
For most of human history, flight was an impossible dream. In this short, the dizzying rise and fall of a pilot whose aeronautic feats changed aviation forever and turned chancy stunts into acrobatic mastery.
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Frank Marrero
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Narrator/Reporter
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Frank Marrero
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Jad Abumrad
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
Narrator/Reporter
Cut the camera.
Sam Kean
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Liberty, Liberty, Liberty Savings. Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.
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Jad Abumrad
Wait, you're listening. Okay.
Sam Kean
All right.
Jad Abumrad
Okay.
Sam Kean
All right.
Jad Abumrad
You're listening to Radiolab Lab Radio Lab shorts from wnyc. Yes, and npr. Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.
Robert Krulwich
And I'm Robert Krulwich.
Jad Abumrad
This is Radiolab, the podcast Lincoln beach.
Jump Rope Chant Singers
He thought it was a.
Jad Abumrad
Today on the podcast, we start off just for kicks in New York City.
Jump Rope Chant Singers
Lincoln beach, he thought it was a dream.
Lincoln Beachy (voice actor or quoted text)
Harlem with let's see.
Jump Rope Chant Singers
I'm Paige Capote 1 Trinise Jones. My name is Captain Martinez and I go to school in the CS203.
Jad Abumrad
Girls doing a little jump rope chant.
Jump Rope Chant Singers
Lincoln Beachy thought it was a dream to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down and down he fell. He thought he'd go to heaven, but he went to Lincoln Beachy thought it was a dream.
Jad Abumrad
So this is a story actually about the guy at the center of this chant. The guy who's being jump roped about. Name's Lincoln Beachy and he's someone I.
Robert Krulwich
Heard about from a friend of mine.
Sam Kean
Hello, my name is Sam Keane and.
Jad Abumrad
I'm a writer and then we met this guy.
Robert Krulwich
Hey, hey.
Frank Marrero
My name is Frank Marrero.
Robert Krulwich
And together they told us the story of the most famous man you've never.
Jump Rope Chant Singers
Heard of, Lincoln Beachy.
Jad Abumrad
What can you tell us about Lincoln Beachy? The early years.
Frank Marrero
He was, you know, he was born here in San Francisco.
Sam Kean
Kind of a short kid, sort of lonely, kind of chubby, emotional, you know. He wasn't exactly a popular kid, not someone you'd peg as a hero, but he was fearless.
Jad Abumrad
For instance, when he was about 10, this would be 1897, he was really into bicycles. And apparently he would launch himself off.
Frank Marrero
Fillmore Hill, which is, you know, if you've seen the streets of San Francisco and seen cars flying through the air, that's those kind of hills without breaks.
Robert Krulwich
Because what he really wanted to do, even as a little kid, is he wanted to fly.
Frank Marrero
Yeah.
Robert Krulwich
And when Lincoln was 18 years old, he met one of the pioneers of the duration.
Frank Marrero
And he got this young guy, Lincoln Beachey, to be his dirigible pilot.
Jad Abumrad
What is a dirigible?
Sam Kean
It's a big floating sack of hot air. That's a basic idea.
Frank Marrero
Okay.
Jad Abumrad
Sim says you could steer this thing sort of, because it was kind of an early blimp.
Sam Kean
Yeah.
Robert Krulwich
But for Beachy, just wasn't enough.
Sam Kean
He wanted to fly in a plane. Planes were the future.
Jad Abumrad
Keep in mind this was early 1900s.
Sam Kean
Less than 10 years after the Wright brothers flew their first flight. Planes were pretty primitive, basically like a flying bicycle, even.
Robert Krulwich
So people were getting really excited about aviation, so they were going to air shows.
Frank Marrero
They had every kind of flying machine that did and didn't work.
Robert Krulwich
And Beachy, he tracked down the guy who put together most of the really big air shows.
Frank Marrero
He says, hey, you know, I'm Lincoln Beachy. You know, I'm like, you know, really popular and cool and everything, and I'll be glad to fly for you. And he said, no, I don't think so. We don't need another pilot.
Robert Krulwich
But Beachy says, how about, do you.
Frank Marrero
Need a good mechanic? And so he got on as a mechanic.
Sam Kean
I have heard stories that he would sleep in a tent near the plane factory, and he would actually get up at dawn and sort of sneak into these planes so he could fly them before other people were around.
Jad Abumrad
And his big break came at a show in la, when one of the big time show pilots goes up, gets injured, and the organizer's like, oh, who.
Frank Marrero
Are we gonna get to show the rest of the planes? And Beachy says, oh, I'll do it.
Jad Abumrad
Bum. Bada dum.
Frank Marrero
So they sent poor Beachy up in this plane and got up to about 3,000ft and the motor stopped.
