[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: The podcast.

JAD: Today on the podcast we start off, just for kicks, in New York City, Harlem.

ROBERT: With, uh, let's see ...

PAIGE CAPOTE: I'm Paige Capote.

ROBERT: One ...

TRENCE JONES: Trenice Jones. 

ROBERT: Two ...

KATHERINE MARTINE: My name is Katherine Martine and I got to school at CS 200. 

ROBERT: Three girls.

JAD: Doing a little jump rope chant.

GIRLS: Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream, to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down, and down he fell, he thought he'd go to heaven but he went to—Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream ...

JAD: So this is a story actually, about the guy at the center of this chant, the guy who's being jump roped about. His name's Lincoln Beachey, and he's ...

ROBERT: Someone I heard about from a friend of mine.

SAM KEAN: Hello. My name is Sam Kean and I'm a writer.

JAD: And then we met this guy.

FRANK MARRERO: Hey, hey. My name is Frank Marrero.

ROBERT: And together they told us a story of the most famous man you've never heard of.

GIRLS: Lincoln Beachey ...

JAD: Can you tell—what can you tell us about Lincoln Beachey, the early years?

FRANK MARRERO: He was—you know, he was born here in San Francisco.

SAM KEAN: Kind of a short kid, sort of lonely. Kind of chubby, emotional. You know, he wasn't exactly a popular kid. Not someone you'd peg as a hero.

ROBERT: But ...

FRANK MARRERO: He was fearless.

JAD: For instance, when he was about 10—this would be 1897—he was really into ...

SAM KEAN: Bicycles.

JAD: And apparently, he would launch himself ...

FRANK MARRERO: Off Fillmore Hill, which is, you know, if you've seen The Streets of San Francisco ...

JAD: Yeah.

FRANK MARRERO: And seen cars flying through the air, that's those kind of hills.

JAD: Yeah.

FRANK MARRERO: Without brakes.

ROBERT: Because what he really wanted to do, even as a little kid, is he wanted to fly.

FRANK MARRERO: Yeah.

ROBERT: And when Lincoln was 18 years old, he met one of the pioneers of the dirigible.

FRANK MARRERO: And he got this young guy, Lincoln Beachey, to be his dirigible pilot.

JAD: And what is a dirigible?

SAM KEAN: It's a big floating sack of hot air. That—that's the basic idea.

JAD: Okay.

JAD: Sam says you could steer this thing—sort of—because it was kind of an early blimp.

SAM KEAN: Yeah.

JAD: But for Beachey ...

ROBERT: It just wasn't enough.

SAM KEAN: He wanted to fly in—in a plane. Planes were the future.

JAD: Keep in mind, this was early 1900s.

SAM KEAN: Less than 10 years after the Wright brothers flew their first flight.

JAD: Planes were pretty primitive.

SAM KEAN: Basically, like a flying bicycle ...

ROBERT: Even so, people were getting really excited about aviation, so they were going to air shows.

FRANK MARRERO: They had every kind of flying machine in—that did and didn't work.

ROBERT: And Beachey, he tracked down the guy who put together most of the really big air shows.

FRANK MARRERO: He says "Hey, you know, I'm Lincoln Beachey. You know, I'm, like, you know, really popular and cool and everything and would you—I'll be glad to fly for you." And he said, "No, I don't think so. We don't need another pilot."

ROBERT: But Beachey says ...

FRANK MARRERO: "How about do you need a good mechanic?" And so he got on as a mechanic.

SAM KEAN: I have heard stories that he would sleep in a tent near the plane factory, and he would actually get up at dawn, and sort of sneak into these planes so he could fly them before other people were around.

JAD: And his big break came at a show in LA, when one of the big time show pilots goes up, gets injured, and the organizer is like, "Uh, uh-oh!"

FRANK MARRERO: "Who are we going to get to show the rest of the planes?" And Beachey says, "I'll do it."

JAD: Bum ba da dum ...

FRANK MARRERO: So they sent poor Beachey up in this plane, and he got up to about 3,000 feet and the motor stopped.

