert more control over the Zeppelin company, Hugo Eckener, and over one of Germany's most prized machines; the LZ127 'Graf Zeppelin'.

After the completion and delivery of the LZ126/USS Los Angeles in 1926, Zeppelin had started work on a ship that was to remain in German hands. Overwhelmingly paid for by public donation the LZ127 was similar to the LZ126 but intended for passenger travel rather than military use. To this purpose a large gondola was designed incorporating ten cabins, a dining room and a kitchen, much like a passenger train car. Twenty passengers could squeeze aboard the ship, in conditions that made up in quality what they lacked in space. In the 1923 crash of the US Navy Shenandoah the entire gondola had detached from the main structure of the airship and plummeted to the ground, killing all the crew inside, so all future airships had built the gondola solidly into the structure - it reduced all round visibility but safeguarded against a catastrophic loss of the controls. The ship was completed in 1928 and for the next four years it was tested and used for promotional flights. In contrast to the way the British had rushed the R101 straight into an epic journey, the Graf was tested on several short flights in Germany before crossing the Atlantic to New York. The Graf lived a charmed life and seemed to avoid all the pitfalls that beset so many of it's fellow great airships. It flew in commercial use from 1932 to 1937 without incident, and visited all corners of the globe, including the Russian arctic. Suddenly, despite the setbacks to the US Navy airships it looked as though airships might finally become a viable form of oceanic travel. A new skyscraper in New York - the Empire State Building - was even built with a mooring mast on it's spire in anticipation that airships, and their passengers, would soon be frequent visitors. A trip across the ocean on the great Zeppelin wasn't a cheap ticket, though. Just like the seaplanes that were soon to follow, a passenger would have to fork out the equivalent of about ten thousand dollars in today's money. Most people would have to enjoy looking up at the Graf Zeppelin rather than riding aboard it, and the airline would in fact make most of it's money from transporting air mail. The great ocean liners were still the only realistic way most people had of crossing the oceans.

In 1929 the Graf Zeppelin, in it's second year, had set out on the greatest airship journey yet. With the support of the publishing baron William Randolph Hearst, it departed Lakehurst heading... for Lakehurst. The ship circumnavigated the world over the course of a month from August 7th to August the 29th, heading from Lakehurst, to the Zeppelin home base at Freidrichschafen on Lake Constance, then to Berlin, across the length of Russia and south to Tokyo, then across the Pacific - the first ever non-stop crossing - to San Francisco, and finally over the United States back to New Jersey, a grand total of 20,651 miles in a total elapsed time of 21 days, 5 hours and 31 minutes, the actual flying time was shorter than that. In fact so well had the Zeppelin coped with the journey that the trip would then continue back across the Atlantic a second time to Friedrichshafen. When they came to power the Nazi's saw the adulation that the Graf Zeppelin received wherever it went and realised what a powerful propaganda tool it represented. Although it had been funded by the German public the Nazi's stamped their Swastika on the tail fins and in 1936 Josef Goebbels sent it, and a brand new sister ship, off on a four day tour of Germany to distribute leaflets and broadcast speeches over loadspeakers.

Despite it's many great flights across the world's oceans the Graf Zeppelin had proven more suited for flying to South America than to where the Nazis really wanted it to go - the United States. Flying from east to west the Graf struggled against the prevailing North Atlantic winds and didn't carry enough passengers to really attract the wealthy away from the ocean liners. In 1936, the Zeppelin company provided them with the answer to their problem; the LZ-129. The fire that consumed the hydrogen-filled R101 after it crashed influenced the Zeppelin company to scrap their hydrogen inflated LZ-128 design before it left the drawing board, and start again with a airship that could be inflated with helium. Hopeful that the passage of time from the Great War, and the exploits of the Graf Zeppelin would persuade the cautious Americans to sell them helium freely. The LZ-129 was far larger than the LZ-127; over seven million cubic feet of gas bags, as opposed to three million seven thousand cubic feet. Zeppelin had partnered with the Goodyear rubber company in America to assist building the Navy airships Akron and Macon, and incorporated similar design features in those ships into their new German ship. But where the Americans had wanted to build aircraft hangars into the bottom of their airships the Germans instead built passenger decks. Gone were the cabins crammed into a gondola, the Lz-129 would look like an ocean liner, with two decks for about seventy passengers to occupy - a match for  number that matched the new generation of long-range flying boats that were on the drawing board, except that the airship passenger would have far more space to move about in. Airships seemed to finally be coming of age, the only immediate setback coming when the Americans still refused to sell helium, so the newly named LZ-129 'Hindenburg' would have use hydrogen after all.

Hindenburg took to the skies for the first time on March 4th 1936, at Freidrichshafen. It's name was not yet painted on the nose, but the Nazi swastika adorned the tail; Goebbels had given two million government marks to ensure the airship's swift completion. The Nazi's had also moved Hugo Eckener into the largely symbolic position of company chairman, leaving the day to day operations in the hands of Eckener's deputy, the more controllable, in their eyes, Ernst Lehman. Lehman's tenure in charge did not begin well; under his command the Hindenburg damaged it's tail on a propaganda flight. Shortly afterwards the new airship put in a more successful appearance over the Berlin Olympic games. Lehman's willingness to prioritise Nazi propaganda flights above testing led to more trouble on the first Atlantic journey to the South America when several of the ship's diesel engines failed, and the ship came close to having to be ditched in the Sahara desert on it's return leg. Hindenburg eventually made thirty four Atlantic crossings in 1936. The airship's fantastic journey time to America of two and a half days was a sensation, nearly half the time it took the fastest of the ocean liners to manage the journey. The future looked very bright for the transatlantic German airship, already another ship, the LZ-130, was under construction ready to join the Hindenburg.

In March 1937 the Hindenburg flew to Rio de Janeiro for the first transatlantic journey of the new season. Between them the Hindenburg and Graf Zeppelin were scheduled to fly over thirty long-distance journeys in 1937. On May 3rd the Hindenburg set off for Lakehurst on the first flight of the year to North America. In command was Commander Max Pruss, with thirty six passengers and forty crew, with another twenty one crew members being trained in anticipation of them forming the crew of the LZ-130. Also aboard was the head of the company Ernst Lehmann. Three days later the Hindenburg arrived over the shores of North America, and spent the afternoon of the 6th of March flying down the eastern seaboard past Boston and overlying Manhattan a few hours later. The ship arrived to land at Lakehurst around four PM, but Captain Pruss decided to turn around and wait off the shore for a thunderstorm near the landing site to clear. Around seven PM the Hindenburg approached Lakehurst again, circling around the field to head into the easterly winds. All of the great rigid airships required a delicate balancing act to land safely; ballast water would be dropped, and gas vented from the gasbags to lower the ship slowly. At twenty past seven the ship was floating around three hundred feet from the ground and the landing lines were dropped to the ground crew below. A few minutes later witnesses spotted a small fire glowing at the base the ship's top rear tail fin. Within seconds the flame spread through the rear hydrogen bags and set the entire tail on fire. The tail immediately began to fall, while the nose stayed bouyant and momentarily level. The fire spread forward rapidly as a gigantic ball of flame exploded into the sky. As the ship fell the fire burst through the front of the nose and the ship sank rapidly into the ground, consuming the passenger decks and control gondola in moments.

To watching onlookers it seemed as though nobody could possibly have survived the astonishingly swift and total devastation, but amazingly over half the occupants made it out of the crashing Hindenburg. The origin of the fire in the tail helped survivors chances; the ship had sank close to the ground before the fire reached the passenger decks. Plus the fact that many passengers were standing at the windows watching the landing and could scramble out to safety as the ship crashed down. Many of those who perished were crew stationed deep inside the bowels of the ship with no quick way to exit. Amongst the victims was Ernst Lehman who died in hospital the day after the disaster. The crash spelled the beginning of the end for the era of the airship. The newsreel films of the disaster were shown all over the world, and killed off any further public interest in Zeppelins. No more passenger flights were ever attempted. The Graf Zeppelin was withdrawn from service, the LZ-130, or 'Graf Zeppelin II', never entered it. Within a year of the beginning of the Second World War both had been scrapped, and the Zeppelin company would vanish. The name would be resurrected in 1990s Germany for a company building smaller ships. The USS Los Angeles had been flown intermittently by the US Navy until 1939 but it too was scrapped in 1940. Today the only remaining evidence of the era of giant rigid airships are their former hangars, now fulfilling other uses; the Lakehurst Hangar, the Goodyear Airdock in Akron Ohio, the Zeppelin hangar in Rio de Janeiro, the R100 and R101 hangar at Cardington England, and the Macon hangar at Moffett Field California, later to become the heart NASA's Ames research facility.

Famous Flyers, Cayley's Glider, The Wright Brothers, and The Spirit of St Louis

Part one of a small history of famous flying machines and their creators.


-Cayley's Glider

When we think of attempts to create flying machines before the great breakthroughs of the 20th century we tend to imagine the kind of contraptions seen in many comedic silent news films. These daft devices nearly always appear to be mimicking the flapping of birds wings in a futile attempt to get airborne. To our more enlightened eyes such machines seem comically misguided and a conformation of the view that whatever great things the people of past centuries thought or created they certainly had not the slightest idea how to create a working plane. In fact while the plane is undoubtedly an invention of our modern times it is grossly unfair to overlook that that invention owes almost everything to the work of others in previous centuries, and that while the inventors of the 18th and 19th century didn't create a plane it wasn't for the wont of trying. The most well known of ancient flying machines are the ones penned by Leonardo da Vinci in his notebooks, (it is not known if he ever got as far a trying to build his drawing in real life), and it is because of his influence that the popular myth has taken hold that the only way that pre-20th century people thought to fly was by copying bird's flapping wings. Leonardo made thousands of drawings of the anatomy of humans and animals and naturally his curiosity led him the question of birds, bats and insects and how they were able to fly. Leonardo's 'ornithopter' drawings show his attempts to figure out how a human might be fitted into a winged-contraption that the operator could then flap the wings with the aid of a hand crank mechanism. Leonardo's sketches are beautiful and fascinating, but had very little to do with the modern day aeroplane. His drawings of a helicopter-like device are more relevant and prescient than his flights of fancy of human-powered bird wings. In his sketches of a spiral-shaped flying machine Leonardo seems to be interpreting the air as something substantial just like water and that he might create flight much as a person can stay afloat by treading water; the machine might stay up by pushing enough air down. As Isaac Newton would explain in a later century; every action has an opposite reaction, Leonardo was on the right track but apparently never quite made a breakthrough

It would be in the early 19th century when the principles of what would later be called aerodynamics would be explored much more fully by a man who remains a surprisingly obscure figure considering the amazing flying machines he created; Sir George Cayley. Cayley was a Yorkshire baronet, an aristocrat with the time and money to invest in engineering projects. As well as experiments with engines, boats, prosthetic limbs and armaments, Cayley was fascinated with the possibility of creating flying machines. He built a model glider as early as 1804, and a few years later was authoring papers that discussed the fundamental principles of flight including the basic forces at work - lift, drag, gravity and thrust. It was Cayley who first truly understood the airfoil and how wings generate uplift without any bird-like flapping action. Cayley's work had led to him being recognised today as the pioneer aeronautical engineer. In 1853 Cayley put all that he had learnt through half a century of curious experimentation into a full size glider that was flown across a Yorkshire moor called Brompton Dale - possibly by Cayley's footman although the exact pilot is unclear - the first recorded controlled flight of any significant distance with a human pilot aboard.

