On May 20, 1927, 25-year-old pilot Charles
Lindbergh strapped into his famous airplane, “The Spirit of St. Louis,”
and took off on the first ever non-stop flight from New York to Paris.
The 33.5-hour crossing vaulted Lindbergh to international stardom, but
he was later visited by tragedy in 1932, when his 20-month-old son was
kidnapped and murdered in what was dubbed “the Crime of the Century.”
Below, learn 10 surprising facts about the heroic and controversial life
of the aviator known as “The Lone Eagle.”
1. His father was a U.S. Congressman.
Charles August Lindbergh
When Lindbergh was four years old, Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional
District elected his father, Charles August Lindbergh, to the U.S. House
of Representatives. The elder Lindbergh would serve five terms in
Congress, where he won a reputation for his independent stances and
fierce opposition to the Federal Reserve System. Congressman Lindbergh
was among the few members of the House to speak out against U.S.
involvement in World War I, and was later censored and accused of
sedition after writing an anti-war pamphlet called “Why is Your Country
at War?”
2. He worked as a daredevil and stunt pilot.
After learning to fly at the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation in
Lincoln, Lindbergh spent two years years as an itinerant stuntman and
aerial daredevil. During “barnstorming” excursions through the American
heartland, the young aviator wowed audiences with daring displays of
wing-walking, parachuting and mid-air plane changes. After purchasing
his own plane, he became one of the nation’s top stunt pilots, often
twisting his machine into complicated loops and spins or killing the
engine at 3,000 feet and gliding to ground. Despite the hazardous nature
of stunt flying, “Lucky Lindy’s” closest brushes with death would come
during his time as a U.S. Army flier, test pilot and airmail pilot, when
he survived a record four plane crashes by bailing out and parachuting
to safety.
3. He wasn’t the first person to make a transatlantic crossing in an airplane.
Arthur Brown and John Alcock, 1919
In the years before Charles Lindbergh’s New York to Paris flight, dozens
of other pioneering aviators completed airborne crossings of the
Atlantic. Most made the journey in multiple stages or used
lighter-than-air dirigibles, but in 1919, British pilots John Alcock and
Arthur Brown famously flew nonstop from Newfoundland to Ireland in a
Vickers Vimy biplane before crash landing in a bog. Lindbergh’s major
achievement was not that he was the first person to cross the Atlantic
by airplane, but rather that he did it alone and between two major
international cities.
4. He experienced hallucinations and saw mirages during his famous flight.
Along with the perils of navigating the foggy Atlantic, Lindbergh’s
biggest challenge during his transatlantic flight was simply staying
awake. Between his pre-flight preparations and the 33.5-hour journey
itself, he went some 55 hours without sleep. Lindbergh went so far as to
buzz the surface of the ocean in the hope that the chilly sea spray
would help keep him awake, but 24 hours into the journey, he became
delirious from lack of rest. He later wrote of mirage-like “fog islands”
forming in the sea below, and of seeing “vaguely outlined forms,
transparent, moving, riding weightless with me in the plane.” Lindbergh
even claimed the apparitions spoke to him and offered words of wisdom
for his journey. The hallucinations eventually faded, and only a few
hours later, the exhausted aviator landed in Paris to a crowd of more
than 150,000 jubilant spectators.
5. He achieved several more “firsts” in aviation.
Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow, 1930 (Credit: Keystone-France/Gamma Keystone via Getty Images)
Lindbergh’s transcontinental crossing made him one of the most famous
men in the world. He received millions of letters from adoring fans,
rode in more than a thousand miles of parades and was even given the
Medal of Honor. Still, it wasn’t long before the “The Lone Eagle” took
back to the skies on another ambitious journey. In December 1927, he
piloted “The Spirit of St. Louis” on a solo, non-stop flight from
Washington D.C. to Mexico City as part of a goodwill tour of Latin
America. While in Mexico, Lindbergh met Anne Morrow, the daughter of
U.S. Ambassador Dwight Morrow, and the two married only a few months
later. Anne later became Lindbergh’s trusted copilot and radio operator,
and the couple made several groundbreaking flights, including a 1931
trip from the United States to Japan and China.
6. Gangster Al Capone offered to help find Lindbergh’s kidnapped baby.
Charles Lindbergh Jr.