ROBERT: Stopped?

FRANK MARRERO: Now ...

JAD: Like, just ...

FRANK MARRERO: Stopped. As in no going.

JAD: So there he is, 3,000 feet in the air. And ...

ROBERT: The plane naturally starts to drop.

JAD: Down, down, down ...

ROBERT: And it's not just dropping, it's ...

FRANK MARRERO: Spinning. Because when you stall, always one wing stalls first and that throws you into a spin. No one has ever gotten out of this. In 1910, one in three flights ended in disaster because nobody had figured out how to get out of the deadly spiral.

JAD: Because whenever this happened, the pilot would try to do sensible things like turn the plane the opposite direction of the spiral.

FRANK MARRERO: Makes it worse.

JAD: Or try to pull up.

FRANK MARRERO: Makes it way worse.

JAD: But Lincoln Beachey, in a split second, decides to do something ...

ROBERT: ... totally odd.

FRANK MARRERO: He realized what he was gonna have to do is dive into it.

ROBERT: In other words, turn into the spin and down.

FRANK MARRERO: It's kind of like running down a mountain rocky path and tripping, and instead of putting your hands out, you put your hands behind your back and smile.

ROBERT: [laughs]

FRANK MARRERO: You do not want to do what you think—you don't want to do that. Of course, he came right out of it. 

ROBERT: Wait, he came right out of it, meaning he landed the plane?

FRANK MARRERO: Yeah, he—he—when you dive into the spin, when you do the absolute worst thing you can think of, then all—all the controls come back.

JAD: So suddenly the plane just stops spinning, and he was able to land?

FRANK MARRERO: He just pulled—he just pulled—he just curls out of it, pulls out and lands it, floats it down.

JAD: Wow!

FRANK MARRERO: And he said, "I suddenly could feel the airplane."

ROBERT: As though it was part of his body.

FRANK MARRERO: And from that moment forward, aviation was never the same. He went bananas. When you go see an aerobatic show, and you see them do all these fancy thises and thats, he invented them—the figure eight, the vertical drop, the dip of death. He was the first person to point his plane straight down and achieve terminal velocity. At the time, medical science said if you achieve terminal velocity you would die from fear. He would dive out of the—out of the sky from thousands of feet, spinning at the ground, and at the last second pull up and pick up a handkerchief with his wing tip.

JAD: No. No way!

FRANK MARRERO: Oh yes, oh yes. He invented aerobatics.

JAD: Pick up a handkerchief with his wing? From where, the ground?

FRANK MARRERO: Yeah, he—well ...

JAD: That—that's crap. There's no way. There's no way he could do that.

ROBERT: Now, wait a second, wait, wait ...

ROBERT: Well, we may never know for sure because these things are wrapped within legends within legends ...

JAD: Clearly.

ROBERT: But a lot of people saw wonderful things happen.

FRANK MARRERO: Everybody recognized that this was nascent, this was new. The population of the United States was about 90 million then. 17 million people saw him that one year alone.

SAM KEAN: He was a—he was a pretty big deal.

FRANK MARRERO: He had a girlfriend in every major American city. I talked to people who watched him buy diamond engagement rings by the dozens.

ROBERT: [laughs]

FRANK MARRERO: And he always had one in his vest pocket.

SAM KEAN: Thomas Edison praised him, Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about him.

FRANK MARRERO: Railroads changed their schedules to follow him around the country.

JAD: What?

SAM KEAN: Orville Wright called him the most wonderful aviator anyone has ever seen.

FRANK MARRERO: People are gaga.

ROBERT: And most gaga of all are pilots.

FRANK MARRERO: So many people are dying imitating him, the city of San Diego considered doing an injunction, a legal injunction, to bar him from flying.

JAD: But for Beachey, nothing could stop him—for a while at least. Nothing could stop him until he mastered this one particular trick, the trick of all tricks.

FRANK MARRERO: Loop the loop.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: What is that?