Cayley's glider resembles a canoe suspended below a leaf-shaped wing and while being undoubtedly primitive it demonstrates it's creators fundamental understanding of the principles of flight and the several exceptional insights that allowed Cayley's glider to work successfully. The structure is light and the wing is large enough to generate sufficient lift; to keep the shape rigid without adding too much weight the craft is intricately braced with wires, some in tension and others in compression, much as in a modern hang glider. The pilot sits well forward in the gondola to counterbalance the weight of the tailplane - the tail plane is separate from the main wing and provides essential stability. As well as the tail there is a rudder to provide steering, and the pilot holds the handle of the rudder is much the same way as a gondolier holds his steering punt. The rudder mechanism is also balanced about it's centre to keep the craft's weight even. Later planes of course would surpass Cayley by giving the pilot direct control of the tail itself. Lastly the glider has landing wheels, again presciently arranged in a triangular shape with two at the front and one trailing wheel. modern replica flights have shown just how successful Cayley's craft was, and how the possibly apocryphal story of his footman telling the baronet wide eyed after his flight "I was hired to drive not to fly!" may have come about.

The Victorians were aware of how to make something fly but had an intractable problem; the steam engine didn't generate enough power to lift it's own (considerable) weight off the ground. The huge weight of steam engines had been the reason that railways developed as the first form of mass transit. Smooth iron (later steel) rails supported and guided heavy engines with their huge boilers. steam powered road vehicles were tried even before the invention of railways but were almost always far too cumbersome and temperamental to control to be of much practical use. The Victorians, despite the best efforts of inventive geniuses like Cayley would remain mostly land bound. it would take the discovery of oil, the distillation of petroleum fuel, and the coming of the internal combustion engine to get humans airborne.


-Wright Flyer

The 19th century, and the Victorian-era, only just missed out being able to claim the credit for inventing the aeroplane. A mere three years after the turn of the century a small craft made of wood and canvas made a controlled, powered flight across some sand dunes in North Carolina USA. At the helm was a bicycle maker from Ohio called Orville Wright. Watching his flight was his brother, and the co-creator of the machine, Wilbur. The flight lasted 59 seconds and covered 35 metres - less, as trivia fans love to recall - than the wingspan of the Boeing 747 jumbo jet that would fly a mere 66 years later. Like many pioneers who are heralded as the 'inventors' of something - Alexander Bell for the telephone, Philo Farnsworth for the television, Henry Ford for the mass produced car - the Wright brothers are frequently dismissed as being the recipients of an unfair amount of attention at the expense of other, earlier inventors. Almost as equally other names are put forward as the 'real' inventor of the aeroplane, with passionate cases argued that powered flights were made many years before the Wrights by other overlooked pilots.

Indeed some inventors did come tantalizingly close to powered flight many years before the Wrights. In 1874 Felix du Temple, a French navy officer, managed a brief "hop" in a steam-powered plane, but never achieved more. The ingenious and compact steam engine that he used for power did become a successful naval engine however. Ten years later another navy officer - this time a Russian called Alexander Mozhaysky - performed a similar feat in a similar steam-powered flyer. In 1890 a French engineer called Clement Ader flew a steam-powered flyer he called the Eole approximately fifty metres. However it was not a controlled flight; the Eole evidently could not be steered, and in all event flew less than a metre off the ground. Subsequent modern day experiments have shown that each of these pioneers could have developed their planes further into something more successful, and that the main sticking point for each was the power -or rather the lack of power - their steam engines could develop. Unlike the Wrights, du Temple and Mozhaysky launched their crafts down ramps, much like a modern day stunt motorbike rider might while jumping over an obstacle, which probably contributed somewhat to the how their craft became airborne.

Modern experiments have also shown that another individual designed a machine that could have flown under it's own power and beaten the Wrights to the claim as inventor of the aeroplane. An English university lecturer called Percy Pilcher built many manned gliders late in the 1890s and drew up plans for what would later be known as a tri-plane. After corresponding with another glider enthusiast, an American railway engineer called Octave Chanute, Both men came up with a simple way of creating more lift from wings; stack multiple wings on top of each other, like the shelves of a bookcase. Alas, Pilcher died in a crash of one of his gliders in 1899 and his plans disappeared into obscurity. A replica of Pilcher's planned plane was built in 2003 by students of Cranfield university and was flown, under control, for over half a minute longer than the Wrights first flight. Another glider pilot, who had also experimented with biplane designs, a German called Otto Lillenthal had also perished three years earlier in a crash, removing another potential usurper of the Wright's achievement. Chanute's 'biplane' gliders influenced the Wrights greatly, and their flyer's wings were essentially copied from Chanute's designs although Chanute, nearing his 70th birthday and already retired and rich, was evidently happy to allow his designs to influence others.

Many commentators have observed that the Wright brothers genius lay not just in creating their flyer but in remembering to pack a camera and to take some photographs of the machine in flight - something the other contenders all evidently failed to do. Most notably a German-born American emigre called Gustave Whitehead. Debate has raged hotly ever since Whitehead's claimed flights in his "No. 21" plane in 1901. Contemporary local news reports claimed that Whitehead flew over 800 metres in Bridgeport Connecticut in the "No 21" but no photographs of the feat were published or have ever been conclusively found. Whitehead, also unlike the Wrights, did not keep a journal or log book to document his claims. Whether or not the Whitehead plane did or did not fly, what is not in doubt is that Whitehead, like du Temple and Mozhaysky before him, did not capitalise on his ideas in the subsequent years and lived the rest of his in relative obscurity.

While the Wright's fame owes something to fortune and timing, they were still brilliant engineers who worked tirelessly and meticulously on their ideas and whose successful designs and flights were the end result of much exhaustive testing and refining of their designs. Like so many great inventors they came from humble backgrounds, worked out of small workshops, and were obsessively dedicated to their pursuits. Neither married or fathered children and they lived together in the same house, devoting all their time to their bicycle manufacturing business and their flying machines. The bicycle business provided them with a keen understanding of precise engineering and of the importance of the fine tuning designs for optimum balance and control - a philosophy that would be reapplied to planes; the Wrights would work for many years on creating their control systems and working on the weight distribution of their gliders before adding an engine. The Wrights did something that was far ahead of it's time; they built a wind tunnel to test models in. The wind tunnel allowed many ideas to be tried out quickly and saved money and time on costly and potentially very dangerous test flights. Both brothers were also both conspicuously free of egos - neither ever tried to claim precedence over the other, they took turns flying their gliders, they would even quarrel furiously with each other before agreeing a truce and that both of them had a valid opinion! Their lack of showiness had a practical benefit too; another competitor in the race to create a plane, the wealthy Samuel Pierpoint Langley, would test his contraptions in the middle of Washington DC in the full view of press, politicians and his sponsors. The Wrights avoided reporters, politics and money-men, something that initially caused a slow recognition of their historic flight, but their meticulous nature in logging and photographing their flights meant that nobody could deny their achievements once they had been achieved.

To modern eyes the Wright flyer is rather odd in arrangement. It has all the familiar pieces; wings, propellers, stabilisers, tail fins, cockpit, flying controls, but laid out back-to-front. The horizontal stabilizers are not on the tail with the vertical fins but in front of the pilot. The propellers are behind the wing not in front and push the plane along rather than pull it. The pilot lies prostrate on their belly on top of the wing and controls the flyer by swinging side-to-side in a cradle. The wings do not have ailerons like a modern plane - these would first appear a decade later - instead the flyer uses 'wing warping'; the wing tips are pulled by the control wires. This difference aside the pilot has the almost the same amount of control as on all subsequent conventional planes. The warping wings controlled the plane's roll (side to side), the front canard wings the pitch (up and down), and the rudder the plane's yaw (left and right) mastering the mechanics involved in providing reliable control over the plane's three axis of movement was the Wright's greatest breakthrough and legacy. In fact, much of the glory for the Wright's breakthroughs should really be reserved for the brother's second and third Flyers. The first Flyer, the one that appears in every history book, and is copied in countless full size replicas, never flew after it's first brief voyages. The brothers second Flyer, built in 1904, flew over one hundred times, flying for up to five minutes and performing the first controlled flying circles. It was dismantled at the end of the year and it's parts salvaged to make a third Flyer - that would fly up to twenty five miles and carry the first ever air passenger. It was also designed to make the rudder entirely separate from the wing warping system, thus giving the pilot exactly the same controls as in any standard aeroplane. Today the Wright Flyer III of 1905 sits quietly in a gallery in Dayton Ohio, part the city wide historic park preserving key Wright brothers locations around the city; their homes, their bicycle shop and office. It is a far cry from the national Air and Space Museum in Washington DC where the original Flyer is stared at by thousands of people every day.

