A (tiny) recording of Amelia Earhart’s 1932 London speech, played for the first time

When Amelia Earhart gave a speech in London on May 22, 1932, she told a funny, scary, death-defying story about how she got there — by flying solo nonstop across the Atlantic, landing the day before. She was the first woman to do so, the second human being to do so, and it was five years (to the day) after Charles Lindbergh pioneered the feat. “Something happened which had never happened before in my 12 years of flying, that is, the altimeter, the instrument required to register altitude — height above ground — failed,” she said of her 15-hour flight. “The hand swung around the dial in such a manner that I knew it was out of commission for the rest of the night.” When her memoir, “The Fun of It,” came out a few months later, her publisher (who was also her husband and promoter, George Putnam) threw in a nifty promotional gimmick: a tiny 78 rpm record of a snippet of that speech, tucked inside the back cover. A little over nine decades later, Amanda Zimmerman, a reference specialist in the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division, opened a first-edition copy of “Fun,” and there, still nestled…

Read full article on Library of Congress Blogs →