be regarded as the year in which aviation came of age. At the end of 1908 the first exhibition devoted to aircraft was held in the Grand Palais in Paris, and this was followed by the first London Aero Exhibition at Olympia in May 1909. The Aéro-Club de France issued its first pilot's licences in January, awarding them to a select few pioneer aviators including the Wright Brothers. The first British magazine to be devoted to the subject, Flight published its first issue in January. (Aviation matters had previously been covered by The Automotor Journal.) The British Daily Mail newspaper had offered a number of prizes with the intention of encouraging aviation: in 1906 it had offered a prize of £10,000 for the first flight between London and Manchester. This was met by widespread derision; the satirical magazine Punch responded by offering a similar prize for a flight to Mars. On July 25, 1909 Louis Blériot won their £1000 prize for the first flight across the English channel. One contemporary newspaper led its account of the event with the headline "Britain is no longer an island", and the flight caused a reassessment of Britain's strategic reliance on the Navy for defence. Blériot became world-famous, and the publicity resulted in over a hundred orders for copies of his design within a few weeks. The year also saw the Grande Semaine d'Aviation de la Champagne at Rheims, attended by half a million people, including Armand Fallières, the President of France; the King of Belgium and senior British political figures including David Lloyd George, who afterwards commented "Flying machines are no longer toys and dreams; they are an established fact" A second aircraft exhibition held in October at the Grand Palais in Paris attracted 100,000 visitors. In America, Wilbur Wright made two spectacular flights over New York Harbor, flying from Governor's Island. On 29 September he made a short flight circling the Statue of Liberty, and on 4 October he made a 33-minute flight over the Hudson witnessed by around a million New Yorkers. Lighter-than-air The lightweight power source provided by the petrol engine also revolutionised the prospects for airship development. Alberto Santos Dumont achieved celebrity status on 19 October 1901 by winning a prize for making a flight from Parc Saint Cloud to the Eiffel Tower and back. In Germany Graf (Count) Ferdinand von Zeppelin pioneered the construction of large rigid airships: