Today, we meet an odd almost-hero of early
aviation. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Bert Hinkler was Australia's first
pioneer of aviation. Born in 1892 in the East-Coast
town of Bundaberg, he fixated on flying right from
the start. When he was 14 he tried to make an
ornithopter -- an airplane whose wings flap. It
failed, but in 1911 he did make quite a successful
glider. A year later, the first itinerant
barnstormer -- a man named Wizard Stone -- showed
up in Australia. Hinkler fastened on to him like a
barnacle.
In 1914 Hinkler went to England to work in the
Sopwith company. And during WW-I he flew bombers,
but he had little stomach for the work of bombing
and strafing retreating troops. Still, he brought
back medals and a new wife -- a nurse he'd met in
France.
After the war, he turned to long-distance flying.
He was only five-foot-three, and that gave him a
real edge in a cramped cockpit. He dreamt of flying
back home to Australia. He first tried to make the
flight in 1920, but he had to turn back at Rome. It
seems war had broken out around his fuel stop in
Syria.
He set his first official record on a flight from
England to Latvia, and he finally made his flight
to Australia in 1928. It wasn't the first, but he
did set a record flying the leg from Darwin to his
home in Bundaberg nonstop. And there he enjoyed his
greatest moment of glory -- parades, speeches, and
a popular song that began, Hustling Hinkler, up
in the sky ...
In 1928 he went to America, where he'd taken up
with another woman some years before. He tried to
set up his own airplane company, but the depression
squashed any chance of success and drove him back
to England. A year later he married his American
friend and moved her to Paris.
Then, of course, the noose of his double marriage
began closing in on him. But Hinkler kept moving.
He took off in an attempt to beat the earlier
England-Australia flight records, and then he
vanished into thin air over Italy's Appennine
mountains. Three months later, a charcoal gatherer
found his crashed plane with his frozen body
nearby. The investigation showed that he'd thrown a
propeller blade. It also suggested sabotage.
The plot thickens when we find that his home was
rifled a week before the flight. Documents were
stolen, and all the pictures of his mother were
smashed. Was there a conspiracy here? Did it
involve a wife or an angry colleague? We're left to
wonder.
The strange story of Bert Hinkler leaves us
unsatisfied, but in it we surely see the sort of
raw, driving compulsion that brought flight into
being. Hinkler didn't do so well with the parts of
his life outside the hangar and the cockpit. But
there he clearly was one of the many driven
geniuses who helped shape the reality of flight out
of the stuff of dreams.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