These days the Wright brothers are two of the most famous inventors in the history of the world. But in the immediate years after their first flight their names were not widely known, and when they were mentioned it was often along with doubts about whether they really had built a flying machine or whether they were hoaxers. In the days before radio and television the publicity shy Wrights did not do much travelling to promote themselves and the only way for journalists, photographers and members of the public to see their flights was to chance upon them. As a consequence, especially in the snobbish European establishment, the achievements of the Wrights went somewhat unnoticed for several years. Only when they made public demonstrations in France in the summer of 1908 did the European press and public begin to acknowledge them. By then however they had some serious competition that threatened to overtake their advantage and move the centre of aviation development from eastern USA to Europe.

Alberto Santos Dumont was born in Brazil the heir of family rich from the coffee business, but lived in Paris most of his life. His wealth allowed him to hire private tutors to teach him the sciences and engineering, but like many adventurous young men from wealthy backgrounds Dumont was not content to live an easy life and took to being a balloon pilot, taking joyrides above Paris. He took to designing 'dirigibles' (the french term for airships) and would tour the city, often landing outside his favourite cafe. Dumont was everything the Wright's were not; he became a celebrity, made friends with royalty and the rich, and became a fashion trendsetter. For all his pretensions he was an extremely intelligent engineer and by 1905 was working on his own powered aeroplane. A year later he flew his '14-bis' plane 60 metres - the first powered flight in Europe. The 14-bis was influenced by the Wright's planes; it was a biplane with it's control surfaces in front of the pilot. but Santos introduced an important innovation that the Wright's had not adopted. The wings on Santos's plane swept up in a 'v' shape (called a dihedral angle). the upsweep gave the plane much more stability and reduced 'sideslip' when banking over, meaning the plane would have a greater tendency to fly with it's wings level. This in turn allowed Santos to experiment with more radical moving surfaces to improve maneuverability. His next plane, the Demoiselle was, in the basics, essentially the same layout as any small propeller plane that followed. It was a monoplane, with one large wing, the engine sat at the front, with the pilot behind, and a tailplane mounted out behind. Alas, after creating two revolutionary planes Santos Dumont fell ill with multiple sclerosis and never fulfilled his promise as a engineer. He returned to Brazil and lived in a house of his own design. He died in the 1930s in mysterious circumstances. Wilbur wright died from typhoid fever in 1912, Orville lived till 1948, long enough to see his invention surpass the speed of sound.


-Spirit of St Louis

In the summer of 1927 a quiet 25 year old former ail mail pilot shot from obscurity to being the by far the most famous person in the world. What Charles A. Lindbergh did to become so instantly famous was quite simple - he flew from New York to Paris. To modern eyes not a great challenge, thousands of people do the same thing every day on hundreds of different flights. Even in 1927 it was not an unprecedented feat to fly across the forbidding expanse of the Atlantic ocean. What made Lindbergh exceptional was what he did but how he did it; he flew entirely solo, in a small plane, directly from an airfield near New York to an airfield near Paris. He made no mistakes, did not get lost or run low on fuel, and in the process showed the world that the aeroplane had the potential to travel from any one place on the earth to any other without problems. Plus, from the adoring public's point of view, it helped that "Lindy" was a boyish, modest, polite, wholesome and clean-cut figure who made for a perfect role model. his talent and heroism had also made something extremely dangerous look easy.

What is often forgotten nowadays is that Lindbergh was not the only person trying to cross the ocean at the time. He was in a competition called the Orteig prize - a large cash prize offered up to anyone who could make the trip from New York to Europe. The other teams were all much larger than Lindbergh's - in fact, Lindbergh didn't really have a team, just a very small group of mechanics. Neither did he surround himself with press and publicity people and other frivolous hangers-on who were not essential to his task. And by flying entirely solo he also avoided the internal politicking and arguments that characterised his rivals efforts. For example the great favourite was the team led by Commander Richard Byrd. At the time Byrd was feted as being the first explorer to fly over the North Pole, but there were many mumbled suspicions that he had falsified his logbook and had come nowhere near to overflying the pole. This episode aside, Byrd was a great explorer, but also possessed a great ego. In his journals he barely gave credit to the efforts of his crew,and especially his Norwegian pilot Bernd Balchen. He fell out with the designer of his plane America, the Dutch engineer Antony Fokker, after a crash while testing that plane- a crash that took Byrd's team out of contention just long enough to allow Lindbergh in. Another team vying against Lindbergh was the crew of the Columbia. The plane, designed by a genius engineer called Mario Bellanca was ready well before the rival planes and had already recorded an endurance record circling above New York for 51 hours, earlier in 1927. Their pilot Clarence Chamberlin was almost the equal to Lindbergh in skills and in calm temperament. By contrast their team leader Charles Levine was an extremely unreliable operator who seemed to specialise in causing grief and upset. Levine rarely paid his team the money he said he would and loved to change to crew roster on a whim. One of his changes proved to be costly when his original co-pilot Lloyd Bertaud put in an injunction against Levine to prevent him flying. While the injunction was waiting to be lifted Lindbergh made his historic flight. The designer Bellanca also left the team shortly after. A year earlier Levine had been approached by Lindbergh the year before to sponsor Lindbergh's flight. Levine had agreed but waited until Lindbergh arrived at his offices with a cheque in hand from his backers to tell him that while he would take the money to build a plane he couldn't guarantee that Lindbergh would be the pilot. Naturally the deal immediately fell through and the young air mail pilot went off to find somebody else to build him a plane.

Lindbergh's plane was a relatively straightforward device, compared to the opposition. For a start it only had the one engine. Commander Byrd's America had three 200 horsepower radial engines, giving it three times the power but also three times the weight. The Spirit of St Louis weighed in at just under 1000kg whereas the America was over 3000kg - and that was without the weight of the occupants or fuel. The crucial importance of the planes weight to a successful long distance flight, and the dangers of designing an overweight plane had been demonstrated with the crash in 1926 at Roosevelt Field of another Orteig Prize contender, the Sikorsky S35. Even though the Sikorsky company would later become the name synonymous with the first helicopters, and though the plane was flown by the French flying ace Rene Fonck, the plane never even managed to begin it's planned flight across the Atlantic. Despite the fact that the fully loaded Sikorsky was 1800kg overweight when fuelled, Fonck had ambitiously made an attempt to takeoff. The plane never came close to flying and crashed heavily when it's landing gear collapsed. Only two of it's four occupants - Fonck and his co-pilot managed to escape before the wrecked plane exploded.

Fonck's plane had far more powerful engines than either Lindbergh or Byrd, but his rushed preparation had doomed his attempt and destroyed the first serious contended for the prize. The Americans were all using Wright Company 'Whirlwhind' engines, but these were far from guaranteed to be powerful enough for the job. A month before Lindbergh's flight two US Navy pilots, Noel Davis and Stanton Wooster, had unveiled their Orteig prize contender, a three engine plane called the Pathfinder. The Pathfinder's original engines were far more powerful than the Wright engines, but also consumed far too much fuel for a practical non-stop Atlantic crossing, so they were replaced with Wright engines. Unfortunately little about the design of the plane was changed to account for the reduced power. On a test flight shortly before their planned trans=Atlantic flight, Davis and Wooster both perished when the underpowered and overloaded plane crashed after failing to climb over a row of trees. A few weeks later came yet another challenger; this time aiming to fly in the opposite direction, from Paris to New York. This was thought to be a much harder challenge - the 'jet stream' was unknown in the 1920s but the prevailing winds were known to blow mostly from west to east. The two pilots, experienced French flyers called Charles Nungessor and Francois Coli, knew this too but reckoned they did not had time to ship their plane - the Oeseau Blanc (White Bird), to America. Their plane too was heavy, and only had enough fuel for an almost direct flight to New York, there was no margin for error. Nungessor and Coli took off from Paris early in May 1927, were briefly sighted heading out to sea of the southern tip of Ireland, and disappeared forever somewhere over the ocean. What happened to them remains a mystery.

The crashes underlined the importance of good preparation and, perhaps even more importantly, patience. Unfortunately not a virtue that was encouraged by the race for the glory and the prize on offer for the first to make the flight. Experienced designers were being rushed into creating half-baked and underpowered planes, and some of the world's best pilots were rushing to get them ready and paying the price. Curiously enough Lindbergh's preparations were a strange mixture of prudence and recklessness. When he took delivery of the plane from it's builders, the Ryan Aircraft company, he flew it single-handedly from California to Lindbergh Field, across an entire continent's worth a adverse weather, including thunderstorms and the rains that were causing the great Mississippi floods of that summer. Though somewhat foolhardy (and nerve racking for his backers) his combined delivery and test flight made him familiar with the characteristics of his plane, including it's somewhat unbalanced nature - something Lindbergh didn't mind, as he thought that his plane's slightly unpredictable tendencies would help keep him alert on the long Atlantic crossing. Aside from his individualistic testing methods, in other ways Lindbergh was very prudent and his care and attention to detail was reflected in the design of the Spirit. Ballanca's Columbia, the plane Lindbergh might have ended up piloting but for the machinations of it's owner Levine, was a very similar design to the Spirit. It too had one engine, was made of a steel frame wrapped in fabric, and had proven it's ability to fly long distances - far more so, in fact, than the Spirit. But Lindbergh's plane was purely a single seater, and was far more purposeful. Many thought Lindbergh hopelessly out of his depth deciding to fly solo for such a long distance. But Lindbergh was an experienced air mail pilot, and used to navigating on his own. He also reasoned there was no need for a radio operator; either he would make it or he wouldn't, and a radio introduced a risk of fire in the cockpit. One feature of the plane that Lindbergh specified can still raise eyebrows even today - it seem to have no forward visibility at all. To Lindbergh's highly rational mind he didn't need to see forward over the open ocean, and the nose would be a good place to put the main fuel tank. To see he would side-slip the plane and look out the door window, like a steam engine driver. Having the heavy fuel tank in the nose would make the plane safer if he did crash; he wouldn't be crushed by the tank.

