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13, as was the slip of paper on which he first registered for the Blériot school. Ovington, like Hugh Robinson and Matilde Moisant, considered thirteen a lucky number. He went aloft for the first time on January 20, by accident, and earned his brevet (license) after just eight lessons. Every morning he would sit in bed for fifteen minutes to practice, imagining that he was flying and teaching himself to recover from unexpected setbacks. Because no American flight schools existed, Ovington traveled to France in January 1911 and learned to fly at the Blériot school in Pau. Glenn Curtiss was there, along with his exhibition team (including Eugene Ely), but the fastest flying machines at the competition were French-made Blériot monoplanes. Ovington was self-employed as an electrical engineering consultant when he attended the Belmont International Aviation Tournament in October 1910 as a special correspondent for the New York Times. In that capacity, he befriended Glenn Curtiss, a motorcycle engine manufacturer who would become interested in flight in 1907. He was a founding member of the Federation of American Motorcyclists and became its president. Later he formed the Ovington Motor Company, manufacturing engines for motorcycles. He graduated in 1904 and formed a company that made medical devices, including x-ray machines. Wanting to complete his formal education, Ovington enrolled at Boston Tech (now MIT) at the age of twenty, competing on the track team as he pursued his engineering degree. An inveterate tinkerer and inventor, he received a number of patents, most notably co-inventing a high-frequency coil based on the ideas of Nikola Tesla. Ovington left school and moved to New York, where he took a job as an engineering assistant to Thomas Edison. He was sixteen when his father, a dealer in china and bronze, died. It provides his written authorization to make the delivery.Įarle Lewis Ovington, born in 1879 in Chicago, showed a keen interest in electricity as a young boy. One of the air mail letters is addressed to Ovington himself. The postmaster of Mineola, New York, collects the scattered mail and brings it to his post office for processing. He flies three miles across Long Island, balancing the sack on his knees before dropping it to the ground, where it bursts open. On several previous occasions, individual notes and letters have been carried by aviators, but today Ovington completes the country’s first scheduled air mail delivery. Fifteen pounds of posted letters and cards are put into a sack that is handed to independent aviator Earle Ovington, sworn by Hitchcock “to defend the mails” as the country’s first Aeroplane Mail Carrier. Hitchcock, a canvas tent is erected on the grounds of the Nassau Boulevard International Aviation Meet, officially “Aeroplane Station No.
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