On March 1, 1932, Lindbergh’s 20-month-old son, Charles Lindbergh,
Jr., was mysteriously kidnapped from his home in New Jersey. The family
received thousands of offers of assistance, including one from none
other than “Scarface” himself—Al Capone. While waiting to be transferred
to prison on charges of tax evasion, Capone released a statement
offering the Lindberghs his condolences, saying, “I know how Mrs. Capone
and I would feel if our son were kidnapped.” The gangster put up a
$10,000 reward for information that would lead to the arrest of the
perpetrators, and even proposed to use his criminal connections to help
find the kidnappers in exchange for his release from jail. Lindbergh
didn’t accept the offer, but he did work with other underworld figures
who claimed they had information on the crime. The search would
ultimately end in tragedy in May 1932, when the body of the murdered
Lindbergh baby was found only a few miles from the family home.
7. He played a role in the advent of the space program.
Harry
Guggenheim (second from left), Robert Goddard (third from left) and
Lindbergh near Goddard's testing site in Roswell, New Mexico, 1935.
(Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Lindbergh was a famous proponent of early air travel, but he also
helped sow the seeds of the space program through his work with Robert
Goddard, the so-called “father of modern rocketry.” Lindbergh first
learned about Goddard’s experiments with liquid-fueled rockets in
late-1929, and the two soon struck up a lifelong friendship. Convinced
that Goddard’s work might one day facilitate a trip to the moon,
Lindbergh became the physicist’s greatest champion and even persuaded
philanthropist Daniel Guggenheim to give him $100,000 in funding.
Goddard’s breakthroughs would later prove invaluable in the development
of early missiles and space travel. When Apollo 8 became the first
manned space mission to orbit the moon in 1968, Lindbergh sent the
astronauts a message saying, “You have turned into reality the dream of
Robert Goddard.”
8. He helped invent an early artificial heart.
Lindbergh and Alexis Carrel (center), 1936. (Credit: The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)
Lindbergh was known for his hands-on approach to repairing and
prepping his aircraft, and he later turned his mechanical wizardry
toward biology. Inspired by his sister-in-law Elisabeth’s battle with
heart disease, he teamed with Nobel Prize-winning French surgeon Alexis
Carrel and spent much of the early 1930s working on a method for keeping
organs alive outside the body. By 1935, Lindbergh had developed a
perfusion pump made of Pyrex glass that was capable of moving air and
life-giving fluids through excised organs to keep them working and
infection-free. The pump was hailed as a medical breakthrough, and
helped pave the way for the development of the first true artificial
organs. Lindbergh and Carrel later collaborated on a 1938 book on the
subject called “The Culture of Organs.”
9. He was a major opponent of U.S. involvement in WWII.
Lindbergh delivers anti-war speech in New York City, April 1941. (Credit: NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
In the late-1930s and early 1940s, Lindbergh’s ironclad reputation
took a serious hit for his opposition to World War II and his apparent
fascination with Nazi Germany. The aviator had made several trips to
Germany in the 1930s to inspect its air force, and returned home
convinced that the Luftwaffe was capable of overpowering the rest of
Europe. He became one of the most vocal opponents of American
involvement in the conflict, and gave dozens of public speeches and
radio addresses criticizing President Franklin Roosevelt and Jewish-run
newspapers and arguing in favor of isolationism. As the United States
edged closer to war, many began to denounce the former hero as an
anti-Semite and a traitor. Lindbergh gave up his crusade and tried to
win a commission in the military after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but
President Roosevelt—who privately called the aviator a Nazi—barred him
from serving. Lindbergh later spent time as a test pilot and aviation
advisor before travelling to the war’s Pacific Theater as an observer.
Though officially a civilian, he eventually flew around 50 combat
missions and even shot down a Japanese fighter plane.
10. He was a staunch conservationist.
Credit: Jack Manning/New York Times Co./Getty Images
Lindbergh traveled widely after World War II, and later claimed that
his wanderings had made him acutely aware of the toll modern
civilization was taking on animal and plant life. Arguing that he would
rather have “birds than airplanes,” in the 1960s, Lindbergh threw his
support behind the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for
Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. He used his travels to
lobby for environmental causes, and fought against the disappearance of
dozens of endangered species including blue and humpback whales,
tortoises, tamaraws and eagles. Before his death in 1974, he also lived
among indigenous tribes in Africa and the Philippines and helped procure
land for the formation of Haleakala National Park in Hawaii.
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