One June morning, as the sun rose over the banks of the Newfoundland coast casting ribbons of light across a small, rugged landing field near St. John’s, Lieutenant Arthur Brown watched a large black cat amble under the wing of an airplane. It was the plane he was scheduled to fly that day, if and when the now gusting westerly winds lessened. As the cat turned around and retraced its steps, walking a second time under the same wing, Lieutenant Brown seemed troubled as if he feared the dire portent of its presence. But Brown’s furrowed brow and sullen stare were not about black cats or bad luck. In fact, stowed away in a small cupboard at the tail of the plane were two more black cats nestled between bundles of white heather given to Brown by friends and colleagues for the journey ahead. What worried Brown was the 40 knot half-gale blowing straight out of the west. The uneven gusts had been strong enough to delay the flight that he, the navigator, and Captain John Alcock, the pilot, so long had planned: the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic.
The two men had arrived at St. John’s by ship on the 13th of May. Another ship carrying their disassembled flying machine landed in Newfoundland on May 26. They had hoped to embark on their 1,980-mile crossing at the beginning of the full phase of the moon on Friday, the 13th of June. A coincidence of 13s caused quite a stir in the local and national media and among superstitious readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Alcock and Brown were either heavily cursed or charmed, so wrote several papers, considering the black cats on board and the uncanny list of 13s in their lives. Even the date that their plane arrived was a multiple of the number 13. Traveling with them from England were 13 mechanics to work on the plane, which was a Vimy bomber that happened to be the 13th of its type to be built by the Vickers company in Weybridge, England. The bomber had been completed on February 13 of 1919, and weighed about 13,000 pounds. And there was more. In 1913, the Daily Mail, a London newspaper, had announced its contest and handsome reward—now £10,000 or $50,000—for the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic. In 1913 also, Captain Alcock had won his first flying competition. Add to this that during the war Alcock had spent 13 months as a prisoner of war in Turkey after being shot down after a bombing raid.
“Vimy Transocean Team Not Afraid of No. 13,” a New York Times headline read. The Times worked the angle, adding that the Vimy’s wingspread was 67 feet—digits that added up to 13—and it carried 871 gallons of fuel, which was close to 67 times 13. Alcock’s comment for the Times was, “If only we are lucky enough to get away by the full moon on the 13th.” On the 14th, they were still on the ground.
Neither Alcock nor Brown relied on luck and neither feared the lack of it, although Alcock later admitted that the number 13 might be lucky for him and both used the word “lucky” when talking about their experiences in the Great War, especially about surviving many months as prisoners. Alcock also believed that he was lucky to catch what he called “the flying fever” during the first decade of the twentieth century. He once told a New York Times reporter that he intended to “keep on flying indefinitely” and that there was nothing in his life that he cared about as much as flying—a passion that began in his childhood.
As a teenager, Alcock, born in Manchester, England, in 1892, wanted to fly hot-air balloons and even designed several made of silk and bamboo. When he was eighteen he apprenticed to a French aviator, Maurice Ducrocq, studied aerodynamics, plane construction and design, and experimented with gliders. By the time he was nineteen, Alcock was flying. Two years later he won second place in one of the more famous of the many flying competitions of the era, from London to Manchester.
Blond, six feet tall, and sturdy, Alcock was an affable, outgoing man who was also humble and unpretentious. He was well known in early aviator circles for his talents as a pilot and as a bold designer of planes. He was also notorious for his daring spontaneity. One night in 1913 while standing on the landing field of the Brooklands, the flying center outside London, Alcock commented to a friend about what a great night it was for flying, though for him most nights were good for flying. The friend agreed about that particular night and asked Alcock if he would take him for a spin. The spin turned out to be the first cross-country flight with a passenger at night.
During the war, Alcock joined the Royal Naval Air Service and was stationed in the east on Lemnos Island in the Aegean Sea, off the Dardanelles. There, he designed the first successful triplane night-fighter and ran two bombing raids a month. During one raid, he dropped an entire ton of bombs—thirty-six in all—on the town of Adrianople, destroying a fort, an ammunition train, and at least three thousand houses. He was also the first of the Allied bombers to hit Constantinople (later known as Istanbul). He had recently gained the record for long-distance raids when, in October of 1917, on a return flight he lost an engine and was forced to land on the Sea of Marmara. Unable to find the patrol boat that was supposed to rescue him, he was captured and taken prisoner. After having flown one thousand hours before the war, 2,926 hours as an instructor in the early part of the war, and five hundred hours on the front, Alcock was grounded. He remained in captivity until November of 1918 after the signing of the Armistice. To endure, he spent all the time he could working on a plan to achieve what was then his dream: to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. After the war, Alcock took a job as a test pilot at Vickers Aircraft Company and persuaded his employers to enter one of their flying machines in the Daily Mail’s competition.