Robert Krulwich
Stopped?
Frank Marrero
Like just stopped? As in no going.
Jad Abumrad
So There he is, 3,000ft in the air.
Robert Krulwich
The plane naturally starts to drop down, down. And it's not just dropping, it's spinning.
Frank Marrero
Because when you stall, always one wing stalls first, and that throws you into a spin. No one has ever gotten out of this. In 1910, one in three flights ended in disaster because nobody had figured out how to get out of the Deadly Spiral.
Jad Abumrad
Because whenever happened, the pilot would try to do sensible things like turn the plane the opposite direction of the spiral.
Frank Marrero
Makes it worse, or try to pull up, makes it way worse.
Jad Abumrad
But Lincoln Beachey, in a split second, decides to do something totally odd.
Frank Marrero
He realized what he was gonna have to do is dive into it.
Robert Krulwich
In other words, turn into the spin and down.
Frank Marrero
It's kind of like running down a mountain, rocky path and tripping. And instead of putting your hands out, you put your hands behind your back and smile. You want to do what you think you don't want to do that. Of course. He came right out of it.
Robert Krulwich
Wait, he came right out of it, meaning he landed the plane?
Frank Marrero
Yeah. When you dive into the spin, when you do the absolute worst thing you can think of, then all the controls come back.
Jad Abumrad
So suddenly the plane just stopped spinning and he was able to land.
Frank Marrero
He just curls out of it, pulls out of it and lands and floats it down. And he said, I suddenly could feel.
Robert Krulwich
The airplane as though it was part of his body.
Frank Marrero
From that moment forward, aviation was never the same. He went bananas. When you go see an aerobatic show and you see them do all these fancy. This is. And that's. He invented them, the figure 8, the vertical drop, the dip of death. He was the first person to point his plane straight down and achieve terminal velocity. At the time, medical science said if you achieve terminal velocity, you would die from fear. He would dive out of the sky from thousands of feet, spinning at the ground, and at the last second, pull up and pick up a handkerchief with his wingtip. No.
Jad Abumrad
No way.
Frank Marrero
Oh, yes. He invented aerobatics.
Jad Abumrad
Pick up a handkerchief with his wing from where? The ground?
Frank Marrero
Yeah.
Jad Abumrad
That's crap.
Frank Marrero
There's no way. There's no way.
Robert Krulwich
Wait a second. Well, we may never know for sure because these things are wrapped within legends, within legends, clearly. But a lot of people saw wonderful things happen.
Frank Marrero
Everybody had recognized that this was nascent, this was new. The population in the United states was about 90 million then 17 million people saw him that one year alone.
Sam Kean
He was a pretty big deal.
Frank Marrero
He had a girlfriend in every major American city. I talked to people who watched him buy diamond engagement rings by the dozens. And he always had one in his vest pocket.
Sam Kean
Thomas Edison praised him. Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about him.
Frank Marrero
Railroads changed their schedules to follow him around the country.
Sam Kean
What Orville Wright called him the most wonderful aviator anyone has ever seen.
Robert Krulwich
People are gaga, and most gaga of all are pilots.
Frank Marrero
So many people are dying, imitating him. The city of San Diego considered doing an injunction, a legal injunction to bar him from flying.
Jad Abumrad
But for Beachy, nothing could stop him. For a while, at least, nothing could stop him until he mastered this one particular trick. The trick of all tricks.
Robert Krulwich
Loop the loop.
Jad Abumrad
Yeah. What is that?
Sam Kean
Basically, it's like a corkscrew maneuver.
Jad Abumrad
Like on a roller coaster?
Sam Kean
Yeah, like exactly like a roller coaster where you go level, then you go upside down. You come back going the same way. Difficult thing to do. Humans aren't evolved to fly. It's very easy to lose your equilibrium, to get. Get screwed up on what's up, what's down.
Robert Krulwich
Plus, if you turn your plane upside down, one of these old planes, the.
Frank Marrero
Motor would go off.
Jad Abumrad
Why would the motor go off?
Frank Marrero
Because they hadn't figured out fluid mechanics of pumping the gas up into it. It all fell. It was by gravity.
Robert Krulwich
Still, Beachy thinks, I'm gonna do this thing.
Jad Abumrad
Can't stop me.
Robert Krulwich
But one day he's on a train.
Frank Marrero
He's gonna speak at the Olympic Club. And Charlie Walsh's wife. Now, Charlie Walsh is one of his dear friends. He just died two days before trying to do a Beachy, as dozens did, meaning trying to do a trick that Beachy did. It's called doing a Beachy. And so Charlie Walsh's wife sees him changing trains, and she crashes against him, saying, you killed Charlie. He's in the baggage car in a coffin.
