Amelia Earhart
Also known as: Amelia Mary Earhart, Amelia Mary Earhart Putnam, Amelia (Mary) Earhart
Born: 1898 in Atchison, Kansas, USA
Died: 1937
Amelia Earhart was an American aircraft pilot who set numerous records, including being the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. She disappeared mysteriously in the Pacific during a pioneering flight around the world.
BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY
Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas, the daughter of a lawyer who worked for a railroad company. Until the age of 12 she lived with her sister and grandparents in Atchison, and then she moved with her parents to various cities where her father was working until he was dismissed from the railroad company for alcoholism. In 1918, at the age of 20, she went to visit her sister in Toronto, Canada. This was during World War I and after seeing wounded servicemen on the streets of Toronto, she volunteered to work as a nurse's aide at a local military hospital. She also visited a local airfield and decided then that she wanted to learn how to fly.
For a short time after the war, Earhart took a medical course at Columbia University in New York. She then joined her family in Los Angeles and persuaded her father to spend $10 to send her up on a joyride at an airshow. After she landed, she decided that she was going to take flying lessons immediately. She hired Neta Snook, the first woman instructor to graduate from the Curtiss School of Aviation, to teach her. She paid for the first lessons by driving a sand and gravel truck. After only 2[frac12] hours of instruction, she decided that she wanted to buy her own plane. She bought a small experimental plane that cost $2,000 with money advanced by her mother and took a job at a local telephone company sorting mail to help pay for it.
Earhart made her first solo flight in 1922 and shortly afterward set a new altitude record of 14,000 feet in her plane. This record was shortly broken by someone else, and Earhart immediately set out to remake it. She ran into dense fog at 12,000 feet, in a plane with no instruments at all, and almost crashed but was finally able to land safely. In 1924 Earhart's parents divorced, and she bought a yellow roadster to drive her mother back to the east coast. In order to pay for the car, she sold her plane to a young man who took off while she watched and promptly crashed it and killed himself. In Boston, Earhart resumed her medical studies for a short while and then went to work in 1926 as a social worker in a settlement house in Boston.
After going to work in the settlement house, Earhart's flying became a hobby although she tried to fly as often as she had time for and could afford on her small salary. In April 1928, she received an unexpected invitation to travel to New York to be interviewed by a committee headed by the publisher and publicist George Palmer Putnam to select the first woman to travel, as a passenger, on a plane across the Atlantic. Earhart was selected and left with a male pilot and navigator on June 3, 1928 in the Friendship, the same plane that Richard Evelyn Byrd had flown across the North Pole. Putnam released the news to the press, and the Christian Science Monitor headlined "Boston Woman Flies Into Dawn on Surprise Atlantic Trip." This news was not exactly accurate since fog forced them to land in Newfoundland and wait there until June 17. They took off that morning with the pilot drunk and landed in a bay in Wales 20 hours and 40 minutes later. They were greeted with great enthusiasm, and Earhart became the center of international attention because she was the first woman to have flown over the ocean even though she had only been a passenger.
On her return to the United States, Earhart was suddenly looked upon as a spokesperson for women aviators, and with George Putnam as her manager undertook an extensive series of lecture tours and was hired to write a column on aviation for Cosmopolitan magazine. She also was hired to endorse several commercial products. In September 1928, she flew across the country to visit her father in Los Angeles and then flew back to New York. This made her the first woman to fly both ways solo across the country.
In 1929 the Lockheed Company presented Earhart with a brand-new Vega, a new type of single-wing plane that was also flown by Amy Johnson and Beryl Markham. She flew the Vega in the first Women's Air Derby across the United States and came in third. In July 1930 she set a new speed record for women and in 1931 she made a tour of the United States in an autogiro, a forerunner of the helicopter, in which she set an altitude record.
In February 1931 Earhart married George Putnam, who had recently divorced. They both pursued their careers, but he used his great abilities as a publicist to make her one of the best-known personalities in America. In 1932 Earhart decided to fly solo across the Atlantic in order to earn the fame that she had been unjustly given in 1928. She took off from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland on the evening of May 20, 1932. For the first few hours everything went well. Then she began to run into difficulties. She ran into a violent electrical storm, the altimeter failed, the wings iced up and sent the plane into a tailspin for 3,000 feet. Finally, the exhaust manifold caught on fire. In the face of the problems, Earhart decided to land in Ireland rather than continuing on to Paris as she had originally planned. She landed in a pasture outside of Londonderry in Northern Ireland 14 hours and 56 minutes after she had left Newfoundland. Once again she became the center of public adulation, and this time she felt she had earned it. She was feted throughout Europe and then returned to New York to a giant ticker-tape parade.
