Charles Lindbergh
Charles Augustus Lindbergh was an American aviator, military officer, and author. On May 20–21, 1927, he made the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris, a distance of, flying alone for over 33 hours. His aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis, was built to compete for the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first flight between the two cities. Although not the first transatlantic flight, it was the first solo crossing of the Atlantic and the longest at the time by nearly, setting a new flight distance world record. The achievement garnered Lindbergh worldwide fame and stands as one of the most consequential flights in history, signalling a new era of air transportation between parts of the globe.
Lindbergh was raised mostly in Little Falls, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C., the son of U.S. congressman Charles August Lindbergh. He became a U.S. Army Air Service cadet in 1924. The next year, he was hired as a U.S. Air Mail pilot in the Greater St. Louis area, where he began to prepare for crossing the Atlantic. For his 1927 flight, President Calvin Coolidge presented him both the Distinguished Flying Cross and Medal of Honor, the highest U.S. military award. He was promoted to colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps Reserve and also earned the highest French order of merit, the Legion of Honor. His achievement spurred significant global interest in flight training, commercial aviation and air mail, which revolutionized the aviation industry worldwide, and he spent much time promoting these industries.
Time magazine named Lindbergh its first Man of the Year for 1927, President Herbert Hoover appointed him to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1929, and he received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1930. In 1931, he and French surgeon Alexis Carrel began work on inventing the first perfusion pump, a device credited with making future heart surgeries and organ transplantation possible.
On March 1, 1932, Lindbergh's first-born infant child, Charles Jr., was kidnapped and murdered in what the American media called the "crime of the century". The case prompted the U.S. to establish kidnapping as a federal crime if a kidnapper crosses state lines with a victim. By late 1935, public hysteria from the case drove the Lindbergh family abroad to Europe, from where they returned in 1939. In the months before the United States entered World War II, Lindbergh's non-interventionist stance and statements about Jews and race led many to believe he was a Nazi sympathizer. Lindbergh never publicly stated support for the Nazis and condemned them several times in both his public speeches and personal diary, but associated with them on numerous occasions in the 1930s. He also supported the isolationist America First Committee and resigned from the U.S. Army Air Corps in April 1941 after President Franklin Roosevelt publicly rebuked him for his views. In September 1941, Lindbergh gave a significant address, titled "Speech on Neutrality", outlining his position and arguments against greater American involvement in the war.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and German declaration of war against the U.S., Lindbergh avidly supported the American war effort but was rejected for active duty, as Roosevelt refused to restore his colonel's commission. Instead he flew 50 combat missions in the Pacific Theater as a civilian consultant and was unofficially credited with shooting down an enemy aircraft. In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower restored his commission and promoted him to brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. In his later years, he became a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, international explorer and environmentalist, helping to establish national parks in the U.S. and protect certain endangered species and tribal people in both the Philippines and east Africa. After retiring in Maui, Lindbergh died of lymphoma in 1974 at the age of 72.
Early life
Early childhood
Lindbergh was born in Detroit, Michigan, on, 1902, and spent most of his childhood in Little Falls, Minnesota, and Washington, D.C. He was the only child of Charles August Lindbergh, who had emigrated from Sweden to Melrose, Minnesota, as an infant, and Evangeline Lodge Land Lindbergh of Detroit. Lindbergh had three elder paternal half-sisters: Lillian, Edith, and Eva. The couple separated in 1909 when Lindbergh was seven years old.Lindbergh's father, a U.S. congressman from 1907 to 1917, was one of the few congressmen to oppose the entry of the U.S. into World War I. Lindbergh's mother was a chemistry teacher at Cass Technical High School in Detroit and later at Little Falls High School, from which her son graduated on, 1918. Lindbergh attended more than a dozen other schools from Washington, D.C., to California during his childhood and teenage years, including the Force School and Sidwell Friends School while living in Washington with his father, and Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach, California, while living there with his mother. Although Lindbergh enrolled in the College of Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in late 1920, he dropped out in the middle of his sophomore year.
