Eleven months after Charles Lindbergh's solo Atlantic crossing in the custom-built Spirit of St. Louis, three men boarded ajunkers factory-made, all-metal airplane, the Bremen, and, despite fierce headwinds, fog, and sleet, became the first to fly across the ocean in the other direction. Teddy Fennelly, the biographer of the Bremen's Irish co-pilot, wrote that the flight "was considered impossible by the experts of the day-including Lindbergh." Although Lindbergh's trip from New York to Paris was the second nonstop eastward crossing (eight years after John Alcock and Arthur Brown made the first in an open-cockpit Vimy that landed them in an Irish bog) and the Bremen's crew achieved a first, the Bremen did not win the lasting fame of the Spirit. Lindbergh's airplane became a centerpiece at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum. Germany's premier science museum rejected the Bremen, and it bounced from one American museum to another, until finally, 70 years after its historic flight, it made its way back across the Atlantic to its namesake city. The story of the Bremen proves again that finding a place in history depends as much on timing and social context as it does on virtuosity.
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