The Secret Life of Charles Lindbergh

mqudsi

mqudsi

Mostly Harmless
Staff member
BBC has a really interesting article about Charles Lindbergh, the famed American pilot (the Lindbergh baby, anyone?) and some of his more well-kept secrets:

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Lindbergh's deranged quest for immortality

It seems he wasn't just a pilot but also an avid inventor, responsible for the creation of the cardiac-respiratory regulation machines (life support devices) amongst other things.

Here are some select quotes from the article:

Lindbergh hooked up with Alexis Carrel, a brilliant surgeon born in France but who worked in a laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan. Carrel - who was a mystic as well as a scientist - had already won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the transplantation of blood vessels. But his real dream was a future in which the human body would become, in Friedman's words, "a machine with constantly reparable or replaceable parts".
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Lindbergh created something that Carrel's team had singularly failed to: a perfusion pump that could keep a human organ alive outside of the body. It was called the "Model T" pump. In later years, Lindbergh's pump was further developed by others, eventually leading to the construction of the first heart-lung machine.
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He believed the world was split into superior and inferior beings, and hoped that science would allow the superior - which included himself and Lindbergh, of course - to dominate and eventually weed out the inferiors. He thought the planet was "encumbered" with people who "should be dead", including "the weak, the diseased, and the fools". Something like Lindbergh's pump was not intended to help the many, but the few.
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Friedman says Lindbergh considered himself a "superior being". "Let's not forget that, as a pilot, he felt he had escaped the chains of mortality. He had had a god-like experience. He flew amongst the clouds, often in a cockpit that was open to the elements. Flying was such a rare experience back then. In taking to the skies, he did something humans have dreamt of for centuries. So it is perhaps not surprising that he ended up trying to play god in a laboratory."
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Just though I'd share this interesting article given our recent discussions about inventors and the like.
 
He sounds like a interesting man but his idea about superior beings sounds a little like the final solution, I have heard many things about him being a great aeronautical engener he came up with a few ideas that lead to the airframe becoming much lighter buy much more sturdy an resistant to damage from errant winds an bird strike ect.
 
His ideas aren't specific to him though, a great number of "great" minds in the past have belonged to elitist clubs with ideas similar to that. It's actually scary when you read into the various different cults that have existed throughout history with similar aims of immortality and feelings of self-preferential treatment.

(btw, our Terry is a pilot - I'm sure he knows best about all these aeronautics ideas :wink:)
 
Cool terry might recognise the name Hans Mennborg relitive of mine (mums older sister married him) he was a aircraft designer for saab responsible for swedens first ejector seat, but to get back on topic...

Your right there is a lot of great people in history the belong to secret societies i know issac newton was a mason, funnily what classifies a secret society? I mean as kids we all formed little clubs with friends ect an we mostly had secrets (mostly where you stashed a comic book) but some of the practices that go on in the more grown up world are just weird like the whole blood stone oath (I am sure that has been phased out though in the masonic lodge). But in some fields like politics an some of the more interesting parts of science require connections that are formed in school's an private clubs.
 
Yes CG, I happened to have read the same article today. I knew nothing of that side of his history at all, just the first solo Atlantic flight stuff. (Not the first trans-Atlantic flight by the way, that was Alcock and Brown in 1919, much earlier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcock_and_Brown. He was the first solo)
The only other thing I'd seen about him (though I knew of his and Joe Kennedy's attempts to prevent the US helping Britain against Hitler - perhaps not from isolationism but nazi sympathies though ?)
was a documentary years ago, claiming that he was a man of violent temper, who was probably responsible for the disappearance of his own child, and let an innocent tramp go to the electric chair for a kidnapping that never happened !! )

Oh and not a big call for ejector seats in the kind of things I flew Saxon !
 
Yeah, I heard those rumors about the Lindbergh baby myself.. so many secrets throughout history!
 
I saw on a british show called QI there was a guy who wanted to fly solo an did so in a old bairly air worthy plane he claimed he "Flew the wrong way" who was that guy?
 
Thats the fella I would love to see a film or atleast a documentary about him, oh terry what did you fly? I am thinking either hobby pilot or short haul commercial?
 
Very interesting. But seeing how America was discovered when Christopher Colombus took a wrong turn.

Now its kind of difficult for them to make that kind of mistake. Maybe theyll go to Venus instead of Mars, they talk a wrong turn around the Earth :smile:
 
Strictly hobby Saxon, anomolous colour vision eliminated any prospect of professional flying. It's all been discussed elsewhere, so I won't bore everyone with repeats.
 
Sorry to here that terry, knowing how to fly must be so liberating I would love to know how to fly a helicopter I know how much skill that takes.
 
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