Happy Birthday, Amelia!

Amelia Mary Earhart was born on July 24, 1897, in Atchison, Kansas, to Amy Otis Earhart and Edwin Stanton Earhart, followed in 1899 by her sister Muriel. The family moved from Kansas to Iowa to Minnesota to Illinois, where Earhart graduated from high school. During World War I, she left college to work at a Canadian military hospital, where she met aviators and became intrigued with flying.

With her first plane ride in 1920, she realized her true passion and began flying lessons with female aviator Neta Snook. On her twenty-fifth birthday, Earhart purchased a Kinner Airster biplane, and she flew it in 1922 when she set the women's altitude record of 14,000 feet. With faltering family finances, she soon sold the plane. When her parents divorced in 1924, Earhart moved with her mother and sister to Massachusetts and became a settlement worker at Dennison House in Boston while also flying in air shows.

After Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, Amy Guest (1873–1959) expressed interest in being the first woman to fly (or be flown) across the Atlantic Ocean. After deciding that the trip was too dangerous for her to undertake, she offered to sponsor the project, suggesting that they find "another girl with the right image." While at work one afternoon in April 1928, Earhart got a phone call from Capt. Hilton H. Railey, who asked her, "Would you like to fly the Atlantic"?

Amelia went on to accomplish several records and achievements:

• Woman's world altitude record: 14,000 ft (1922)
• First woman to fly the Atlantic Ocean (1928)
• Speed records for 100 km (1931)
• First woman to fly an autogyro (1931)
• Altitude record for autogyros: 18,415 ft (1931)
• First woman to cross the United States in an autogyro (1931)
• First woman to fly the Atlantic solo (1932)
• First person to fly the Atlantic twice (1932)
• First woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross (1932)
• First woman to fly nonstop, coast-to-coast across the U.S. (1932)?
• Women's speed transcontinental record (1933)
• First person to fly solo between Honolulu, Hawaii, and Oakland, California (1935)
• First person to fly solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City (1935)
• First person to fly solo nonstop from Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey (1935)
• Speed record for east-to-west flight from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii (1937)
• First person to fly solo from the Red Sea to Karachi (1937)

During an attempt at becoming the first woman to complete a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937 in a Purdue-funded Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island. The two were last seen in Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, on the last land stop before Howland Island and one of their final legs of the flight. She presumably died in the Pacific during the circumnavigation, just three weeks before her fortieth birthday. Nearly one year and six months after she and Noonan disappeared, Earhart was officially declared dead. Investigations and significant public interest in their disappearance still continue over 85 years later.

References:

Amelia Earhart | National Women's History Museum. https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/amelia-earhart

Amelia Earhart - Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Earhart