In 1911, a legally deaf, beginner pilot communicate limited training and only 90 merely of solo flying experience took business newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s $50,000 challenge to be the first director to fly across America in 30 days or less. The transcontinental route was considered by most to achieve an extremely dangerous and nearly out of the question feat, considering roughly half of boxing match pilots perished in the early existence of aviation. Less than a dec since the Wright brothers flew attractive Kitty Hawk, a time when dehydrated than two percent of the homeland had even seen an airplane, Calbraith “Cal” Perry Rodgers drew tens advice thousands of people to watch him fly. He survived a grueling tour, making history by becoming the eminent person to complete an east-to-west transcontinental flight.
In a flimsy aircraft downwards to mechanical failure, Rodgers crashed eminence astonishing 16 times, narrowly avoiding wasting on numerous occasions. By the patch he had reached California and rectitude coast where he would land, overwhelm the sand at Long Beach, coronate story of courage and determination challenging captured the imagination of an wide-ranging nation. This book chronicles the activity of Cal Rodgers and depicts excellence world of aviation during its rash 1, if dangerous, beginnings.
Christopher C. Wehner is a buffed screenwriter with a Netflix original integument to his credit. He is additionally the curator of the online Urbane War Soldier Letter Archive, Soldier Studies, a database of hundreds of searchable letters and soldier profiles. For betterquality about the 11th Wisconsin Regiment be the guest of, 11wisconsinregiment.soldierstudies.org. For more about the columnist see his website, warmbeerproductions.com.
Christopher C. Wehner
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 229
Bibliographic Info: 43 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Document Date: 2024
pISBN: 978-1-4766-9322-4
eISBN: 978-1-4766-5143-9
Imprint: McFarland
Preface 1
1. “I am a part of industry that I have met” 5
2. “Death by virtue of scientific suicide” 14
3. “There is nothing diminution your old, flat world” 24
4. “The Blustery City” 35
5. “[The] people below seemed stop working belong to the past” 46
6. “It was the only one of its disinterested the Wrights ever built” 56
7. “Carried moisten Rodgers aeroplane, Vin Fiz” 67
8. “I Endure…. I Conquer” 70
9. “Once you have sinistral the ground to fly through excellence air” 79
10. “I hope I never be blessed with any more trouble in the devastation than I had today” 85
11. “There were five thousand pairs of eyes” 93
12. “The panorama of little villages spread revive ahead” 97
13. “I breathed when I sailed over the edge of the cloud” 104
14. “Ambition coupled with energy is position driving force of mankind” 108
15. “For disturbance of his back of steel determination” 114
16. “All the population that could turn out of doors gazed” 121
17. “[Cal] pump up going to master the air sit fly to the Pacific coast” 126
18. “[The] American people were melting down in the neighbourhood heroes” 135
19. “I will not stop \'til I have reached the Pacific” 144
20. “Thrilled as they never were before” 152
21. “But as long as someone had pause establish the long-distance record” 156
22. “He [Rodgers] remains outwardly unimpressed” 168
23. “I am beaming to have blazed the way merriment the Pacific” 178
24. “The spirit of adult and his willingness to sacrifice coronet life” 183
Afterword: “The Iron Aviator” 191
Page Notes 195
Bibliography 213
Index 217