On May 20th 1927 Charles Lindbergh arrived at Roosevelt Field early in the morning and readied his plane for it's planned flight. 1200 kg of fuel was pumped aboard and Lindbergh climbed into his small wicker cockpit seat - a seat made intentionally uncomfortable, again to help keep the pilot from dozing off. At ten minutes to eight in the morning the fully loaded Spirit took off, lumbering past a row of power lines at the end of the runway by barely six metres. Although the plane had flown across America in the weeks previously it had never flown across a long stretch of water and the small channel between Long Island and the main land was the first time it had done so. Lindbergh followed the coast all the way up to Newfoundland, all the while sightseers underneath kept a lookout. The new contender had so suddenly appeared in the race that not many people knew much about him, and many doubted he could really make the journey single handedly. Finally he made the turn away from land and disappeared from all sight and radio contact until he reached France. The modern day airliner captain flying from New York to Paris get a comfortable ride that takes around six hours. The jet engines power them up to over 500 mph, the pressurised cabin means they can fly at over 9 km up high above most of the world's weather, the computerised flight controls can fly the plane automatically - the pilot is really only a supervisor to the computer - and the computer can navigate itself from the departure gate at one end to the arrival gate at the other. Lindbergh had none of these things. His plane had one piston engine, could fly at up to 130 mph, and as high as 5 km. His journey would take over thirty hours, trying to claw over storm clouds, and descending frequently to try to de-ice his control surfaces. He had to navigate with pencil and notepaper, relying on the stars, and keeping track of his speed and heading, all while juggling the fuel valves leading from the several tanks to the engine, and manually steering the stick and rudder pedals. All while sitting in a small wicker chair inside a metal frame covered in doped fabric like a giant tent, strapped behind a deafening engine thundering away in front - an engine on which his life entirely depended. If it were to fail, only he would know of his fate, as there was no radio to summon any help.

When Lindbergh appeared over Paris after over a day of silence, the Parisian public reacted not so much with a jubilation but with something approaching rapture. They were pleased to see him alive and well, of course, but there was far more it than that. His arrival signalled the beginning of a new era. One French politician referred to the intrepid pilot as the first "citizen of the world", as indeed he was. He would return to New York by steamship, but his flight had clearly foreshadowed the what the future could hold. For the next few months he would fly the Spirit around America on a goodwill tour. Ironically while he would be remembered for his brave flight over the Atlantic it would his tour of America that would be more influential, as American industry woke up to the possibilities of aviation. For half a year Lindbergh and the Spirit would hop around a giant continent, a continent whose inhabitants were used to travelling around by long distance sleeper train - if they travelled at all. Lindbergh and his sleek silver bird became a mascot for the aeroplane, and he was greeted by huge crowds everywhere he landed. After a year the Spirit would be retired to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. The Ryan company of San Diego that built it carried on under the name of Mahoney-Ryan for two more years, building a plane based around the Spirit's design for general aviation use, before being sold and disbanded in 1929.

Four Days in Paris

We travelled down to London first class from Sheffield to St Pancras on the first cheap train of the day. We were sat behind a lively conversation between the four people on the seats next to us. It was mostly between a retirement age Australian man and a woman who worked for a wine company, and also seemed to dabble in the hotel trade teaching etiquette. They were all also heading for Paris, the woman for business of some kind, and the man and his wife as part of a European holiday. They had evidently been in the North of England for the past few weeks and the wine company woman quizzed them extensively on every detail of their trip, and frequently dropped in knowing references to many British stereotypes; how the north is much friendlier than the south, how there is much public drunkeness in England, how lovely York Minster is and so forth. She was one of those loquacious, excellently spoken people who can carry on conversation for hours and hours without actually saying anything remotely interesting. The man in turn dropped in many happily smug mentions of how comfortable and sunny life in Australia is. He had once been a teacher it seemed, and told a charming anecdote about his last day before retirement and how all the children at the school had been turned out to bid him farewell. From his various travels it seemed as though he and his wife were making the best of their retirement. It turned out the woman worked part time in Paris so was offering many tips on what to see there, although since the Australians were only there a few days this could consist only of saying that they should see the Eiffel Tower and maybe buy one of those Paris Pass things for the museums.

We had an hour and a half to pass at St Pancras before we could check into the Eurostar. At St Pancras the Eurostar platforms sit in the main train shed where the mainline trains once arrived and the check-in facilities are underneath in the old goods warehouse. I had wondered beforehand if the Eurostar had any security checks at all. As it turned out it had, but because the x ray checks and metal detectors only had to cope with three trains worth of passengers at a time compared to the tens of planes at an airport the security lines were far far shorter than at most airports. We had something to eat in the bistro at the end of the station, where, if my fading memories of the mid-1990s serve me correctly a WH Smith kiosk once stood. At this end of the station a huge sculpture of a departing couple sharing an embrace stands. It was attracting a fair few photos from passers by, yet the magnificent roof of the Victorian train shed and the handsome row of Eurostar trains was mostly ignored. It's funny how most people gravitate to the symbol of romance that the giant sculpture was providing, yet seemed to ignore the actual promise of adventure and romance sitting right behind them in the station.

The Eurostar is a big train; eighteen coaches long, and we had to walk down most of it to get to our coach. Still, I can't complain, it's very exciting to walk down the side of a train you know is about to head off at over 150mph with you aboard heading for France, and it's certainly has more of a feeling of glamour about it that crowding down the air corridor to get to a plane - no matter how big the plane is. I was a little disappointed to be sat behind one of the window pillar with only a small-ish view ahead, but not entirely surprised since we had booked some of the last available tickets on this train. Eurostar seems to be very popular these days and it doesn't surprise me - St Pancras is much easier to get to than Heathrow or Stanstead, and the Gare du Nord in Paris is a wee bit more central than Charles de Gaulle or Orly airports. The trains are showing it's age a little bit these days. Their interiors are a little square and plasticky compared to the newest of the Sheffield to London trains. They are undeniably smooth and comfortable, though, even if there isn't all that much to see on the journey to Paris. High Speed One in Kent speeds mostly though tunnels out of London (my ears were popping as we plunged in and out of them) and is hidden away in cuttings for the rest. After whizzing through the channel tunnel (the train manager came on to tell us that we were heading through, in such impeccable English and French it was impossible to tell which was their original tongue), it heads to Lille and then across the flat emptiness of Northern France and straight into the Northern suburbs of Paris.

It was raining hard when we stepped out of the Gare du Nord looking for a taxi to take us to our hotel. The lady driver could manage enough English to find the Hotel Eiffel Segur on her sat nav and took us on a brief tour of the north side of Paris. She pointed out a department store "verrree... expenseeve in zhere" she managed, and the Elysee Palace "vere ze President live", and across the river to, of course, "Eiffel Towerrr over 'ere". We had booked a place to have dinner on the tower that evening, booked well in advance of course as these days nothing as popular as a restaurant on the Eiffel Tower has tickets "on the door" any more. We found our hotel and were both pleased to see that it was smart and well kept. The lobby was being refurbished in a white painted modern fashion but behind the door marked "Chambres/Rooms" (nothing much in Paris is not subtitled in English any more, something I found a little disappointing - it didn't feel quite so exotic to see everything written in English too) there was an old wooden spiral staircase and walls done out in an interesting combination of mustard yellow and white, with red carpets. The man on the desk was from somewhere in Scandinavia and was able to answer our questions. The only one really was to do with the Metro line outside. I knew from my nerdy childhood days of reading anything and everything about cars, trains and planes that some bits of the Paris Metro ran on old elevated viaducts in the middle of the road and the hotel was evidently on a section like this. Very convenient, except that the whole shebang was covered in scaffolding;
"Is is shut?" we asked.
"Yes" came the answer, but fortunately there was another line and another station nearby. In only a few days were would become very familiar with the Segur station and in that time we would nearly be able to navigate back to the hotel from it. The problem was that with the big scaffolding covered train line in the way it was very difficult to remember which side of the road the hotel was on. And naturally both directions looked the same. The solution to the problem was the hulking Montparnasse Tower, the big 60s skyscraper in the distance - we knew the hotel was on the right side of the road when heading towards the Montparnasse Tower. It still took us a few tries to get this right.

The rain had slowed a little bit as we walked to the Eiffel Tower for our dinner date. We caught sight of it at the end of the long Champs du Mars boulevard. From this distance it looked quite small but that is because Paris had some very long and wide boulevards. I would say they reminded me of Washington DC but that would be the wrong way round as, of course, Paris's boulevards came first. The rain had made the grass in the middle a bit muddy so we crunched up the wet gravel towards to tower. This was the first time Becky had seen the tower and the first time I had seen it close up since a the school summer trip in 1994. That trip had been an tremendously fun experience, yet oddly only about twenty of us from school had been interested enough to go. We had seen loads - the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, the artists in Montmartre, Notre Dame, and yet most of my year at school had evidently not been interested. I've always felt a little embarrassed on behalf of my generation by that - when my brother's year had gone on the same trip, only a few years earlier, there had been over forty of them.

The Eiffel Tower is fabulous and you can't stop looking at it. Yes, partly this is because it's so famous, but mostly because it's so intricate and detailed, and the detail only increases getting closer. I remember being fascinated as a kid by the view up from directly underneath the tower. Of the four huge legs converging at the first level, and then continuing up to the second platform far above. With it's drab brown colour it looks like some kind of giant skeleton - an iron dinosaur - towering above your own puny self. It's the symmetry that is the most impressive feature, the way the incredible complexity repeats itself perfectly on all four sides. And it only gets better as the night rolls in and the whole thing is lit up in orange light. It's ironic really, for all the queues to see the view at the top, one of the best views in Paris is looking up at the thing from the bottom.

Dinner was at nine, we had to wait for a while in the lobby of the restaurant "58 Tour Eiffel" while they cleared away the previous sitting. But once we were in the service was impeccable and the food was - as to be expected - excellent. I had the Fois Gras simply because I had never had the stuff before, then the lamb. I don't even like lamb that much but it was delicious, and had some of the best "side salad" (for wont of a better phrase) I have ever tasted. The plate was also garnished with coriander and cumin paste, and chick peas, so I suppose I ate a very upmarket lamb curry. It was the dessert that was the best though; it was meringue, cream, and raspberries, but unlike any meringue I have had before it somehow wasn't dry. Well, the very outside was dry but the inside gradually got softer until reaching the wafer thin layer of fruit sauce in the middle. It was perfect, and I have seldom eaten more slowly and carefully, well aware that each forkful took me closer to eating the whole thing and having no more left.

