The Airplane - Jay Spenser [79]
The culprit is the human vestibular system, which provides our sense of balance. Easily confused when motion sets fluids swirling in our inner ears, and absent visual cues to provide a fixed frame of reference, it is a highly persuasive liar.
Harry Guggenheim was born to great wealth in 1890. The son of New York–based mining magnate Daniel Guggenheim and Florence Guggenheim, Harry attended Yale University in Connecticut, worked briefly in the family businesses in Mexico and elsewhere, and completed his education at Cambridge, England.
This multimillionaire accustomed to privilege was in his late twenties as World War I raged in Europe. Realizing his country would inevitably become involved and determined to be of help, he purchased a Curtiss flying boat and took flying lessons. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, he joined the U.S. Navy and served with distinction as a naval aviator in France, England, and Italy.
Like his parents, young Harry possessed a strong sense of civic responsibility. He was devoted to aviation, a fascination shared by his father. Consequently, when the elder Guggenheims formed a philanthropic foundation in 1924, part of its endowment was earmarked to benefit the emerging science of flight.
Perceiving a critical lack of U.S. expertise, the Guggenheim Foundation in 1925 established an aeronautical engineering program at New York University (NYU). That was just the beginning; the following June the family chartered the subordinate Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, whose eminent board of trustees worked closely with interested U.S. government agencies. Harry served as president of the Guggenheim Fund, which in four short years of existence (1926–30) revitalized aviation in the United States.
The U.S. aviation scene had been in the doldrums since World War I, with America lagging ever farther behind Europe. Under Harry’s gifted leadership, the Guggenheim Fund worked to reverse this trend through infusions of capital focused on several vital fronts.
One was education. Based on the successful NYU effort, the Guggenheim Fund also endowed aviation programs at Stanford, Harvard, the University of Washington, Northwest, MIT, the University of Michigan, and several other schools. One of these new programs—the California Institute of Technology’s Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT)—scored a coup by luring Hungarian aerodynamicist Dr. Theodore von Kármán, a brilliant former student of Ludwig Prandtl, away from Germany to serve as its director.
The Guggenheim Fund also fostered aviation research and development, sponsored safety-plane competitions, pioneered improved aviation weather forecasting, and in general helped U.S. commercial aviation make the transition from carrying the nation’s airmail to transporting passengers.
In the midst of all this activity, a twenty-five-year-old airmail pilot named Lindbergh arrived at Curtiss Field with the intention of flying nonstop to Paris. It was the spring of 1927 and he was the last of many to gather at the Hempstead Plains to try for the Orteig Prize, a $25,000 purse posted by wealthy hotel owner Raymond Orteig for the first airplane to fly nonstop between New York and Paris.
Curtiss Field and neighboring Roosevelt Field, whose longer runway Lindbergh would use, were not far from Harry Guggenheim’s palatial estate on Long Island’s North Shore. Shortly before the young aviator took off on May 20, Guggenheim stopped by to wish him well. “When you get back to the United States,” he said gamely, “come up to the Fund and see me.”2
Nevertheless, he privately felt that the slender youth a dozen years his junior stood