Charles

Lindbergh
& the Spirit of St. Louis
◼ In 1919, a wealthy
hotel man, Raymond
Orteig, offered a prize
of $25,000 to anyone
who could fly from
New York to Paris.
Several pilots tried for
the prize. No one
collected.
◼ In 1927, competition got fierce. Besides the money,
everyone knew there would be much glory for the
pilot who first crossed the Atlantic Ocean.
◼ In April, Richard E. Byrd took off, crashed, and
broke his wrist.
◼That same April, two pilots set out from Virginia,
crashed, and were killed. In early May, two French
aces left Paris, headed out over the Atlantic, and
were never heard of again.
◼In mid-May, three planes were being made ready.
Newspapers were full of their stories. The
competition had captured the imagination of people
on both sides of the Atlantic.
◼ Most of the newspaper
attention focused on
Byrd, who was famous
and eager to try
again. His plane had
three engines and a
well-trained crew.
◼ The second plane, with two engines, was to be
flown by two experienced pilots. The third plane,
a small single-engine craft, could hold only one
person. It was called the Spirit of St. Louis.
◼ The Spirit
of St.
Louis got
its name,
from a
group of
St. Louis
businessm
en who
helped
pay for
the plane.
◼ The pilot, Charles Lindbergh, was little known. He’d
been a barnstormer, a pilot who went around doing
trick flying, circles and loops and daredevil things.
 Charles Lindbergh picture on left.

◼ Lindbergh would take people on plane rides for $5

a spin.
◼ That was the kind of thing most pilots did in those
days. People didn’t use airplanes for
transportation. Trains were used to get places.
◼ Airplanes? No one was quite sure where the future
of aviation lay. But if planes could fly across the
ocean safely, they might have an important future.
◼ Lindbergh was a good pilot. He was the first man to
fly the U.S. mail from St. Louis to Chicago.
◼ And the first to survive four forced parachute
jumps (forced because his planes developed
problems and crashed.)
◼ Something about him attracted people. Partly it
was his looks. He was tall, six-foot-two, thin, with
light, curly hair and a boyish grin. He looked
younger than his 25 years.
◼ He was quiet, and was always more at ease with
machines, or nature, than with people. He’d grown
up in Minnesota, where his father was a
congressman.
◼ Lindbergh never did well in school, maybe because
he went to a different school almost every year. But
he was smart enough to do a lot of reading.
◼ It was 8 a.m. on May 20 when he took off. The
weather wasn’t good, but he was anxious to beat
the others, and he was used to flying the mail in all
kinds of weather.
◼ His little plane carried so much gasoline that some
people thought it would never get into the air. But
Lindbergh had planned carefully. There wasn’t an
extra ounce on the plane.
◼He sat in a light wicker chair and carried little
besides the fuel, a quart of water, a paper sack
full of sandwiches, and a rubber raft.
◼ There was no parachute, it would be of no use over
the ocean, and there was no radio. He would be on
his own once he left the East Coast.
◼ Lindbergh headed out to sea, and people around
the world learned of it on their radios.
◼ That evening, during a boxing match at Yankee
Stadium, the spectators rose and said a prayer for
Charles Lindbergh, somewhere over the Atlantic
Ocean.
◼ Lindbergh had to stay
awake or crash. After eight
or ten hours of sitting in one
place he began to doze.
The night before the flight
he had been so excited,
that he had not slept at all.
◼ Luckily the plane was frail. It banged about in the
wind, and each time he started to nod it went
spiraling down toward the water. That woke him.
 Cockpit of the
Spirit of St. Louis.

◼ Then miraculously, the

fatigue ended, he
looked down, and
there was Ireland.
Lindbergh was exactly
where the charts said
he should be.
◼ Lindbergh didn’t
know that his
plane was
spotted over
Ireland and the
news radioed to
America and
France. People
cheered and
wept with relief.
◼ He was seen over London, and then
over the English Channel.
◼Thirty-three and a half hours after he left the
United States, he circled the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
◼It had taken less time than he expected, so he
was worried that no one would be at the airport
to meet him. Then he looked down and saw a
mob of people. They were waving and
screaming.
◼ The young flyer, who had brought nothing with
him but the paper bag with sandwiches, was
carried about on shoulders and hugged and
kissed and cheered.
◼ Charles Lindbergh was soon meeting kings and
princes and more crowds of admirers.
◼ He wanted to stay in Europe and see the sights, but
President Calvin Coolidge sent a naval cruiser to
Europe just to carry him and the Spirit of St. Louis
back to America. He was a world hero.

Charles Lindbergh &

President Calvin Coolidge.
◼ All over America there were parades and dinners
and celebrations for the man they called “Lone
Eagle.” People went wild with pride and
excitement.
◼ By the way, Lindbergh collected the prize check.