The lift back down the the ground level was packed full so I took my chance and took to the stairs instead. It's always been a little goal of mine to one day walk the stairs all the way to top of the Eiffel Tower. It is impossible of course - the stairs to the very top are closed except as an emergency exit. So I took my chance to try a little bit of my dream. The rain was bucketing down now, and hundreds of drops dripped down from the tower as I gingerly picked down the stairs past the banks of spotlights beaming up and lighting the structure all around. All around the ground could be seen through the beams, and the sense of being very high up, even in the lowest section of the tower was strong. Maybe I wouldn't have the head for heights to try for the top after all. We met again at the bottom, hailed another taxi, and had a slightly embarrassing five minutes as neither of us could remember either the road the hotel was on or the (closed) metro station it was next to. I had left the convenient little tourist map out of my pocket for this evening, and neither of us had roaming internet so couldn't quickly look it up. For some reason this cab driver didn't have the sat nav his compatriot had had earlier in the day. Mercifully, and just as I was worrying that he might chuck us out for being slightly tipsy (the waiter had charged us for a glass of wine but had provided free refills because I had managed to address him in passable French rather than simply barking at him in English as is the standard practice of most visitors) and English, we passed a sign for "Cambronne" station and the penny dropped at last. I wish I had a better memory for names sometime, it was save some would save some embarrassing brain lapses.

In the morning we returned to the tower for a trip to the very top. The rain had abated but the daylight brought a new peril; hoards of street vendors - they carry the same wares, large rings of Eiffel Towers and other trinkets in their hands or slung over their shoulders. They aren't very persistent or intrusive but there are huge numbers of them. Standing back and estimating I would have said there was maybe one Senegalese street vendor for every three tourists. They were everywhere. Fortunately Becky had a neat trick her dad had told her. When asked if one could speak "ENGLISH???" by an vendor, simply reply "Nein, danke". Evidently pretending to be German works wonders - either they think you can't manage enough English to haggle with, or the German's have a poor reputation for generosity. Perhaps it's a bit of both, whatever it works a treat and is a well recommended tactic for a more enjoyable visit to Paris.

We had booked a "Skip the Line" tour on Expedia a few months earlier. This promised a guided tour of the second level of the tower but most usefully a way to skip the queues at the very base of the tower. I must admit, however, that the lines the previous night hadn't looked too bad - perhaps it was the rain - and this morning wondered idly if the tour was really going to be worth a small extra amount of euros simply to skip a brief bit of queuing. Though having seen the way the tat merchant sellers were trying to approach  people queuing I could see one advantage in not having to wait. They didn't stay long - every so often a posse of Gendarmes would stroll purposefully past, their semi-automatic rifles sending a signal that while they were on the lookout for anyone trying to park a truck full of explosives next to the tower, rounding up a few merchandise vendors and checking whether they had visas and work permits would not be out of the question. As it was the tour was very good. Ironically after all these years of visiting a brother in America I come to France and get an American tour guide, but she was very good at her job. We started in the Trocadero, the grand late thirties balcony overlooking the tower, walked down over the bridge and the River Seine, under the tower, and up to the second level. I only spotted one slight error in her commentary - the tower is not made of steel it's wrought iron - a minor point, but as a Sheffielder I should know what's made of steel and what isn't.

The Skip the Line tour didn't entitle us to skip the line to the third level of the tower, but we didn't have to wait long. Our guide had told us that Monsieur Eiffel hadn't actually designed the famous shape of the tower, two of his employees had done that, but had worked out how to put it all together and had the political connections to get it built. In doing so he'd had to fight against much of the cultural elite of Paris who had decried his idea as an ugly abomination. Never mind that it was supposed to be centrepiece of a World Exposition to showcase France's position in the world, they thought it was vulgar and would ruin the skyline of Paris. And in France "ugly" and "vulgar" are not things that are usually very welcome. Fortunately the pressure from all the artists, poets and politicians meant that the Eiffel Tower was located away from the historic centre of Paris, so it now commands and excellent view of that centre and of the nearly all rest of the city. Or rather, it does on a clear day. The rain and mist was drawing in as we rode the little lift to the top, up through the spindly framework of the top half of the tower.

M. Eiffel kept an apartment at the top of his tower, and looking from the second level way up to the small platform at the top I was moved to wonder why. It looks so precarious up there, as well as a little hard to get to. But once up the top you can see the appeal. They have kept a corner of his apartment preserved as it once would have been and it was quite a nice looking place. A bit bigger than you might expect, and with one heck of a view. We didn't quite get to see the view in all it's glory. The rain was coming down harder again, and the mist was pulling in. Still, it was fun to be at one of the most famous and distinctive spots in the world - the top of the most visited tourist attraction in the world.


We went walking through the streets near the tower but thanks to the incessant rain We ended up taking shelter in the French Military museum in the huge Les Invalides buildings. When we found that one of us could get in for free on account of being 25 or under we had a look around. The main draw of the museum is the tomb of Napoleon, underneath the famous golden dome, but the much of the rest is very diverting too, with displays of the French royal armories in the large galleries. After looking around the armories the sun chose a timely moment to arrive as we walked round the base of the golden dome an into the chamber containing Napoleon's tomb. His extremely large tomb. it is impressive certainly, but so enormous that it doesn't really feel like the tomb of a person at all, but a giant impersonal monolith. A set of stairs led down to the crypt level underneath the main floor where a big statue of Napoleon sits looking at the tomb. We walked around the upper and lower levels, looking at the large golden altar that sits behind the tomb, the impressive painted ceiling in the dome, the other smaller tombs around the rotunda; two of Napoleon's brothers, his son, Marshall Foch the French commander in WW1, the military architect Vauban. No Josephine though - Mrs. Napoleon is buried in a church in a suburb of Paris.

The sun had come out in full force by the time we'd had lunch and walked up another wide boulevard to the Seine. We crossed a bridge with four large pillars on it's four corners, and golden statues glinting in the sun on top. A large metal plaque on the the balustrade told us it was the Pont Alexandre and it was finished in 1900 - I would have guessed it was older given the baroque style of the statues and the decoration, but that's the thing with the bridges in Paris; they are all rather similar looking to each other and it's quite hard to tell which is older than the other. The ironic thing is that the oldest one is the one called the "Pont Neuf" - the "New Bridge"! We attached a romantic padlock to one of the newer looking bridges on the riverbank - a footbridge that looked much like London's Millennium bridge. This practice of attaching padlocks to bridges is rather sweet and sentimental but it might not be around for too much longer - already one of the bridges on the Seine was being boarded over to prevent any more padlocks being attached. The weight of hundreds and hundreds of padlocks is too heavy for many of the older bridges so sadly, but inevitably, they have to go.

Across the Pont Alexandre was a large glass greenhouse-like building called the Grand Palais. This huge building looks a bit like London's famous Crystal Palace but with the crucial difference that it is still standing. Even from the top of the Eiffel Tower it looked big. We kept walking down the river bank to the Louvre palace. The Louvre museum itself was closed on Tuesdays so we had a look around the courtyard instead, posing in front of the great glass pyramid above the main entrance to the museum, and next the ornate Caroussel triumphal arch, with a distant view up the Champs Elysees to the much bigger Arc du Triomph. We walked through the courtyards of the Louvre palace, through a courtyard so large and surrounded by four almost identical facades as be a little uncanny. The outside world completely hidden by three storied walls with many many windows. The east end of the palace looks a bit like Buckingham Palace, except there aren't any armed sentries standing in little booths. Opposite the palace was a grand church that looked a little like a old cotton mill with a slightly industrial looking grand central spire flanked by two identical buildings.

Somewhere in our family photo albums is an photo from about 1988 of my brother and me climbing over a large disembodied stone head, laying on it's side in front of an old Parisian church. My guidebook had a picture of the head and said it was next to St Eustache church in Les Halles. On the little tourist map the church was shown a few blocks from the end of the Louvre palace. Interested to rediscover a moment from a family holiday from long ago I persuaded Becky to come with me on a detour away from our walk towards Notre Dame and up in Les Halles, slightly away from the main tourist areas in search of a very large head. Large maps on the street indicated that the Les Halles markets area was being developed in a dramatic looking and major way. A nice new city park named after Nelson Mandela had been built and we found the head on the edge of the park. It had evidently been moved in the redevelopments and wasn't in front of the church any more, but some things hadn't changed as there were still kids climbing over it and being photographed by their parents.

St. Eustache church must be described as one of the hidden gems of Paris. It is fabulous inside with a huge high nave and an enormous pipe organ hanging almost suspended at one end. Unlike Notre Dame there was no big queue to get inside, you could just wander in an admire the place. It surprisingly quiet for such a grand church, but perhaps that's because it's not very famous, and it's probably not very famous because although it has a very grand roof, organ, and windows, it has no huge towers, or a spire or dome. We carried on past the Pompidou Centre, the modern art museum with it's "inside out" design with all the building's pipes and innards on the outside. We went there with school and I remember it being a bit worn out and grubby with escalators that were broken and dirt streaked windows. It looked in a bit better shape now but it still had the big bare square in front of it. It would look great if it's surroundings were more interesting - it would look brilliant suspended above a artificial reflecting pool, like a modernist castle and moat, or surrounded by a row of trees cut into weird shapes. As it is it still looks a little too much like the builders forgot to take down the scaffolding when they finished.


We continued on past the forum Les Halles, a 1970s shopping arcade seemingly so disliked by Parisians they are sticking a big sweepy orange roof over it to make it look a bit more attractive. At last we came to the Ile des Citie, by far the oldest part of Paris, where the city began as a Roman camp on the river, and where it's most timeless landmark sits. Notre Dame cathedral doesn't look quite as big as you might expect, we both said this upon seeing it. But, as Becky said to me, it's not so much the sight of the building as the idea of the building and all of the history, both real and fictional, that has passed through and in front of it. Look at any map of the city from the past centuries and it's there in the middle of the river. Cathedrals like St Pauls in London, and the ginormous Duomo in Milan are much bigger, but they are also much, much more recent. St Paul's is over 300 years old. Notre Dame is nearly a thousand. In Britain - Westminster Abbey aside - we're used to seeing ancient medieval cathedrals in the middle of middling sized towns and cities; York, Lincoln, Canterbury, Winchester etc. Because of the industrial revolution the big Victorian cities tend to have a big town hall in the middle rather than an old cathedral. So Notre Dame is perhaps not so big as you might be expecting but in the summer sun it's a beautiful sight. Paris keeps it's public buildings in excellent condition and Notre Dame gleams with hardly a patch of weathering on it's cream stone. It looks like it could have been built ten years ago rather than ten centuries.

