The former bar porter had come a long way since emigrating to the United States as a 12-year old from southwest France with 13 francs in his pocket. In 1882, Raymond Orteig joined an uncle living in Manhattan and found a job working at a bar in Wengler's Restaurant on William Street.
Orteig worked his way up through the hospitality ranks, becoming a waiter before joining Jean-Baptiste Martin as the maître d' at the Martin Hotel at 9th Street and University Place, in Greenwich Village. Martin, who had run a hotel in Panama, initially named his hotel the "Hotel de Panama" but, as this was around the same time as the failed French attempt to build the Panama Canal, the Hotel de Panama reminded potential clients of the Canal, who "associated it with fever and Spaniards, and neither were popular." Martin changed the name of the hotel in 1886 and billed it as New York's "only first-class French hotel," offering a café that appealed to the Bohemians of Greenwich Village, entertaining writers and artists such as Jean and Edouard de Reszke
When Baptiste decided to move to the greener pastures of Uptown Manhattan and open a restaurant in 1902, the 32-year old Orteig was in a financial place to assume the lease of the hotel, which he renamed the Hotel Lafayette, after the Marquis de Lafayette. People still referred to it as "Old Martin's." Visitors to the Lafayette enjoyed the tile floor and marble-topped tables, where they could be entertained by an orchestra, or the foreign newspapers, or even the board games provided by Orteig. He was a subscriber of the Brasserie Universelle - a Parisian weekly newspaper whose recipes Orteig would introduce to his diners on a regular basis.
World War I happened. American and French airmen alike gathered in the Lafayette to pass the time during the War, and in its aftermath as Europe figured out how to deal (harshly) with Germany, and it was here that Orteig became friendly with a number of them, gaining an interest in aviation.
American and French diplomacy was on the rocks. As President Woodrow Wilson tried to whip up support for his League of Nations - sort of a peer-mediation group for countries to work out their differences and a forerunner to the United Nations - France was extremely interested in wearing Germany out for killing over 1.3 million of their soldiers and tearing up their countryside.
Orteig had an idea to try to mend these diplomatic fences: a $25,000 prize to the first (Allied) aviator to fly non-stop from the New York to Paris, or vice versa. Orteig formally introduced this offer in a letter to Alan Ramsay Hawley, one of the early American aviators, Hawley was the first airplane passenger to fly from New York City to Washington, DC. A retired stockbroker, Hawley and his friend Augustus Post flew in a hot air balloon from St. Louis to...180 miles north of Quebec City, landing in the wilderness and hiking for three days until some fur trappers agreed to help them get back to civilization. Their 1,173-mile journey in a free balloon set an American record that stood for 95 years.
Post is an interesting figure in his own right. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Post bought the first automobile in New York City and subsequently received the first tickets in the city's history, one for driving through Central Park at 5mph and one for driving on the sidewalk while trying to park. Post founded what would become AAA, and was an original member of what would become the Boy Scouts of America. He built New York City's first parking garage (underneath the St. Nicholas Skating Rink at 66th Street and Columbus Circle), and performed on Broadway. It was Post who gave Orteig the idea to put up his prize for the first Transatlantic flight.
The $25,000 prize (equivalent to about $373,000 today), offered on May 22, 1919, came just a few weeks before British airmen John Alcock and Arthur Brown successfully flew a plane almost 1900 miles from Newfoundland to Ireland, collecting an earlier-awarded prize from the Daily Mail. It wasn't exactly an easy flight. Alcock and Brown almost clipped the trees upon take-off, an electric generator failed (cutting off the intercom through which the two could communicate, their radio communications, and their heating system), an exhaust pipe broke resulting in a terrifying sound so loud that they couldn't even yell at each other. Alcock and Brown flew through dense fog and a snowstorm, their instruments and carburetor iced up, the trim control broke which caused the plane to pitch forward as they used their fuel. Twice Alcock lost control of the plane, one of which resulted in a spiral dive from which Alcock recovered slightly before hitting the ocean nose-first. They landed in a bog near Clifden, Ireland, causing the plane to nose-over, but both men emerged unscathed. Arthur Brown drily noted that with better weather they could have flown to London. King George V knighted both men a few days later.
It would take a few years, however, for another serious attempt to be made at the Orteig Prize. Rene Fonck, by this point in his Age 32 season, was a legendary French fighter pilot who held the title of "the Allied Ace of Aces." The World War 1 veteran won the Legion d'honneur in 1917 before an incredible 1918 campaign when, over a bet of a bottle of champagne, Fonck shot down six German planes in a three-hour span on the afternoon of May 9 and went on to be a member of the French parliament from 1919-1924. To prepare to win the Orteig Prize, Fonck commissioned legendary helicopter and aircraft designer Igor Sikorsky to re-design his Sikorsky S-35 for the flight. On September 26, 1926 Fonck and three assistants took off for New York when the landing gear collapsed on take-off after hitting a sunken road that stretched across the runway. Fonck and his copilot survived, but the two other assistants died in the crash.
