Harry F. Guggenheim

And Wright's response to this proposal is not just, you know, a polite professional disagreement.

He writes to Harry Guggenheim and the art critic, uh, Aline Saarinen, with the rhetorical fire of like an Old Testament prophet.

He truly viewed the white paint as a violent intervention.

Wright calls white a devastating color under daylight.

Now, here is where it gets interesting.

In 1928, Harry Guggenheim, whose father Daniel had built a copper fortune and chosen to spend a significant portion of it advancing aviation in America, established something called the Full Flight Laboratory at Mitchel Field on Long Island, New York.

The mission was simple to state and ferociously hard to execute: develop the instruments, the procedures, and the training that would allow a pilot to fly safely in conditions that were currently killing pilots at an appalling rate.

Guggenheim recruited Doolittle to run the laboratory, and Doolittle assembled what was, for its time, a remarkable concentration of talent.

The work centered on three instruments.

The first was the Sperry Gyroscopic Horizon.

And that is apparently the genesis of Atlantic aviation, which is a great story I didn't know about, but he connected with the world.

And that was really Harry Guggenheim's idea.

And Harry thought that that would be the best thing that Charles could do to forward because that was his stated goal for flying across the Atlantic, was to show people that aviation was useful for commercial purposes.

And it had a massive impact that continues.