Lincoln Beachey’s feats as a teenage dirigible pilot made him rich and famous — and led hordes of adoring women to throw themselves at him — but that celebrity was nothing compared to what was about to come.
The previous Portals told the story of how a working-class San Francisco youth named Lincoln Beachey became an expert balloonist, and then mastered a far more challenging contraption, the brand-new aeroplane. Beachey’s feats as a teenage dirigible pilot made him rich and famous — and led hordes of adoring women to throw themselves at him — but that celebrity was nothing compared to what was about to come.
After Beachey’s triumph in San Francisco, Curtiss booked the young pilot on a long tour, starting in Puerto Rico, going on to Cuba and then Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, New York and across the upper Midwest. During the tour, Beachey constantly worked on improving his flying, in the process developing new techniques, in particular long, steep drops and intentional stalls. He was the first aviator to fly at night, attaching acetylene lamps to his wings.
But Beachey was confident. He had perfected a new technique, a sheer vertical drop, dubbed the “dip of death” or simply “a Beachey.” As he dropped his Curtiss Pusher into the gorge “like a hawk diving for its prey,” wrote a newspaper, he headed straight for Horseshoe Falls — and then, to the horror of the crowd, disappeared into the vapor. On the canyon’s edge, where 250,000 people were watching, parents covered their children’s eyes and women “fainted by the thousands.
Beachey’s nadir came in 1913, when he was traveling to San Francisco to give a speech at the Olympic Club. As he was changing trains, a young woman with two small children came running up to him, screaming “You killed my husband!” and beating on Beachey’s chest with her fists. The woman’s husband, Charles Walsh, was a pilot who had died. His coffin was on the train.
In late 1913, the organizers of the Panama Pacific International Exposition, the world’s fair to be held in San Francisco in 1915, asked Beachey to be the headline performer every day during the fair’s 10-month run. The fair celebrated modern technology, of which the aeroplane was the ultimate example. Beachey eagerly agreed. He kicked off his appearances on Dec.
But this time, his plane was not up to the task. As he rocketed toward the bay, both his plane’s wings broke under the strain. He crashed into the water at 210 miles an hour. Miraculously, the impact did not kill him, but he was unable to release the straps that held him in the cockpit, and he drowned in San Francisco Bay, not far from the shore. Lincoln Beachey was 28 years old.
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