Early aviation career
From an early age, Lindbergh had exhibited an interest in the mechanics of motorized transportation, including his family's Saxon Six automobile, and later his Excelsior motorbike. By the time Lindbergh started college as a mechanical engineering student, he had also become fascinated with flying, though he "had never been close enough to a plane to touch it". After quitting college in February 1922, Lindbergh enrolled at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation's flying school in Lincoln and flew for the first time on as a passenger in a two-seat Lincoln Standard "Tourabout" biplane trainer piloted by Otto Timm.A few days later, Lindbergh took his first formal flying lesson in that same aircraft, though he was never permitted to solo because he could not afford to post the requisite damage bond. To gain flight experience and earn money for further instruction, Lindbergh left Lincoln in June to spend the next few months barnstorming across Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana as a wing walker and parachutist. He also briefly worked as an airplane mechanic at the Billings, Montana, municipal airport.
Lindbergh left flying with the onset of winter and returned to his father's home in Minnesota. His return to the air and his first solo flight did not come until half a year later in May 1923 at Souther Field in Americus, Georgia, a former Army flight-training field, where he bought a World War I surplus Curtiss JN-4 "Jenny" biplane for $500. Although Lindbergh had not touched an airplane in more than six months, he had already secretly decided that he was ready to take to the air by himself. After a half-hour of dual time with a pilot who was visiting the field, Lindbergh flew solo for the first time in the Jenny. After spending another week or so at the field to "practice", Lindbergh took off from Americus for Montgomery, Alabama, some to the west, for his first solo cross-country flight. Lindbergh went on to spend much of the remainder of 1923 engaged in almost nonstop barnstorming under the name "Daredevil Lindbergh", this time flying in his "own ship" as the pilot. A few weeks after leaving Americus, he made his first night flight near Lake Village, Arkansas.
While Lindbergh was barnstorming in Lone Rock, Wisconsin, on two occasions he flew a local physician across the Wisconsin River to emergency calls that were otherwise unreachable because of flooding. Lindbergh broke his propeller several times while landing, and on, 1923, he was grounded for a week when he ran into a ditch in Glencoe, Minnesota, while flying his father—then running for the U.S. Senate—to a campaign stop. In October, Lindbergh flew his Jenny to Iowa, where he sold it to a flying student. Lindbergh returned to Lincoln by train, where he joined Leon Klink and continued to barnstorm through the South for the next few months in Klink's Curtiss JN-4C "Canuck". Lindbergh also "cracked up" this aircraft once when his engine failed shortly after takeoff in Pensacola, Florida, but again Lindbergh managed to repair the damage himself.
Following a few months of barnstorming through the South, the two pilots parted company in San Antonio, Texas, where Lindbergh reported to Brooks Field on, 1924, to begin a year of military flight training with the United States Army Air Service there. Lindbergh had his most serious flying accident on, 1925, eight days before graduation, when a mid-air collision with another Army S.E.5 during aerial combat maneuvers forced him to bail out. Only 18 of the 104 cadets who started flight training a year earlier remained when Lindbergh graduated first overall in his class in March 1925, thereby earning his Army pilot's wings and a commission as a second lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps.
Lindbergh later said that this year was critical to his development as both a focused, goal-oriented individual and as an aviator. However, the Army did not need additional active-duty pilots, so following graduation, Lindbergh returned to civilian aviation as a barnstormer and flight instructor, although as a reserve officer, he also continued to do some part-time military flying by joining the 110th Observation Squadron, 35th Division, Missouri National Guard, in St. Louis. Lindbergh was promoted to first lieutenant on December 7, 1925, and to captain in July 1926.
Air mail pilot
In October 1925, Lindbergh was hired by the Robertson Aircraft Corporation at the Lambert-St. Louis Flying Field in Anglum, Missouri, to lay out and then serve as chief pilot for the newly designated Contract Air Mail Route #2 to provide service between St. Louis and Chicago with intermediate stops in Springfield and Peoria, Illinois. Lindbergh and three other RAC pilots flew the mail over CAM-2 in a fleet of four modified war-surplus de Havilland DH-4s.On, 1926, Lindbergh executed the United States Post Office Department's Oath of Mail Messengers, and two days later, he opened service on the new route. On two occasions, combinations of bad weather, equipment failure, and fuel exhaustion forced Lindbergh to bail out on night approach to Chicago; both times he reached the ground without serious injury. In mid-February 1927, Lindbergh left for San Diego, California, to oversee design and construction of the Spirit of St. Louis.