Amelia Earhart
1897 – 1939 · United States
Known for: First woman to fly solo across the Atlantic
“The most effective way to do it, is to do it.”
Biography
She saw her first plane at a state fair and was unimpressed; a decade later a ten-minute flight changed everything. Working as a truck driver and photographer to pay for lessons, Amelia Earhart became, in 1932, the first woman to fly the Atlantic alone, through storms, ice and a leaking fuel line, landing in an Irish pasture to a farmer's astonished "Have you flown far?"
She used the fame deliberately: founding an organisation for women pilots, lecturing tirelessly that "women must try to do things as men have tried." In 1937 she set out to circle the globe at the equator and vanished over the Pacific with navigator Fred Noonan, a mystery that has never let go of the world's imagination, and never dimmed what she proved before she disappeared.