Amelia Earhart: First Woman to Fly Alone Across the Atlantic

Amelia Earhart: First Woman to Fly Alone Across the Atlantic

Amelia Earhart was born in 1897 in Kansas. She was not a child of her times. Most American girls were taught to sit quietly and speak softly. They were not permitted to play ball or climb trees. Those activities were considered fun for boys. Amelia and her younger sister Muriel were lucky. Their parents believed all children needed physical activity to grow healthy and strong. Amelia and Muriel were very active girls. Other parents would not let their daughters play with Amelia and Muriel. When Amelia was preparing to enter a university, World War One began. And Amelia was shocked by the number of wounded soldiers sent home from the fighting in France. She decided she would be more useful as a nurse than as a student. So she joined the Red Cross. Amelia Earhart first became interested in flying while living in Toronto. She talked with many pilots who were treated at the soldiers’ hospital. She also spent time watching planes at a nearby military airfield. Flying seemed exciting. But the machinery - the plane itself - was exciting, too. After World War One ended, Amelia entered Columbia University in New York City. She studied medicine. After a year she went to California to visit her parents. During that trip, she took her first ride in an airplane. And when the plane landed, Amelia Earhart had a new goal in life. She would learn to fly. One of the world’s first female pilots, Neta Snook, taught Amelia to fly. It did not take long for Amelia to make her first flight by herself. She received her official pilot’s license in nineteen twenty. Then she wanted a plane of her own. She earned most of the money to buy it by working for a telephone company. Her first plane had two sets of wings, a biplane. On June 17, 1928, the plane left the eastern province of Newfoundland, Canada. The pilot and engine expert were men. The passenger was Amelia Earhart. The plane landed in Wales twenty hours and forty minutes later. For the first time, a woman had crossed the Atlantic Ocean by air. Amelia did not feel very important, because she had not flown the plane. But the public did not care. People on both sides of the Atlantic were excited to meet the tall brave girl with short hair and grey eyes. They organized parties and parades in her honour. Suddenly, she was famous. Amelia Earhart became the first lady of the air. She wrote a book about the flight. She made speeches about flying. And she continued to fly by herself across the United States and back. In the last years of the nineteen twenties, hundreds of record flights were made. A few were made by women. But no woman had flown across the Atlantic Ocean. She had become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean alone. Purdue University provided Amelia with a new all-metal, two-engine plane. It had so many instruments that she called it the “Flying Laboratory.” It was the best airplane in the world at that time. Amelia decided to use this plane to fly around the world. She wanted to go around the equator. It was a distance of forty-three thousand kilometers. No one had attempted to fly that way before. Amelia and three male crew members were to make the flight. However, a minor accident and weather conditions forced a change in plans. Three hours after leaving New Guinea, Amelia sent back a radio message. The messages began to warn of trouble. Fuel was getting low. They could not find Howland Island. They could not see any land at all. The radio signals got weaker and weaker. Then there was silence. American Navy ships and planes found nothing. Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were officially declared “lost at sea.”
( ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ b y Oscar Wilde was first published in Lippincott’s M onthly Magazine on June 20, 1890. Later, Wilde was asked to edit this version, and it was published again in April 1891. The story is often incorrectly called ‘The Portrait o f Dorian Gray’.) In his London studio, artist Basil Hallward is finishing his latest portrait of a young man. Although Lord Henry asks about the young man’s name, Basil keeps it a secret but later says that the subject of the portrait is Dorian Gray.
Lord Henry immediately begins to offer Dorian a lot of money. He wants Dorian to sell his soul. He explains to Dorian that he will stay as young as he looks in the portrait and instead of him his image in the portrait will become older. Dorian agrees because he is afraid to be old. He wishes he could stay young and beautiful. Since that time the portrait begins to live its own life. Lord Henry also tells Basil that if he burns the portrait Dorian will be killed. Dorian falls in love with a young actress, Sibyl Vane. She plays a different role at each night’s performance. Dorian likes her performance more than the actress herself. They want to get married. Lord Henry and Basil are very surprised. Happy Sibyl discusses her wedding with her family. Her mother does not have much money and she does not want her daughter to marry Dorian because she thinks he is poor. But Dorian is rich. One day Dorian attends Sibyl’s performance with Lord Henry and Basil, but the performance is terrible. Sibyl tells Dorian that she can no longer act well, because he has shown her a beautiful reality. Dorian is surprised by her poor acting. He tells her that he does not love her anymore, and he returns home. To his surprise, the face in his portrait becomes very cruel. He thinks that his wish to stay young is coming true, so he wants to be good so that both he and the portrait can remain young. So the next day he wants to apologize to Sibyl and marry her after all. However, he is too late: Sibyl dies at the theatre that night. Dorian first feels sad, but then he thinks that it is a wonderful entertainment and the last act of her play. Dorian and Lord Henry spend the evening at the opera. Basil arrives and says that Dorian has a moral problem. But Dorian does not think about Sibyl or her family; he wants to talk only of happy things. The next day, he moves his portrait to the attic, to which Dorian has the only key. Several years pass, and Dorian lives a life organised by Lord Henry. While the f ace in the portrait has turned ugly, Dorian stays young and beautiful. People say that Dorian is not a moral person, but he does not pay attention. Finally, when he is thirty-eight years old, Dorian shows the portrait to Basil, who asks Dorian to try to be good again. Instead, Dorian kills Basil and destroys his body. Six months later, while looking at the portrait, Dorian decides to damage it with the knife he used to kill Basil. Soon after, Dorian’s servants and a police officer find an old, ugly man lying dead on the floor in front of a portrait of a young and beautiful Dorian.