Look! Up in the Sky!
"He’s going 40 miles an hour!"
(Walter Brookins makes first night flight, Montgomery, Alabama, 1910)
It is mid-June 1910, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is crowded with enthusiastic spectators. That may seem a little odd, because the very first Indy 500 Mile Race won’t be held until next year.
But the folks here aren’t looking down at the racetrack, they are gazing upward, watching a 21-year-old sky cowboy named Walter Brookins coax his biplane into the blue at a foolhardy speed.
When Walter is almost a mile up his engine begins to sputter, so he just turns it off. The crowd gasps as the biplane turns downward in the direction of some farmland in the distance.
Sometimes I enjoy looking back at newspapers from a century ago, to see how much life has changed.
And maybe more to the point, to smile at the things that once bedazzled us.
Recently, I saw a grainy old photo of a biplane on an Indy nostalgia site. That lured me down a research rabbit hole and I only emerged four days later, when I smelled pizza.
The Motor Speedway was hosting a 1910 Aviation Week, a very early competition for “aeroplanes,” these newfangled gadgets that most people had never even seen before.
Young Walter was eager to impress his employers, two guys named Wilbur and Orville Wright, who were in the Indy audience. Keep in mind, this was a mere seven years after the famous brothers made the first sustained aeroplane flight, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
Flying was a brand spanking new thing.
In those early days, nearly every time someone went up in one of the winged contraptions, some new record ended up being set.
Earlier that month, it made headlines when three aeroplanes were in the sky together, over Long Island. Three! And you could see them all at once!
A few weeks before that, Belgian aviator Daniel Kenet set a new world record for flying with a passenger, remaining aloft for two hours and 50 minutes. Kenet broke a record set in 1909 by Orville Wright, who had kept a passenger up in the sky for one hour and 35 minutes.
And here in Indianapolis, just a few days before he switched off his engine in front of shocked spectators, Walter Brookins had set a world record for altitude, taking his aeroplane to a breathtaking height of - be prepared to gasp - 4,384 feet!
(Walter Brookins, ready for takeoff on record-breaking ascent in Indianapolis, 1910)
The day-by-day accounts of Walter’s Indy exploits that week were poetic. One newspaper story said his biplane “appeared against the horizon like a giant hawk.”
During the Indianapolis competition, Wilbur Wright was quoted as saying of Walter, “He is knocking all records silly! He’s going 40 miles an hour!”
Here are some things to know about Walter:
He learned to fly in March, three months before the June Aviation Week.
He flew solo after two and a half hours of lessons.
Oh, and, he had logged only 15 hours of flying time ahead of the Indy event.
(Crowds watch Walter Brookins in 1910)
When we left young Walter earlier in this story, he was heading toward earth, without benefit of an engine or propeller or parachute, as frightened onlookers, including his mother and father, watched.
A fleet of rescue vehicles left the racetrack in the direction where he was seen going down, at the same time countless drivers who had witnessed the spectacle from elsewhere in Indianapolis sped toward the site in search of burning wreckage and a crumpled body.
What they found, instead, was a relaxed Walter, smoking a cigarette and leaning against the biplane he had glided to a smooth landing in a wheat field near the County Poor Farm.
A gun-toting county employee, guarding the wheat crop, had watched the landing, witnessing a scene he probably dined out on for the rest of his life.
Walter had just beaten his own altitude record, this time reaching the dizzying height of 4,939 feet.
(Walter Brookins)
Don’t bother memorizing that figure, though. Three weeks later, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Walter would become the first human to reach an altitude of one mile.
Think about that. Flying 40 miles an hour and climbing one mile above the earth was enough to amaze the world back in 1910.
Folks, this is your captain speaking. We’ve reached our cruising altitude of 35,000 feet, with a ground speed of 550 miles an hour. Thanks for flying with us today. Our beverage service will begin soon, so relax and enjoy living in the year 2025…
Flying is the second greatest thrill known to man. Landing is the first.
Wonderful stuff. I share your enthusiasm for what must have been the headiest of times in aviation history. (That photo of Brookins at the contols of the Wright plane is amazing. It looks as though he's sitting in the rather flimsy frame of an old garden shed with his foot on a random piece of battening...) I'm slightly puzzled, though, that his life, at least as reported, seems to have been a couple of amazing years, (1910 and 1911) when he thrilled tens of thousands with his antics...and then he died - in 1953. What happened in between? I find it hard to believe that he achieved so much in his early twenties and then spent the next forty years doing largely nothing. If you have any leads on the rest of his life, please point me to them!