Lucky Lindy And The New York: Paris Orteg

Chapter Three: “Lucky Lindy” and the New York – Paris Orteig Challenge

On June 16th 1927, in the ornate surroundings of his own Breevort Hotel, Raymond Orteig handed Charles Augustus Lindberg a specially designed check for $25,000 – his prize for completing the first non-stop New York to Paris flight. For Lindberg, the ceremony marked the climax of a month of international public frenzy surrounding the successful “hop” (the word he along with other aviators used for all travel by air). A cordon of 250 police officers had escorted him through the cheering crowds on Central Avenue as he walked to the Hotel. For Orteig the gift capped a year of efforts to hit a mark he first set in May 1919, “as a stimulus to the courageous
He thanked Lindbergh for the “splendid advancement in aviation” his flight illustrated, and for “strengthening the bonds” between France, the country of his birth, and the United States. Colonel Walter Scott, President of the Stevenson Society of America, meanwhile brought out the broader significance of the young Mid-Westerner’s achievement – and by implication of the Orteig Prize itself. According to Scott the flight “eliminated time and brought the peoples of the world together”. The phrase alluded to what we would now call the “proof of concept” Orteig’s challenge implied – one firmly in the minds of the press and the half-dozen consortia of aviators, manufacturers and idealists besides Lindberg vying to be first across the finish-line. If the flight was done once, as Rodman Wanamaker of the American Trans-oceanic Company averred, it would quickly become commercially viable. (Lindberg predicted that within ten years transoceanic flights would be a daily affair.) It would mark an
The press said Lindberg’s flight “captured the imagination” of “millions” – no exaggeration, if the seething crowds accompanying his public appearances in Paris, Brussels, London and New York are any measure. Perhaps mass enthusiasm would have greeted whoever among the contenders completed the mission first. One-legged Nungesser and one-eyed Coli; the French war ace Rene Fonck; the American Corporal Byrd (who had completed the first trans-Polar flight); and his rival and friend Lieutenant Noel Davis – each had their own charisma. But no-one doubted at the time that it was Lindberg himself – this quiet, handsome, mid-Western “Boy” – along with the peculiar manner of his bid that fixed the public’s attention. He epitomized everything the Orteig prize stood for – the courage as well as the ingenuity, the spirit of enterprise as well as the humility, the simplicity as well as the originality. Better still, he had emerged from nowhere. Without Lindberg, the prize would still have contributed a major boost to the gathering momentum of air travel as a modern transport technology. With him, it became the stimulus of a legendary achievement of the human