SAM KEAN: Basically it's like a corkscrew maneuver.

JAD: Like on a roller coaster?

SAM KEAN: Yeah, like—exactly like a roller coaster, where you go level, then you go upside down then you come back going the same way. Difficult thing to do. Humans aren't evolved to fly, it's very easy to lose your equilibrium to, you know, get screwed up on what's up, what's down.

ROBERT: Plus, if you turn your plane upside down, one of these old planes ...

FRANK MARRERO: The motor would go off.

JAD: Why would the motor go off?

FRANK MARRERO: Because they hadn't figured out fluid mechanics. Pumping the gas up into it, it all fell—it was by gravity.

ROBERT: Still, Beachey thinks, "I'm gonna do this thing."

JAD: "Can't stop me."

ROBERT: But one day he's on a train ...

FRANK MARRERO: He's gonna speak at the Olympic Club, and Charlie Walsh's wife—now Charlie Walsh is one of his dear friends—he just died two days before, trying to do a Beachey, as dozens did.

JAD: Meaning trying to ...

FRANK MARRERO: To do a trick that Beachey did. It's called doing a Beachey.

JAD: Right.

FRANK MARRERO: And so Charlie Walsh's wife sees him changing trains, and she crashes against him saying, "You killed Charlie! He's in the baggage car in a coffin!"

SAM KEAN: It really—it really got to him.

ROBERT: And it started him thinking about all the people who had died trying to imitate him.

SAM KEAN: At one point he said he felt like he had murdered some of these people. That's how hard he took this. And at that point, he decided he couldn't go on with it, he decided he had to retire.

JAD: So he arrives at the Olympic Club, and as everyone's cheering, steps up to the podium ...

FRANK MARRERO: Comes up and says, "You could not make me enter a plane again at the point of a revolver, I'm done."

JAD: That's really what he said?

FRANK MARRERO: That's really what he said.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: But he added a kind of parting thought.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lincoln Beachey: I am tormented with the desire to loop the loop in the air. I know I can do it, but I know no one else can do it. And I know that if I ever go up into the air again, I will pull off this loop the loop, and then many men will be taken by death in trying to do the same thing because I have done it.]

FRANK MARRERO: So he retires—for three months. And ...

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: That's not exactly quitting.

ROBERT: Here's the thing: during those three months the unthinkable happens. Somebody else does the loop the loop for the first time, some [bleep] Frenchman.

SAM KEAN: He couldn't stand that someone else had looped the loop before him, and he decided he was going to be the best looper in the world. And it took him a few months of practice ...

ROBERT: But he did it.

SAM KEAN: He eventually outdid the Frenchman. And he would start pulling, you know, four, five, six loops in a row.

ROBERT: Again and again and again ...

FRANK MARRERO: When he finally did the loop the loop I want to—I want to read you what he wrote. "The silent reaper of souls and I shook hands that day."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Lincoln Beachey: Thousands of times, we've engaged in a race among the clouds, plunging headlong into breathless flight, diving and circling with awful speed through ethereal space. And many times when the dazzling sunlight has blinded my eyes, and sudden darkness has numbed all my senses, I have imagined him close at my heels. On such occasions I have defied him, but in so doing have experienced fright which I cannot explain. Today, the old fellow and I are pals.]

FRANK MARRERO: Suffer me for a second while I wax philosophical.

JAD: Do it.

FRANK MARRERO: Something happened in the psyche of humanity — you gotta realize for a hundred thousand years, millions upon millions of people have wanted to fly.

JAD: And Frank believes that when people saw Beachey loop the loop so many times, so effortlessly, it was a turning point. 

FRANK MARRERO: If you could do that, you could—you were free in the air.

JAD: We were no longer just managing to fly, now we owned the sky.

ROBERT: 1915. The World's Fair is gonna be held that year in San Francisco, California, which is Beachey's hometown.

FRANK MARRERO: Now at the time, he was working on a monoplane, a single-wing airplane.

ROBERT: It was a brand new thing, it hadn't been tested, but ...