Medal of Honor recipient and polar explorer Richard Byrd (descendant of Virginians John Rolfe and Pocahontas) wanted to win the prize. Byrd planned the flight path of the U.S. Navy's historic May 1919 transatlantic flight and volunteered to attempt to win the Orteig Prize in 1921. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. - Secretary of the Navy - nixed the idea and instead assigned Byrd to the ZR-2 dirigible (blimp) which was going from Hull to Norfolk, UK. Byrd missed his train to the airship on the morning of its departure, which was lucky for him since the blimp broke apart in midair, killing 44 of the 49 crew onboard. In 1925 Byrd may or may not have completed the first aerial trip over the North Pole. We do know, however, that an Army Air Service Reserve Corps Lieutenant named Charles Lindbergh applied to be a pilot on Byrd's North Pole expedition, but his application was received too late.
Two years later, in 1927, Byrd announced he had the backing of department store magnate and future PGA founding member Rodman Wanamaker's American Trans-Oceanic Company (which unsuccessfully attempted to win the Daily Mail's prize in 1919) and was attempting to win the Orteig Prize. On a practice takeoff with legendary Dutch airplane designer Anthony "The Flying Dutchman" Fokker - who had been commissioned by Wanamaker to design the plane, and whose planes Germany used during World War 1, and whose planes bore his name throughout the 1920s and 1930s - his plane, the America, crashed. Byrd was slightly injured, the plane more so, which was taken in for repairs.
Another serious attempt was taking place backed by the American Legion. Stanton Hall Wooster and Noel Guy Davis, two United States Navy airmen (the US Air Force wouldn't be officially established until 1947) took off on April 26, 1927 with a heavy load of fuel when the American Legion (named after their benefactors) crashed on its nose in Virginia, killing both men.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Charles Eugene Jules Marie Nungesser - the third-highest ranking French ace pilot in World War 1 - and his navigator, a one-eyed pilot named Francois Coli, known for his long-distance flights pioneered by his 1919 double crossing of the Mediterranean, planned their attempt to win the Orteig Prize. Coli had been planning a transatlantic flight since 1923 but when an accident destroyed his plane and badly burned his flying partner Paul Tarascon. Tarascon lost his foot in a practice flight in 1911 but still went on to serve in both World War 1 and with the French Resistance in World War 2. Coli then joined Nungesser's attempt, both of whom disappeared over the Atlantic in l'Oiseau Blanc ("The White Bird" or "The White Dove") on May 8, 1927. The plane was never recovered. Maybe it crashed in the Atlantic, maybe it crashed in Maine. No one knows. Byrd told his team to suspend operations until their fate was known.
Meanwhile a 25-year old Minnesota U.S. Air Mail pilot named Charles Lindbergh was preparing his a, attempt, a solo flight backed by St. Louis bankers, in a single-engine plane appropriately called The Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh arrived at Long Island's Roosevelt Field (named after Teddy Roosevelt's youngest son, Quentin, was killed in air combat on July 14, 1918) in the middle of May. A few days later, at 7:52am on May 20, 1927, he took off. The following day Lindbergh arrived at Le Bourget Airport, just northwest of Paris, completing a solo flight that took 33 hours. The solo flight removed any clashing personality/ideology conflict, the single engine allowed for less weight and more fuel, Lindbergh saying, "I'd rather have extra gasoline than an extra man." He didn't carry a radio or a parachute to save weight. It worked.
A number of quality checks were required to verify Lindbergh's attempt: a sealed cylinder that measured atmospheric pressure to prove that the flight was one single leg, a measure of the remaining fuel (85 gallons) sealed in the tanks. 13 French officials, US Ambassador to France Myron Herrick (the only American ambassador to have a Parisian street named after him), Belgian Air Attaché Willy Coppens, and Lindbergh himself signed an official document to verify the effort. Lindbergh's 3,605-mile flight was acknowledged and approved as the world record for a non-stop flight. After 63 consecutive hours of being awake, Lindbergh went to bed.
Raymond Orteig was ecstatic. Orteig rushed to Paris from his vacation in Pau, France - about 500 miles in the south of France - as soon as his son telegrammed him of Lindbergh's departure - to congratulate Lindbergh at the American Embassy, eight years to the day after his prize offer to Alan Hawley. Orteig eventually awarded the purse to Lucky Lindy in New York.
The popularity of aviation sparked a period of innovation around the world. For Orteig, who died in 1939, he held Lindbergh's achievement close to his heart, hanging the American flag Lindbergh carried on his flight on the wall of the Café Lafayette. Two years after Orteig passed, one of Orteig's sons moved it out of the Cafe to a private room, probably because Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer. "Too many pros and cons," Orteig's son told the New York Times. "Particularly for a restaurant. The flag hung there since 1927 when Lindbergh was an aviator and everyone was proud of him. But now he's talking politics. And lately when people noticed the flag a discussion began."
That discussion probably centered around Lindbergh's involvement with the pro-Hitler "America First" movement. Nazis, man.
