Charles Augustus Lindbergh February 4, β August 26, was an American aviator, military officer, and author. On May 20β21, , he made the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris , a distance of 3, miles 5, km , flying alone for His aircraft, the Spirit of St. Although not the first transatlantic flight , it was the longest at the time by nearly 2, miles 3, km , the first solo transatlantic flight thereby exemplifying the American ideal of self-sufficient individualism, setting a new flight distance world record.
Congressman Charles August Lindbergh. He became a U. Army Air Service cadet in The next year, he was hired as a U. Air Mail pilot in the Greater St. Louis area, where he began preparing to cross the Atlantic. Time magazine named Lindbergh its first Man of the Year in for the year , President Herbert Hoover appointed him to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in , and he received the Congressional Gold Medal in In , he and French surgeon Alexis Carrel began work on inventing the first perfusion pump , a device credited with making future heart surgeries and organ transplantation possible.
On March 1, , Lindbergh's first-born infant child, Charles Jr. The case prompted the U. By late , public hysteria from the case drove the Lindbergh family abroad to Europe, from where they returned in In the months before the United States entered World War II , Lindbergh's non-interventionist stance and statements about Jews and race led some to believe he was a Nazi sympathizer, although Lindbergh never publicly stated support for the Nazis and condemned them several times in both his public speeches and personal diary.
However, he supported the isolationist America First Committee and resigned from the U. Air Force Reserve. Lindbergh had three elder paternal half-sisters: Lillian, Edith, and Eva. The couple separated in when Lindbergh was seven years old. His father, a U. Congressman from to , was one of the few congressmen to oppose the entry of the U.
Lindbergh attended more than a dozen other schools from Washington, D. From an early age, Lindbergh had exhibited an interest in the mechanics of motorized transportation, including his family's Saxon Six automobile, and later his Excelsior motorbike. By the time that he started college as a mechanical engineering student, he had also become fascinated with flying, though he "had never been close enough to a plane to touch it".
