Amelia Earhart： She Vanished (How They Died Episode 14)

Throughout the course of history, men and women have lived and died. Looking back from this place in time, it is clear that people long ago really did some really dumb things. And in order to understand how they died, we must first understand how they lived. These are the stories of how they died. During her lifetime, Amelia Earhart was a very well-known global celebrity. Her life story has been told as a motivational tale to inspire young girls to pursue their dreams. Amelia's sense of adventure and rough-and-tumble childhood has led many to characterize her as the quintessential tomboy. But the circumstances surrounding her disappearance at such an early age has propelled her to everlasting notoriety and caused many to speculate about what happened to this independent and courageous young woman. Amelia Mary Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas on July 24, 1897, in the home of her affluent maternal grandparents, Alfred and Amelia Otis. After the devastating loss of a previous child, Amelia ended up being the eldest daughter of Samuel Edwin Stanton Earhart and Amy Earhart. When Amelia was two years old, her sister Grace was born. Eventually, Amelia was given the nickname Mealy, and Grace was nicknamed Pidge. The girl's mother did not believe in raising her children to follow the conventional rules of society of being nice little girls, and she afforded the girls many freedoms despite the many protests from their maternal grandmother. A sense of adventure radiated from the Earhart children, so their mother dressed them in bloomers instead of dresses, and the sisters would set off daily to explore. The girls loved the outdoors and would spend hours climbing trees, sledding down hills, and collecting toads, worms, and bugs. Amelia's father, Edwin, had been working as a claims officer for the Rock Island Railroad. In 1907, he was transferred to Des Moines, Iowa. However, as the family's finances were insufficient, the Earhart sisters continued to live with their grandparents in Atchison while their parents moved to Des Moines. During this time, the girls received homeschooling from their governess, and Amelia became very fond of reading and would spend hours in the family's large library. At the age of 10, while visiting her parents, Amelia saw her first aircraft at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, but Amelia took one look at the unsteady aircraft and decided to go back to the merry-go-round. As the Earhart's finances were seeming to improve, the family was finally reunited in Des Moines. The Earhart sisters were enrolled in public school, and Amelia, now age 12, entered 7th grade. But it soon became apparent that Edwin had a drinking problem. Five years later, he was forced to retire. It was around this time that Amelia's maternal grandmother passed away suddenly. The Otis house was auctioned off along with all of its contents, leaving a small inheritance in a trust and a young Amelia heartbroken. She would later describe this event as the end of her childhood. After her father had failed attempts of finding employment and constant moving, her mother took the girls to Chicago where they lived with friends. Amelia graduated from Chicago's Hyde Park High School in 1916 and was aspiring to a bright future career. She was interested in the pioneering women who had become successful in the male-dominated careers, including film direction, law, advertising, and mechanical engineering. She began junior college at a school in Rydell, Pennsylvania, but unfortunately did not complete the program. During the Christmas of 1917, while visiting her sister in Toronto, Amelia saw the wounded soldiers returning from World War I and decided that she wanted to help. Amelia was trained as a nurse's aide from the Red Cross and began work with the Voluntary Aid Detachment at Spadina Military Hospital. When the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic reached Toronto, Amelia contracted pneumonia and maxillary sinusitis and ended up becoming a patient herself. As this was a time before antibiotics, Amelia suffered greatly from the pain and pressure in her sinuses. It took her nearly a year to recover, and she passed the time by reading, learning to play the banjo, and studying mechanics. Amelia would suffer from the chronic sinusitis for the rest of her life. In 1919, Amelia enrolled at Columbia University. However, she quit a year later to be with her parents, who had reunited in California. On December 28, 1920, in Long Beach, Amelia and her father visited an airfield where Amelia took a ride that would forever change her life. In her own words, By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly. Amelia was immediately determined to fly after that ten-minute flight. In order to pay for flying lessons, Amelia worked a variety of odd jobs, including photographer, truck driver, and stenographer at the local telephone company. Eventually, she managed to save the $1,000 she needed for flying lessons. Amelia had her first flying lesson on January 3, 1921 at Kinner Field near Long Beach. Amelia felt that as a female flyer, she needed to look the part. She purchased a leather jacket and slept in it for three nights in order to give the jacket a worn look. To complete the image of her transformation, she cut her hair short in the style of the other female flyers. Six months later, she purchased a second-hand Kinner Airster biplane that was painted bright yellow, which she named the Canary. In the fall of 1922, Earhart flew the Airster to an altitude of 14,000 feet and set a world record for female pilots. On May 15, 1923, Amelia Earhart became the 16th woman in the United States to be issued a pilot's license. However, the inheritance from her grandmother, which was now managed by her mother, was now exhausted, and Amelia knew that flying was becoming more costly than she could afford. So, she decided to part with her plane and set off in a new career direction. Following her parents' divorce in 1924, Amelia drove her mother from California to Boston, Massachusetts, where she returned to Columbia University for a few semesters. But with her inheritance all but gone, she was forced to leave school. She eventually found work as a teacher, then as a social worker. However, Amelia never gave up on her interest in aviation and became a member of the American Aeronautical Society's Boston Chapter. She worked as a sales representative for Kinner Aircraft in Boston and also wrote local newspaper columns promoting flying. She was quickly becoming a local celebrity and she developed plans for an organization devoted to female flyers. This organization became known as the 99s, and Amelia was their first president. After Charles Lindbergh completed a solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, socialite Amy Guest expressed interest in being the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. However, her family intervened and decided that the trip was too risky for her to take on, suggesting that they find another girl with the right image. And as it turned out, Amelia Earhart