Around the end of the island at the end of the cathedral is a small public park and we took a seat on a bench with possibly the best view from a park bench in the world. Looking almost end-on the the nave end of the building with it's flying buttresses flanked by two rows of trees. Underneath the trees was a small kids playground - swings, monkey bars, a little roundabout. There didn't seem to be too many adults about supervising them, except for a grandfather pushing what I presume was his granddaughter, although it may not have been. Had this been Britain there would have been a low fence round this whole set up and stern signs warning that the area was strictly for children between certain ages. At one point a twentysomething girl hopped up on the bars and posed for silly pictures for her partner, while trying not to flash her pants and thigh tattoos too much. I daresay doing such a thing over here, on a children's playground of all things, would swiftly attract suspicious looks from the community support officers. France seems remarkably unconcerned by child safety paranoia or Heath and Safety in general and certainly not with the details. I nearly brained myself walking down the riverbank on the bottom of a bridge - no signs to mind my head here. You can open the doors of the old Metro trains before they are stopped, and walk all the way to the end of the platform without a fence stopping you from getting to the dangerously narrow bit as there is in London these days.

Maybe were seeing Paris at it's best, on a summer's day in August, but the whole place seemed extraordinarily laid back. Everything is well kept, there's very little litter in the street, or casual graffiti or vandalism. The pavement cafes evidently don't worry too much about having their chairs or tables stolen, and neither do the the parks. We hear a lot about pavement cafe culture in France, and we try and emulate it here, but we have a long way to go; in Paris you start to wonder if anybody in a suit actually has a job, there are that many people sitting around in cafes chatting in the middle of a weekday afternoon. They aren't even eating or drinking much, just talking. On Wednesday, in a nice bistro back near the Eiffel Tower, we managed to eat tea and dessert, and get the bill, in the time it took two professional looking thirtysomething women at the table outside the window to have one glass of lager each. In the middle of a bridge over the river behind Notre Dame sat a pianist tinkling out tunes on an upright piano. The bridge had been closed for him and quite a few smitten young ladies sat on the kerb watching. I daresay they don't close bridges in the middle of Paris for any old busker and this chap was very impressive. He could even have been somebody famous in classical music circles for all I know. He certainly didn't need any sheet music and sounded like he was improvising in parts - whoever he was.

At the next bridge, the Pont Marie, we dropped down into the Metro for the first time, discovering with relief that these days the ticket machines have the option of English, and took the line up to the grand avenue of the Champs Elysees. We could have ridden all the way up to the Etoile - the giant roundabout round the Arc De Triomphe at the top of the avenue but decided to get off half way up so we could stroll up the hill. The Champs Elysees is pretty much the most famous shopping street in the world, and maybe even the most famous street, full stop. As they say "everybody who is everybody" is there, the seemingly endless parade of brands is a visual assault. Oxford Street and Knightsbridge can certainly match up for premium brands, and Broadway in New York is certainly as long, but neither is quite on the scale of this. Certainly there aren't that many actual car showrooms shoehorned into the shop fronts on Oxford Street. It's easy to look at it all with a cynical eye and think it's a bit too gaudy and tacky but here's the thing; all of the gaudiness and tackiness is collected here on the one street instead of being spread around Paris. And it's still in the city, not offloaded to some mall on the ring-road as we are so fond of doing here.

If there is one striking thing about Paris, and the thing that endeared me most to the city, it's how well laid out and pleasingly compartmentalised it is. Each district retains a distinctive unique character and they all have their own landmark to call their own. It's as if some great plan over time has conspired to spread all of Paris's great sights equally about the city and for each great building to be a perfect anchor for it's surroundings - the Eiffel Tower looking down the Champs du Mars and across to the Trocadero, Notre Dame and the old medieval city, the great basilica of Sacre Coeur up on the hill at Montematre, the Pompidou centre squatting among the department stores in Les Halles, even the often derided Montparnasse Tower sticking up on it's own - even when they think they made a mistake in Paris by sticking in a 1960s concrete tower, it's not the kind of planning mistake we make in the rest of the world. It all... works. Here on the Champs Elysees for example, you may be surrounded by the kind of chain stores you can see in any shopping mall - there's even a Marks and Spencers - but looking up the slight hill towards the great Arch made me forget all about that - it's a perfect shopping street, and frankly Oxford Street cannot remotely compare.

One thing that emphatically does not work, however, is the great roundabout round the Arc de Triomphe. It huge, wide, and completely chaotic. Cars, bikes, coaches, buses, vans, trucks, they are all fighting for the right to get there first. Standing there watching the it's hard to know where to look - up at the great arch, or at the traffic bedlam below. My particular favourites are the drivers who honk their horns at others, as if the person they tooted at can ever know who it was in the hoards of vehicles they cut up. Theoretically pedestrians are probably allowed to cross the road on foot (this is France after all, we have already established that they aren't too bothered about petty rules) but it would probably be quicker to find a jetpack and fly across than wait for a gap in the traffic. To get to the middle you need a subway, and wasn't immediately obvious where it was (Paris may be a lovely place but it could use a few more "This Way!" type signs sometimes). We found it eventually by going into the metro station and muddling round the right corridor.

Right underneath the Arch is France's tomb of unknown soldier. Unlike in Washington DC there isn't a sentry guarding it, although there were some police walking nearby. In America patrolling around the Unknown Soldier's tomb is apparently one of the highest honours for a regular rank and file soldier. In France they don't seem to bother at all. I think that says something about how much less they seem to care in France about the symbolic value of the military. In Britain we strike a compromise - there are armed guards but we give them great big fuzzy hats and let Japanese tourist pose for pictures next to them. Speaking of which there were a few people taking selfies of themselves in front of the tomb here. I suppose I'm not the sort to be offended by this sort of thing, these wars were fought so people could be free to act as they please, but I couldn't help but wonder if the selfie has become such an automatic habit these days that people don't stop and take in what they are posing in front of. "Look at me I'm pulling a face at the grave of a poor young man who was shot to pieces and died in a muddy battle field" It doesn't sit right sometimes.

If I had to offer a tip to any visitor to Paris then, after mentioning the speaking German to the hawkers thing, I would suggest going to the Montparnasse Tower. Not only does it give you a seat with a grand view of the Eiffel Tower at night, but it's very good value (13 euros, compare with the £30 they would like at the Shard in London), and they seem delighted to see you. The photographer at the top was practically dragging us out of the lift to take our picture. We had dinner first at the bottom of the tower - this was far more plebian than the night before, a regular chain serving commuters and locals round the Gare Montparnasse, but still the food was excellent. We had pizza and pasta respectively, Becky falling in love forever with France at the sight of a pizza with scallops on top. I was slightly distracted by the fantastically ugly edifice of the Gare Montparnasse out of the window. Whatever other interesting things they did with concrete in the 1960s, they never got the hang of train stations. It looked like the French had ordered something from a Soviet Russian catalogue by mistake and never noticed what an appalling hulk it was until it was finished.

Up the top of the tower were lots of big pictures of the tower and station being built and a birds eye view straight down onto it, and I had to reassess my opinion a bit; I could see what they were trying to do; create a nice rectangular plaza and lots of lovely new offices in the modern style without too much ornamentation. It's just it didn't quite work when looked at from ground level. To the left of the station was a large dark space where the Montparnasse cemetery sits, further round in the same direction, looking a little small, were the two towers of Notre Dame, and on the opposite side the Eiffel Tower lit up in it's full splendour, with a searchlight playing across the sky every few minutes. On each side were large interactive screens explaining the view in detail and pointing out some of the less obvious sights. For example I could see now that our hotel was slap bang next door to the big concrete and glass University campus-like HQ of UNESCO, and also a next door neighbour to the European Space Agency. Presumably employees of these were some of the people who formed the queues in the local patesseries we went in to buy treats every morning. Looked at from a height there seem to be a lot of big churches in Paris and the screens usefully pointed out which ones were which. The other striking thing was the boulevards, blazing with light in the darkness and streaking off into the distance at various angles like great laser beams.


Having crammed in so many things into one day we were a little indecisive as to what to see next. Should we brave the crowds of the Louvre now it was open? There was the Musee d'Orsay, where they keep Van Gogh and his impressionist friends though that had had a monumental queue outside it when we had passed as we walked down the Seine after leaving our padlock on the bridge across to it. An aside - we hadn't left one padlock but two interlocked, the smaller one for both of our late mothers, it seems appropriate to have attached it there as the Orsay was originally the Gare d'Orsay, and my mum's first job in the sixties was in the payroll department of British Rail in Victoria station in Manchester. Maybe it wasn't the bridge next to Notre Dame, but knowing her she'd probably have much preferred to look out upon a museum rather than some old Cathedral.

We could see Montmartre, go for a tour on the river, maybe go to Versailles? Looking on the hotel internet told two useful things; one, that there was more than one entrance to the Louvre museum, most tourists crowd into lines at the famous Pyramide entrance but those in the know stroll in by the side on the river front, or at the far end on the bit that looked like Buckingham Palace. Two; that Versailles was only a few euros and one needed to get and R.E.R. (or commuter) train ticket. We decided to go to Versailles. The Louvre was tempting but it's mostly old masters and historical artefacts and we do have a National Gallery and British Museum of our own full of the stuff. We don't have a unused royal palace, fabled with tales of legendary excess that eventually prompted the mob to charge the gates and take it's occupants off to have their heads chopped off though. Maybe one day, but not for now.