Sam Kean
It really got to him.
Robert Krulwich
And it started him thinking about all the people who had died trying to imitate him.
Sam Kean
At one point, he said he felt like he had murdered some of these people. That's how hard he took this. And at that point, he decided he couldn't go on with it. He decided he had to retire.
Jad Abumrad
So he arrives at the Olympic Club and as everyone's cheering, steps up to.
Frank Marrero
The podium, comes up and says, you could not make me enter a plane again at the point of a revolver. I'm done.
Jad Abumrad
That's really what he said?
Frank Marrero
That's really what he said.
Jad Abumrad
Wow.
Robert Krulwich
But he added a kind of parting thought.
Lincoln Beachy (voice actor or quoted text)
I am tormented with the desire to loop the loop in the air. I know I can do it, but I know no one else can do it. And I know that if I ever go up into the air again, I will pull off this loop, the loop. And then many men will be taken by death and trying to do the same thing, because I have done it.
Frank Marrero
So he retires for three months.
Jad Abumrad
And that's not exactly quitting.
Robert Krulwich
Here's the thing. During those three months, the unthinkable. Somebody else does the loop de loop for the first time. Some Frenchman.
Sam Kean
He couldn't stand that someone else had looped the loop before him. And he decided he was going to be the best looper in the world. And it took him a few months of practice, but he did it. He eventually outdid the Frenchman. And he would start pulling, you know, four, five, six loops in a row.
Robert Krulwich
Again and again and again.
Frank Marrero
When he finally did the loop de loop, I want to read you what he wrote. The Silent Reaper of Souls. And I shook hands that day.
Lincoln Beachy (voice actor or quoted text)
Thousands of times we've engaged in a race among the clouds, plunging headlong into breathless flight, diving and circling with awful.
Frank Marrero
Speed through ethereal space.
Lincoln Beachy (voice actor or quoted text)
And many times when the dazzling sunlight has blinded my eyes and sudden darkness has numbed all my senses, I have imagined him close at my heels. On such occasions, I have defied him, but in so doing have experienced fright which I cannot explain today. The old fellow and I are pals.
Frank Marrero
Suffer me for a second while I wax philosophical.
Jad Abumrad
Do it.
Frank Marrero
Something happened in the psyche of humanity. You got to realize, for a hundred thousand years, millions upon millions of people have wanted to fly.
Jad Abumrad
And Frank believes that when people saw Beachy loop the loop so many times, so effortlessly, it was a turning point.
Frank Marrero
If you could do that, you were free in the air.
Jad Abumrad
We were no longer just managing to fly. Now we own the sky.
Robert Krulwich
1915. The World's Fair is going to be held that year in San Francisco, California, which is Beachy's hometown now.
Frank Marrero
At the time, he was working on a monoplane, a single wing airplane.
Robert Krulwich
It was a brand new thing. It hadn't been tested, but the fair.
Frank Marrero
Officials had seen it and they said, oh, would you show? Would you fly us your new one? He said, sure.
Robert Krulwich
So March 14th, Beachy takes this thing up for its very first flight.
Sam Kean
Some people say there are up to a quarter million people at the expo and most of them were watching him.
Frank Marrero
So he goes up above, over Alcatraz and 3,000ft above Alcatraz and starts diving and that structural metallurgical smarts hadn't been developed enough yet on single wing airplanes. And they both of his wings crack back.
Sam Kean
Someone said it sounded like a ship mass just snapping, cracking right in half.
Frank Marrero
He fell 3,000ft. They estimated him going at 250 miles an hour and hit the water right at the foot of Fillmore Hill.
Sam Kean
When a doctor looked at him later, he actually only had a broken leg from the impact. But what got him was he was strapped in pretty tightly and no matter how hard he struggled, he could not get out of the straps. Plane had him wrapped in so tightly it just drug him down to the bottom and he drowned in the bottom of San Francisco Bay. After that show, for 24 hours straight.
Robert Krulwich
You couldn't make a phone call in.
Sam Kean
San Francisco because so many people were calling in and out with news and rumors about what had happened to Lincoln Beachy. So he took down the entire San Francisco phone system.
Robert Krulwich
So why has he been erased from the common historical memory? I mean, you hear about flying aces from World War I, Eddie Rickenbacker and you hear about Charles Lindbergh, of course, and you hear about Amelia Earhart. Yeah, but you don't hear about Lincoln Peachey.
Frank Marrero
Well, after the war we had new heroes and he slipped into obscurity, except for one thing.
Sam Kean
It's a jump rope chant.
Jump Rope Chant Singers
Lincoln Beachy thought it was a dream.
Sam Kean
That, you know, little kids would say. It went. Lincoln Beechey thought it was a dream to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down and down he fell. Instead of going to heaven he went.
