Evangeline Land Lindbergh poses with her infant son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, in 1902.
Minnesota Historical Society
Evangeline Land Lindbergh poses with her infant son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, in 1902.
Minnesota Historical Society
Congressman C. A. Lindbergh and his eight-year-old son, Charles, in 1910.
Minnesota Historical Society
Charles attended this demonstration of aircraft at Fort Myer, Virginia, in 1912. A Wright biplane flies overhead.
Library of Congress
Dogs were always Charles’s preferred companions. Here the eleven-year-old poses with Dingo in 1913.
Minnesota Historical Society
During Charles’s first weeks at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Evangeline snapped this photo of her smiling eighteen-year-old son as he flipped through his scrapbook in the bedroom of the apartment they shared.
Minnesota Historical Society
Charles in front of the plane in which he learned to fly—a Lincoln-Standard J-1—with another pilot at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation around 1922.
Library of Congress
Charles’s first plane, a Jenny, after a crack-up in a Minnesota pasture, June 1923.
Minnesota Historical Society
Cadet Lindbergh poses on the Kelly Field bomb range in 1924 with Booster, the dog he adopted during basic training.
Minnesota Historical Society
Charles loads mail into a Robertson mail plane around 1926. It was while flying one of these that he conceived the idea of making a nonstop flight to Paris.
National Archives and Records Administration
Eric Rohmann
Charles tinkers with the Spirit of St. Louis’s Wright J-5C Whirlwind radial engine in his hangar at Curtiss Field on Long Island in May 1927. (The propeller and spinner have been temporarily removed.)
Library of Congress
After refusing reporters’ demands to kiss goodbye, mother and son pose uncomfortably for the press, 1927.
Library of Congress
This map shows Charles’s route from New York to Paris. He flew a great circle route, one that takes into account the curvature of the earth, thus tracing the shortest possible route between two points on the globe.
Eric Rohmann
Looking solemn and overwhelmed, the hero rides up Broadway on June 13, 1927, through a blizzard of ticker tape and confetti. Beside him is New York City mayor James J. Walker.
Library of Congress
A grinning Charles and a dazed-looking Anne are caught by a photographer just weeks after the world learned of their engagement in 1929.
Bettman Archives/Getty Images
Newlyweds Charles and Anne, looking awkward and uncomfortable, promote commercial air travel for Transcontinental Air Transport (TAT).
Library of Congress
Anne holds the Lindbergh’s first child, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., in June 1930.
AP/Wide World
Dr. Alexis Carrel, the man who influenced Charles’s thinking about both medicine and the perfection of mankind.
Library of Congress
Dr. Carrel talks while Charles leans in and listens closely over lunch in the Rockefeller Institute’s dining room in 1935.
Granger/Granger—All rights reserved
The “first couple of the air” posing in front of the Lockheed Sirius seaplane in which they would fly to Japan in 1931.
Minnesota Historical Society
While Charlie and his nurse, Betty Gow, were out for a walk on August 30, 1931, tabloid photographers startled them by leaping out and snapping this photograph. Riding with the boy in the baby carriage is Skean, one of the Lindberghs’ Scottish terriers, while the other, Bogey, follows behind.
AP/Wide World
Charlie celebrates his first birthday on June 22, 1932.
New Jersey State Police Museum
The ransom note left by the kidnappers on the nursery windowsill.
New Jersey State Police Museum
The Lindbergh home near Hopewell, New Jersey, in March 1932. After repositioning the ladder left behind by the kidnapper, state police climbed into the baby’s window in an attempt to reenact the crime.
New Jersey State Police Museum
Banned from the Lindbergh property, the dogged press found creative ways to scope out the crime scene. Here reporters climb a tree bordering the estate.
Jersey City Free Public Library
Wanted posters like this one were distributed nationwide.
New Jersey State Police Museum
Dr. John F. Condon, “Jafsie,” demonstrates for state police how “Cemetery John” wore his hat and collar to disguise his face the first time the two men met, 1935.
New Jersey State Police Museum
Mug shot of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the man accused of the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby.
New Jersey State Police Museum
Five hundred people crammed into Flemington’s tiny courtroom each day for the trial. The tight space forced the prosecution and defense teams into uncomfortably close proximity, as shown here. (A) Charles Lindbergh, (B) Colonel H. Norman Schwarzkopf, (C) lead defense attorney Edward Reilly, (D) New Jersey attorney general David Wilentz, (E) defense team attorneys Egbert Rosecrans and (F) Lloyd Fisher, and (G) Bruno Richard Hauptmann.
Library of Congress
Looking strained but composed, Anne appears in court to testify on January 3, 1935. When she entered the room, spectators murmured her name, and some stood for a better look, forcing Judge Thomas W. Trenchard to rap his gavel for quiet.
AP/Wide World
A calm and methodical Charles finishes his testimony on the third day of the trial, January 5, 1935.
Library of Congress
Children (the top one wearing a leather flying helmet just like Lindbergh’s) peek through the bars of the Flemington jail to get a look at Bruno Hauptmann.
New Jersey State Police Museum
Hauptmann signed this photograph to one of his attorneys, Lloyd Fisher. Despite being on trial for kidnapping and murder, he appeared to enjoy his celebrity.
New Jersey State Police Museum
After five years of redesigning, building, and testing, Charles finally created this perfusion pump.
Minnesota Historical Society
Anne, Charles, and three-year-old Jon arrive in Liverpool, England, on December 31, 1935.
AP/Wide World
Looking happy and relaxed after seventeen months in England, Anne and Jon pose in front of Long Barn with their dogs Skean and Thor in May 1937.
Minnesota Historical Society
Charles shows four-and-a-half-year-old Jon how to use a bow and arrow at Long Barn in May 1937.
Minnesota Historical Society
Berlin as Charles and Anne saw it for the first time in the summer of 1936. Swastikas and Olympic flags fluttered everywhere, while all evidence of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies had been temporarily swept away.
National Archives and Records Administration
Charles is driven to the opening ceremony of the Olympics on August 1, 1936, in a car full of Nazi officials.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Leaving the White House after his meeting with President Roosevelt on April 20, 1939, Charles is besieged—and obviously annoyed—by reporters.
Library of Congress
Charles speaks at an America First rally in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1941.
AP/Wide World
Constantly traveling, Charles rarely appears in family photographs, like this one with Anne, taken in the backyard of their Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, home in 1943. From left to right are three-year-old Ansy, one-year-old Scott, eleven-year-old Jon, and six-year-old Land.
Lindbergh Picture Collection, (MS 325B), Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library
A Holocaust survivor shows a US soldier the crematorium ovens used to burn corpses in Dora-Mittlebau on April 11, 1945. Just eight weeks later, Charles would have a similar tour of the same camp.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Arnold Bauer Barach
Three more Lindbergh children in 2005: Astrid Bouteuil and her brothers, Dyrk Hesshaimer (left) and David Hesshaimer (right). They did not come forward until after their mother, Brigitte Hesshaimer, had died.
AP/Wide World
Charles faces old age with optimism and confidence in 1969. He would live five more years.
Minnesota Historical Society