Broken Icarus: The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, the Golden Age of Aviation, and the Rise of Fascism by David Hanna
What was it like to believe in the future? Ninety years ago, people knew that, very soon, passengers would be going regularly and quickly across the Atlantic Ocean by air instead of by ship. How they would do it was an open question—the Italian aviator Italo Balbo envisioned fleets of sleek, shining seaplanes; the German Hugo Eckener predicted majestic zeppelins.
One way or another, though, routine air travel would come to be, and with it, a new state of affairs for humanity. “Closer international relations become unavoidable as the vague distances of an old era are measured on a new scale of relativity,” Charles Lindbergh told the League of Nations in 1930, speaking alongside Balbo and Eckener.
