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Amelia Earhart Date: Aug. 3, 2017 From: Explorers & Discoverers of the World Publisher: Gale Document Type: Biography Length: 1,695 words Content Level: (Level 4) Lexile Measure: 1210L

About this Person Born: July 24, 1897 in Atchison, Kansas, United States Died: July 02, 1937 Nationality: American Occupation: Airplane pilot Other Names: Earhart, Amelia Mary; Putnam, Amelia Mary Earhart Updated:Aug. 3, 2017 Full Text:

Amelia Earhart was born on July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas, the daughter of a lawyer who worked for a railroad company. Until the age of 12, she lived with her sister and grandparents in Atchison, and then she moved with her parents to various cities where her father was working until he was dismissed from the railroad company for alcoholism. In 1918, at the age of 20, she went to visit her sister in Toronto, Canada. This was during World War I. After seeing wounded servicemen on the streets of Toronto, she volunteered to work as a nurse's aide at a local military hospital. She also visited a local airfield and decided then that she wanted to learn how to fly. In 2017, a photograph was discovered in the National Archives that some experts interpret as evidence that Earhart was captured by the Japanese navy.

Dreamed of Becoming a Pilot

For a short time after the war, Earhart took a medical course at Columbia University in New York. She then joined her family in Los Angeles and persuaded her father to spend $10 to send her up on a joyride at an air show. After she landed, she decided that she was going to take flying lessons immediately. She hired Neta Snook, the first woman instructor to graduate from the Curtiss School of Aviation, to teach her. She paid for the first lessons by driving a sand and gravel truck. After only 2½ hours of instruction, she decided that she wanted to buy her own plane. She bought a small experimental plane that cost $2,000 with money advanced by her mother and took a job at a local telephone company sorting mail to help pay for it.

Earhart made her first solo flight in 1922 and shortly afterward set a new altitude record of 14,000 feet in her plane. This record was shortly broken by someone else, and Earhart immediately set out to remake it. She ran into dense fog at 12,000 feet in a plane with no instruments at all, and she almost crashed but was finally able to land safely. In 1924 Earhart's parents divorced, and she bought a yellow roadster to drive her mother back to the east coast. To pay for the car, she sold her plane to a young man who took off while she watched and promptly crashed it and killed himself. In Boston, Earhart resumed her medical studies for a short while and then went to work in 1926 as a social worker in a settlement house in Boston.

Became a Sensation

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After going to work in the settlement house, Earhart's flying became a hobby although she tried to fly as often as she had time for and could afford on her small salary. In April of 1928, she received an unexpected invitation to travel to New York to be interviewed by a committee headed by the publisher and publicist George Palmer Putnam to select the first woman to travel, as a passenger, on a plane across the Atlantic. Earhart was selected and left with a male pilot and navigator on June 3, 1928 in the Friendship, the same plane that Richard Evelyn Byrd had flown across the North Pole. Putnam released the news to the press, and the Christian Science Monitor headlined "Boston Woman Flies Into Dawn on Surprise Atlantic Trip." This news was not exactly accurate since fog forced them to land in Newfoundland and wait there until June 17. They took off that morning with the pilot drunk and landed in a bay in Wales 20 hours and 40 minutes later. They were greeted with great enthusiasm, and Earhart became the center of international attention because she was the first woman to have flown over the ocean even though she had only been a passenger.

On her return to the United States, Earhart was suddenly looked upon as a spokesperson for women aviators, and with George Putnam as her manager undertook an extensive series of lecture tours and was hired to write a column on aviation for Cosmopolitan magazine. She also was hired to endorse several commercial products. In September of 1928, she flew across the country to visit her father in Los Angeles and then flew back to New York. This made her the first woman to fly both ways solo across the country.

In 1929 the Lockheed Company presented Earhart with a brand-new Vega, a new type of single-wing plane that was also flown by Amy Johnson and Beryl Markham. She flew the Vega in the first Women's Air Derby across the United States and came in third. In July of 1930, she set a new speed record for women, and in 1931 she made a tour of the United States in an autogiro, a forerunner of the helicopter, in which she set an altitude record.

In February of 1931, Earhart married George Putnam, who had recently divorced. They both pursued their careers, but he used his great abilities as a publicist to make her one of the best-known personalities in America. In 1932 Earhart decided to fly solo across the Atlantic to earn the fame that she had been unjustly given in 1928. She took off from Harbor Grace, Newfoundland on the evening of May 20, 1932. For the first few hours everything went well. Then she began to run into difficulties. She ran into a violent electrical storm, the altimeter failed, the wings iced up, which sent the plane into a tailspin for 3,000 feet. Finally, the exhaust manifold caught on fire. In the face of the problems, Earhart decided to land in Ireland rather than continuing on to Paris as she had originally planned. She landed in a pasture outside of Londonderry in Northern Ireland 14 hours and 56 minutes after she had left Newfoundland. Once again she became the center of public adulation, and this time she felt she had earned it. She was feted throughout Europe and then returned to New York to a giant ticker-tape parade.

In the following years, Earhart was able to profit from her fame by expanding her circle of friends, including flying over Washington with Eleanor Roosevelt and joyriding with her around the White House grounds in a race car. She also undertook interesting professional assignments, including becoming a visiting faculty member at Purdue University. She endorsed numerous products, including her own design for traveling clothes and Amelia Earhart luggage. She loved daredevil stunts such as jumping off a metal tower with a parachute and piloting a one-person submarine.