Arthur Brown was a reserved, quiet, and studious sort with prematurely graying hair, a wiry build, very blue eyes, and, like Alcock, quite handsome. He was an American citizen, born in 1886 in Scotland while his parents, then living in England, were on holiday in Glasgow. His grandfather had fought in the Union Army at Gettysburg and his great-great-grandmother had led a nurses corps during the Revolutionary War. His father, a mechanical engineer and an associate of the inventor of the automatic engine, George Westinghouse, moved the family to England from Pennsylvania to introduce the manufacture of Westinghouse engines. They settled in Manchester, where Brown spent much of his childhood, though he never knew Alcock. After working as an apprentice at the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, Brown believed he was destined to be an engineer and by the time the war broke out in 1914 he had even been published in several engineering journals. Although an American citizen, Brown enlisted in September of 1914 in what was called the University and Public Schools Battalion. After serving in the trenches at Ypres and on the Somme, he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps, was shot down over Vendin la Vielle in France, recovered in England, then returned to the front, was shot down again and taken into captivity in Germany for fourteen months, followed by nine months in Switzerland. During his captivity, he studied aerial navigation.
When the wartime ban on aerial competition to cross the Atlantic was lifted, Brown hoped that one of the numerous firms preparing to compete would hire him. Despite his expertise in navigation, he now had a lame leg, which diminished his chances of finding a job flying. And then one day in the early spring of 1919 he went to Weybridge to the Vickers Company for a job interview. During Brown’s interview, Captain Alcock, who had been with Vickers since his return to England, entered the room. It was then that Brown learned that Vickers was one of the companies planning to enter a plane in the transocean competition. Alcock was the chosen pilot. After a brief introduction, Brown revealed his ideas for the navigation of aircraft during long overseas flights—and all that he had analyzed so thoroughly while a prisoner of war. What an odd coincidence that each of the men had spent their time in captivity studying the challenges of a transatlantic flight and also that they had both grown up in Manchester, although they had never met. And so it was that Alcock then talked to Brown about coming to work for Vickers and about being his partner and aerial navigator in the transatlantic conquest. That was in late March.
On May 3, they set sail from Southampton on the Mauretania to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on to Port aux Basques, and then by way of the Reid Newfoundland Railway, they traveled to St. John’s and checked into the Cochrane Hotel. Their Vickers flying machine, with its two Rolls-Royce aero engines and sturdy undercarriage, its many feet of hollow, seamless steel tubing, its eight tanks, its 166-foot wings, cockpit, throttles, control wheel, and leather cushions, was shipped in crates to St. John’s ten days later.
In April, May, and June of 1919, the Cochrane was one of St. John’s foremost hotels and surely the city’s most famous. Operating for nearly fifty years on the corner of Cochrane and Gower Streets, the thirty-two-room Victorian Cochrane was the place where Guglielmo Marconi stayed when he sent the first transatlantic wireless message from Newfoundland’s Signal Hill in 1901. In 1919, the Cochrane was effectively an international club for daring young aviators. What the Hotel Crillon was to the Paris peace treaty, the Cochrane was to the history of aviation. Despite Newfoundland’s hilly, rough terrain, which was hardly suited for landing fields, the area surrounding St. John’s was considered the ideal place for takeoffs as it was the easternmost reach of the North American continent. Newfoundland to Ireland was the shortest distance between the two continents.
By the time Alcock and Brown had arrived, the Cochrane was headquarters for several teams of aviators entering the Daily Mail competition as well as newspaper reporters from America, Canada, Britain, Australia, France, and Italy covering what they hoped would be front-page stories about flying firsts. Shortly after their arrival, two more teams eager to win the Daily Mail prize checked in at the Cochrane.
