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The story of John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown’s 1919 journey across the Atlantic in a converted Vickers Vimy bomber—the first nonstop transatlantic flight—is a true one. What made you decide to use it as fictional material in this week’s story, “Transatlantic”? Oh, Lord, there are so many ways to answer this question. The quick, brutal version is that I began a novel a while ago, for which I was interested in the transatlantic journeys of two great Americans, Frederick Douglass, in 1845, and Senator George Mitchell in the nineteen-nineties.
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Guglielmo Marconi made the first transmission connecting Europe with North America here in 1907 with a 10,000 word memo. And the first non-stop transatlantic flight, a modified World War I Vickers Vimy bomber, crash-landed in a bog ... Read Post

This week, the magazine devotes itself the subject of journeys, from Patricia Marx’s piece about couch surfing to Colum McCann’s short story “Transatlantic.” In keeping with the theme, we draw your attention to “Lavatory... Read Post

Nowadays transatlantic flights are commonplace. In our grandparents' time, however, this wasn't the case. The first nonstop transatlantic flight was made in 1919 by British aviators Alcock and Brown. Zeppelin service began in 1928 f... Read Post