FLIGHT TO FAME AND FORTUNE

Charles Lindbergh (left) accepted his

prize from Raymond Orteig (right)

in New York on June 14, 1927

On the 20th May 1927 Charles Lindberg took off from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, New York on the world's first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic. He touched down at Le Bourget Field in Paris the next day after some 33 hours of flight. He was awarded the Orteig Prize of $25,000 for the crossing.

Lindberg's Spirit of St Louis

I find it difficult to make too much comment about Lindberg. He was the father of the victim of one of the most notorious kidnapping cases in the United States, referred to by the press at the time as "the crime of the century", and which was the inspiration for the plot of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1934). He and his family were deeply affected by the tragedy and the resulting never ending publicity and attention. As a consequence the family left the United States to live in Europe. Initially in the U.K. at Sevenoaks Weald in Kent and after three years they moved to Brittany in France. Politically however, he leaned very far right and was by all accounts an anti-Semite and racist. His personal life was a bit of a shambles as well. He distinguished himself during the second world war, and was disgusted and angered by what had happened in Nazi Germany's death camps; although, it's hard to say whether any of that changed any of his views. His only real redeeming feature was his exploit of 1927 and his account of it in his book Spirit of St Louis, 1953, won him a Pulitzer Prise the following year and a very lucrative film contract. The rights were sold for a sum in excess of one million dollars, which in 2011 would be something equivalent to over nine million. He also benefited from a performance by James Stewart.