“At this time there was a lot of excitement in the air. Orteig was offering his $25,000 prize for the first man to cross the Atlantic, and there were a lot of aviators who would have liked the prize, and were trying for it. Of course, the money wasn’t the whole thing. There was the honor attached to it. And besides, there was the fact that crossing the Atlantic would make people sit up and take notice that flying wasn’t as dangerous as they thought. If a man could fly all that distance in a plane, maybe planes weren’t the death traps that some people had an idea they were. Lindy must have been thinking of this when he first decided that he’d like to try for the Orteig prize. Because everything that he’s done since his flight has been to get people interested in aviation. “But it takes money to fly across the ocean. You’ve got to get a special plane and all that. Lindy had to have backers. He couldn’t get them at first. Everybody tried to discourage him. In the first place, he looked such a kid. He was twenty-five, and that’s young, but he didn’t even look twenty-five. The men he asked to back him all but told him to run home and wait until he had grown up. “Then Major Robertson, Lindy’s Big Boss, tried to get backers for him. He knew that Lindy could fly and finally got some influential men to put up $15,000 for his flight. Maybe Lindy wasn’t glad! He tucked his check in his pocket and went on a shopping trip for a plane. He tried the Bellanca people in New York, but they didn’t have what he wanted, so he skipped to San Diego to the Ryan Airways, Inc., and told them what he wanted. They put their engineers to work on his specifications, and designed him a Ryan monoplane, the neat stream-lined job that was christened the Spirit of St. Louis. It’s a graceful bird—but you’ve all seen so many pictures of it, you know what it looks like. It has a wing span of 46 feet, and an overall length of over 27 feet. They put in a Wright engine—a Whirlwind, 200 horsepower. It’s a radial engine. You two probably know what a radial engine is, but Hal here doesn’t.” Bob paused and turned to Hal. “Do you?” “Uh-uh,” grunted Hal. “Do you?” “Of course I do. It’s one in which the cylinders aren’t in a straight line or in a V, but arranged around an axis, like the spokes of a wheel. Lindy’s plane had two spark plugs for each cylinder, so that in case one missed, there was another one ready. She could carry 450 gallons of gas and twenty gallons of oil, and she was loaded to the gills when Lindy took her off the ground at the Field. “Suppose Lindy wasn’t anxious about that plane. He hung around the factory all the time that it was being built, and made suggestions to help along Hawley Bowlus, who built the thing. You know Hawley Bowlus. The fellow who held the glider record until Lindy took it away from him—but that’s later. Bowlus knows how to build planes, and Lindy swears by him.