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Sun Lakes resident James Bailey is a retired engineer and Army veteran.

Sun Lakes resident James Bailey is a retired engineer and Army veteran.

About 70 years ago, during the “golden era” of science fiction, an obscure author wrote of the invention of a “time viewing machine.” With this machine, the operator could set both the geographic coordinates and the specific date to observe an event in the past. In the book, the first trial observation was that of the defeat of Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn on July 25, 1876. The machine did have one drawback, however: it could only “see” back a century, so, if we had such a device today, Custer would be lost to us. But we could look back to the evening of July 25, 1956 at the correct spot in the North Atlantic to watch the tragic collision of the Andrea Doria with the Stockholm if we so desired.

So, for a second short historical exercise, let’s this time assume that we are going to choose only those events that illustrate man’s attempts to conquer the great expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. We’ll also assume that we have modified the machine so that, although it still will view only a century, it can span the entire 20th Century.

Finally, we will adopt a further constraint: that we cannot repeat any month. For example we may choose only one event in a past May and, therefore must decide to be in Paris in 1927 for Lindberg’s arrival or in Lakehurst, N.J., in 1937 when the Hindenberg explodes or off the Irish Coast in 1915 for the sinking of the Lusitiania, as well as anywhere else during some May in the past century.

With those criteria in mind, here are my choices.

(Note: Here are the accounts for the first four months of our mythical tour that were covered in the April 8 edition.

January 1976 — The first commercial flight of the Concord

February 1942 — The fire aboard the Normandie

March 1939 — The first Pan Am Clipper successful crossing

April 1933 — The loss of the USS Akron)

It is perhaps the most memorable moment in the conquest of the Atlantic in the 20th century. Certainly, it is the most thrilling moment between the world wars. We arrive outside the “City of Light” on the evening of May 21, 1927. It is already completely dark and crowds are gathering. Lindberg’s single engine Spirit of St. Louis has been spotted flying over the French coast while it was still daylight, but because the flyer soon to be known as the “Lone Eagle” worldwide, has no radio on board (every possible gallon of fuel was critical), it is not known when he will arrive. The crowd is anxious and the newsreel cameramen wonder what can be recorded without the necessary lighting. More critical are the runway landing lights: there are none!

Suddenly, the murmur of the crowd is silenced by the sound of an aircraft engine. The plane is coming closer. The city is alight but the runway is still in the dark. Suddenly, almost as if a military action, the French drivers move to align their autos perpendicular to the strip and heading in, All soon have their headlights blazing. The runway is now very well lit. We hear the small plane circle the field and see a nearly perfect landing, with the silver craft stopping near the terminal building. As the engine dies and the prop stops turning, the crowd rushes forward.

They lift the young pilot out of the cockpit and carry him on their shoulders to the building. The cameramen capture the scene — one that will last far into the future.

It is, of course, the finest moment for the 25-year-old Lindberg. He will suffer the loss of his first-born son in the infamous kidnapping five years later in 1932. Prior to the U.S. entry into WWII, he will be one of the leaders of the “America First Party,” a group that advocates staying out of the European war, believing the Nazis are sure to win. As a result of his participation in that movement, Roosevelt refuses Lindberg’s offer to serve in the war and strips him of his U.S. Army Air Force commission. Lindberg does see combat as a civilian test pilot for the Chance

Vought Aircraft Co. when he performs test flights of the advanced version of the F4U Corsair in the Pacific and just happens to encounter some Japanese Zero fighters. No records were kept, but witnesses always claim that had he been officially a Navy pilot, Lindberg would have been an ace.

Late in life, Lindberg suffered the public embarrassment of the revelation that he had a second family in Germany. He died at age 72 in Hawaii in 1974.

Now we go back to just after the “Great War” for June.

It is a blustery day in County Galway in the west of Ireland near Clifden on the coast.

Only a few casual observers are present with us. Few in Ireland, or indeed anywhere, are that interested in yet another aviation stunt. Flying the entire Atlantic non-stop — what an outlandish idea!

