Made In America (62 page)

Because it occurred so far from the public gaze, news of their historic achievement didn’t so much burst on to the world as seep out. Several newspapers reported the event, but often with only the haziest idea of what had taken place. The
New York Herald
reported that the Wrights had flown three miles, and most other papers were similarly adrift in their details.

Many of those who had devoted their lives to achieving powered flight found it so unlikely that a pair of uneducated bicycle makers from Dayton, working from their own resources, had succeeded where they had repeatedly failed that they refused to entertain the idea. The Smithsonian remained loyal to Langley – he was a former assistant secretary of the institution – and refused to acknowledge the Wrights’ accomplishment for almost forty years.

* * *

The Wrights’ home town, Dayton, was so unmoved by the news that it didn’t get around to giving them a parade until six years later. Unperturbed, the brothers put further distance between themselves and their competitors. By 1905, in an improved plane, they were ‘flying up to twenty-four miles, and executing complicated manoeuvres, while staying aloft for almost forty minutes. Only the tiny capacity of the plane’s fuel tank limited the duration of their flights.
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The next year they received their patent, but even it was not the ringing endorsement they deserved. It credited them only with ‘certain new and useful improvements in Flying-machines’.

The Wright brothers seemed unbothered by their lack of recognition. Although they made no secret of their flying, they also offered no public demonstrations, and hence didn’t attract the popular acclaim they might have. Indeed in 1908, when the more publicity-conscious Glenn Curtiss flew over half a mile at Hammondsport, New York, many assumed that that was the first flight.

In 1914, long after Langley himself was dead, the Smithsonian allowed Curtiss to exhume Langley’s airplane, modify it significantly and try to fly it in order to prove retroactively that the Wrights had not been the first to design a plane capable of flight. With modifications that Langley had never dreamed of, Curtiss managed to get the plane airborne for all of five seconds, and for the next twenty-eight years the Smithsonian, to its eternal shame, displayed the craft as ‘the first man-carrying aeroplane in the history of the world capable of sustained free-flight’.
⁶

The original Wright Flyer spent twenty-five years under dustsheets in a Dayton shed. When no institution in the United States wanted it, it was lent to the Science Museum in London and displayed there from 1928 to 1948. Not until 1942 did the Smithsonian at last accept that the Wrights were indeed the inventors of powered flight, and not until
forty-five years after their historic flight was the craft at last permanently displayed in America.

The Wright brothers never called their craft an airplane. The word was available to them – it had existed in America for almost thirty years and, as
aeroplane,
in Britain for even longer. (
Aeroplane
was first used in 1869 in a British engineering magazine to describe a kind of aerofoil used in experiments.) In the early days there was no agreed term for aircraft. Langley had called his contraption an
aerodrome.
Others had used
aerial ship
or
aerial machine.
The Wright brothers favoured
flying machine.
But by 1910
airplane
had become the standard word in America and
aeroplane
in Britain.

Flying and its attendant vocabulary took off with remarkable speed. By the second decade of the century most people, whether they had been near an airplane or not, were familiar with terms like
pilot, hangar, airfield, night flying, cockpit, air pocket, ceiling, takeoff, nosedive, barnstorming, tailspin, crack-up
(the early term for a crash),
bail out
and
parachute.
Pilots were sometimes referred to as
aeronauts,
but generally called
aviators,
with the first syllable pronounced with the short ă of
navigator
until the 1930s.

In 1914
airlines
entered the language. The first airlines were formed not to carry passengers but mail. Pan American Airways began by ferrying mail between Key West and Havana. Braniff, named for its founder, Tom Braniff, covered the south-west. Other early participants were United Aircraft and Transport Corporation, which would eventually become United Airlines, Pitcairn Aviation, which would evolve into Eastern Air Lines, and Delta Air Lines, which had begun as a crop-dusting service in the South.
Airmail
was coined in 1917, and
airmail stamp
followed a year later.

