The Big Hop Quotes

“There were new manufacturing techniques, new machine tools, new analytical processes, new business structures. Giant corporations like Westinghouse acted as crucibles for innovation. Then they scaled it up for industrial production. The four-decade period before the Great War saw the development of electric lighting and power, synthetic drugs like aspirin and heroin, a chemical industry, artificial fibres, radio, the telephone, cinematography, mechanical data processing, the machine gun, motor vehicles, and the aeroplane. Countless other innovations we take for granted today first emerged in that short, vivid period.”
― David Rooney, The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future

“It was a world apart from the rest of British society, where everybody knew their place and kept to it. The flying community at Brooklands became a place where the gentry mixed with the proletariat. Women and men worked side by side. Teenagers could chat as equals with their elders. Britons rubbed shoulders with aviators from overseas. They all came together at the airfield’s café-restaurant, the Blue Bird, where they discussed their problems and pored over the latest copies of flying magazines while smoking cigarettes, eating bread and jam, and drinking endless cups of tea.”
― David Rooney, The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future

“It was May 1919. Hawker and Grieve were among seven aviators that summer who would take off from Newfoundland, intending to land on the shores of the British Isles without stopping along the way. The contest for the first nonstop transatlantic flight was sponsored by Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper. It was known to some, especially in the United States, as “the Big Hop.” Only two of the seven airmen would make it across successfully. The others would fail in their endeavours.”
― David Rooney, The Big Hop: The First Non-stop Flight Across the Atlantic Ocean and Into the Future