A plane appears coming from the west, very low over the ocean, the twin engines occasionally missing a beat. The pilot then guns the motors to climb over the coastal bluffs, then just as quickly, cuts his engines and executes a very rough landing on the grass. It is so rough that the craft noses over, severely crushing the undercarriage. But very soon, both pilots exit their machine, unscathed. The first successful non-stop flight across the Atlantic has been completed.

The two British aviators, Capt. John Adcock and Lt. Arthur Brown, are veterans of the Great War and members of the Royal Flying Corps, the predecessor of the RAF. Their now crippled craft is a modified Vickers Viny bomber, one that has successfully carried them from St. John’s, Newfoundland. They have just won the London Daily Mail prize for the first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in “less than 72 consecutive hours.” Winston Churchill will personally present the award to them. King George V will later knight the airmen at Windsor Castle.

Adcock and Brown will be followed, first, by other aerial daredevils but soon thereafter by regularly scheduled flights such as the hundreds that take place each month today.

Turning our attention across the Atlantic, we will again visit the Hudson River terminals in New York, this time for an American triumph in the early postwar year of 1952.

We take our spot along the river, waiting for the arrival of the newest and fastest passenger ship afloat. Soon we see the very large vessel in the distance, coming fast. Then she slows for the harbor pilot to come aboard. Plumes of water from the NYFD fireboats welcome the liner.

Some of the spectators hold up copies of the day’s NY Times, the edition that proclaims that the ship has broken the existing speed records, both eastbound and now westbound. The S.S. United States has reclaimed the “Blue Ribbond” from the Europeans for the first time in the 20th century.

No passenger ship has ever equaled her average speeds of 36 knots eastbound and 35 knots westbound in the intervening 69 years (although the eastbound record was barely eclipsed by a specially-built power boat).

Built to both rigorous U.S. Navy and U.S. Lines standards, the grand liner was designed to be easily converted to wartime use as either a troop or hospital ship, but that was never deemed necessary. Unfortunately, a planned sister ship was never built, something that became a factor in the U.S. carrier never having made the money that had been expected from her. She sailed without incident until 1969 and then was “mothballed” in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Over the years, she has been considered for a conversion to a cruise ship (like the France becoming the Norway) or as a permanent exhibition like the first Queen Mary in Long Beach. None of these plans were attempted and now the vessel still can be seen at the navy yard pier, stripped of all her finery but with the “Blue Ribbond” still flying from her stern mast.

Now we venture to Montreal, Canada, for another arrival, this time in August 1930.

It is another delightful late summer Friday afternoon in Montreal, the capital of French Canada. Hordes of spectators are scanning the sky for the expected British visitor. The R100, a rigid airship, entirely of British design and built by a private concern, has just completed her first long range flight, having left Cardington in the United Kingdon on July 29. The rigid is over 700 feet in length and can be seen approaching from the east at an altitude of about 1,500 feet. We watch as she lazily circles the city and departs to her mooring mast outside the metropolis. Had we wanted, we could have watched her arrival back in Cardington 15 days later. After a near perfect, three-day return trip, the successful entrant from Britain in the transoceanic airship race will, unfortunately, never fly again. She will be dismantled in 1932.

The British government had planned to continue in its airship contest with the Germans by building two competing passenger ships. The R100 would be built to government specifications by a private concern, while the competing design, the R101, would be managed and built directly by a UK agency. When the R101 crashed in France two months later on an aborted trip to India, killing nearly everyone aboard, British authorities canceled all further airship development, leaving the field to the Germans and the Americans. France and Italy had experienced their own disasters and had quit the race earlier in the 1920s. (A brief historical note regarding the R100: Neville Shulte, the author of the ultimate disaster novel “On the Beach,” was an engineer on the R100 and wrote an interesting memoir on the R100 vs. R101 contest.)

Now we return to New York, only a month later for a French triumph.

It is the day after the long Labor Day weekend on Long island. We venture there to the same airfield that Lindberg had left some three years earlier. Roosevelt Field is still grass but, fortunately, is dry this day, unlike the mud that almost doomed the American. Two French aviators, veterans of the Great War, are expected shortly, because unlike “Lindy,” they have a radio onboard. Then we see it, a two-place single-engine biplane, coming from the northeast, having passed over New England that morning. Painted a brilliant white, the craft is a modified Brequet 19 Super Bidon, named “Point d’ Interrogation,” the “Question Mark.” The pilot circles the field, cuts the power of the 650-hp Hispano-Suizza radial engine, and then makes a smooth landing on the turf. Just as in Paris, we see the crowd rush forward to greet the visitors, eager to get the first photos and to perhaps touch the airmen.

