In 1926 an oilfield roughneck in Oklahoma took a metal splinter in his left eye and lost it. Seven years later, the same man flew around the world on his own in under eight days, and then went looking for the edge of the atmosphere.

Wiley Post had one eye, no formal education to speak of, and a habit of doing things nobody had done. He is the reason we know how to put a person in a pressure suit, and one of the first people to notice that there is a river of very fast air running around the top of the sky.

The eye, and the aeroplane that was not his

The accident settlement bought Post his first aircraft. It did not buy the Winnie Mae — that belonged to an Oklahoma oilman named F. C. Hall, who bought the Lockheed Vega in 1930, named it after his daughter, and hired Post to fly it. Only after the 1931 circumnavigation did Hall hand the aeroplane over to him.

Losing the eye cost him depth perception, which is a genuinely serious problem for a pilot judging a landing flare. He retrained himself to read distance from the relative size of familiar objects. It worked well enough that he then flew around the planet twice.

Doing it alone

The 1931 flight was a two-man job because somebody had to navigate. In 1933 Post removed the somebody and replaced him with hardware: a Sperry gyroscopic autopilot, which he nicknamed Mechanical Mike, and a prototype radio direction finder borrowed from the Army.

He left Floyd Bennett Field on 15 July 1933 and was back on the 22nd, having gone round the world alone in 7 days, 18 hours and 49 minutes — beating the time he and Gatty had set together, with one fewer person and one fewer set of eyes. It is fair to call it the first practical demonstration that automation could substitute for a crew member.

The suit

Post then wanted to fly high, where the air is thin and an aircraft goes faster for the same power. The Winnie Mae had a plywood monocoque fuselage that could not possibly be pressurised, so he did the obvious thing: pressurise the pilot instead.

Working with Russell S. Colley at B.F. Goodrich, he went through three suits. The first ruptured under test. The second had to be cut off him because he could not get out. The third worked: long underwear, an inner rubber bladder, an outer rubberised shell, and a bolted aluminium helmet with a faceplate he sealed at 17,000 feet, fed with liquid oxygen and held at seven pounds per square inch.

It is the direct ancestor of every space suit that followed. Post wore it into the stratosphere, well above 30,000 feet, and on 15 March 1935 he ran from Burbank to Cleveland — 2,035 miles in 7 hours 19 minutes, with the ground sliding past at times at 340 mph while his airspeed indicator read about 185.

He had climbed into the jet stream. Nobody had a name for it yet.

Alaska

In 1935 Post built himself a floatplane out of two other aeroplanes: the fuselage of a Lockheed Orion and the longer wings of a wrecked Lockheed Explorer. Lockheed declined to do the work, on the grounds that the two designs did not belong together. The floats he had ordered were late, so he fitted a set intended for a heavier aircraft, which made a nose-heavy machine more so.

On 15 August, flying with the humorist Will Rogers, he got lost in fog near Point Barrow and put down in a lagoon to ask the way. On the take-off that followed, the engine failed at very low altitude. The aeroplane went in nose-first and the right wing tore off. Both men were killed instantly.

Rogers had been the one to sum up the 1931 flight, in the way only he could.

The Winnie Mae was bought from Post’s widow by the Smithsonian in 1936 for $25,000. It is still there.

Newsreel footage of the Vega and the flights, from the Smithsonian’s own archive:

British Pathe on the 1933 solo attempt:

And contemporary coverage of the Alaska crash:

Sources: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Winnie Mae collection record and Time and Navigation gallery; Library of Congress.