Today, a new generation of women fliers. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Early airplanes drew women to
them. Women wanted freedom from their corseted
Victorian lives and those new machines pointed the
way. We glimpse the mood of the first generation of
women who took to the air, at an air show near
Boston in the summer of 1912.
The beautiful and flamboyant Harriet Quimby, first woman to fly
the English Channel, was piloting her Bleriot airplane. It lurched
suddenly and she fell to her death. Watching her
was an-other flier, Ruth Law, who went on to an
illustrious career as a barnstormer. After Law gave
it up, she grumbled that:
Things are so proper now ... A pilot has so many
rules ... to follow ... I couldn't skim over the
rooftops or land in the streets ... The good old
days of flying are gone.
These women were daredevils of the old school. The
new generation of women fliers, after WW-I,
was still daring but also more purposeful.
Airplanes now had greater range. Flight was
reaching into the far corners of the world.
Amelia Earhart came out
of America. Beryl
Markham, who first flew the Atlantic
East-to-West, learned to fly in British East
Africa.
Jean Batten had been a three-year-old child in New
Zealand when Harriet Quimby fell from the sky.
Batten learned to fly in 1928. Like Katherine Stinson sixteen years
before her, Batten had sold her piano to pay for
flying lessons. Like Stinson, Batten's superior
motor skills had been honed on the piano.
Stinson had gone from America to France to learn
flying. Batten went from New Zealand to England. In
1933, she set a record flying from England back to
Australia. Then she set a second record by being
first to make the return trip. She crossed the
South Atlantic Ocean in record time. She took
hair-raising risks and set other records. She was
probably a greater pilot than Earhart, but (unlike
Earhart) she retired and lived to the age of 75.
The year Batten flew from England to Australia, a
17-year-old girl named Nancy Bird was learning to
fly in Australia. Nancy Bird's life took a
new path entirely. Within two years, she was the
youngest woman ever to hold a commercial pilot's
license.
She did some racing, but she proved less interested
in record-setting than in public service. A
Catholic Priest recruited her to help take medical
service into the western Australia outback. Still a
teen-ager, Bird became a lifeline to remote
settlers - shuttling fresh fruit, getting the sick
to hospitals in Sydney, and earning barely enough
to keep her airplane aloft by shuttling passengers.
It was in women like Nancy Bird that all the
stunting and record setting finally bore its fruit.
It may seem ironic to find flight maturing at the
hands of a nineteen-year-old. But hasn't it always
taken the young to make sense of their forebears'
still half-formed ideas.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Lomax, J., Women of the Air. New York: Ivy
Books, 1987.
Welch, R., Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and
Space. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 1998.
The following excellent site gives a great deal of
background on the first generation of women fliers
- the generation that preceded the ones we talk
about here. It focuses especially on Harriet
Quimby:
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/verona/514/8.html
See also Episode 289 and a
longer essay on women and
flight.
Jean Batten (left) and Nancy Bird (right)
See also Episode 289 and a
longer essay on women and
flight.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1999 by John H.
Lienhard.
