A chip of steel flew off a piece of drilling equipment on a rig near Seminole, Oklahoma, and went into Wiley Post's left eye

A chip of steel flew off a piece of drilling equipment on a rig near Seminole, Oklahoma, and went into Wiley Post's left eye. Infection set in and the eye had to come out. He was twenty seven years old, a cotton farmer's son out of Van Zandt County with a grade school education, and he had just lost the one thing anybody would have told him a pilot cannot do without.

The state cut him a check for it that fall of 1926. One thousand six hundred and ninety eight dollars and twenty five cents, ordered against the drilling company's insurance carrier. He took every dollar of that settlement and bought a wrecked, second hand Canadian built biplane.

Then he set about learning to see again. He spent roughly two months at his uncle's place in southwest Texas doing almost nothing but practicing depth perception with the eye he had left, teaching himself to judge distance the way the rest of us do it with two. The government licensed him anyway after a probationary stretch of about seven hundred hours.

It is worth saying that he had been jumping out of airplanes before he had ever ridden in one. He heard a flying circus was coming through Wewoka and that their parachute man had been hurt in the previous show, so he volunteered, having never once been off the ground. He made better than a hundred jumps over the next two years, for as much as fifty dollars a show.

Here is what that eye's worth of money finally bought. In 1930 he won the nonstop derby from Los Angeles to Chicago in a hair over nine hours. In 1931 he flew around the world with an Australian navigator in eight days, fifteen hours and fifty one minutes. And in July of 1933 he did it again alone, in seven days, eighteen hours and forty nine minutes, cutting twenty one hours off his own record, sleeping in snatches while a prototype autopilot he had nicknamed Mechanical Mike held the airplane straight. Nobody matched that flight until 1947.

Two years later he flew Burbank to Cleveland, two thousand and thirty five miles in seven hours and nineteen minutes, at moments making a ground speed of three hundred and forty miles an hour in an airplane whose own top speed was a hundred and eighty five. He was riding a river of wind that nobody had figured out how to use yet. He did not discover the jet stream. He was the first man to fly up into it and put it to work.

He died that August in Alaska alongside Will Rogers, in a hybrid airplane he had put together himself out of two wrecks. Twelve thousand movie screens across the country went dark for two minutes.