But during these years, Earhart also continued to set flying records. In January of 1935, she became the first person to fly from Hawaii to the American mainland. In April of 1935, she set a speed record on a solo flight from Los Angeles to Mexico City and then set another record from Mexico City to New York. Writing about her flight from Hawaii, she said "After midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flights to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying."

Attempted to Fly Around the World

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Stimulated by her Hawaii flight, Earhart set herself a new goal, to fly around the world at (or near) the Equator, something never before attempted. Purdue University purchased a new twin-engine Lockheed Electra that was specially modified for the flight. The test plane was first flown on July 22, 1936 and was then presented to Earhart on her thirty-ninth birthday. She announced her world trip at a press conference in New York in February of 1937 and then left from San Francisco in the early morning of March 17 when all but one member of the accompanying press corps was asleep. The flight to Hawaii set a new record of just under 16 hours. As she was leaving Hawaii, however, the heavily laden plane crashed on take-off. It took $50,000 and five weeks of work to repair the plane and to reschedule the flight. The cost was donated by a number of private individuals.

Because of the delay, Earhart decided to reverse the original course of her flight by flying from west to east to take advantage of changed weather patterns and air currents. She also replaced the original navigator with Fred Noonan. They took off on June 1, 1937 from Miami, Florida and headed for Brazil. They flew across the Atlantic to Africa and then across the Red Sea to Arabia and on to Karachi, Pakistan, Calcutta and Burma. They reached Lae in New Guinea on June 30. This was to be the most dangerous leg, to land on Howland Island, a tiny speck only 2½ miles long in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Earhart and Noonan never reached Howland Island, and no one knows what happened to their plane. Much speculation existed that part of Earhart's mission was to spy on the Japanese-mandated Pacific islands. According to this theory, the Japanese knew this, intercepted her plane, and took her captive. No substantiation existed for this theory. In 1992 an expedition found certain objects (a shoe and a metal plate) on the small atoll of Nikumaroro south of Howland, which could have been left by Earhart and Noonan. In August of 2012, reports surfaced that plane wreckage, which could have been Earhart's plane, was found in the Pacific Ocean off Nikumaroro island. These reports, however, were not conclusive.

In 2017, a picture was found in the United States national archives that several experts believe depicted Earhart and Noonan. In the photograph, the pair are sitting on a dock while a Japanese ship pulled a wrecked plane to shore. If this photograph truly depicts the duo, it means that they were rescued by the Japanese navy. Following their rescue, the two were probably detained by the Japanese government, and likely lived out the rest of their lives in captivity. However, other experts argue that the photograph is too grainy to definitively identify the subjects as Earhart and Noonan.

FURTHER READINGS Given the accomplishments of her career and the mysteries surrounding her disappearance, it is inevitable that a large number of works exist about Earhart. Her own books are: 20 Hrs. 40 Min. (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1928); The Fun of It (New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1932); and Last Flight (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1937), edited by her husband, George Putnam, who went on to write Soaring Wings: A Biography of Amelia Earhart (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1939).

Other biographies include: Doris Shannon Garst, Amelia Earhart: Heroine of the Skies (New York: Messner, 1950); Adele Louise DeLeeuw, Story of Amelia Earhart (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1955); Fred Goerner, The Search for Amelia Earhart (New York: Doubleday, 1966); John Burke, Winged Legend--The Story of Amelia Earhart (London: Arthur Barker, 1970); Dick Strippel, Amelia Earhart: The Myth and the Reality (New York: Exposition Press, 1972); Burke Davis, Amelia Earhart (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1972); Jean Backus, Letters from Amelia (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982); Oliver Knaggs, Amelia Earhart: Her Last Flight (Cape Town: Timmins Publishers, 1983); Vincent Loomis, Amelia Earhart (New York: Random House, 1985); Muriel Morrissey, Amelia Earhart (Santa Barbara, California: Bellerophon, 1985); Roxane Chadwick, Amelia Earhart: Aviation Pioneer (Minneapolis: Lerner, 1987); Muriel Morrissey and Carol Osborne, Amelia, My Courageous Sister (Santa Clara,

7/6/24, 6:16 PM Amelia Earhart - Document - Gale In Context: U.S. History

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California: Osborne Publishers, 1988); Mary S. Lovell, The Sound of Wings: The Life of Amelia Earhart (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989; also available in paperback).

Several good books about women aviators exist and include short biographies of Earhart: Wendy Boase, The Sky's the Limit: Women Pioneers in Aviation (New York: Macmillan, 1979); Valerie Moolman, Women Aloft (New York: Time-Life Books, 1981); and Judy Lomax, Women of the Air (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1987).

Online

"Not So Fast, Naysayers: These May Be Parts of Earhart's Plane," NBC News, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/48707048/#.UVwxoTc1B8E (April 3, 2013).

"New Photo May Prove Amelia Earhart was Captured by the Japanese," USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/07/05/new-photo-may-prove-amelia-earhart- captured-japanese/451521001/ (August 13, 2017). Source Citation (MLA 9th Edition) "Amelia Earhart." Explorers & Discoverers of the World, Gale, 1993. Gale In Context: U.S. History,

link.gale.com/apps/doc/K1614000106/UHIC?u=mill30389&sid=bookmark-UHIC&xid=9a97b29b. Accessed 6 July 2024.

Gale Document Number: GALE|K1614000106

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