Yesterday I read a large chunk of Scott Berg’s magnificent biography of Charles Lindbergh (rather appropiately on a plane) and discovered that the actual take-off of ‘The Spirit Of St. Louis’ was captured by newsreel cameras. It’s hard now to grasp, from a centuries distance, how special this event was and how overwhelming the worlds response was to his having accomplished his Atlantic crossing in his little single-engine plane. Berg covers the build up to the flight–the idea of doing it, the race to be the first to accomplish it, the search for funding, the building of the plane by a tiny San Diego based company when other larger aircraft builders turned the opportunity down, the take-off, the ride, the landing and the earth-shaking response to the feat in a hundred plus un-put-dowanble pages. I found the take-off footage–it’s silent which gives it a wonderful, lonely quality–and compared it to Berg’s description of it. Above is the actual footage. Below is Berg’s superb account. It’s fun matching the picture and description.

As the engine sputtered louder and louder, several men under each wing pushed on the struts, finally getting the two ton winged gasoline tank to move. It picked up speed but inside the plane Lindbergh felt the stick wobble, assuming none of the outside pressure required to give the plane lift. At last the vehicle was sloshing forward fast enough to leave the men in its muddy wake, as it fishtailed down the runway. After more than a thousand feet had passed beneath him, Lindbergh felt play then strength in the stick. At the halfway mark on the runway–the point at which he had to decide whether or not to abort the flight–the Spirit still had not reached flying speed, but he felt the load shirting from wheels to wings. Coordinating his hand-on-throttle and foot-on-rudder movements with the view of the approaching telephone lines, which he could see only by leaning out the side windows, Lindbergh felt the plane leave the ground, only to return again. With less than a thousand feet, he attempted to lift the plane sharply enough to clear the web of wires in front of it. At 7:54, the plane was airborne–ten feet above a tractor on the field, over a gully into which he easily could have crashed, and clearing the telephone wires by twenty feet. The cheer of the crowd ripped the air.