Ever since Christopher Columbus theorized that the world was round, there were other intrepid seafaring souls who also wanted to prove this by sailing westward until they reached their starting point. Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator, was determined to try. With the backing of Charles I of Spain, he set out with five ships from Seville on 10 August 1519 to search for a western route to the Spice Islands of the East Indies. He headed southwest across the Atlantic Ocean, explored the Rio de la Plata, and wintered in Patagonia. He then sailed through the strait, named for him, at the tip of South America and headed northwest across the Pacific, reaching the Marianas and Philippine Islands in 1520.
Magellan never returned to his adopted land; he was killed by natives at Macatan. But on 8 September 1522, his flagship Victoria with eighteen men aboard returned to Spain, thus completing the first circumnavigation of the globe. It had taken the crew 1,088 days to complete the voyage.
The first expedition leader to succeed was Sir Francis Drake, an English navigator, who set out in 1577 sailing westward and returned to England in 1580 after pillaging the coasts of South and North America. In the more than four millennia since, others have circled the earth by ship, dirigible, and aircraft, many vying to make the trip faster than their predecessors.
One of the first persons to circle the earth in a deliberate attempt to establish a record was Nellie Bly, a newspaper reporter who had become well-known for her exposés of social conditions in the United States in the nineteenth century. Born Elizabeth Cochrane on 5 May 1867, she took “Nellie Bly” as a pen name when she began writing for the Pittsburgh Dispatch. In 1887, she pretended to be insane so she would be committed to an asylum. Her series of articles on conditions there, published in the New York World, made her famous.
Joseph Pulitzer, the paper’s publisher, in a continued effort to outdo his competitors with sensational and unusual news accounts, had been impressed by Jules Verne’s novel, Around the World in Eighty Days, which had been published in 1873. Would Nellie be interested in trying to beat Phineas Fogg’s record by using available commercial transportation?
It was the opportunity of a lifetime for Nellie. She studied shipping schedules and in mid-November 1889, with a minimum of baggage, left New York and sailed across the Atlantic and Mediterranean. She proceeded to Aden, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, San Francisco, and reached New York on 25 January 1890, 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes after her departure.
Pulitzer gave much front-page space to Nellie’s adventures by train, ship, ricksha, and sampan. Clothes, games, songs, and dances were named for her. She later wrote three books, one of them titled Nellie Bly’s Book: Around the World in Seventy-Two Days.
The public attention paid to Nellie encouraged others to try to beat her record. George Francis Train duplicated her trip in 1890, setting a new mark of sixty-seven days. Charles Fitzmorris, Chicago’s chief of police, left the city in 1901 and returned 60 days, 13 hours, and 29 minutes later to brief acclaim. Round-the-world fever was contagious. J. W. Sayre of Seattle became the first to make the trip in less than two months when he set a new mark of 54 days, 9 hours, and 42 minutes in 1903. Later that year Henry Frederick bested Sayre’s mark by a scant 2 hours and 40 minutes. In 1907, a new record of 40 days, 9 hours, and 30 minutes was set by Colonel Burnley-Campbell of Great Britain. This was broken four years later by André Jaeger-Schmidt, a one-legged Parisian newspaperman, who encircled the globe in 39 days, 19 hours, 42 minutes, and 38 seconds.
The celebrity given these trips, however brief, continued to fascinate the few Americans who could afford the trip and who wanted the glory and publicity anticipated in setting a new record. John Henry Mears, a New York theatrical producer and writer, carefully analyzed world shipping schedules in 1913 and went around the world in 35 days, 21 hours, and 36 minutes, much of the trip by ship. Mears has the distinction of being first to use an airplane as one of the means of transportation. It was a stunt arranged by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to gain this honor for Mears since he flew only about forty miles while approaching the West Coast by sitting on the wing of a chartered plane and clinging to the wing struts.
The Mears short flight may have inspired others to think about the potential of aircraft to establish new records. In February 1914 the Bureau of Aeronautics of the Panama-Pacific Exposition Company announced sponsorship of a race around the world by “aeroplane.” The race was to start and end in San Francisco and be completed within ninety days, with a starting date of 15 May 1915. Prizes totaling $150,000 were offered to the first three successful world circlers. Confidence that the trip could be made entirely by air was shown in an article in Aero and Hydro magazine:
Considerable discussion has been launched as to the possibility of accomplishing the voyage within the prescribed limit of 90 days, traveling only by some sort of motored aero vehicle for the entire distance.… To win the race, and the Exposition’s cash prize of $100,000 … it will be necessary to average 250 miles a day. The world’s record for one day’s flying is 1,350 miles.1
The only restrictions were that the course outlined by the race’s organizers had to be followed and the entire distance had to be by aircraft. The race was to be flown eastward from San Francisco with prescribed stops at six cities in the United States and then designated points between Newfoundland and Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, and the Hebrides. The route next included stops in England, France, Germany, Poland, and Russia, then along the Trans-Siberian Railway, down into Manchuria and Korea, and across Japan. The prescribed route was then from northern Japan to Kamchatka, with varying routes across the gap which separates Asia from North America, then on to Vancouver, Seattle, Tacoma, and Portland to San Francisco.