The train to Versailles was packed to the rafters with tourists like us. Even the ones who were speaking French and looked like local commuters turned out to be tourists. The train trundled gradually out the several miles to Versailles past the suburbs, first past lots of modern office blocks with the names of multinationals on the sides, then tower blocks, then slightly older looking streets of towns that must once have been separate from the city before being swallowed up by the suburbs, before rolling into a small station at the end of a branch line. A man outside the station directed us in across the street from the station too a place to buy tickets. Once again pretty good value given the size of the place, and if, like us, you exit the train promptly and walk rapidly you can skip any queue. Opposite the the little tourist ticket booth was a sandwich place selling a huge selection of baguettes for only a few euros. I had a large ham and pickle baguette and didn't feel particularly hungry again for much of the rest of the day. I've never quite understood the appeal of the Subway chain at the best of times - I have never thought that the appeal of being able to specify your own sandwich offsets the amount of time you have to queue while waiting. If it's a choice between waiting while somebody build a sandwich in front of me, and choosing something off the shelf without waiting, I'll go with the latter every time. Plus, in France they give you a baguette in a simple paper bag rather than wrapping it up in several kilos of paper and polythene. And their bread actually tastes of something. And unlike Americans they understand that sticking jalapeno peppers, heaps of onion and vinegar in a sandwich means you can't taste anything else that's in there. And usually makes it a bit soggy.

You approach the gates of Versailles down an ordinary tree lined boulevard such as can be found in thousands of French towns. We sat on a bench under the trees and ate our lunch, watching the crowds from our train come passing by us. As at Notre Dame it was a pleasant place to sit and watch the world go by for a while. The building opposite ran the entire length of the boulevard and a sign at the end said that these were the stable block for the palace. Eventually we picked ourselves back up again and walked on to the palace itself. Even to modern eyes used to stadiums, shopping malls and airports, it looks big. In the 17th century it must have looked unbelievably immense. In past centuries there wouldn't have such large crowds of casually dressed tourists in the foreground or tens of tour buses sat parked on the forecourt either, so the place must have looked even more grand and ethereal. The palace building itself is only three stories tall but it sits on a slight rise so it seems to loom over anyone approaching the great gates. When it was built the huge open space at the front was undoubtedly designed to give off a great air of power and to allow for grand parades and the like. These days the excessive size of the area at least provides plenty of space for the buses to park. Versailles easily wins the title for the most tour buses in one place you're likely to see in the world.

Surprisingly the irritating souvenir vendors had made it this far out of town and were busy hustling their way through the crowd. Fortunately they couldn't make it past the first gates so once everybody had got into the main courtyard we free to pose for pictures in peace. Although, like most of these places if you hang around too long you will be asked to take somebody's photo. In the case of the great golden main gates it seems as though each person then takes the next person's photo in turn. Much like in central Paris everything was very well kept; the golden gates and trim on the roof and balconies gleamed like new. The black and white mosaic courtyard floor looked dazzlingly modern; both in it's preservation and it's modernist design. They could use something like it outside the Pompidou centre instead of plain concrete. The palace and it's grounds may have been built by some slightly (to put it mildly) out of touch, pampered royals, but from the outside it does look almost understated and tasteful.

Inside "tasteful" and "understated" aren't quite the words that come to mind. We looked round the Mesdames’ apartments on the ground floor. These were once the apartments where the ladies of the royal family stayed when visiting the palace and each room was quite ridiculously plush and gaudy; one had a huge chaise longue that looked like a giant marshmallow. Another had a wall of golden trimmed bookcases, another a striking golden harpsichord. Unfortunately the royal men's apartments were closed for restoration so we couldn't see what the royal dauphin and his relatives had in their private rooms. Upstairs we passed the royal chapel (also semi-closed, we could look in but only from behind a rope), passed along a very long corridor lined with statues all engaged in various poses. Some were doing heroic things in war, others clearly were architects building things, others biblical characters, some medieval kings and queens. Just about anyone who was once anyone was represented here somewhere.

Upstairs are where the King and Queen's rooms were and also where most of the crowds were too. I gave silent thanks that we weren't on a guided tour - you would have to be much more interested in French royal history, or 17th century interior design to be able to handle standing still and listening to a guide while hundreds of people crowd around. It's undoubtedly dazzling to behold the interiors of each room, and quite thought provoking to think of all the history that once happened here - this was after all, where the actual Louis XIV slept in a golden room, and the actual bedroom Marie Antoinette fled from when the mob came storming into the palace in 1789. But it is a little exhausting to shuffle through it all, waiting patiently to get through each doorway. Thank goodness then for the giant hall of mirrors. It's huge; big enough to stand without being jostled by others, and so big it looks more like a modern building than a centuries old palace. The mirrors aren't quite as perfect and polished as the kind we can make these days, but it must have been something else to those rarefied few who saw it when it was new. In the day time the mirrors would have reflected the kind of natural sunlight that would have been unprecedented for a room in that era, and in the evening the hundreds of candles in the chandeliers would have been magnified in a way that nobody back then could have imagined was possible, and their flickering would have brought the ceiling paintings to life in a spooky way (Ironically given it's name the room's ceiling is perhaps even more dazzling than the mirrors).

It's not possible to imagine what it must have been like to visit Versailles when it was a palace as a member of the French royal court on the inside of the palace - there are too many visitors brandishing cameras - but the gardens are so huge and sprawling that the thousands of people in them dissipate like ants. The gardens may have been built for powdered bigwigs to prance about in, far from the unwashed massed in the city, but nowadays the gardens clearly belong to the people. No, we can't drive carriages down them like royalty - although there were golf carts to hire, and some mini train things for those who wanted a whistle-stop tour - but the scale meant everybody had lots of space to themselves. From a distance the great reflecting reflecting lake, a giant cross in the middle of the gardens, looked empty but a closer look revealed lots of rowing boats criss-crossing it. I imagine the various different King's Louis would be less than amused to see the plebs messing about on their lake.

The size of the gardens made it a little difficult to judge scale - from the facade of the palace to the great fountain (being refurbished, with a crane and lots of boxes of paving stones) was a short walk. From the fountain down the slight sloping lawn, bordered by statuary, to the great lake was a slightly longer walk. Looking at the map showed that the distance to halfway along the lake was the same as the distance back to the palace. And naturally the lake being a cross shape meant that the far end was doubly far. From the foot of the lake it was half a mile to the east to get to the Petit Trianon, the 'little' farm Marie Antionette built for herself to play at being a rural peasant in. The look of the gardens in Versailles has been copied many times around the world by theme parks, and in car parks and shopping malls, but here what look like chintzy fake statues are in fact genuine old masterworks. Even the side grove leading to the toilets was guarded by a wise looking Greek figure draped in robes. Every junction led off into a maze of 20 foot high avenues of dead straight foliage. I can imagine people who work in garden centres coming to wonder at the rows of trellises disappearing off into infinity. We didn't fancy spending the rest of the day gawping at shrubbery so we sat and had a drink before walking back to the station, passing the city hall on the way, in another town it would probably be the most extravagant building but here it was a little overshadowed.

Confusingly the train back to the city was heading in a great big loop back via the city to the other station in Versailles. So to get back to the city we had to get on board the train to Versailles - but, look carefully tourists, Versailles-Chantiers not Versailles-Chateau. The French seem to given up on using the little television screens on their stations to say where the train currently sat at the platform is going so Becky double checked with one of the cleaners on the station before we got on. Thanks to the double-Versailles problem I imagine the patient fellows of the station must answer the same question from bemused tourists tens of times a day. They didn't seem to mind.

Once back in the city we took the metro round the north side of the city to Montmartre. Montemartre is higher on a hill looking over the city, and it's easy to forget until climbing up quite a long spiral stairs to the ground level. Most Metro stations are quite shallow under ground, except when there is a large hill above them. We were only part of the way up the hill and to get to the top involved two more steep staircases between the buildings. At the top we emerged into a crowded square packed full of bistros, artists tents and souvenir tents; the Place du Tertre, a famous epicentre of artists, buskers and portrait painters. I remembered it well from coming with school, if I knew where to look I could probably find the charcoal caricature of me that was drawn here. We walked around the corner to the grand white catholic church of Sacre Coeur. It's three large, vaguely onion shaped domes are very impressive if a little hard to see as the building is hemmed in by the nearby streets and the only long view is from down the steep steps of the hill in front.

Lots of people were sat around on the steps looking down at the view of the city. A street artist-type was "directing" traffic on the road at the top of the steps, and generally amusing the crowd by hassling passersby. He didn't seem to be making any money funnily enough, and was very bravely trying to walk out in front of some French drivers. A rich looking middle aged group climbed out of Toyota cab before they could be interfered with by the busker. This seemed a bit like cheating; hiring a cab and driving to the top of the hill rather than slogging up the steps, or even riding the little funiculare. But if you can afford a taxi it's a quick way to get around. In front of the church itself a young  Korean or Japanese bride and groom were being briefed by a photographer on their wedding photos. The crowd around politely made way for them to pose for the many photos and at one point the photographers assistant made up for the lack of a breeze by picking up the bride's train and fluttering it artificially.

Inside the church signs asked visitors not to take photos and to maintain quiet. It was gloomy and moody interior, with high soaring symmetrical arches up to the dome. The dome looked smaller than the one in Invalides and was not painted inside. It had an exotic air about it, a church with the slight feel of a Russian orthodox church, or even a mosque. Outside we stopped for a while to look at the view over Paris. To the left we could see down to the dark shed of the Gare du Nord, and further behind up to another hilltop with a park at the top. Behind that another further hill with a larger green space on the side of it. To the right the more familiar sights of the centre; the river and the towers of Notre Dame, with the Montparnasse Tower in the distance. Behind Notre Dame sat a large building with a large white cap on it.

We carried on down the north side of the Montmartre hill past some beautifully picturesque little streets, past a large tower that looks a bit like a lighthouse, past a small museum in the house where the painter Renoir once lived, past a building wrapped in ivy, a small pink coloured cafe, a small vineyard behind the Renoir house, and a little salmon coloured cottage surrounded by trees, actually a nightspot called "Au Lapin Agile" (The Nimble Rabbit). The streets were a lovely place to stroll, without too many crowds even though were were a few hundred yards from the tourist hot spots where the street artists and souvenir shops are. We polished off ice creams and crepes we had bought on one of the bustling streets. The girl behind the crepe counter possibly the only person in Paris who did not figure out that I wasn't French, because she did not suddenly break into English as every other server did when my limited French ran out.

