And the French had some reason to be cocky. The French aeronautical revival, inspired by Octave Chanute's address to the Aero-Club de France in early 1903, was beginning to bear fruit. At the urging of Ernest Archdeacon and Ferdinand Ferber, French aviators had experimented with gliders derived from Wright designs. Their success was limited — none of them repeated the careful research in lift and drag that had enabled the Wrights to build their record-breaking 1902 glider. More importantly, they misunderstood the function and necessity of the Wright's control system and discarded it. Instead, the French endeavored to build an inherently stable flying machine that would need little control input, and they were satisfied with their own results. Ernest Archdeacon recruited a young architectural student, Gabriel Voison, to pilot glider of a design that had come to be known as an aeroplane de type Wright. After testing it for several weeks, Voison was making flights up to 65 feet in length, and Archdeacon gleefully announced to the Aero-Club de France that Voison had mastered skill of piloting an aircraft. It mattered little that the Wrights had made flights almost ten times as long in their 1902 glider. Archdeacon was confident that the French could now design a glider that would "do as well as the Wright brothers."

To spur the progress of aviation in Europe — especially France — well-heeled enthusiasts offered rich prizes. Archdeacon himself put up the Coupe d'Aviation Ernest Archdeacon, a silver trophy that would go to the first person to fly a powered airplane 25 meters (80 feet). The Aero-Club de France offered a prize of 1500 francs to the first person to fly 100 meters, or 330 feet. And Archdeacon collaborated with Henri Deutsch de la Meurthe to establish the Grand Prix d'Aviation, a prize of 50,000 francs to the first person to fly a kilometer in a circular course.

Europe got to work. Voison and Louis Bleriot — a manufacturer of automotive components —designed and flew improved gliders. Samuel F. Cody, an American cowboy is Great Britain, flew a kite-glider with ailerons. Ferdinand Ferber added a 12-horsepower engine to his most successful glider to date, but it could not sustain flight. Rumanian Trajan Vuia made a series of short hops in a monoplane powered by a carbolic acid motor. In Denmark, J. C. R. Ellehammer made a 42-meter circular flight in an odd biplane while tethered to a post. Leon Levavasseur perfected two light airplane engines of 24 and 50 horsepower he named "Antoinette" motors after his daughter. These engines would become the mainstay of European aviation during its earliest years.

But the aviator that captured Europe's attention was Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian-born immigrant to France and the son of a wealthy coffee-plantation owner. Santos was a talented engineer who began racing motorized tricycles, then turned to lighter-than-air flight. He puttered about in odd-shaped dirigibles of his own design over the rooftops of Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, often crashing slowly and safely into trees and chimneys. In 1904, he visited the St. Louis Exposition in the United States, where he saw demonstrations of Octave Chanute's gliders and heard about the work of the Wright brothers. Inspired, he turned his talents to powered aircraft.

In July of 1906, Santos-Dumont suspended an odd-looking airplane beneath his dirigible Airship No. 14 for flight testing. Called the 14-bis ("14 encore"), this aircraft was a type de Wright, but the wings met a sharp upwards angle or "dihedral" to give it stability. At the front was a pivoting box-kite assembly that acted as both an elevator and a rudder. A 24-horsepower Antoinette engine turned a single propeller that stuck out from behind. The pilot stood upright in a wicker basket, much like a balloon pilot.