Charles lindbergh

Charles Augustus Lindbergh (February 4, 1902 in Detroit, Michigan - August 26, 1974 in Kipahulu, Hawaii) was an American aviator and engineer. In 1927, he achieved the status of the first pilot to cross the Atlantic Ocean, from west to east, uniting the American continent and the European continent in a solo non-stop flight; previously a couple of British aviators (Alcock and Brown) had made it from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1919, but not to the European continent. The flight linked New York and Paris, more than 6,000 km away, and Lindbergh was awarded the prize for it. Orteig, twenty-five thousand dollars at the time. In 1954, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature with his work Spirit of St. Louis , a story about his famous flight. He died in 1974.

Biography

Lindbergh with the "Spirit of Saint Louis"

Memorial to Lindbergh flight, with the image of the "Spirit of Saint Louis"

Lindbergh was born in Detroit, Michigan, into a family of Swedish immigrants. Her mother was a chemistry teacher and her father was a politician; later, he was a congressman and, from his rostrum, voiced his opposition to the United States' entry into World War I. Very soon, young Charles began to show an interest in machines. In 1922, he abandoned his mechanical engineering studies, joining the Nebraska Aircraft Corporation's mechanical and flight school training program in Lincoln, where he made his first flight on April 1, 1922 as a passenger in a Lincoln-Standard biplane. “Tourabout” flown by Otto Timm. Later, he bought his own plane, a Curtiss JN-4 Jenny. In 1924, he began training in the United States Army Air Corps. After finishing first in his class, he worked as a civilian pilot on the St. Louis mail line in the 1920s.

He decided to opt for a $25,000 prize offered in 1919 by French-born American philanthropist Raymond B. Orteig for the first pilot to fly a non-stop transatlantic flight between New York and Paris. In his Ryan NYP single-engine monoplane (a modified Ryan M-2), christened the "Spirit of St. Louis," Lindbergh took off from Roosevelt Airfield (Long Island) on May 20, 1927, and after a thirty-minute flight and three hours and thirty-two minutes, it landed at Le Bourget airport, near Paris.

Aboard the Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh toured sixteen countries in Latin America between December 13, 1927, and February 8, 1928. Known as the "Good Will Tour," it included stops in Mexico (where he also met his future wife, Anne, the daughter of US Ambassador Dwight Morrow), Guatemala, British Honduras, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, the Canal Zone, Colombia, Venezuela, Santo Tomás, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba, covering 9,390 miles (15,110 km) in just one hundred and sixteen hours of flight. On the Spirit of St. Louis the flag of each country he visited was painted; in Honduras it was painted by the young Carlos M. Gálvez Banegas.

Subsequently, he became a consultant to commercial airlines. Charles Lindbergh also piloted the first official flight for the Mexicana de Aviación airline.

In 1932, the kidnapping and subsequent murder of her twenty-month-old son, Charles Lindbergh Jr., drew national and international interest. A German-born carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann was convicted and sentenced to death.

The Lindbergh family moved to Europe in 1935 and Charles was able to study the organization and operation of the air forces of various countries. Upon his return to the United States (1939), he toured the country lecturing against the war and declaring himself a supporter of American isolationism. In addition, he declared himself a supporter of Adolf Hitler - who even decorated Lindbergh in person - and selective births, for which he was forced to resign from his posts. However, during World War II he acted as a civilian of the aircraft manufacturing companies and carried out combat missions, even shooting down Japanese planes in the Pacific Ocean and in Europe in the service of the US air force, thus managing to regain some of his public image.

Subsequently, Lindbergh dedicated the rest of his life to preserving the environment, rescuing endangered animals, and making important archaeological and anthropological discoveries.

Finally retired with his wife in Hawaii, he died of cancer on August 26, 1974.

Some posts

• Charles A. Lindbergh: Autobiography of Values. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. ISBN 0-15-110202-3.

• Spirit of St. Louis. New York: Scribners, 1953.

• The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970. ISBN 978-0-15-194625-9.

• "WE" (with an appendix entitled "A Little of what the World thought of Lindbergh" Fitzhugh Green, p. 233–318). New York & London: G.P. Putnam's Sons (The Knickerbocker Press) July 1927.

Awards

Wrote an account of his historic flight, which won him the 1954 Pulitzer Prize,

• The Spirit of Saint Louis (1953) and
• The War Diary of Charles A. Lindbergh (1970).

Eponymy

• Moon crater Lindbergh bears this name in his memory.

Pop Culture

In 1957, Billy Wilder directed the feature film The Spirit of St. Louis, in which the role of Charles Augustus "Slim" Lindbergh was played by James Stewart.

Philip Roth's novel, The Plot Against America, and the television series based on it narrate a fictional situation in which an anti-Semite and pro-Hitler Charles Lindbergh becomes president of the United States after defeating Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 elections.