by a hotel owner named Raymond Orteig. The offer was this: the first aviator to fly nonstop from New York to Paris would receive 25,000 dollars. Nobody had succeeded by 1927, and Lindbergh decided he could do it if he had a suitable plane. He said, Why shouldnt I fly from New York to Paris? I have more than four years of aviation behind me and close to 2,000 hours in the air. Ive barnstormed over half of forty-eight states. Ive flown my mail thought the worst of nights. He arranged for nine St. Louis businessmen (Harold M. Bixby, Harry Hall Knight, Harry F. Knight, Major A.B. Lambert, J.D. Wooster Lambert, Major William B. Robertson, E. Lansing Ray, and Earl C. Thompson) to help him finance his plane. He chose the company Ryan Airplanes and the Wright Aeronautical Company, in San Diego, to construct the plane which Lindbergh helped design. The final cost of the plane was 10,580 dollars and was completed on April 8, 1927. The plane was named "The Spirit of St. Louis". A transcontinental record was immediately set in a test run when Lindbergh flew from San Diego to New York City in twenty hours and twenty-one minutes. As he was getting on the plane nine days later to begin his journey, he was given a St. Christopher pendant by a school teacher name Katie Butler. May 20, 1927, at 7:51 a.m., Lindbergh started his thirty-three and one-half hour journey across the ocean. The Spirit was carrying 5,250lbs and had never before carried that much weight so there was much concern to whether it would affect the plane performance or not, but there were no problems. Will Rogers broadcast that day this quote: No attempt at jokes today; A...slim, tall, bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, where no human being has ever ventured before...if he is lost it will be the most universally regretted loss we ever had. The whole world was worried about this skinny kid from Little Falls, Minnesota. During the thirty-three a...