So unusually busy were the skies over Newfoundland in May and June that a concerned citizen wrote this letter to the St. John’s Daily News: “Sir—As one who protested against the bicycle nuisance twenty years ago, I desire to join in the present agitation to prevent motor cars from using the public roads, covering pedestrians with dust and interfering with their comfort generally and I also wish to voice a strong protest against airplanes being allowed to fly over the city of St. John’s frightening our poultry and thereby interfering with the supply of eggs, so important during our present shortage of food. This nuisance is only just beginning and now is the time to stop it before the airplane becomes as great a pest as the bicycle and the dreadful motor car.”
The bold men and their flying machines were indeed among the hottest news sensations of the year. In May, there had been three American teams at the Cochrane, all of which departed from Newfoundland on May 6 intending to be the first to fly the Atlantic. In his American naval seaplane, the NC-4, American Lieutenant Commander Albert C. Read had achieved the honor on May 31, arriving in Plymouth, England, via stops at the Azores and Lisbon. And while Alcock and Brown were preparing for their attempt at what they hoped would be the next spectacular feat—a nonstop flight to Ireland—the great British dirigible R-34 was planning a June departure from England for an unprecedented round-trip voyage to America.
In the running for the Daily Mail prize for the first nonstop transatlantic flight were five teams altogether. Whether any of them succeeded, it was abundantly clear that someone soon was going to prove that it was possible to fly between the two continents nonstop within the time representing the limit of human endurance. The transatlantic airways were opening up and the talk at the Cochrane was that it would someday be possible, perhaps even in 1919, for airplanes to travel between England and America with passengers.
The force behind the prize was the Daily Mail’s editor, Lord Northcliffe, who in 1909 began to offer rewards for aviators achieving ever-increasing distances: £100 for the first nonstop flight of a quarter of a mile outward and back again and £1,000 for the first crossing of the English Channel, both achieved in 1909. In 1913, Lord Northcliffe announced that £10,000 would be given to the first to fly across the Atlantic within a time limit of seventy-two hours. During the war the paper stopped the competition, and after the war, when the Daily Mail resumed the contest, engine design had improved because of the war, enough to enable someone to actually achieve what Northcliffe had boldly dared. “Being myself a spectator of early attempts at flight, I realized that what was wanted was tangible encouragement; also that attention should be focused upon a science of such profound importance,” Lord Northcliffe wrote in 1920. “The prizes given by my journals were devised, therefore, to these two ends—to encourage the flying man and to interest the public.”
The first of the five Daily Mail contenders in Newfoundland took off from St. John’s on May 18 in a single-engine biplane. Soon after takeoff, however, over the Grand Banks, the plane flew into dense fog, then heavy rain squalls, and a forceful north wind that forced the plane south of its course, which the team’s navigator had mapped out above a steamship line. It also caused the plane to use far more fuel than anticipated for the early hours of the flight. The plane crash-landed not halfway across the Atlantic on the heaving waves of a storm at sea. A small cargo vessel traveling from Mexico to Perth happened to be nearby and to see the two men and their flying machine. At the Cochrane Hotel, where everyone was certain they had perished and where they had learned that King George V had already sent a message to the pilot’s wife expressing his sadness at the news of the death of her husband, the news of the rescue of both pilot and navigator on May 15 was a relief. The next attempt from St. John’s crashed on takeoff. Coming up in June would be Alcock and Brown.
Alcock and Brown’s attempt was unique in several ways. For one, on board would be a mailbag containing three hundred private letters, each of which had a special stamp provided by the postal officials at St. John’s. If the flight succeeded, this would be the first international airmail delivery.Disregarding the shipping routes that others had followed, Brown mapped out a crow-line course from St. John’s, aiming for the middle of Galway Bay in Ireland and landing very near to the town of Clifden. It was the nearest possible route to a straight line between St. John’s and Galway Bay. Their plane, the Vickers Vimy, with its two 350 horsepower Eagle Mark VIII Rolls-Royce engines, had been designed during the war for long-range bombing; its purpose was to bomb Berlin. But the war ended before it could be used. It was thought that the Vickers Vimy had a range of 2,500 miles. Until the flight of Alcock and Brown, the stunning Vickers creation had received little or no attention.