Jump Rope Chant Singers
To Link and Beachy thought it was a dream to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down and down he fell. He thought you gotta heaven but he went to Lincoln Beachy thought it was.
Additional Chant Singers
A dream to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down and down he fell. He thought he'd go to heaven but he went to Blinkin Beach. He thought it was a dream to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down and he fell. He thought he'd go to heaven but he went to Lincoln Beach. He thought it was a dream to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down and down he fell. He thought he'd go to heaven but he went to Lincoln Beach.
Jad Abumrad
Thanks to Sam Kean, author of the Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of Elements. And thanks to Frank Moreno Morero. Right.
Frank Marrero
My book is Lincoln the Man who owned the sky.
Robert Krulwich
And thanks to Nick Capodici for being our Lincoln Beachy.
Jad Abumrad
And lastly, we want to than again our jump ropers at CS200 here in Manhattan and this talented group of singers at the LaGuardia School of the Arts.
Frank Marrero
My name is Emma Moorcroft.
Jad Abumrad
Kelly Fthew, Mew, Julia Egan, Marielle Nazareno, Ruby Froome. And Ruby wrote and arranged what you're hearing.
Additional Chant Singers
Lincoln Beach. He thought it was a dream to go up to heaven in a flying machine. The machine broke down and down he fell. He thought he'd go to heaven, but he went too.
Jad Abumrad
Oh, and thank you to Robert Apostle at LaGuardia and Brenda Addison at CS200 for the hookups.
Robert Krulwich
And if you are be at all tantalized by the idea of a loop.
Jad Abumrad
Well, we have a whole hour long segment coming up next in our next podcast, all about loops.
Robert Krulwich
Loopy math, loopy biology, loopy neurology, loopy jokes coming your way.
Jad Abumrad
I'm Jad Abumrad.
Robert Krulwich
I'm Robert Klowicz.
Jad Abumrad
Thanks for listening.
Dallas (Radiolab Listener/Message Reader)
Message. Hey, I'm just gonna read for the credits. This is Dallas from Dallas. That's really my name and that's really where I'm from. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www. Excuse me. More information about Sloan@www.sloan.org. and this is me mentioning that I'm a Radiolab listener.
Sam Kean
Bye.
Dallas (Radiolab Listener/Message Reader)
End of message.
Host: Jad Abumrad, Robert Krulwich
Guests: Sam Kean (author), Frank Marrero (author)
Date: September 20, 2011
In this Radiolab short, Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich unravel the dazzling, nearly forgotten life of Lincoln Beachey, an early aviation daredevil whose aerobatic feats changed both public perception of flight and the course of aviation history. The episode winds through Beachey’s exploits, innovations in aerial stunts, and the tragic costs of pushing boundaries—both for himself and the many who tried to emulate him. It concludes by exploring why his fame faded, except in the echoes of a schoolyard jump rope chant.
[02:02 – 02:24]
[02:50 – 03:24]
[03:28 – 04:33]
[04:46 – 07:26]
[07:26 – 09:16]
[09:16 – 10:36]
[10:36 – 12:23]
[12:34 – 14:48]
[14:21 – 14:48]
[14:52 – End]
"He wasn't exactly a popular kid, not someone you'd peg as a hero, but he was fearless."
— Frank Marrero (03:01)
"When you do the absolute worst thing you can think of, then all the controls come back."
— Frank Marrero (06:15)
"He was the first person to point his plane straight down and achieve terminal velocity. At the time, medical science said if you achieve terminal velocity, you would die from fear."
— Frank Marrero (06:38)
"Railroads changed their schedules to follow him around the country."
— Frank Marrero (08:09)
"'You could not make me enter a plane again at the point of a revolver. I'm done.'"
— Lincoln Beachey (quoted by Frank Marrero, 10:05)
"On such occasions, I have defied him [Death], but in so doing have experienced fright which I cannot explain today. The old fellow and I are pals."
— Lincoln Beachey (quoted by Frank Marrero, 11:39)
"Something happened in the psyche of humanity...for a hundred thousand years, millions ... have wanted to fly."
— Frank Marrero (12:06)
"After the war we had new heroes and he slipped into obscurity, except for one thing."
— Frank Marrero (14:38)
The jump rope chant repeats throughout, capturing Beachey’s legend in playful yet haunting simplicity. (14:52 – End)
True to Radiolab’s signature, the episode blends playful curiosity with reflective depth. Complex history and technical explanations are interwoven with music, sound design, and the voices of children. The hosts’ amazement and affection for their subject create an inviting and reverent atmosphere.
This fascinating short captures the lost legacy of an early twentieth-century superstar, a man whose daring redefined what it means to dream—and to fly.