Word: channell
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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British artillerymen stationed at the summit of Langdon Stairs near Dover looked out to sea. They saw a snorting little tug-nothing unusual. But one keen-eyed soldier pointed to a tiny speck kicking up a faint spray. It must be another one of these channel swimmers...
That night all Deutschland-toasted the name of Ernst Vierkoetter, baker, he who had swum the English Channel in 12 hr. 42 min., thereby lowering Gertrude Ederle's record by 2 hr., beating the best male time by 4 hr. Only six days before, Herr Vierkoetter had battled waves and a blinding fog for ten hours, failed to reach the Dover cliffs. Even then people wondered of what stuff this man was made...
...Three hours later the Egyptian collapsed. The next afternoon the Englishman gave up one mile from the Shakespeare Cliffs at Dover. At 3:10 p. m. the daughter of the Vikings stumbled on the sands of Dover beach, collapsed. She was the first mother to swim the English Channel. Her time was an hour slower than Gertrude Ederle's. Mrs. Corson (nee Amelia Gade) revived, told the crowd around her: "I was determined to make it or go down. I have to make some money for my kids...
Next afternoon the English Channel was strewn with fog and a wrack of rain. Approaching Romney Marsh on the shore of Kent, a big new Farman Goliath passenger plane, belonging to the French Air Union, sent chills through its 13 passengers by groping low for its bearings, faltering as with engine trouble. Steering over the marsh toward the village of Hurst, the pilot struggled with his controls. A barn roof loomed underneath. The world tipped crazily, spinning around. Crash! A haystack flew at the shrieking passengers, then another, then the cabin crushed in upon them, everything upside down in pain...
...fortnight by Port Darwin, Cobham's first point of contact with the kangaroo continent (TIME, Aug. 16). The motors of his big De Havilland ship were examined, found in flawless condition after a month and a half of droning through all temperatures, humidities and aridities, from the English Channel, over the Dolomites, Syria and Arabia, the Indian Ocean, New South Wales-13,000 miles. Cobham planned to relax for a day or two, then fly home again. Object: to prove that airplanes can traverse the most hazardous, inaccessible arcs of the globe...