Harriet Quimby: An Intrepid Pioneer for Women’s Aviation
MI – Whenever we think of the great Pioneers of Women’s Aviation, we think of people like Amelia Earhart. Less is known about Harriet Quimby, one of the world’s first female Aviators, yet she paved the way for women’s rights and aviation. As said by Don Dahler, an award-winning Journalist who wrote a book about Quimby, she was daring and fearless. Having grown up in “the wilds of Michigan,” Dahler contends that Quimby’s harsh upbringing was paramount to forming her fierce character and eventual success. Working from sunup to sundown along Lake Michigan came with significant perils in these early days, from snakes to blood-sucking mosquitos and hungry bears. Who would Harriet Quimby have become if she had led a more comfortable early life?
Harriet Quimby was, in every sense, “a Renaissance woman.” The first woman to earn a pilot’s license in a male-dominated industry and the first woman to fly the English Channel, a daring feat that killed many brave enough to attempt it. A screenwriter for D.W. Griffith, “the creator of modern cinema,” one of the first journalists to start using a typewriter and one of the first women to drive and own a car. Quimby, at one point, managed to talk her way into a race car one day, with top speeds reaching 100mph; this was a bold undertaking when you consider automobiles in the early 20th century typically went 8-10 miles an hour.
Quimby’s somber demise came at the hands of the sport she had loved her entire life. She crashed in Boston while attempting to break a record at the Squantum Boston Meet. At that time, Quimby had been experimenting with a new class of plane, a two-seater designed for military use. However, she found that the aircraft became dangerously unstable if the weight in the backseat shifted. The day before she planned to break the record, she wanted to go on a practice flight. The event organizer, William Willard, expressed great enthusiasm about going up with her. After a brief coin toss with his son, William climbed in the plane’s back seat and prepared for flight. Not much is known about the events that transpired that ultimately led to the crash. The leading theory is Quimby hit turbulent weather while Willard was off-center in the back, causing him to fall out of the plane. As Dahler discusses in an interview, “once Harriet lost the ballast of his weight in the back of the plane, there was no way she could control it.” Quimby was a hero of early aviation and an incredibly skilled aviator. But as we often find, when one pushes the limits, sometimes the limits push right back.