In the following years, Earhart was able to profit from her fame by expanding her circle of friends, including flying over Washington with Eleanor Roosevelt and joyriding with her around the White House grounds in a race car. She also undertook interesting professional assignments, including becoming a visiting faculty member at Purdue University. She endorsed numerous products, including her own design for traveling clothes and Amelia Earhart luggage, still being sold today. She loved daredevil stunts such as jumping off a metal tower with a parachute and piloting a one-person submarine.
But during these years Earhart also continued to set flying records. In January 1935 she became the first person to fly from Hawaii to the American mainland. In April 1935 she set a speed record on a solo flight from Los Angeles to Mexico City and then set another record from Mexico City to New York. Writing about her flight from Hawaii, she said "After midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flights to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying."
Stimulated by her Hawaii flight, Earhart set herself a new goal, to fly around the world at (or near) the Equator, something never before attempted. Purdue University purchased a new twin-engine Lockheed Electra that was specially modified for the flight. The test plane was first flown on July 22, 1936 and was then presented to Earhart on her 39th birthday. She announced her world trip at a press conference in New York in February 1937 and then left from San Francisco in the early morning of March 17 when all but one member of the accompanying press corps was asleep. The flight to Hawaii set a new record of just under 16 hours. However, as she was leaving Hawaii, the heavily laden plane crashed on take-off. It took $50,000 and five weeks of work to repair the plane and to reschedule the flight. The cost was donated by a number of private individuals.
Because of the delay, Earhart decided to reverse the original course of her flight by flying from west to east to take advantage of changed weather patterns and air currents. She also replaced the original navigator with Fred Noonan. They took off on June 1, 1937 from Miami, Florida and headed for Brazil. They flew across the Atlantic to Africa and then across the Red Sea to Arabia and on to Karachi, Pakistan, Calcutta and Burma. They reached Lae in New Guinea on June 30. This was to be the most dangerous leg, to land on Howland Island, a tiny speck only 2[frac12] miles long in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Earhart and Noonan never reached Howland Island, and to this day no one knows what happened to their plane. There was much speculation then and now that part of Earhart's mission was to spy on the Japanese-mandated Pacific islands. According to this theory, the Japanese knew this, and intercepted her plane and took her captive. There has never been any substantiation for this theory. In 1992, an expedition found certain objects (a shoe and a metal plate) on the small atoll of Nikumaroro south of Howland, which could have been left by Earhart and Noonan.
FURTHER READINGS
Given the accomplishments of her career and the mysteries surrounding her disappearance, it is inevitable that there are a large number of works about Earhart. Her own books are: 20 Hrs. 40 Min. (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1928); The Fun of It (New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1932); and Last Flight (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1937), edited by her husband, George Putnam, who went on to write Soaring Wings: A Biography of Amelia Earhart (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1939).
Other biographies include: Doris Shannon Garst, Amelia Earhart: Heroine of the Skies (New York: Messner, 1950); Adele Louise DeLeeuw, Story of Amelia Earhart (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1955); Fred Goerner, The Search for Amelia Earhart (New York: Doubleday, 1966); John Burke, Winged Legend—The Story of Amelia Earhart (London: Arthur Barker, 1970); Dick Strippel, Amelia Earhart: The Myth and the Reality (New York: Exposition Press, 1972); Burke Davis, Amelia Earhart (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1972); Jean Backus, Letters from Amelia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982); Oliver Knaggs, Amelia Earhart: Her Last Flight (Cape Town: Timmins Publishers, 1983); Vincent Loomis, Amelia Earhart (New York: Random House, 1985); Muriel Morrissey, Amelia Earhart (Santa Barbara, California: Bellerophon, 1985); Roxane Chadwick, Amelia Earhart: Aviation Pioneer (Minneapolis: Lerner, 1987); Muriel Morrissey and Carol Osborne, Amelia, My Courageous Sister (Santa Clara, California: Osborne Publishers, 1988); Mary S. Lovell, The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia Earhart (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989; also available in paperback).
There are several good books about women aviators that include short biographies of Earhart: Wendy Boase, The Sky's the Limit: Women Pioneers in Aviation (New York: Macmillan, 1979); Valerie Moolman, Women Aloft (New York: Time-Life Books, 1981); and Judy Lomax, Women of the Air (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1987).
Source: Explorers and Discoverers of the World. Gale Research, 1993.
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