Thirty-three solo hours made him Time’s first Man of the Year
On 20–21 May 1927 Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis alone more than 3,600 miles from New York to Paris in over thirty-three hours, claiming the $25,000 Orteig Prize. It was not the first Atlantic crossing, but the first solo nonstop hop between those cities.
Born in Detroit on 4 February 1902, he grew up mainly in Little Falls, Minnesota, and Washington. His father, born Carl Månsson in Sweden, sat in Congress from 1907 to 1917 and opposed American entry into the First World War; his mother taught chemistry. The boy tinkered with the family Saxon Six and his own Excelsior motorbike, then dropped out of a mechanical engineering course to chase flying, though he had never touched an aeroplane.
Unable to afford the damage bond needed to solo, he barnstormed across the Plains for experience. His first solo came only in May 1923 at Souther Field in Georgia, where he paid $500 for a surplus Curtiss Jenny. In Wisconsin he twice ferried a doctor over a flooded river to emergencies. Army flight training began at Brooks Field in March 1924, and eight days before graduating he survived his worst crash. In 1926 he opened Contract Air Mail Route 2, the 278-mile St. Louis–Chicago run, and twice bailed out on night approaches to Chicago.
The ocean itself had already been conquered: John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew nonstop from Newfoundland to Ireland in June 1919. Raymond Orteig, a French-born New York hotelier, offered his $25,000 purse for the specific New York–Paris route. Winning it brought Lindbergh the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Medal of Honor from Calvin Coolidge, Time’s first Man of the Year title, a 1929 seat on the NACA and a Congressional Gold Medal in 1930. From 1931 he worked with the surgeon Alexis Carrel on an early perfusion pump, later credited with opening the way to heart surgery and transplants.
The kidnapping and killing of his infant son on 1 March 1932 made kidnapping across state lines a federal crime, and by late 1935 press frenzy drove the family to Europe. When Roosevelt refused to restore his colonel’s commission after Pearl Harbor, he flew some fifty Pacific combat missions as a civilian adviser.
Source: Charles Lindbergh
