Spirit of St. Louis flies nonstop across Atlantic

“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.