The two French airmen, the pilot Dieudonne Costes and the navigator/radioman Maurice Bellonte, have reversed Lindberg’s flight, having left Le Bourget outside Paris just under 30 hours before on Sept. 1. They will stay in the United States for 25 days touring this country before returning to France. President Hoover will welcome them to the White House after the city of New York stages one of its famous “ticker-tape” parades in their honor.

Costes and Bellonte have completed the first east to west crossing of the Atlantic by an airplane, flying against the prevailing winds. These winds are still with us today: jet airliners usually need an extra hour westbound. Several others, British, French and American, had tried the westward flight with no success, most ending in disaster.

Both the French heroes will survive both future flights and the Second World War. Costes had been a French ace during the Great War with eight confirmed kills. He dies at age 81 in 1973. His partner survives to age 88, living on until 1984. Both are honored with memorials in France today.

Now to a German milestone two years earlier.

We see a nearly perfect October day in Lakehurst on the New Jersey coast. A large mooring mast that normally is used to collect the U.S. Navy’s USS Los Angeles is being towed into position and secured. Since the German Zeppelin Company originally built the Navy craft as the LZ-126, which had flown without incident for over four years, no problems are expected with the newer LZ-127, the Graf Zeppelin, when she arrives as coordinated by an exchange of radio messages.

The ship comes into view, arriving from the north after her cruise around Manhattan. A drogue line is dropped and secured to the winch at the top of the mast. Slowly the huge rigid is brought up against the mast and the large ground crew, consisting of U.S. sailors, secures the ship to her grounding pylons. The gondola hatch opens and the airship Commander, Hugo Eckner steps out, followed by his staff. The U.S. officers and men give a wild ovation. The Atlantic has been crossed east to west non-stop against the prevailing winds.

The dirigible, the pride of post-war Weimar Germany, had successfully completed the flight from Fredrickshofen, Germany. But it was not without incident. She had met stiff winds and had been severely stressed by a squall in mid-ocean, lengthening her trip by over a day when part of the outer-skin was torn away. A crew of riggers, lead by Hugo’s son, Kurt, had made emergency repairs at great risk while the ship was slowed almost to a stop. (This mishap and the resulting harrowing struggle were added to the 1975 movie “The Hindenburg.” But they had actually taken place nine years earlier aboard the LZ-127, not the LZ-129.)

Both Eckner and his airship would continue to have successful passenger carrying transoceanic flights from Germany to and from both North America and South America for the next nine years without incident. He and his company would build two even larger ships, the LZ-129 and –30 (there was no –28). He would not be popular with the new Nazi machine, but his contribution to German airship superiority saved him. He was rarely mentioned in the party controlled media. That all changed in May 1937.

When the Hindenburg exploded, Adolph Hitler was finally able to get rid of Eckner and the rest of the irritating management of the Zeppelin Company, none of whom were Nazis—who did not always toe the line. After the loss of the Hindenburg, the German dictator ordered all passenger airships grounded and had the sister ship, the LZ-130, the second Graf Zeppelin, as well as the original record setter destroyed in 1940.

Now to a different ocean, in the middle of a war more than 20 years before.

We visit the beautiful Aegean Sea on a brilliant Sunday morning in this third year of the First World War. Just off the Greek island of Kea, we see a very large ship that looks strangely familiar. But it is painted completely white with the exception of a green band that circles the vessel midway between the boat deck and the waterline. Three large red crosses divide the band on each side. Four stacks (or funnels to the purist) can be seen as she steams eastward toward the latest British war zone. Some of the medical staff onboard can be seen strolling on the boat deck after breakfast. It is just at 8 a.m., at the shift change for the stokers feeding the furnaces when a large explosion can be seen and heard on the starboard bow. A severe list soon develops.

