“The life of an aviator seemed to me ideal. It involved skill. It brought adventure,” Charles Lindbergh said the year of his famous flight. Born in Minnesota, the son of a lawyer and future Congressman, Lindbergh displayed exceptional mechanical ability from his earliest years, but mechanics was too dull a pursuit: “Mechanical engineers were fettered to factories and drafting boards while pilots have the freedom of wind with the expanse of sky.” Instead, Lindbergh set his sights on the impossible: the $25,000 purse to the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic.
On this day, May 20, 1927 at 7:52 in the morning Charles Lindbergh took off in his Spirit of St Louis off the dirt runway of Roosevelt Field, Long Island. The heavy, fuel-laden plane only slowly gained altitude, on the way to a history-making flight.
After the flight Lindbergh became an instant celebrity and a spokesman for the development of flight, touring around the country with sponsorship from Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics. Along the way Lindbergh learned of a Robert Goddard, a physics professor working on sending rockets into space. Although many dismissed Goddard’s work as impossible, Lindbergh urged Guggenheim support for the research that eventually led to spaceflight and rocketry.