When his grandfather died, Gabriel was sent to school in Lyon and Paris, where he learned industrial design, a field Voisin claims to have been exceptionally gifted.

After nine months of military service, in February 1904, he attended a lecture given by Captain Ferdinand Ferber,[4] one of the leading figures in French aviation circles at the time.

Archdeacon then commissioned Voisin to build another glider of similar design, but differing in having a fixed horizontal stabiliser behind the wings and its front-mounted elevator.

Fortunately, the test was unmanned, the pilot's place being taken by 50 kg (110 lb) of ballast since the aircraft suffered a structural failure and crashed.

Voisin successfully flew it on 8 June 1905, having been towed into the air behind a motor boat on the river Seine between the Billancourt and Sèvres bridges, managing a flight of about 600 m (2,000 ft).

While working on this aircraft, Voisin was approached by Louis Blériot, who asked him to build a similar machine, later known as the Bleriot II.

[7] This aircraft was unsuccessful, as was its subsequent modification (the Blériot IV) in which a conventional biplane arrangement and a second engine added replaced the forward wing.

Experiments were made first with floats and then with a wheeled undercarriage, and the aircraft was wrecked in a taxiing accident at Bagatelle on the morning of 12 November 1906.

[8] Two almost identical[10] pusher biplane machines, with Antoinette engines, were built by the Voisin brothers for two early aviation pioneers: the first for Leon Delagrange in March 1907,[8] and the second for his friend and rival Henry Farman in October 1907.

[8][11] The second one became known as the Voisin-Farman I,[12] and was flown by Farman to win Archdeacon's Grand Prix d'Aviation for making the first one-kilometer closed-circuit flight on 13 January 1908.

[15] The Voisin III, a two-seater pusher biplane with a 120 hp Salmson radial engine, was extensively used for bombing and observation missions during World War I.

The Voisin III was built in large numbers (about 1,000[16]) between 1914 and 1916 and sold not only to the French air services but also to other allies, including Russia.

A complete and original Voisin Type VIII bomber aircraft is preserved in excellent condition at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington,D.C.

However, the luxury car market shrank in the 1930s because of depressed economic conditions followed in June 1940 by the invasion of France by Nazi Germany forcing him to close down his factory.

After 1945, he turned his attention to designing a minimalist car for the masses, the Biscooter, thousands of which were produced under licence in Spain during the 1950s as the Biscúter.

In 1960 he retired to his country house, "La Cadolle", at Le Villars near Tournus on the banks of the Saône river, where he wrote his memoirs.