“They call me the Master Birdman,” he said once, “but they pay to see me die.” He hated his audience. He loved his audience. He was bitter, contradictory, expansive, and fatalistic. Foremost in the first generation of daredevil pilots, he flew in a natty pin-striped suit with a two-carat diamond stickpin keeping his necktie in place. His fellow pilot Beck-with Havens, one of his very few close friends, described him as “a strange, strange man.” He was also, according to Orville Wright, who knew something about it, “the most wonderful flyer I ever saw and the greatest aviator of all.” He claimed to have flown for twenty million people—and he flew wide enough and far enough for that to be possible.

Lincoln Beachey was born in San Francisco in 1887. While still in his teens, he made his way east to Toledo, where he got a job in the balloon factory of a man named Charles Strobel. He wanted to fly, but Strobel refused to let him, so Beachey started spending his nights in the factory, sneaking out at dawn to take up the airships. After a few weeks of ghosting around over the sleeping town, he told Strobel what he had been doing, and demanded an aviator’s contract. He got it.

By 1905 he was the best in the business, and sometime in 1910 he decided to shift from airships to airplanes. It was a typically reckless Beachey decision; more than thirty pilots died that year trying to put their wood, wire, and canvas machines through paces beyond their capabilities. Impressed by his reputation as a balloonist, the Wright brothers offered to take him on as an exhibition flyer, but the money wasn’t good enough, so he went to Hammondsport, New York, where a gifted inventor named Glenn Curtiss was building airplanes. Curtiss gave him a tryout, but Beachey immediately wrecked the plane. “His big trouble,” his brother Hillery said, “was that he wanted to stick it right up into the air. There wasn’t enough power to do it. … He broke up several of Curtiss’ planes. … Curtiss was afraid to look—just turned away when he first saw him fly.” But Curtiss’ exhibition manager saw something in Beachey’s Sailings and browbeat Curtiss into sticking with the impetuous would-be pilot. It turned out to be the best publicity investment Curtiss ever made, for as soon as Beachey got the hang of handling an airplane, he flew like a drunken angel.

In an era when most people were awed just by the sight of a plane in the air, Beachey could make his primitive machine do almost anything. Bucking and twisting across a field, he would angle down to pick up a handkerchief off the ground with his wing tip. Then he would climb a mile up, cut his engine, and go into his “death dip,” a vertical dive that had women in the crowd fainting.

Beachey’s first summer’s