While the crated Vickers Vimy sailed for Newfoundland in mid-May, Alcock and Brown spent their days looking for a stretch of land that would be suitable for takeoff and their evenings playing cards with the other competitors staying at the Cochrane. What they needed for a temporary airstrip was a level field measuring about one hundred yards wide and at the very least three hundred yards long. If they had to contend with strong winds, they would need to add two hundred yards to the length. In Newfoundland, finding such land was not an easy task, especially in the St. John’s vicinity, where woods were common, soil was soft, and any cleared grounds were uneven, rolling, and dotted with boulders. The low supply and the high demand, considering the number of aviators currently in the St. John’s area, made finding such fields very competitive. By the time Alcock and Brown began their search in mid-May much of the choice land had been claimed by competing fliers. And then the inevitable began to happen: owners of the few appealing plots began to ask for money for their use. Once when Alcock and Brown thought they had found an ideal place, the landowner demanded £5,000 plus an indemnity for any damage and the cost of preparing it.
When their plane arrived on the 26th, they had not yet found their aerodrome. Now, in addition to the land search, they began the stressful job of reassembling the plane, working twelve to fourteen hours a day with a team of mechanics and volunteers. So intense was the task that even newspaper reporters from the Daily Mail, the New York Times, and the New York World volunteered their labor. What was a standard Vickers Vimy bomber had to be altered for the journey. The bombs and bombing apparatus were taken out and replaced by extra gasoline tanks. The first of the tanks to be used and thus emptied was designed in the shape of a boat and could be used as a raft, in the event of a descent onto water. The cockpit was redesigned so that the pilot and navigator sat side by side rather than in a row, allowing the space behind the pilot’s seat to be used for another tank. Tantamount to rebuilding a plane, the project attracted tourists who gathered by the dozens each day to watch and who became so curious and intrusive that the mechanics built an enclosure to protect the machine.
By the 6th of June, the Vickers Vimy was ready for testing and Alcock and Brown had finally reserved a suitable location for their aerodrome: a series of four fields near a place called Mundy’s Pond. Although hilly in parts, the fields together provided about four hundred yards for takeoff. The price was high but after some negotiating, they got the land and they hired thirty workers to build a bump-free runway by blasting boulders, slicing off the tops of hills, and filling in the rugged dips. By then too, Lieutenant Brown had set up a receiving station on the roof of the Cochrane where he could practice sending and receiving wireless messages from the Vickers Vimy’s new radio set.
On the 9th and 12th, pilot and navigator ran test flights. The machine was nearly ready except for the highly acclaimed wireless, which would not sputter a single sound. There were other snags, all of which prevented the planned takeoff on Friday the 13th. That night Alcock and Brown went to bed at 7 P.M. while the mechanics worked on the wireless and the rest of the plane all night long.
At 3:30 A.M. on the 14th, everyone met at the aerodrome. The plane and its crew were ready to go. The tanks were filled with 870 gallons of gasoline and forty gallons of oil. The food—a dozen sandwiches, chocolate bars, malted milk, two thermos flasks of coffee, a flask of brandy, bottles of water, and stores of emergency rations—was packed. The mascots—the two black cats, named Lucky Jim and Twinkletoe—were stowed away. In the cockpit was a small pocket flash lamp in case the cockpit lighting system gave out, a sextant clipped to the dashboard, a drift indicator under Brown’s seat, a distance calculator on the side of the fuselage, charts on the floor of the cockpit, an electric flashlight, a pistol with red and white flares, and the battery for heating Alcock’s and Brown’s electric suits. In his wallet, Brown carried a tiny silk American flag, which his fiancée had given to him. And in Alcock’s pocket was a silver kewpie doll from his girlfriend, who also gave him two yarn dolls, Ran-Tan-Tan and Olivette, that he hung by his seat in the cockpit. The only thing missing was a box of extra life-jackets that, sent by a U.S. company, had ended up by accident at the Bank of Montreal, which then stored the unopened box in its basement, mistaking it for office supplies.
At first light as Brown was staring at the black cat under the wing of his plane, the meteorological officer handed him the latest weather report: strong westerly wind. Conditions otherwise fairly favorable. As the morning progressed, the wind did not diminish. Neither did Alcock’s and Brown’s determination, despite the wind. “We had definitely decided to leave on the 14th, if given half a chance,” Brown later wrote, “for at all costs we wanted to avoid a long period of hope deferred while awaiting ideal conditions.”
At 2 P.M., seated under the wings of their plane, they ate lunch, still waiting for the hefty gusts to subside. Finally, two hours later, although nothing had changed, Alcock and Brown decided they must go. They donned their electrically heated clothing, their Burberry overalls, their helmets and their gloves, and climbed into the cockpit. There were few reporters and no tourists to watch their dramatic ascent, taking off against winds with gusts as strong as 35 knots on the still somewhat bumpy four-hundred-yard runway in an airplane that now, with an extra load of fuel, weighed close to five tons. With such high winds, no one believed the flight would begin that day.
