Félix du Temple de la Croix

Who was Félix du Temple de la Croix?

Félix du Temple de la Croix was a French naval officer and an inventor, born into an ancient Normandy family. He developed some of the first flying machines and is credited with the first successful flight of a powered aircraft of any sort, a powered model plane, in 1857, and is sometimes credited with the first manned powered flight in history onboard his Monoplane in 1874, twenty-nine years before the 1903 flight of the Wright brothers. He was a contemporary of Jean-Marie Le Bris, another French flight pioneer who was active in the same region of France.