In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

4 ARRAYS
achieved the highest altitude in the history of aviation (39,588 feet),
describes the inability of the human body and the human mind to
perceive an aircraft's speed (which normally goes up to around a hundred
miles per hour) while looking out of the airplane: "You have no clear
picture of the speed at which you're moving in an airplane, unless you
take a look at one of the gauges. There are no indications by which you
can measure the speed, because you're passing through nothing but air."
The privileged experience of the pilot is not speed but the bird's-eye view
of land and sea: "One could eventually map the entire United States
through a series of high-altitude flights. Flying over Dayton at an altitude
of 3,000 feet or more, a pilot can look left and right: 100 miles to the
west is Indianapolis, 73 miles to the north is Columbus, and 57 miles to
the south is Cincinnati. At this distance, the cities become mere clouds
of smoke." [see Roof Gardens, Center = Periphery (Infinitude)] In passionately
gendered words, the pilots, many of whom are flying aces from
the Great War, often interpret the altitude which they are able to reach
as a sign of their potential military superiority: "The man who occupies
the higher position and who forces his adversary down has the advantage."
Airplanes intensify the effect of any kind of action or event, and they
therefore emerge as standard elements within many different genres of
narrative. On September 18 Caras y Caretas publishes a report, with
photographs, on the kidnapping of two boys from their school at Buenos
Aires. Allegedly, for a price of 4,000 pesos, they have been taken in a
Junkers plane to Rio Grande in Brazil, where their father is living. The
narrator's sympathy is with the technologically minded kidnapper, Federico
Ernesto Meier, "the father who went straight to the root of his
lawsuit against his wife, pulling the two children out of the school where
they were studying, and moving them out of the country." For no obvious
reason, the boxing gloves for the world heavyweight championship
fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney [see Boxing] are brought
to Philadelphia by airplane ("Gloves for Big Bout Arrive by Air Mail,"
New York Times, September 21). With even less practical necessity, Gene
Tunney, the challenger, travels by air from his training camp in
Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia, where the fight is to be held,
covering the distance in under ninety minutes (New York Times, September
23). This addition to the epic of a boxing match contains further
colorful details: "Gene traveled in a red Curtiss Oriole plane, piloted by