Prizes and Spectacles as R&D Accelerators

“Edouard wants nothing to hear of it. The tire, just the tire. Let us not get distracted. Parisian sirens are seductive but dangerous. In response, he writes back to his brother. “We have too much to do with our tire to embark on anything else; besides, this industry is thrilling, it will revolutionize the world. I am like you, I cannot resign myself to seeing it grow without contributing to it a little. What if we clearly posed to this new tool a well-understood and striking problem, for example: passing over the Arc de Triomphe and landing like a sparrowhawk on the summit of the puy de Dôme, triumphing over both the distance, four hundred kilometers, and altitude, one thousand four hundred and fifty-six meters.” The engineer refines and completes the idea. “Yes,” he confirms to Edouard, “that will capture imaginations, but let’s add an annual prize for the longest distance flown in the year without touching the ground.””

“Starting in 1911, Michelin no longer limited itself to prophecies and warnings. On August 22, the two brothers wrote again to the president of the Aéro-Club of France to propose the creation of a new prize called the aero-target. They offered fifty thousand francs to the aviator who, in a single flight, would place fifteen projectiles weighing twenty kilos each from a height greater than two hundred meters within a ten-meter radius circle. They also offered twenty-five thousand francs for a drop from a height of one thousand meters within a rectangle of one hundred meters by ten.”