Transatlantic

Gilbert Seldes (1893–1970)
From Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight

Interesting Links

“The powerful role of incentive competitions to spur innovation” (Vivek Wadhwa, The Washington Post)

Audio: Lindbergh at New York City Hall, following a ticker tape parade in his honor in June 1927 (WNYC)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Flying—A Dream Come True!” (1913), Ida M. Tarbell
• “Notes on War Experiences” (1918), Eddie Rickenbacker
• “The Day I Sprouted Wings” (1924), J. Herman Banning
• “Twelve Strangers in the Night” (1933), Elizabeth M. Bisgood

Buy the eBook
Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight
Sixty selections, ranging from the era of balloon flight to the Space Age

Nearly a thousand people assembled at Roosevelt Field (Long Island, NY) to see Charles Lindbergh off on his historic flight to Paris. Underwood and Underwood. National Air and Space Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution, image #SI-77-2701, via Wikimedia Commons.

---

In 1919 American businessman Raymond Orteig offered a $25,000 prize, available for five years, to “the first aviator of any Allied Country crossing the Atlantic in one flight, from Paris to New York or New York to Paris.” Few took up the challenge—and no one came close to achieving the goal—but in 1925 Orteig renewed his commitment for another five years. The various attempts made during the next two years resulted in planes that never even got off the ground, several crash landings, and six fatalities. On May 8, 1927, in perhaps the most famous failed expedition, French war heroes Charles Nungesser and François Coli departed from Paris and were last sighted off the coast of Ireland—and were never seen again.

By this time two American aviation teams, each with a corporate sponsor, were widely regarded as the most likely candidates for success. The Columbia Aircraft Corporation selected a crew to pilot Miss Columbia, a plane designed by Giuseppe Mario Bellanca. The Bellanca craft would in fact make the second successful trip from New York to Europe, landing at Eisleben, Germany, on June 4–6, 1927; it was also the first transatlantic flight to carry a passenger. The other team, sponsored by the American Trans-Oceanic Company, was led by Arctic explorer Commander Richard Byrd, who piloted a Fokker Trimotor christened America. The crew made it all the way to Paris on July 1—but, unable to land because of the weather, ended up ditching the plane in the surf off the Normandy coast. (No one was hurt.)

The competitor considered by most observers to be a long shot—or to be no shot at all—was Charles A. Lindbergh. Even after Lindbergh’s flight was airborne, Lloyd’s of London refused to give odds on his success because they believed “the risk was too great.” Coincidentally, his path to fame had intersected with each of the other crews. The Bellanca plane—the only one of its kind—was actually his first choice of aircraft for making the transatlantic flight, but Lindbergh would not agree to the stipulation that Columbia Aircraft must be allowed to select his crew. And earlier, in late 1925, Lindbergh had applied to be a copilot for the mission led by Commander Byrd that became the first flight over the North Pole—but the crew had already been selected by the time his application was received.

When columnist Gilbert Sildes reported on the competition just days before Lindbergh’s triumphant flight (May 20–21), he understood that the young, lone aviator appealed to the American fondness for romantic adventurism yet acknowledged that the future of aviation (that is, of its commercial applications) relied far more on the success of the elaborately conceived corporate teams. Still, it was Lindbergh who won the prize—and nobody expected it.

See the previous Story of the Week selection, “The Flying Fool,” Waverly Root’s dispatch from France immediately after Lindbergh’s landing, portraying how “the diplomats, the airport authorities, the police, the journalists”—and, indeed, the public at large—were unprepared for his achievement.

Note: Harry Hawker, mentioned in passing, was an Australian aviator and stunt pilot who aborted an attempt at a transatlantic flight in 1919 and was rescued by a passing freighter. He died two years later while practicing during the London Aerial Derby.

*   *   *

Nerves and a little nastiness have crept into the arrangements for the transatlantic flight; there have been quarrels between pilots and backers, an ignoble sharing of prize money before it has been won, disagreements about the route to be taken. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Twelve Strangers in the Night

Elizabeth M. Bisgood (1905–1988)
From Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight

Interesting Links

Lindberghs on Tour, 1933:
a newsreel (YouTube)

Charles Lindbergh: An American Aviator (The Spirit of St. Louis Project)

Previous Story of the Week selection
• “The Flying Fool,” Waverly Root

Buy the eBook
Into the Blue: American Writers on Aviation and Spaceflight
Sixty selections, ranging from the era of balloon flight to the Space Age

Passengers in a Ford Tri-Motor in 1932. Photograph by Russell Froelich (1890–1958). Missouri History Museum Photographs and Prints Collections (30283). Courtesy Missouri History Museum.

