Thrill Makers by Smith Jacob

Author:Smith, Jacob
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 18. Lincoln Beachey's 1911 flight under a bridge spanning the Niagara River. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The tension between aeronautic science and thrills was also manifested in the acts of the birdmen, as can be seen in a discourse that framed airplane stunts as practical instruction. For example, there was much discussion of the practical merits of the French aviator Adolphe Pégoud's thrilling loop-the-loops and upside-down flying. One article in the popular press referred to “Pégoud's reassuring feats”—reassuring in that they demonstrated the “safety of the present day aeroplane under any condition.”70 Another magazine described Pégoud as “a pioneer with a great lesson to teach” and claimed that his acrobatic feats were “of the utmost value to pilots throughout the world” since they showed the capabilities of the modern flying machine.71 In rhetoric such as this, stunt flyers such as Pégoud and Beachey married the public images of Washington Donaldson and John Wise, becoming public figures that resolved long-standing tensions in the aeronautic structure of feeling. The Hartford Courant even wrote that Beachey possessed “two entirely different personalities,” one the “scientific, ambitious, non-mercenary, careful Dr. Jekyll Beachey,” the other the “danger-calloused, money-loving, death-inviting and scientific-hating” Mr. Hyde Beachey.72 Beachey became famous for loops like those performed by Pégoud, but his trademark stunt was the “death dip,” which involved turning off his engine while high over the crowd and plunging downward so that the audience thought he had lost control. At the last moment Beachey would straighten out and sail over the heads of the crowd just as they had begun to “shiver and grow faint.”73 The “death dip” was an update of Washington Donaldson's “drop act,” but note that Beachey framed his shtick in terms of its practical instructional value: “I was furthering the interests of science, in that I was showing airmen that it was possible to cheat death when your motor stalled above.”74

There was, however, clearly more to the appeal of aerial stunts than the rational demonstration of aviation technique for an audience of fellow flyers and engineers. The performances of flyers such as Beachey and Pégoud were powerful enactments of human mastery over new technology in a bid to “conquer the air.” When Beachey appeared at the 1914 Texas State Fair, a reporter described how he performed his loops against “the dome of the great heavens,” so that his miraculous “contrivance of wood and wire and canvas” seemed to represent an “uncanny defiance and awesome disregard of the very law that holds the universe itself in check.”75 In 1911 the San Francisco Chronicle published this description of a recent aviation meet:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.