Early planes were dangerous. In 1921 the average pilot had a life expectancy of 900 flying hours.
⁷
For airmail pilots, flying mostly at night without any proper navigational aids,
it was even worse. While an airmail pilot on the St Louis-Chicago run, Charles Lindbergh staked his life on a farm boy in Illinois remembering to put on a 100-watt bulb in his backyard each night before he went to bed. It is little wonder that of the first forty pilots hired to carry air mail for the government thirty-one died in crashes. Lindbergh himself crashed three planes in a year.

Largely because of the danger, flying took on a romance and excitement that are difficult to imagine now. By May 1927, when Lindbergh touched down at Curtiss Field on Long Island for his historic flight across the Atlantic, the world had become seized with a kind of mania about flying and was ready for a hero. Lindbergh was just the person.

In recent months, six aviators had died attempting to cross the Atlantic, and several other groups of pilots at or around Curtiss Field were preparing to risk their lives in pursuit of fame and a $25,000 payoff called the Oteig Prize. All the other enterprises involved teams of at least two men, and muscular, well-provisioned, three-engined planes. And now here was someone who had flown in from out of nowhere (and had incidentally set a coast-to-coast speed record in the process) who was aiming to fly the ocean alone in a frail, single-engined mosquito of a plane. That he had lanky boyish good looks and an air of innocence made him ideal, and within days America and the world were gripped by a Lindy hysteria. On the Sunday after his arrival, 30,000 people showed up at Curtiss Field hoping to get a glimpse of this untried twenty-five-year-old hero.

That Lindbergh was a one-man operation worked in his favour. Where others were fussing over logistics and stocking up with survival rations, he bought a bag of sandwiches at a nearby lunch counter, filled up his fuel tank and quietly took off in the little plane named the Spirit of St Louis (so called because his backers were from there). He departed at 7.52 a.m. on 20 May 1927, and was so loaded down with fuel that
he flew most of the distance to Nova Scotia just fifty feet above the ocean.
⁸
Because a spare fuel tank had been bolted on to the nose, Lindbergh had no forward visibility. To see where he was going, he had to put his head out the side window. Thirty-four hours later, at 10.22 at night, he landed at Le Bourget airfield outside Paris. One hundred thousand people were there to greet him.

To the French he was
Le Boy.
To the rest of the world he was
Lucky Lindy
– and he was lucky indeed. Though he did not know it, the night before he had taken possession of the plane, one of the workmen fuelling it had lost a piece of hose in the tank. Since a piece of hose could easily foul the fuel lines, there was no option but to take it out. The workman had cut a six-inch hole in the tank, retrieved the hose and surreptitiously patched the hole with solder. It was a miracle that it held throughout the turbulent Atlantic crossing.

Lindbergh was by no means the first person to cross the Atlantic by air. In May 1919, eight years earlier, a US Navy plane had crossed from Newfoundland to Lisbon, though it had stopped in the Azores en route. A little less than a month after that, John Alcock and Arthur Brown of Great Britain flew from Newfoundland to Ireland, the first non-stop flight. Lindbergh flew 1,500 miles further, and he did it alone, and that was enough for most people. Indeed, most didn’t want to be reminded that Lindbergh was not the first. When ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’, a popular newspaper feature, noted that some twenty other people (including those in dirigibles) had crossed the Atlantic by air before Lindbergh, its offices were inundated with 250,000 angry letters.

Never before in modern history had anyone generated such instant and total adulation as Lindbergh. When he returned to America, the parade in his honour produced more confetti than had been thrown to greet the returning troops after World War I. New York City gave him the largest dinner that had ever been put on for a private citizen. The
New York Stock Exchange even closed for the day. Such was the hysteria that attached itself to Lindbergh that when his mother went to have her hair done in Washington, it took twenty-five policemen to control the mobs.
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The immense excitement and sense of possibility that Lindbergh’s solo flight generated helped to usher in the age of passenger travel. Within two years most of the airmail lines were carrying passengers, and others, like American Airways (later Airlines), National Airlines Taxi Service, and Northwest Airways Company, were rushing to join the market. Lindbergh himself helped to found what is generally credited as the first true passenger airline. Formed in 1929, it was called Transcontinental Air Transport, or TAT, but was commonly known as the Lindbergh Line. In July of that year, using Ford Tri-Motor planes, TAT began the first longdistance passenger services across America, and in so doing introduced concepts that are still with us: flight attendants (only men were employed at first), lavatories, meals on board, and individual reading lights. Three months later the first in-flight movies were introduced. It also took the very bold – at the time almost unthinkable – decision not to carry parachutes.

