Voisin

"And its ideas on military aviation, as the battles intensified, will have prevailed, despite the reservations and inertia that the two brothers will have had to overcome. In 1915, twenty squadrons of Maurice Farman and Voisin are specifically tasked with going to bomb enemy lines. In 1918, it will be recognized that the bombing squadrons — there will be thirty-two by the end of the war — will have carried out numerous attacks, destroyed encampments, factories, marshaling yards, canals, ports. And the airplane, definitively, will supplant the airship. Michelin will have won “its” war[17](private://read/01jkqdqdgs7t399cyecbezrhj0/#ftn_fn17)."

"Throughout the year 1907, however, he devoured all the newspapers that talked about these new devices — a very small market for tires — and became passionate about the feats of Voisin, Blériot, Trajan Vuia, Bréguet, de La Vaulx. He shares the analyses of Archdeacon — an old friend who has often participated in car races with the company’s tires — about the indifference of engineers “who dismissively walk past” this new aeronautics where everything is to be invented or on “the inertia of the country’s major industrialists.” He approved when “Archdec” was outraged: “To say that there is no one among our major automobile manufacturers who understands that with the means at their disposal, they could in a small corner of their workshops, create a flying machine at little expense in a few weeks.” And he applauded when this grandson of a Scot — like the Daubrée cousins — wanted to lead by example by founding the cup for the first kilometer to encourage the marvelous “mad fliers.” At the end of the evening, in honor of the new world record holder, the organizers announce “cinematographic projections.” Like those which, under the impulse of Léon Gaumont and Charles Pathé, attract the curious to the major boulevards. On the program: the first flights of heavier-than-air machines. André Michelin is thrilled. “Since one of these tools has been able to leave the ground,” he immediately writes to Edouard, still absorbed in Clermont-Ferrand with his molds and vats, “there is no reason, given the speed of progress we have seen happening in the automobile industry and the great similarity between the engine for a car and the engine for an airplane, that soon we could not travel very long distances. Here, then, is an industry full of promise, both from the perspective of civilian life and from the viewpoint of war. What if we embarked on the manufacturing of birds?”"