We watch as the captain, Charles Bartlett, tries unsuccessfully to ground his ship near the island and then stops all engines. This last of the White Star trio will sink in 55 minutes.

The vessel, we know, is the HMHS (His Majesty’s Hospital Ship) Britannic. Sister to both the ill-fated Titanic and the Olympic, now pressed into military service as a troop carrier, the liner is somewhat larger than either of them. Had she survived the conflict, the Britannic would have been the grandest passenger vessel on the Atlantic run during the early postwar period. But like her infamous sister, she was never able to visit New York. The hospital ship did, however, return 3,000 wounded back to England on each of her five previous voyages.

This time, there is no shortage of lifeboats as her builders, Harlan & Wolfe, had more than doubled their number. And the firm had provided that all boats could be launched on the same side by using a complex crane system. Only 28 passengers and crew were lost, some in the initial explosion and, unfortunately, others when the first boats were lowered before the order to evacuate was given, with two boats being sucked into the still turning screws. We observe the two British warships that soon arrive and save everyone else on board.

Why the ship sank so fast after the lessons from the Titanic disaster had been applied in a redesign is still a mystery after more than a century. The Titanic took over two and one half - hours to sink. The Britannic should have floated with six, rather than four forward compartments flooded. But she didn’t. Some conspiracy advocates have suggested a fifth column member of the crew, but there is no evidence to support that theory. A German mine very probably caused the explosion but most of the survivors said that it was a torpedo. The Germans refuted this, saying they certainly would not have attacked an obvious hospital vessel. No one will ever know for sure.

The ship was largely forgotten for 60 years although she was then, and still remains, the largest completely sunken passenger vessel in existence. In 1976, the French explorer, Jacques Cousteau, located the wreck at a depth of 400 feet. Using Cousteau’s corrected location, Robert Ballard’s 1996 expedition made a detailed study of the wreck. Other visits, most prompted by renewed interest in the Titanic saga, have continued to the present day. But the mystery of why she sank and sank so fast still remains an unresolved question.

As our last visit, we will now travel to the rocky, windswept coast near St. John’s, Newfoundland, in the last month of the first year of the then new 20th century.

We first see a small windowless building, perhaps the first “radio shack” in North America, located atop a large coastal peak, some 265 feet above the swirling Atlantic. A large kite that is tethered to the shack is holding aloft a very long —nearly 500 feet — metal wire. It is just after noon. We move our viewing device inside.

One man, the inventor of the “wireless,” Guglielmo Marconi, listens to his receiver through crude headphones for the signal that is supposed to be sent from his transmitter over 2,200 miles away in Poldhu (near Cornwall) England. Standing nearby is Marconi’s assistant, George Kemp. Suddenly, at 12:20 p.m., Marconi hears the faint signal: three dots, the Morse code for the letter “s.” Both men are jubilant. A new era in man’s communication has begun. The Atlantic Ocean has been crossed at the speed of light. Two hours later, the experiment is repeated, again successfully.

Marconi will go on to create a company that will equip commercial ships and land based transmitting stations with his wireless sets. His operators will be early 20th century versions of today’s “computer geeks.” They will use codes that are remarkably similar to those used in current text messages. Two of his employees, Jack Philips, 25, and Harold Bride, 22, will later stay at their posts until the generators fail aboard the Titanic, costing Phillips his life while Bride spends months in a New York hospital.

Listening to their SOS messages via a Marconi set is a young reporter, David Sarnoff, in his loft high in New York’s latest skyscraper, the 48-story Woolworth Building. Sarnoff will become a celebrity first, and then the founder of RCA. He will start both NBC and the forerunner of ABC in the 1920s and introduce commercial TV in 1939.

Our second journey through time and space, this time to document man’s conquest of the Atlantic Ocean, is now complete and we must return to our current time and place. Of course, the time-viewing device we have used during our 12-month journey, unfortunately, doesn’t really exist. But, if it did exist, what other subjects could we explore?

About 70 years ago, during the “golden era” of science fiction, an obscure author wrote of t…

About 70 years ago, during the “golden era” of science fiction, an obscure author wrote of the invention of a “time viewing machine.” With this machine, the operator could set both the geographic coordinates and the specific date to observe an event in the past. In the book, the first trial …

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