Because of a paucity of suitable airports and certain vexing limitations of the Ford Tri-Motors, not least an inability to clear any but the smallest mountains, passengers flew only about two-thirds of the total distance. Westward-bound travellers began with an overnight train ride from New York’s Pennsylvania Station to Columbus, Ohio. There, safely past the Alleghenies, they boarded the first plane. It flew at about 2,500 feet and at a top speed of 100 m.p.h., stopping in Indianapolis, St Louis, Kansas City, Wichita and Waynoka, Oklahoma. At Waynoka, passengers boarded yet another train to carry them past the Rockies to Clovis, New Mexico, where a plane was waiting to take them on to Los Angeles via Albuquerque, and Winslow and Kingman, Arizona. The
whole undertaking was, by modern standards, drafty, uncomfortable and slow. Altogether the trip took forty-eight hours – though that was twenty-four hours faster than the fastest train. As a reward for their bravery, and for paying an extravagant $351.94 for a one-way ticket, every passenger was given a solid-gold fountain-pen from Tiffany’s.
¹⁰

Planes were unpressurized and unventilated. For many passengers, breathing at the higher altitudes was difficult. Often the rides were so rough that ‘as many as three-quarters of the passengers became
airsick
(another new word of the age). Even the celebrated aviator Amelia Earhart was seen diving for the
airbag
(yet another). For pilots there were additional difficulties. The Ford Tri-Motor, called with wary affection the
Tin Goose
by airline crews, was a challenging plane to fly. One of its more notable design quirks was that the instruments were mounted
outside
the cockpit, on one of the wing struts, and frequently became fogged once airborne.
¹¹

Almost from the start TAT was dogged with misfortune. Six weeks after services began, a Los Angeles-bound plane crashed in bad weather in New Mexico, killing all eight passengers. Four months later, a second plane crashed in California, killing sixteen. People began to joke that
TAT
stood for ‘Take a Train’. In between these two crashes came another – that of Wall Street, when shares plummeted on Black Monday, 29 October, marking the start of the Great Depression. TAT’s potential market all but dried up.

TAT lost almost $3 million in its first year and was taken over by Western Air Express, which itself evolved into Transcontinental and Western Air – TWA. (The name Trans World Airlines was the product of a later, more expansive age.) Within a year, it had slashed the one-way fare to just $160 (though there were no more free pens) and introduced the first
stewardess.
(Her name was Ellen Church and she chose the job title herself.)

On 21 October 1936, just nine years after Lindbergh’s daring flight, Pan Am inaugurated regular passenger flights across the Pacific from San Francisco to Manila, with refuelling stops at Honolulu, Midway, Wake and Guam. Three years later, the airline also offered the first scheduled flights across the Atlantic, to Marseilles via the Azores and Lisbon, aboard its Flying Clippers, four-engine, twenty-two-passenger Boeing flying boats. Ocean flights inspired an ominous new term,
point of no return,
which first appeared in the
Journal of the Royal Aeronautics Society
in 1941, and quickly moved into the language in various figurative senses.

The logistics of Pan Am’s Pacific operations were formidable. Wake and Midway were uninhabited, so everything needed on the islands, from pancake batter to spare engines, had to be shipped in. Three complete hotels were built in San Francisco, dismantled, shipped to Midway, Wake and Guam, and there reassembled. By September 1940, Pan Am had extended its Pacific operations, and was advertising flights to New Zealand in just four and a half days. If pressed for time, travellers could instead settle for Midway – ‘an ideal choice for those who seek a restful, carefree South Seas atmosphere’ – which could be reached in just two days. What the advertisements didn’t say was that Midway was a desolate heap of sand and that the few lonely people stationed there spent most of their time shooting rats. In any case, a little over two years later, Midway became a rather less desirable holiday spot when it became the focus of the first great battle of the war in the Pacific.