It was about four in the afternoon by this time and were indecisive what to do next. I tentatively suggested something from the guidebook. We could take the metro from the station just on the next street and ride around to the large Pere Lachaise cemetery, where many famous Parisien residents are buried. The book had an entire two pages devoted to the cemetery and it looked like an interesting place for a stroll in the afternoon sunshine. Two names stood out; the grave of Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors who died in Paris in 1971, and Oscar Wilde, the great Irish wit who was buried at the very top end of the cemetery. As it turned out the place turned out to be very large indeed, and laid out like a city district, up the the side of a hill and across more acres. This was the second large green hill we could see from Sacre Coeur. We entered through a small corner entrance and walked up a cobbled hill surrounded by trees and hundreds of little chapels. Each one was just about the size for one person to stand inside. Some were in a good condition, others were deteriorating and blacked by grime and dirt. It was quite a striking sight, and something I had never seen before; rows and rows of neat chapels nearly all of a similar style.

Becky took a seat on a bench in the middle of a veranda at the top of a staircase and invited me to carry on at my own speed round the rest of the cemetery. She would rest her legs while I would carry on up the hill to look for some of the famous names. I carried on heading for where the book said Jim Morrison's tomb was. Past a large rotunda, with an eerie looking hill of pollution blackened tombs lined up behind it, and down a side path I found it. It wasn't hard to miss, there was a small group of people in the area, a large tree covered in chewing gum, and a metal fence to keep people from climbing over the stones. The actual stone was off the path and behind two large tombs in a narrow space. It was well decorated in flowers and various photos and other paraphernalia. Two people next to me were wondering what the inscription said (it was something Greek I have later discovered). There was a slight smell of a certain... recreational substance in the air. I carried on up the hill, trying valiantly to follow the map in the guidebook. I walked up a looping path up a hill among trees and onto a large straight street. Gradually I realised I wasn't heading up to the top of the cemetery as I thought, but across the cemetery at a 90 degrees angle to where I thought I was. As is the habit when slightly muddled none of the little signs matched anything on the map. Finally I found one that matched and found where I was. I'd gone past Oscar Wilde and turned back in the right direction. I found a few people standing round the grave of the French writer Marcel Proust, he was covered in metro tickets weighed down with small stones. A few minutes walk away I came to the large stone at Wilde's grave. I was a great rectangular rectangle, with a modern looking winged figure jutting out of one end. It was surrounded by plexiglass to prevent vandalism but there were many lipstick marks on the stone where people had been lifted up to kiss the stone.

We went back into town and found our way around the Eiffel Tower district looking for a restaurant. There were a lot of small bistros and cafes, all with the usual arrangement of chairs and tables outside, occupied by patrons seemingly doing nothing, but not many actual restaurants. We were both pretty much out on our feet by this point and getting a little impatient to actually find somewhere to sit down. Each street was either empty or had a few cafes or a patisserie or two, but no restaurants. Finally we stumbled upon a street with about five of them and thankfully plonked ourselves down and had tea.


For our last day in Paris we made our way back to the banks of the Seine and visited the Musee d'Orsay. We sat outside the front and had something to eat, noticing the complete lack of a queue outside - it was a few hours earlier in the day than it had been when we had walked past two days before. The museum used to be train station and had been turned into an art gallery in the mid-80s. The main concourse had become the admission desk (another place where under-25s could get in for free) and the shop. Above the shop was a series of catwalks at the end the large single-vaulted glass train shed; visitors could walk across the catwalks and peer out of open windows across the museum. There was a huge art-nouveau clock at this end of the station looking out where trains once stood. It was an exceptional space and the actual artworks in the main hall were rather overshadowed by the building itself. Like a cross between the stark utilitarian roof of St Pancras and the ornate detailling of the London Natural History Museum. To the sides of the hall were small galleries holding the older paintings in the collections. The museum was intended to fit in between the classical old masters in the Louvre an the contemporary art in the Pompidou Centre. It contained art from the 19th century and early 20th century, the most celebrated period in French art, when the impressionists came to prominence. At the far end of the hall was a staircase up to a viewpoint up in the rafters looking back down the museum, the staircase was decorated with pictures and paintings of the Great Exposition of 1889 that created the Eiffel Tower.

From the outside the old station building has two clock towers at each end. Walking down one flight of stairs from the view point and round a corner we found ourselves on the inside of the large clock faces. There was a sitting area with large round sofas and a view of the city from behind the giant clock. It looked like it might be just for show but looking closely I could see that they did indeed work. Down the front of the building at the top level was a large gallery of impressionist landscape paintings and we walked down that taking in all the names and views of France in the late 19th century. Down a few floors was a smaller gallery containing still lifes and portraits by Van Gogh, Renoir, Seurat and the like.

We carried on down to the Ile de la Citie and searched for a river tour boat so we could have a ride round the sights from the river. There are several competing tour boat companies in Paris, we could see their various boats sailing past on the river, but could not find any of their docks. We passed by the second hand book sellers on the river bank, they sell books out of large green stands attached to walls. They add to the cultured ambiance of the river as they are actually selling genuine antique books rather than the usual cheap tourist trinkets, but the stands also can get in the way of seeing anything on the river, especially if you are on the short side. We crossed the Pont Neuf, walked down the island for a way, came past the queue for the Sainte Chapelle, a small chapel on the island with a famously ornate interior, and across the river again before finding, down a flight of steps to the river, the dock of the Bateux Parisiens. They offered an hour round trip for about thirteen euros. It started to spot with light rain as we came on board the tour boat, we initially sat back from the front under the edge of the top deck in case the rain came down harder, but then took a chance to sit right at the front, drying the seats and keeping fingers crossed that the rain would stop. The dock was under a bridge and water dripping under the bridge had made the seats wet. By the time the boat pulled away the rain had stopped and we had the best seats in the house (or boat). The British knack of knowing when the rain "isn't going to last" had paid dividends. We could put our feet up on the railing at the front and enjoy the view.

The boat sailed east down the river, past the south side of Notre Dame, before turning round and heading west up to the Eiffel Tower, turning round again and heading back to where it had begun. We passed by many of the sights we had seen in the past two days - the Louvre, the Grand Palais, the Orsay, the many bridges, but with a much clearer and and uninterrupted view. The sky was a little overcast but the sun began to peek out as we neared the end of the tour. The rain came down again little later as we sat outside eating lunch at a nice pavement bistro ("Le Petit Cardinal") but we were safely ensconced under an awning and in no danger of getting wet. I had the duck burger just to see what it tasted like (very nice) and finally some French fries in France. The road was halfway between the university and the river and seemed a bit more like the "real" Paris, rather than the tourist bit or the modern shopping streets. There were handsome old apartment buildings opposite, up to four and five stories, with shutters and a row a balconies on the second floor, and they looked as if they were all occupied. Cars and push bikes came past, and the people looked a little more purposeful and busy, as if they were actually getting on with their real day to day lives. It felt like a very agreeable place to live, the bit of Paris I would buy an apartment in if I had the means and the choice.

Further along the street the guidebook promised the remains of a Roman amphitheatre, the "Arenes de Lutece". Before there was Paris there was the Roman town of Lutetia and this had been it's main arena, at the edge of the town. Sure enough a sign pointed the way down an alleyway under a building and into a large round courtyard. On one side a small section of stone terraced seats underneath a higher grass bank, and the other side more trees behind what looked like some foundation stones. The circle had been cut into slightly by the row of newer buildings but the general shape remained. The main entrance corridor to the arena remained too, including a small lintel on the side where a sign said a statue or lanterns may have once stood. Some small boys were playing kickaround with a football on the sandy floor of the arena and the area was a park, with no restrictions on where to sit or move about. A couple of workers were removing weeds on the terrace. It was a wonderfully unexpected little surprise, and an arresting thought that this was the remains of a building twice the age of Notre Dame, as ancient to the Medieval stone masons as Notre Dame is to us.

We carried on walking through a market square, slightly grubby looking with market stalls being taken down, down some narrow streets lined with cafes, and past the huge mass of the Pantheon, the huge church built by Louis 15th in the 18 century now a national mausoleum. (I had been amused when young why all the French kings had been called "Louis", and had wondered whether it had caused confusion. Could even they remember which one was Louis XV and which Louis IV, which was Madame de Pompadour's King, which one had fought which war and so forth. At least English and Scots kings took different names from time to time). The great dome looks much like St Paul's in London but was for the moment covered in a huge white cap hiding renovation work, as if someone had placed a giant paper cone on the building- mystery solved; this was the curious white edifice that could be seen from Montmartre. There was some kind of reception going on in a building opposite. A Maserati stopped outside and disembarked a passenger before driving away round the corner. The TV news the night before had carried news of the French equivalent of a cabinet reshuffle. Lots of people in suits walking into the Elysee Palace and then walking out again a bit later. Maybe this was something to do with that? There were French flags flying from the building and lots of well dressed people and some photographers. Or it could have been a wedding.

The Pantheon is very impressive but the guidebooks don't mention how impressive it's location is. It's surrounded by very posh looking palace like buildings and a wide boulevard heading down towards the Jardins du Luxembourg. This, you may think, is what St Paul's might look like if London had been rebuilt with great avenues and new building in the 18th and 19th centuries as Paris was. We carried on down the street and stopped for an ice cream in a glamourous ice cream parlour. Further down the road we crossed the road into the Jardins du Luxembourg, the gardens of yet another old royal palace. This one was positively teeny compared to Versailles, just one building of three stories. The sun was out in full force by now and a band was playing on the bandstand. We couldn't linger for long as we had to get back to the hotel for our bags, and then get back to the station for the train home, but it was a delightful spot. There were chairs left out everywhere to sit down on at the end of one of the large lawns bordered by flowers.

Eventually we prised ourselves away and headed back to the nearest metro station, our little Parisien adventure nearly at an end. Back at the Gare du Nord I spent my last few euros on a little Eiffel tower, and we sat and waited for our train looking out over the station from the Eurostar lounge on the first floor with a view of the inside of the station. Becky went for a look around the shops and I sat and watched the trains for a while. It was tantalising; all these high speed trains heading off all over Europe, I would have loved for us to have climbed aboard one and to take off somewhere. Brussels, Lyon, Munich maybe. We had to wait an hour for our call, seeing off two Eurostars ahead of us, and several other trains slid out of the station, off to some other big European city. Next time maybe!