Louis Blériot of 1909. Like some of the other prizes offered by the paper, it was widely seen as nothing more than a way to gain cheap publicity: the Paris newspaper "Le Matin" commenting that there was no chance of the prize being won. The English Channel had been crossed by an unmanned hydrogen balloon in 1784 and a manned crossing by Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries followed in 1785. Blériot, who intended to fly across the Channel in his Type XI monoplane, had three rivals for the prize, the most serious being Hubert Latham, a French national of English extraction flying
Atlantic Balloon Crossing Atlantic Balloon Crossing Atlantic Balloon Crossing is a video game written by Dean Powell for the TRS-80 and published by The Software Exchange in 1979. It was originally printed as a type-in BASIC listing in the June 1979 issue of "SoftSide" magazine. "Atlantic Balloon Crossing" is a game that places the player in control of a gas balloon in an effort to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Canada to Paris in the shortest possible time. Joseph Suchar reviewed "Atlantic Balloon Crossing" in "The Space Gamer" No. 37. Suchar commented that "I feel that this game is well worth the money.