Their meteorological expert had assured them that the wind would drop off to no more than 20 knots as soon as they were a hundred miles out to sea and then the weather would clear. Armed with that hope they pointed the plane westward and prepared to leave. The wind, coming out of the west, was too strong for the structure of their plane to permit them to take off to the east, as planned. Worse still, the plane, if pointed eastward, would face downhill—a daunting challenge with such high winds. For more than three hundred yards the plane lurched and wobbled, threatened every second by sudden upward gusts. Lifting off the ground at 4:17 P.M. they headed straight into the wind until they reached eight hundred feet and then turned toward the sea, reaching 1,200 feet by 4:28, at which time they left the coast of Newfoundland. Within the first few minutes of the flight, Brown spoke to Alcock about their bearings but Alcock heard only screeching vibrations. The communication gear built into their flight caps had failed, thus requiring pilot and navigator, from then on, to scribble notes to each other and converse through hand gestures. Better news came by the end of the first hour of their flight, when, just as their meteorologist had assured them, the winds calmed. The skies, however, were not clear. In fact, as the winds lessened, the haze thickened.
To navigate, Brown relied on measuring the angle of the sun or another heavenly body in relation to the horizon. Essential to the method was visibility. In the absence of a clearly defined horizon, Brown had a sextant that replaced the horizon with a bubble. But none of his equipment could serve as a surrogate sun or star. If neither was visible, he resorted to the method known as dead reckoning, calculating his position with compass bearings, speed and height of the plane, and wind velocity. If he couldn’t use one or more of these, then, he would proceed along the course he had established from his most recent computation and simply hope, faithfully, for the best.
By 5:20, at 1,500 feet, the plane was immersed in heavy fog. Twenty minutes later, Brown wrote a note to Alcock saying “I can’t get an obs. in this fog. Will estimate that same wind holds and work by dead reckoning.” Shortly after six, they heard a loud noise that disturbed both men. Reminiscent of machine gun fire, the sound was the exhaust pipe breaking off. Now three cylinders of the engine were exhausting straight into the air. The uneven rattling sound grew louder, evening out to a constant roaring “thrum,” as Brown called it, that would be with them throughout the rest of the trip. Accepting this, they focused on the more disturbing problem of visibility. Flying higher and higher, they searched for a clear patch of sky so that Brown could fix their position. At 5,200 feet, they still could not get above the clouds and could see nothing beyond the inside of the cockpit. “I waited impatiently for the first sight of the moon, the Pole Star and other old friends of every navigator,” Brown later wrote. But by midnight, there had been no break in the fog. And Alcock later wrote, “For seven long hours we travelled thus, sighting neither sea nor sky.”
Then at about half past midnight, at nearly six thousand feet, a tiny gap in the dense clouds appeared to the northeast and Brown spotted the star Vega, the moon, and the Pole Star, which is the end star in the tail of Ursa Minor, the Little Bear—all essential to finding his way. In the moonlight, Brown could see a cloud horizon and thus could establish a reading. They had flown 850 nautical miles in the past eight hours at an average speed of 106 knots. Brown’s dead reckoning was slightly short of their position but only because he had built into his equation a calculation of diminishing winds, which, so distracted by other challenges, he had not realized had picked up again. Now knowing their position, they could descend several thousand feet, thus reducing the strain on the engines.
For the next hour and a half, they flew through an eerie haze of half-light that allowed them to see the shadows of their plane move across mounds of clouds beneath them. Something about the continuous roar of the engines, the inability to talk to each other, the indefinite nature of the fog that was alternately dense and light but always there, the necessity of sitting in a crammed cockpit for endless hours, the failed wireless radio, and the angle of occasional light slipping through the oddly shaped clouds surrounding them provoked an unsettling anxious feeling for both of them. Brown later called it an “aura of unreality.” He would also later comment about his utter admiration for Alcock, who never complained once about the required permanent position of his feet on the rudder-bars and of his right hand on the joystick. Neither did Brown express any fears or discomfort to his stalwart partner, but by the tenth or eleventh hour in the air, he was conscious of the need to be as disciplined as was humanly possible. What was before them was a seemingly endless expanse of nothingness. Brown concentrated on his vision of the new dawn that surely they would witness in Ireland and he thought about the Irish coast, trying to envision what the first sight of land might look like. They had more than enough fuel and food; they appeared to be on course; and they were more than halfway to their destination. Now it was a matter of fortitude and focus and never allowing themselves to drift into fantasies of fear.
