Flying the Atlantic : 403 



jumped from one wave to another and nearly shook the aircraft to 

 pieces. Nonetheless, Wellman made a long flight in the machine and 

 was finally, by good fortune, rescued at sea. 



About this time the ladies also began to take to the air. Miss Har- 

 riet Quimby was the first woman in America licensed to fly. In 191 1 

 she was the first woman to fly an airplane over the English Channel. 

 Ruth Law and Katherine Stinson also joined the sHm ranks of lady 

 aviators. 



By 191 1 it was possible for a young American enthusiast, by the 

 expenditure of a little money and a great deal of patient effort, to 

 make flights in some of the early French machines. One of the avi- 

 ation centers consisted of some large fields surrounded by sheds at 

 Buc, a suburb of Paris. This field was at its busiest at night and 

 just after sunrise. The early French machines of 191 1 were all under- 

 powered and imperfectly controlled and were, therefore, not able to 

 cope with adverse winds. The theory was that the air was quietest at 

 about the time of sunrise and most flights were made at this ungodly 

 hour. Taking a flight or flying lesson meant either getting up long 

 before dawn or else staying up all night. 



Early in the summer of 1913 one of the sheds at Buc provided an 

 unusual spectacle. Lashed to the rafters was a simple skeleton frame- 

 work to which a little bucket aviation seat was attached in an upside 

 down position and a man was sitting in this seat, also upside down, 

 kept there by a simple harness of webbing and leather. The man 

 hung there for minutes at a time working controls which, as nearly 

 as possible, were the exact models of the controls of his airplane. This 

 was the French aviator, Pegou, seeking experience and orientation 

 for a type of flying that no man had yet attempted. 



A few days later Pegou astonished Europe by completing a vertical 

 loop and also flying his plane in an upside-down position. Pegou 

 was, I believe, the first aviator to have accomplished these feats 

 though the honor is also claimed for an American aviator, Lincoln 

 Beachey, flying a Curtiss plane, who completed a loop in November 

 of 1913. Pegou was killed while attempting a high altitude flight over 

 the Alps. 



Back in 191 1 it was also possible to make a really extensive flight 

 with Count Zeppelin in a rigid dirigible. By this time he was oper- 

 ating out of the fashionable resort Baden-Baden. Here large fields 

 had been cleared for the use of the count's machines and an enor- 

 mous shed built to house them. He was then operating and demon- 

 strating a huge dirigible called the Schwaben, either the third or 



