November 5, 1911: The 1st airplane flight across America is completed. It is not as well remembered as the aerial achievements of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, mainly because most people weren't yet used to hearing about aerial achievements, and it took so long to do. It didn't help that the man who did it didn't have long to brag about it. But it hadn't been done before, and deserves mention.
And his name sounds a bit hoity-toity: Calbraith Perry Rodgers. He might have been better remembered as "Cal Rodgers," just as Lindbergh was well-remembered due to the nickname "Lucky Lindy." And he was born rich, preventing the advantage of a poor-boy-makes-good story.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1879, he was a grandson of Oliver Hazard Perry, the hero of the War of 1812's Battle of Lake Erie; and a great-grandnephew of Matthew Calbraith Perry, whose naval expedition of 1853 opened Japan to the Western world.
He went deaf as a boy, keeping him out of the family business, the U.S. Navy. Nevertheless, his family's wealth meant that he could pursue his interests without having to work for a living. In August 1911, he became a licensed pilot, and became one of the earliest civilians to purchase an airplane. He entered the Chicago International Aviation Meet, and won $11,285.
As with Lindbergh, he achieved his big moment with the goal of winning prize money. In 1910, William Randolph Hearst offered the Hearst Prize to the 1st pilot to fly coast to coast, in either direction, in less than 30 days, requiring a stop in Chicago. The prize was $50,000 -- about $1.54 million in 2022 money. Rodgers talked Chicago meatpacking mogul J. Ogden Armour to sponsor it, and named the plane, a Wright Model EX, after Armour's grape soft drink: The Vin Fiz Flyer.
On September 17, 1911, at 4:30 PM Eastern Time, he took off from Sheepshead Bay Race Track in Brooklyn. He made the required stop in Chicago on October 8, attracting national attention. To avoid the Rocky Mountains, he took a southerly route, flying through the Midwest until reaching Texas. He turned west after passing San Antonio.
Although the plan called for a large number of stops along the way, there turned out to be 75 of them, including 16 crashes, and Rodgers was injured several times. His team of mechanics rebuilt the Vin Fiz Flyer when necessary, and only a few pieces of the original plane actually made the entire trip.
The Vin Fiz Flyer
On November 5, at 4:04 PM Pacific Time, a crowd of 20,000 people saw him land at Tournament Park in Pasadena, outside Los Angeles. He had flown a single plane from New York City to California without getting himself (or anyone else) killed, which had never been done before. But he had missed the prize deadline by 19 days, and Hearst refused to pay. Hearst never awarded the prize.
On April 3, 1912, while making an exhibition flight in a Wright Model B, over Long Beach, California, Rodgers flew into a flock of birds, causing the plane to crash into the ocean. His neck was broken and his thorax damaged by the engine of the airplane. He died within minutes. He was 33 years old, and left behind a wife, but no children.
In 1925, his cousin, John Rodgers, set a record for the longest nonstop flight be seaplane, 1,992 miles, trying to fly from San Francisco to Honolulu. He and his crew ran out of fuel, and had to turn a wing of their plane into a sail to get to the nearest Hawaiian Island, before they were rescued. He was killed in a crash in Philadelphia the next year.
The version of the Vin Fiz Flyer that completed the flight is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
*
November 5, 1911 was a Sunday. Baseball season was over. Professional basketball and hockey barely existed. There was professional football, but it was still very minor-league at this point. So there were no scores on this historic day.
No comments:
Post a Comment