The route of the flight would take the fliers over numerous uninhabited areas where no airplane had ever been seen before. Airfields were most likely to be a polo field, parade ground, or city park. Automobiles were rare and gasoline was in short supply or nonexistent in many areas of the world. Orville Wright, writing in a popular aviation magazine of the day, felt that “it would be foolish for an aviator to risk his life in attempting a nonstop flight across the ocean with such a machine until the motor has been perfected to the point where it could be depended upon.” He noted that the longest single flight to date (1914) was less than 900 miles.2
In the same issue, the editor wrote: “Is the trip worth making? Yes, emphatically, yes. And even if the hazardous voyage is tried several times, with loss of life and consequent failure, it will still be worth trying, and there is no doubt that one of these days—in 1915 or 1925—it will be accomplished.”3
The growing conflict in Europe that became World War I temporarily canceled the idea. But the war did have a beneficial effect on aviation progress, especially long-distance flying. Aircraft, engines, and airfield facilities improved rapidly in the warring countries. Hundreds of pilots were trained and a desire to continue flying in either the military services or pursuing commercial ventures using surplus military aircraft was not going to be denied.
In 1919 two private organizations dedicated to the growth of aviation in the United States—the Aero Club of America and the Aerial League of America—joined forces. They appointed a commission to ascertain the extent of interest in civilian aeronautics throughout the United States. A number of aeronautical authorities were selected to make a survey and the group traveled by Pullman car to forty-nine cities in the United States. They reported that the nation was indeed interested in aviation and noted that several national and international aviation contests were scheduled for 1920, with a total of more than two million dollars in prizes offered. Typical was the prize of $100,000 announced by the Aero Club of America, “to be awarded to the person who evolves and demonstrates the first heavier-than-air aircraft which will rise from and land on the ground vertically and will, in other words, make it possible to rise from and land on the roof of a medium-size house,” according to Flying, the journal of the Aero Club and Aerial League. The prize was offered by the French millionaire André Michelin.4
This expression of interest encouraged the commission members to expand their survey. They appointed a special three-man committee to tour the world and organize the “First Aerial Derby around the World.” The group traveled (mostly by ship and train but never by air) more than 40,000 miles and visited thirty-two countries. Twenty-seven new aero clubs were organized in the nations they passed through. When the commission reached Paris on 20 May 1920, it was dissolved by mutual consent. In its place, the World’s Board of Aeronautical Commissions was established to perpetuate the work of the original aerial derby commission and act in an advisory capacity to those interested in aviation, to advance it as rapidly as possible, and to encourage aerial navigation in all parts of the world.
The rules for the derby reflected an optimism about the future of aviation based on the fact that a few aircraft had already flown great distances without refueling and now seemed reliable enough to make such an arduous trip. The race was never held but the idea remained fast in the minds of pilots of many nations.
Strange as it may seem today, most people in the United States had never seen an airplane when World War I ended. Although the airplane had proven effective as a war machine, the American public, although interested in seeing airplanes, did not accept them as a safe, reliable means of transportation. There were a few American government leaders who fortunately believed that a dedicated core of military airmen must be retained for national defense but there were less than 1,000 Army Air Service pilots, about 10,000 enlisted men, and 800 obsolescent planes left over from World War I available to help prove that the airplane had an unrealized potential for peace as well as for war. That potential had to be proven. The few airmen who remained in uniform were deeply troubled that the nation that had given birth to the first heavier-than-air flying machine was unable to capitalize on this technological advance. To attract the public’s attention they would have to keep the public focused on aviation through the media by continually seeking national and international speed, altitude, distance, and endurance records.
Among the first Army Air Service achievements after the war were three successive world altitude records set in 1919 in an experimental LePere biplane designed by Capt. Gene LePere, a French engineer on loan by the French government, and built at the Air Service’s Engineering Division at McCook Field, Dayton, Ohio. Although altitude records were important, there were other achievements that captured more public interest. That year a Martin bomber was flown completely around the perimeter of the United States for the first time. A U.S. Navy Curtiss seaplane, the NC-1, made a flight with fifty passengers and another, the NC-4, had completed the first flight across the Atlantic. The next year, four de Havilland DH-4s, led by Capt. St. Clair Streett, completed the first aerial round trip between New York City and Nome, Alaska.
One of the first American solo record-setters was Lt. James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle who flew coast-to-coast with one stop in 21 hours, 19 minutes, the first to do so in less than a day. In May 1923, Lts. Oakley T. Kelly and John A. Macready made the first nonstop coast-to-coast flight, setting a new record for the greatest distance ever made in a single cross-country flight up to that time. That summer, Lt. Lowell H. Smith and Lt. John P. Richter captured headlines with their 37¼-hour endurance flight in a de Havilland DH-4B using midair refueling for the first time. The world speed record, set by Navy Lt. A. J. Williams in November 1923, was over 260 mph.
Other nations were also testing the potential of aircraft at the beginning of the nineteen-twenties. Argentina appropriated two million dollars for aviation development; Luis Barrufaldi, one of its military pilots, set a South American altitude record of more than 24,000 feet. Belgium was operating passenger planes on four European routes. China had trained 125 pilots and had 140 planes. France was leading the world in the development of civil aviation. At the same time, Germany claimed to have the most up-to-date, complete, and regularly scheduled air traffic routes in the world, despite the restrictions imposed by the Allied Aerial Control Commission as the result of the Treaty of Versailles. Great Britain was pushing ahead in aircraft development, experimentation, and development of mail routes. Italy was developing aerodromes and encouraging aircraft production. Japan was strengthening its naval and army air arms and increasing production of war machines.
Shortly after the Smith-Richter endurance flight, Maj. Gen. Mason M. Patrick, chief of the Army Air Service, and assistant chief Brig. Gen. William “Billy” Mitchell, became concerned that the United States was beginning to fall dangerously behind in research and development of military aircraft. Both encouraged the pilots to attract public attention to aviation by participating in air races and seeking more speed, altitude, and distance records. Other nations reported preparations to fly around the world in an effort to capture the honor of being first to do so. The time had come for Americans to consider the challenge of a World Flight.