Made In America by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online

fuel lines, there was no option but to take it out. The workman had cut a six-inch hole in the tank, retrieved the hose and surreptitiously patched the hole with solder. It was a miracle that it held throughout the turbulent Atlantic crossing.
    Lindbergh was by no means the first person to cross the Atlantic by air. In May 1919, eight years earlier, a US Navy plane had crossed from Newfoundland to Lisbon, though it had stopped in the Azores en route. A little less than a month after that, John Alcock and Arthur Brown of Great Britain flew from Newfoundland to Ireland, the first non-stop flight. Lindbergh flew 1,500 miles further, and he did it alone, and that was enough for most people. Indeed, most didn’t want to be reminded that Lindbergh was not the first. When ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’, a popular newspaper feature, noted that some twenty other people (including those in dirigibles) had crossed the Atlantic by air before Lindbergh, its offices were inundated with 250,000 angry letters.
    Never before in modern history had anyone generated such instant and total adulation as Lindbergh. When he returned to America, the parade in his honour produced more confetti than had been thrown to greet the returning troops after World War I. New York City gave him the largest dinner that had ever been put on for a private citizen. TheNew York Stock Exchange even closed for the day. Such was the hysteria that attached itself to Lindbergh that when his mother went to have her hair done in Washington, it took twenty-five policemen to control the mobs. 9
    The immense excitement and sense of possibility that Lindbergh’s solo flight generated helped to usher in the age of passenger travel. Within two years most of the airmail lines were carrying passengers, and others, like American Airways (later Airlines), National Airlines Taxi Service, and Northwest Airways Company, were rushing to join the market. Lindbergh himself helped to found what is generally credited as the first true passenger airline. Formed in 1929, it was called Transcontinental Air Transport, or TAT, but was commonly known as the Lindbergh Line. In July of that year, using Ford Tri-Motor planes, TAT began the first longdistance passenger services across America, and in so doing introduced concepts that are still with us: flight attendants (only men were employed at first), lavatories, meals on board, and individual reading lights. Three months later the first in-flight movies were introduced. It also took the very bold – at the time almost unthinkable – decision not to carry parachutes.
    Because of a paucity of suitable airports and certain vexing limitations of the Ford Tri-Motors, not least an inability to clear any but the smallest mountains, passengers flew only about two-thirds of the total distance. Westward-bound travellers began with an overnight train ride from New York’s Pennsylvania Station to Columbus, Ohio. There, safely past the Alleghenies, they boarded the first plane. It flew at about 2,500 feet and at a top speed of 100 m.p.h., stopping in Indianapolis, St Louis, Kansas City, Wichita and Waynoka, Oklahoma. At Waynoka, passengers boarded yet another train to carry them past the Rockies to Clovis, New Mexico, where a plane was waiting to take them on to Los Angeles via Albuquerque, and Winslow and Kingman, Arizona. Thewhole undertaking was, by modern standards, drafty, uncomfortable and slow. Altogether the trip took forty-eight hours – though that was twenty-four hours faster than the fastest train. As a reward for their bravery, and for paying an extravagant $351.94 for a one-way ticket, every passenger was given a solid-gold fountain-pen from Tiffany’s. 10
    Planes were unpressurized and unventilated. For many passengers, breathing at the higher altitudes was difficult. Often the rides were so rough that ‘as many as three-quarters of the passengers became airsick (another new word of the age). Even the celebrated aviator Amelia