Free Weekly AI Sessions for Experienced Software Engineers.
Every Wednesday at 5 PM CT, Gauntlet AI professors teach a live, hands-on AI engineering session — completely free. If you're nontechnical, this isn't for you. New topic every week, built for engineers who want to build, not just watch. See upcoming sessions.
A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR, MASTERS OF TRIVIA
Trivia is more than a game; it’s a global tradition of knowledge and competition. Masters of Trivia’s tournaments have gone live, with 30 fast, multiple-choice questions. Most correct wins. Speed breaks ties. Compete worldwide for a $MOT token prize purse, plus valuable in-kind prizes.
Get the entry link and reminders by email — subscribe free at PlayMOT.
—— ON THIS DAY ——
JUNE 20, 1919
Clifden, County Galway, Ireland
106 years ago
John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown in their Vickers Vimy aircraft — the two RAF veterans who won the Daily Mail prize for the first nonstop transatlantic flight in June 1919, eight years before Charles Lindbergh's solo crossing.
On June 14-15, 1919, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten Brown flew a converted Vickers Vimy heavy bomber from St. John's, Newfoundland, to Clifden, County Galway, Ireland — 1,890 miles in 16 hours and 27 minutes. It was the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. The landing was, technically, a crash: the field Alcock aimed for turned out to be a bog, and the aircraft nosed over on touchdown. Both men were uninjured. They had won the £10,000 Orteig Prize — the Daily Mail's prize for the first transatlantic crossing — and entered aviation history.
Alcock and Brown are systematically underrated in the popular memory of aviation, where Charles Lindbergh's solo New York-to-Paris crossing in 1927 dominates the narrative. But what Alcock and Brown achieved was more difficult in almost every respect: a heavier aircraft, worse weather conditions, no radio navigation, a crossing that included night flying through fog and sleet, and an arrival that required Brown to climb out onto the wings multiple times in flight to remove ice from the fuel gauges. Lindbergh flew alone on a clearer route with eight years of additional aviation technology behind him.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Vickers Vimy aircraft used by Alcock and Brown for their 1919 transatlantic crossing — a converted World War I heavy bomber in which the two airmen flew 1,890 miles in 16 hours and 27 minutes.
The flight's conditions were extreme. Shortly after takeoff, their radio transmitter failed. They flew through fog, rain, and sleet for much of the crossing. At one point, the aircraft went into a flat spin in cloud, recovering only when they descended below the cloud base and Alcock could see the ocean. Brown climbed out onto the wings six times during the flight to clear ice from the fuel meters — at altitudes of up to 12,000 feet, in temperatures well below zero, without any safety harness. The fuel meters needed to function for the engines to run. He did what was necessary.
They landed in Derrygimlagh Bog near Clifden at 8:40 a.m. on June 15. Local people who had watched the aircraft approach were initially uncertain whether it had crashed or landed intentionally; the nose-down angle of the aircraft in the bog suggested the former. Both men climbed out uninjured. Alcock's first words on Irish soil, according to contemporary accounts, were 'A grand morning.' They were awarded the Daily Mail's £10,000 prize by Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for Air. Both were knighted by King George V.
John Alcock died six months after the flight, on December 18, 1919, in a fog-related accident while delivering a new Vickers Viking amphibious aircraft to the Paris Aero Show. He was twenty-seven years old. Arthur Brown never flew again commercially after the transatlantic crossing. He returned to engineering, lived through the Second World War, and died in 1948. The Vickers Vimy they flew is in the Science Museum in London. Lindbergh, when asked in 1927 about Alcock and Brown's achievement, said simply that they deserved more credit than they had received.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Alcock and Brown demonstrated the feasibility of transatlantic air travel eight years before Lindbergh. The technical achievement of flying a World War I-era bomber across the Atlantic in 1919 was considerably harder than Lindbergh's 1927 crossing with a purpose-built aircraft. That the first crossing happened in 1919 rather than 1927 reflects how rapidly aviation technology was developing in the post-war years.
Their flight directly inspired the investments in transatlantic aviation that led to commercial service by the 1930s. The Daily Mail's prize and the public attention to the crossing created investor confidence in the viability of Atlantic routes. Imperial Airways and Pan American Airways' development of transatlantic services in the 1930s was partly a consequence of 1919 demonstrating that the crossing was survivable.
The systematic undervaluing of Alcock and Brown relative to Lindbergh is an interesting case of how aviation memory was shaped by American media dominance. Lindbergh's crossing attracted a US media infrastructure that Alcock and Brown's crossing, in the immediate post-war period, did not. The fame of an event and its historical significance are not always correlated.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On June 15, 1919, two British airmen crash-landed a converted bomber in an Irish bog after sixteen hours across the Atlantic. They had been first. Alcock was dead six months later. Brown never flew again. Eight years later, Lindbergh got the fame. History sometimes works that way.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
"We have had a terrible journey."
— John Alcock, first words on arriving in Ireland after the transatlantic crossing, June 15, 1919
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about Alcock and Brown's transatlantic flight, the technical challenges they overcame, the Daily Mail prize, why they are less famous than Lindbergh, and the crash-landing in a bog that completed aviation's most significant early journey?
