The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh Read Online Free PDF Page A

acquired a lifetime infatuation with all things mechanical. The internal combustion engine began to exert “an irresistible pull” on the teenaged Eddie, and a desire to look under the hood of that Ford and find out what made it tick.
    Not far from home was a small bicycle shop that was in the process of converting into a garage and repair works for the newfangled automobile. Eddie accepted a job as cleanup boy at reduced wages of seventy-five cents a day. Back then, “horseless carriages,” as they were called, were powered by three types of engines—steam, which could be explosive; electric, which required constantly charged batteries; and the gasoline engine.
    Eddie learned to drive by parking the cars customers kept in the garage, which led to his first personal encounter with the vagaries of the internal combustion engine. One afternoon he was driving somebody’s one-cylinder Packard around the garage and neglected to check the oil. Suddenly the engine completely seized up. Eddie panicked, thinking he had ruined the automobile. He gingerly opened the hood, stared at the weird things inside, and deduced that the piston had stuck. He unbolted the crankshaft and, sure enough, the piston was stuck tight in the cylinder casing, which was dry as a bone. Eddie took a big gamble: he put a crowbar behind the connecting rod and levered with all his might. Instead of bending or breaking the connecting rod, to Eddie’s immense relief the piston finally broke loose. He poured a can of motor oil into the cylinder, turned the hand crank to work it around, reassembled the casing, and, presto, the car ran fine.
    Thus began what Rickenbacker described much later as some of his “happiest days.” His obsession with engines led him to an institution of higher learning, namely the International Correspondence School in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which offered a mail-order course in mechanical engineering, with emphasis on the automobile and the internal combustion engine. It was a tough curriculum presented at college level, and the first lesson nearly did him in. He had to learn how to study and, moreover, learn how to think.
    The bicycle-auto garage job lasted only eight or nine months before Eddie was ready to move on. He wanted to go where automobiles were actually made, and that turned out to be the Frayer Automotive Company, owned by Lee Frayer.
    In the days of the burgeoning automobile business after the turn of the century there were car manufacturing companies on nearly every city block—Columbus alone had more than forty. Each company made practically everything itself—frames, bodies, and engines and all their accoutrements: carburetors, cams, pins, axles, valves, rings, flywheels, rods, pistons, blowers, tanks, and so forth. Eddie’s first job at Frayer, like his previous one at the bicycle shop, was cleaning up the place, but that did not last for long. 4
    It soon became apparent to workmen, and then to their supervisors, that they had something special in young Eddie Rickenbacker, who had a gift, almost a prescient way with engines. An old Dutchman taught him how to build a carburetor, and Lee Frayer began to move him through the process. After carburetors, it was engine assembly, bearings, all the phases up to and including assembly of the chassis. One morning, months later, Frayer said to him, “Eddie, I want you to go into the engineering department now.” That was his brave new world—designing and setting specifications for automobiles.
    By the early 1900s there had arisen a great national interest in automobiles, and with them automobile racing. Americans were obsessed with speed (by 1906 the automobile record was approaching 100 miles per hour) and also morbidly fixated on the gruesome wrecks, which were all too frequent, and hardly a week went by during racing season that some young man’s life wasn’t snuffed out on the track. In that sense auto racing in the early twentieth century was not too far removed