Just a cars guy: advertising

from Ray Bradbury. Back in the 90s he was quoted in American Way magazine (American Airlines) saying: When the Smithsonian asked me to conjure up a technological history of America, I simply replied “Garage.”

“Come again?” they said.

"Build me garages in a vast, scientific vaudeville hall. Then invite your museum visitors to open the garage doors one by one. Open the first and find two bicycles repairmen putting wings on a super-bike and flying it down the Kitty Hawk sand dunes. Fling wide the second and see Henry Ford climbing out from under his pet road-mobile. Third garage door? We’re in California, and we find a pale young man with a mustache drawing a cartoon mouse. Fourth “garage”: a gaggle of Caltech students in Pasadena horsing around with rockets to start the Jet Propulsion Lab. And fifth: Steve Wozniah in a Silicon Valley back-yard garage seeding Apples and harvesting communications. So many garages, so many toys, so many earthshaking devices."
thanks Steve!

a 1915 Bleriot

His experimentation and development in aircraft led to fame, fortune and one of the world’s first monoplanes (fixed-wing format with one main set of wing surfaces).

In 1909, he was the first to fly across the English Channel in a heavier-than-air aircraft (others before had flown across in a balloon).

After 1918, with the demand for aircraft slowing down (end of WWI), Bleriot Aeronautique took on contracts to build fishing boats, a motorcycle and a cyclecar. The motorcycles would be manufactured in Paris, the cyclecars in their England factory. Toward the end of its operation, the company would tackle projects to develop a four-engine floatplane (1929), twin-engine airliner with twin fuselages (1931) and a single-engine amphibian flying boat (1931) among many others.