Gabriel Voisin

Gabriel Voisin built the first European aeroplane to fly a closed circuit, and the firm that paid for a plan to demolish central Paris. He trained as an architect at the Beaux-Arts in Lyon, which shows in everything he built afterwards. With his brother Charles he founded in 1906 what is generally reckoned the first commercial aircraft factory in the world, at Billancourt, and sold biplanes to whoever would buy them. Henri Farman flew a Voisin round a one-kilometre circuit in January 1908 and won the Deutsch-Archdeacon prize, which is the moment European aviation stopped being a series of hops. The firm built some ten thousand aircraft in the First World War, including the first Allied machine to shoot down a German one. Charles was killed in a car crash in 1912. He turned to motor cars afterwards and made them the way an aeronautical engineer would - light, aerodynamic, with sleeve-valve engines and aluminium bodies, sold to a clientele that included Le Corbusier, whose 1925 scheme to replace the Marais with eighteen cruciform towers was funded by the company and called the Plan Voisin. He held that machines should be designed from function and hated what he called the fashion trade in bodywork. The car business failed in the Depression and was absorbed by a creditor. He spent the rest of a very long life designing prefabricated housing and a microcar for post-war France, and writing memoirs that are entertaining and not entirely reliable - he claimed rather more of early aviation than the record supports. He died in 1973 at ninety-three, having outlived the industry he started by two generations.

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