At 3:10 A.M., they were flying at about 3,500 feet when suddenly thick drifts of vapor enveloped the plane, so thick that they couldn’t see the front of the fuselage or the far end of either wing. Their sense of the vertical and horizontal was suddenly askew. Pulling back the joystick, Alcock assumed they were nosing upward but at the same time the air-speed meter jammed and the instrument readings could not guide them to a safe horizontal forward movement. The plane “swung, flew amok, and began to perform circus tricks,” Brown later wrote. But it was clear to both pilot and navigator that they were heading downward in a steep slant—a seemingly unstoppable nosedive. Both men prepared for the worst and loosened their safety belts. Then just as suddenly as the clouds had appeared, the air was clear and they found themselves to be a hundred feet above the surface of the sea. Alcock responded, centralized the joystick, and opened up the throttles. At fifty feet, they leveled out. So close were they to the water that they could hear the swooshing of waves breaking and swelling. And so disoriented were they that they were now heading back to America. Turning around, they proceeded eastward and once again entered a vast expanse of interminable clouds, though not as solid as what they had hit at 3 A.M. There would be other urgent moments. Trying to rise above the clouds, they would fly into rain, hail, and snow at 8,000 feet, requiring Brown to crawl onto the wings to scrape off the ice. And they would fly as high as 11,000 feet in search of even a pinpoint glimmer of the sun to allow Brown to fix their position. This happened at about 7:20 A.M., at which time they descended again.
At 8:15 A.M. they were 250 feet above the surface of the ocean. Brown was putting away the remains of food the two men had just shared when suddenly Alcock grabbed Brown’s shoulder and moved his lips rapidly without the usual consideration of waiting to see if Brown had understood, as if he had forgotten that Brown could not hear him. Brown was alarmed until he saw what Alcock saw: specks of land ahead. These were the islands of Eeshal and Turbot. Ten minutes later, Alcock and Brown crossed the coast of Ireland. At 8:40 A.M., after sixteen hours and twenty-eight minutes in the air, flying at an average speed of over 2 miles a minute, they touched land near Clifden, as planned. And it would have been a smooth landing if they had not crashed into a bog, front end first, burying the nose, four propeller blades and lower wings in the ground as if staking a claim to their victory. Pilot and navigator scrambled quickly out of the cockpit grabbing instruments and the mailbag and the flare gun. Firmly on the ground at last, Brown shot off two white flares. Within minutes a group of men appeared from a nearby wireless station. “Anybody hurt?” asked one.
“No,” said Brown. And then all the men helped Brown and Alcock to continue clearing the cockpit.
A few minutes later, one of them asked, “Where you from?”
“America,” said Alcock, at which time one or more of them chuckled, thinking perhaps that if they didn’t laugh a little they were not going along with the joke. They had no knowledge of the trip. The names Alcock and Brown meant nothing to them. But when Alcock showed them the mailbag with letters postmarked at St. John’s, they sent out a loud burst of cheers and nearly knocked down Alcock and Brown in an effort to shake their hands.
In the coming days, Alcock and Brown would be hailed as international heroes, which shocked them no less than their 3 A.M. nosedive. “We had finished the job we wanted to do, and could not comprehend why it should lead to such fuss,” Brown later wrote. “Now, however, I know that the crowds saw more clearly than I did, and that their cheers were not really for us personally, but for what they regarded as a manifestation of the spirit of Adventure, the true romance, the thrilling feat—call it what you will. For the moment this elusive ideal, which they so wanted and needed, was suggested to them by the first non-stop journey by air across the Atlantic, which we had been fortunate enough to make.”
By the beginning of the summer of 1919, above the many ships crossing the Atlantic, there were now vessels in the air. An American flying boat, a British dirigible, and a British biplane had claimed three firsts: the first transatlantic crossing, the first nonstop transatlantic flight, and the first round-trip flight between the two continents. Technology was pushing mankind forward beyond the haze of war and its aftermath. “Even the worst pessimist of yesterday is perfectly willing today to theorize over the possibility of flying to the moon or to Mars or anywhere else,” wrote the New York Times on June 16.