FIFTY THOUSAND PEOPLE WERE at the marina on the edge of San Francisco Bay, staring up in rigid fascination as Lincoln Beachey, his plane horrifyingly shorn of it wings, fell like Icarus from the winter sky. Beachey would have enjoyed their sudden silence. He often said they only came to see him die.

Lincoln Beachey was the hottest flier and the biggest showoff in the world. He had floated around the Washington Monument in a wind-tossed dirigible, circled above a crowded bullring in Mexico City, and landed a fifty-two-foot cigar-shaped lemon-yellow “rubber cow” smack in the middle of Manhattan’s Battery Park during the Tuesday lunch hour, later impaling the explosive and foul-smelling gasbag on the spike of a harbor buoy in the East River. The self-same Lincoln Beachey, after learning to pilot heavier-than-air machines, had crash-landed his aircraft on parked cars, millponds, sand dunes, frozen rivers, and—most disastrously—a row of spectators perched on the ridge pole of a tent.

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