was that girl. The coordinators for the flight project interviewed Earhart and asked her to accompany pilot Wilmer Stultz and co-pilot and mechanic Lewis Gordon on the flight. They gave her the duty of keeping the flight log, but essentially she was just a passenger. After they landed, Amelia stated, Stultz did all the flying, had to, I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes. She then added, maybe someday I'll try it alone. When the Stultz, Gordon, and Earhart flight crew returned to the United States, they were greeted with a ticker tape parade, which was followed by a reception with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House. Amelia became an instant celebrity. At the time, Amelia had been engaged to a chemical engineer from Boston named Samuel Chapman, but in November of 1928, she broke off their engagement. During the same period of time, Amelia found herself spending much time with publisher George P. Putnam, known to everyone as GP. In 1929, Putnam divorced his wife and sought out the attentions of Earhart. He proposed to her six times before she finally accepted. They were married on February 7th, 1931, in a simple secret ceremony at Putnam's mother's house in Noack, Connecticut. Earhart's ideas on marriage were liberal for the time, and she believed in an equal partnership. In a letter delivered to Putnam on the day of the wedding, she wrote, I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. She even kept her maiden's name, which was quite progressive for the time. At 34 years old, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to make a nonstop solo transatlantic flight. This achievement earned her the United States Distinguished Flying Cross from Congress, the Cross of the Night from the Legion of Honor from the French government, and the gold medal of the National Geographic Society from President Herbert Hoover. As her notoriety grew, Amelia gained friendships with many people, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. The First Lady shared many of the same interests and passions as Earhart, especially causes for women. After taking flight with Earhart, the First Lady obtained a student flying permit. However, she never did learn to fly. Early in 1936, Earhart started planning a flight around the world. Even though there were others who had made flights around the world, Earhart's flight would be the longest at 29,000 miles because it would follow a path along the equator. With the financing provided by Purdue University, a Lockheed Electra 10E was built to Amelia's specifications, which included modifications to the fuselage and additional fuel tanks. A first attempt to circumnavigate the globe was made on March 17, 1937. Earhart, Fred Noonan, Harry Manning, and Paul Mance flew the first leg from Oakland, California to Honolulu, Hawaii. Unfortunately, there were several technical problems after the first part of the flight, leading the aircraft to be severely damaged. The flight was called off, and the aircraft was shipped by sea to the Lockheed Burbank facility for repairs. While the Electra was being repaired, Earhart and Putnam secured additional funds and prepared for a second attempt, this time flying west to east. On the second flight, Fred Noonan was Earhart's only crew member, as Harry Manning felt that there had been too many problems and delays and decided not to join the flight. This meant that Earhart and Noonan would make the trip without someone with expert knowledge of the radio system. On June 1, 1937, Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Oakland, California, this time on an eastbound flight around the world. They flew to Miami, then down to South America, across the Atlantic to Africa, then eastward to India and Southeast Asia. On June 29, they reached Leh, New Guinea. At this point, they were just 7,000 miles shy of reaching Oakland, California. Earhart and Noonan departed Leh bound for their next refueling stop, the tiny Howland Island. This was the last time they were seen alive. Earhart and Noonan lost radio contact with the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Atasca, which was anchored just off the coast of the island. When they hadn't reached their destination in time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized a massive two-week search for Earhart and Noonan, but sadly, they were never found. On July 19, 1937, Earhart and Noonan were declared lost at sea. GP refused to give up the search for his wife and financed a private search with local authorities of the nearby Pacific Islands and its waters, but no trace of the plane or its occupants were ever found. Eighteen months later, Earhart was declared dead. Over the years, scholars as well as aviation enthusiasts have suggested many theories as to what happened to Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. The official position from the U.S. government is that Earhart and Noonan crashed and sank into the Pacific Ocean, but there were numerous speculations regarding their disappearance. The crash and sink theory submits that Earhart's plane ran out of gas while she was in search of Howland Island, and she crashed into the open ocean. Expeditions over the last 15 years have attempted to locate the wreckage of the Electra on the seafloor near Howland Island, but modern technology and deep-sea robots have failed to turn up any clues about the crash site. The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, also known as TIGAR, alludes that Earhart and Noonan may have deviated from the course from Howland Island and landed instead some 350 miles to the southwest on Gardner Island, which was uninhabited at the time. A week after Earhart's disappearance, planes flew over the island. They spotted recent signs of inhabitants, but found no evidence of an airplane. They believe that Earhart and Noonan may have survived on the island as castaways for some time before dying there. Since 1988, several TIGAR expeditions to the island have turned up several artifacts to support this hypothesis, including a piece of plexiglass that may have come from the plane's window, a woman's shoe dating back to the 1930s, some improvised tools, and a 1930s woman's cosmetic jar, as well as bones that appear to be, but have not been proven, to be part of a human finger. Most recently, in August of 2019, Robert Ballard, who is known for locating the Titanic wreckage, led a search for Earhart's plane in the waters around Gardner Island. However, there were no signs of the Electra. So, what do you think happened to Amelia Earhart? Let me know in the comments below. I want to give a shout out to my subscriber, Catherine, who requested the story of Amelia Earhart. I really enjoyed learning about her life, and I still wonder what happened to this extraordinary woman. As always, thank you so much for watching. If you would like to hear more stories of how they died, please help my channel grow by giving this video a thumbs up, click that subscribe button, and share this video with your friends. Be sure to turn on the notifications so that you never miss a new story, and I will talk to you next time. Bye guys.