FRANK MARRERO: The fair officials had seen it and they said, "Oh, would you show—would you fly us your new one?" And he said, "Sure."

ROBERT: So ...

FRANK MARRERO: March 14 ...

ROBERT: Beachey takes this thing up for its very first flight.

SAM KEAN: Some people say there were up to a quarter million people at the expo and most of them were watching him.

FRANK MARRERO: So he goes up above over Alcatraz, and 3,000 feet above Alcatraz, and starts diving. And that structural, metallurgical smarts hadn't been developed enough yet on single-wing airplanes, and they—both of his wings cracked back.

SAM KEAN: Someone said it sounded like a ship mast just snapping, cracking right in half.

FRANK MARRERO: He fell 3,000 feet. They estimated him going at 250 miles an hour. And hit the water right at the foot of Fillmore Hill.

SAM KEAN: When a doctor looked at him later, he actually only had a broken leg from the impact, but what got him was he was strapped in pretty tightly, and no matter how hard he struggled, he could not get out of the straps.

ROBERT: Oh!

SAM KEAN: Plane had him wrapped in so tightly, it just drug him down to the bottom. And he—he drowned in the bottom of San Francisco Bay.

ROBERT: After that show ...

SAM KEAN: For 24 hours straight ...

ROBERT: ... you couldn't make a phone call in San Francisco.

SAM KEAN: Because so many people were calling in and out with news and rumors about what had happened to Lincoln Beachey. So he took down the entire San Francisco phone system.

ROBERT: So why has he been erased from—from the—from common historical memory? I mean, you hear about flying aces from World War I, Eddie Rickenbacker, and you hear about Charles Lindbergh of course, and you hear about ...

JAD: Amelia Earhart.

ROBERT: Yeah, but you don't hear about Lincoln Beachey.

FRANK MARRERO: Well, after the war, we had new heroes, and he slipped into obscurity.

JAD: Except for one thing.

SAM KEAN: The jump-rope chant.

GIRLS: One, two, three, four. Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream ...

SAM KEAN: That, you know, little kids would say.

GIRLS: Machine broke down, and down he fell. He thought he'd go to heaven but he went to ...

SAM KEAN: It went, "Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down, and down he fell. Instead of going to heaven he went to ..."

GIRLS: Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream, to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down, and down he fell. He thought he'd go to heaven but he went to—Lincoln Beachey ...

SINGING VOICE: Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream, to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down, and down he fell. He thought he'd go to heaven but he went to—Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream, to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down, and down he fell. He thought he'd go to heaven but he went to—Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream, to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down, and down he fell. He thought he'd go to heaven but he went to—Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream ...

JAD: Thanks to Sam Kean, author of The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements. And thanks for Frank Moreno ...

FRANK MARRERO: Marrero.

JAD: Right.

FRANK MARRERO: My book is Lincoln Beachey: The Man Who Owned the Sky.

ROBERT: And thanks to Nick Cappodici for being our Lincoln Beachey.

JAD: And lastly we want to thank again our jump-ropers at CS 200 here in Manhattan, and this talented group of singers at the Laguardia School of the Arts.

EMMA MORECRAFT: My name is Emma Morecraft.

KELLY EFTI MU: Kelly Etfi Mu.

JULIET EGAN: Juliet Egan.

MARYELLEN AZZARANO: Maryellen Azzarano.

RUBY FRUNE: Ruby Frune.

JAD: And Ruby wrote and arranged what you're hearing.

SINGING VOICES: Lincoln Beachey thought it was a dream, to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down, and down he fell. He thought he'd go to heaven but he went to ...

JAD: Oh, and thank you to Robert Apostle at Laguardia, and Brenda Addison at CS 200 for the hook ups.

ROBERT: And if you are at all tantalized by the idea of a loop ...

JAD: Well, we have a whole hour-long segment coming up next in our next podcast all about loops.

ROBERT: Loopy math, loopy biology, loopy neurology.

JAD: Loopy jokes.

ROBERT: Coming your way.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

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