---

Anne Spencer Morrow and Elizabeth Mitchell Bacon were classmates at Smith College in the late 1920s. In a letter to her father dated 1926, Morrow identifies “that little Bacon girl” as one of her new friends away from home: “It is very nice to be with them and know them on the basis of reading instead of on a basis of just New York, if that makes sense at all.” During the spring of the following year, Bacon was in bed with the measles when Morrow shouted through the window of Elizabeth’s room in the infirmary, “Bacon, Bacon, a man has flown the Atlantic. His name is Charles Lindbergh. He flew all alone. He has landed in Paris.”*

Anne Morrow would meet Lindbergh just seven months later, during the Christmas holidays, when he stayed with her parents in Mexico City (her father was the American ambassador). Two years later they were married, and during their courtship Lindbergh taught Anne to fly; she would fly solo for the first time the year of her marriage and in 1930 she became the first woman to receive a glider pilot license. During the early years of their marriage, the couple would fly all over the world, pivotally charting possible air routes for commercial flights over the North Pole. After their first son was kidnapped and murdered in one of the most infamous crimes of the twentieth century, the couple moved to England to escape the intense American media attention, and Anne began fulfilling her earlier, collegiate ambition of becoming a writer, publishing thirteen books between 1935 and 1980.

“That little Bacon girl” also dreamed of becoming a writer—and it’s tempting to wonder if Anne’s career influenced the choice of topic for one of Elizabeth’s earliest articles, published under her married name Bisgood. Her perspective is different from that of her pilot-friend, however; she is one of twelve passengers, whose attitudes range from awestruck to petrified, on a commercial flight in 1933. And like her friend Anne, Elizabeth would go on to publish a number of other works (including, as Elizabeth Rodewald, the novel At the Edge of the Shadow, about a wife who falls victim to alcoholism). Most of her works are long out of print, but “Twelve Strangers in the Night” is a gem of travel writing rescued from oblivion and included, alongside selections by both Charles and Anne Lindbergh, in the LOA anthology Into the Blue: American Writing on Aviation and Spaceflight.

* As related in Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg

Do you remember how we stared at those people in the airport who were waiting around with us? We tried to make out which were the ones who were leaving and which were being left behind. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Flying Fool

Waverly Root (1903–1982)
From Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology

Interesting Links

“World’s Zaniest Newspaper”: The Short, Happy Life of the Paris Edition (Ronald Weber, Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2003)

The 1932 Lindbergh Kidnapping (FBI)

Buy the book
Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology
Hardcover | 613 pages
Seventy writers spanning three centuries record their impressions of the City of Lights

Charles Lindbergh atop the Spirit of St Louis in San Diego Airport, before departure to St. Louis the month before the New York–Paris flight, 1927. Courtesy Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

---

The great aviator and author Charles Lindbergh died 36 years ago, on August 26, 1974. Few people alive are old enough to remember his singular accomplishment in 1927—making the solo flight from New York to Paris non-stop in 33.5 hours to capture a $25,000 prize offered by American hotelier Raymond Orteig.

Freshly arrived in Paris and oblivious to the impending event, the young Waverly (often spelled “Waverley”) Root had begun a gig working for the Paris Edition of the Chicago Tribune, one of three American papers published in Paris at the time. It was “the liveliest of the three as well as the one most attuned to the artistic life of the Left Bank,” writes Ronald Weber in an excellent history of the paper:

Ezra Pound was an outside contributor to the paper, as were Maxwell Bodenheim, Gertrude Stein, and Kay Boyle. But a lengthy list of remembered and half remembered Americans were once, like Harold Stearns, in Paris Edition harness: Elliot Paul, Henry Miller, James Thurber, William L. Shirer, Eugene Jolas, George Seldes, Vincent Sheean, Alex Small, Virgil Geddes, Ned Calmer, Robert Sage, Lawrence Blochman, Waverley Root, Alfred Perlès, Wambly Bald, Bravig Imbs, Joseph Freeman, Harold Ettlinger, Louis Atlas. Together with a handful of veteran journalists they produced a paper that Shirer pronounced, with an ironic salute to the Chicago Tribune’s self-styled eminence as the World’s Greatest Newspaper, “the world's zaniest newspaper, a crazy journal without peer.”

When Lindbergh accomplished his “perfect flight,” nobody was prepared; “the diplomats, the airport authorities, the police, the journalists”—all were caught flat-footed, both because nobody expected the young 25-year-old to actually make it and because few understood how his accomplishment would capture the imaginations of adoring mobs on both sides of the ocean. In his posthumously published 1987 memoir, Root (who is today remembered for his best-selling books on food) admits that he didn’t even know who Lindbergh was on the morning of May 21, 1927. In “The Flying Fool” he pieces together the chaos in Paris on that historic day.

*   *   *

During my first days on the Paris Edition, I was still isolated from the matter-of-fact world by the euphoria of finding myself in Paris, above which I seemed to be floating without touching the ground. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.