The Aéro-Club de France’s banquet took place in Paris the evening of November 5, 1908, in the salle de théâtre of the Automobile Club on the Place de la Concorde. As reported, the “brilliantly illuminated” room had been “transformed” by plants and flowers “in profusion.” The 250 guests, nearly all men in full dress, included almost every major figure in French aviation—Léon Delagrange, Louis Blériot, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Ernest Archdeacon—in addition to Léon Bollée, Hart Berg, and Comte Charles de Lambert. Conspicuous, too, was the great structural engineer Gustave Eiffel. Among the few
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