Shortly before 10:00 on the evening of May 21, 1927, a plane dropped out of the clouds northwest of Paris. After flying over the city and twice circling the Eiffel Tower, it headed northeast toward the normally sleepy airfield at Le Bourget. No one could have been more surprised than the plane’s single pilot, an unknown American who looked more boyish than his twenty-five years, to see the teeming crowds awaiting him. When he landed his plane at 10:32 that night, the young man had been flying for more than thirty-three hours. By the time he fell asleep early the next morning—after fighting free from the crowds that pulled him from his plane, talking to the crush of international press that had gathered to cover his unprecedented feat, and taking a hot bath at the ambassador’s residence in Paris—he had been awake for more than sixty hours.1
By becoming the first human being to fly alone across the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh went from an unassuming postal pilot to the world’s most famous person—literally overnight. His accomplishment was an example of extraordinary skill and courage, one that many others had failed to achieve in the years and months before, often perishing in the process. But the crowds at Le Bourget, and later in New York, and indeed everywhere Lindbergh would go from then on, weren’t just celebrating one man’s exploit.
For underlying Lindbergh’s undeniable skill—his flawless navigation alone and at night; his constant adjustment of altitude; his nerve-racking battle with fatigue—was a magnificent edifice of science and engineering that had just propelled a single human being in little more than a day across a distance that had previously required weeks and even months. This was an extension of the stunning human capacity for knowledge that had in recent centuries navigated the globe and built the railroads and would eventually place a man on the moon. A triumph of engineering, to be sure, but also of the laws of motion that Sir Isaac Newton had put to paper more than two hundred years earlier, and that had been powering humanity’s remarkable progress ever since. For in tracing that path from Roosevelt Field in New York to Le Bourget, Charles Lindbergh had moved a greater distance in a shorter time than any human in history. Little could he know that barely a thousand kilometers from the airport where he landed that evening, the very idea of what it means for an object to move through space was bein
