FABULIST OF THE AIR

摘要

Times Square was lined with cheering spectators on May 16,1910, as Blanche Stuart Scott set out in her modified Willys-Overland Model 38 automobile on a transcontinental drive from New York to California. Scott, accompanied by reporters, dignitaries, and 40 other cars, was at the start of a 68-day publicity tour for the car company. She had no way of knowing that her life would be transformed during a stop in Dayton, Ohio, when she would see an airplane for the first time. As she watched two airplanes flying above a field, "I looked at them and thought how perfectly idiotic they were," she later recalled. "Anybody who'd do that was crazy as a loon." After she reached the West Coast, an Associated Press reporter told her that the pilot of a Farman biplane was waiting to take her aloft. Scott accepted the offer despite being petrified, and much to her relief, the Farman crashed before she could make the flight. (The pilot was uninjured.) But the reporter had already filed a story saying Scott had flown: "Flight Winds Up Auto Trip; Vassar Girl Motors Across Continent and Then Goes Up in an Aeroplane," blared the New York Times on August 7,1910. To save his job, the reporter and Scott made a pact to keep quiet about the crash and the ride that never happened. Scott's first flight was a fabrication. This would become a pattern.