"One Summer"

[fiefoe]

As usual, Bill Bryson's enthusiasm for his subjects is infectious, and the first several chapters are right out of "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines".

• Six times Brown had to crawl out onto the wings to clear air intakes of ice with his bare hands. Much of the rest of the time he spent wiping Alcock’s goggles since Alcock couldn’t for a moment relax his grip on the controls.
• then awful normality reasserted itself with an enormous gaseous explosion as 2,850 gallons of aviation fuel combusted, throwing a fireball fifty feet into the air.
• This was nothing compared with Nungesser’s extravagant affinity for injury, however... Nungesser had so many injuries that after the war he listed them all on his business card.
• unimprovably glorious name of Consuelo Hatmaker / most riveting foolishness
• as Wolcott Gibbs put it in a famous New Yorker profile of Luce, “Backward ran the sentences until reeled the mind.
• By 1927, France had nine airlines operating, British airlines were flying almost a million miles a year, and Germany was safely delivering 151,000 passengers to their destinations.
• Lost American pilots, by contrast, had to search for a town and hope that someone had written its name on the roof of a building. In the absence of that—and it was generally absent—pilots had to swoop low to try to read the signs on the local railroad station, often a risky maneuver.
• The American fliers also had an advantage over their European competitors that nobody yet understood: they all used aviation fuel from California, which burned more cleanly and gave better mileage. No one knew what made it superior because no one yet understood octane ratings
• In six years, Hoover circled the globe five times. He lived through the Boxer Rebellion in China, hacked through the jungles of Borneo, rode camels across the red emptiness of Western Australia, rubbed shoulders with Wyatt Earp and Jack London in a Klondike saloon, camped beside the Great Pyramids of Egypt.
• It was the greatest relief effort ever undertaken on earth, and it made him, deservedly, an international hero. By 1917, it was reckoned that Hoover had saved more lives than any other person in history.
• Mellon had the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) send its best men to prepare his tax returns for him with a view to keeping them as small as possible.
• He particularly didn’t like the Cajuns of Louisiana, who he thought were “as much like French peasants as one dot is like another.
• It was also why skyscrapers of the period began to sport pointed masts—so that airships could tie up to them.
• Many were dismayed to realize that America now had the highest divorce rate in the world after the Soviet Union.
• the spirit of abandon that characterized the times.
• which meant flying a difficult and unstable plane for a day and a half through storm and cloud and darkness while intricately balancing the flow of fuel through five tanks governed by fourteen valves, and navigating his way across a void without landmarks.
• This made her the most senior woman in the federal government. She was given special responsibility for enforcing Prohibition and income tax laws. It was a wonderfully prescient, if inadvertent, combination of roles because it led her to hit on an ingenious way to tackle organized crime.
• the tunnel’s designer and chief engineer, Clifford M. Holland, dropped dead from the stress before it was finished. He was only forty-one... His successor, Milton H. Freeman, keeled over just four months into the job himself, dead of a heart attack of his own
• It was, some spectators reported, as if Lindbergh had willed it into the air. Even Lindbergh viewed it as a kind of miracle—“5,000 pounds balanced on a blast of air,” he wrote in Spirit of St. Louis
• What he didn’t realize was that the activity was all for him; the sinuous tentacles of light were the headlights of tens of thousands of cars all spontaneously drawn to Le Bourget and now caught in the greatest traffic jam in Parisian history.
• Unsuspecting of just how much attention he would get, Lindbergh had subscribed to a newspaper-clipping service, with the articles to be sent to his mother, who discovered to her horror that a fleet of trucks was preparing to deliver to her several tons of newspaper articles by the end of the first week.