AMELIA EARHART ACCOMPLISHED a lot during her 39 years of life, but she’s remembered most for vanishing on July 2, 1937, while attempting to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe. And that doesn’t seem fair to journalist and author Rachel Hartigan, whose book, Lost: Amelia Earhart’s Three Mysterious Deaths and One Extraordinary Life, discusses the three main theories about what became of her and her navigator Fred Noonan.
What is universally agreed upon is that the pair somehow lost their way between New Guinea and Howland Island, a speck in the Pacific Ocean about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. What happened then is the big question, but the most popular hypotheses are that they ran out of fuel and ditched in the ocean, landed on an island and eventually died there, or were forced down by the Japanese and died in prison.
But in her work, Hartigan also focuses on what often gets short shrift—namely, the notable things Earhart did before her last flight. “I’d like people to remember her as a real person and not just this perfect icon,” Hartigan says.
One of the most interesting aspects of her career, especially to Hoosiers, is the tight connection she developed with Purdue University. It began in 1934 when Purdue president Edward C. Elliott caught a speech by Earhart in New York City. He offered her a dual role straightaway: a visiting professorship and consultantship at the school’s Department of Aeronautical Engineering and a career counselor position in the Office of the Dean of Women. Earhart was big on wearing pants, which Purdue’s female students weren’t allowed to do. When those disgruntled students asked the dean of women, Dorothy Stratton, why Earhart could sport trousers but they couldn’t, Stratton allegedly replied that they could too—once they flew solo to Europe.
Earhart kept up a busy flying schedule but was on campus intermittently from 1935 to 1937. And the school played a central role in her final days and in the riddle of her disappearance. The ill-fated expedition that claimed her and Noonan’s lives was planned at the Purdue campus, and, in fact, the university paid for the top-of-the-line Lockheed 10E Electra that they flew.
“She and her husband, George Palmer Putnam, who was a pretty aggressive publicist, convinced the people at Purdue that it would be good for them to have that plane for scientific study,” Hartigan says. The pair dubbed it “the flying laboratory” to underscore its value to Purdue. “But first, they needed to take it on this around-the-world flight … which would have a lot of publicity value.” That it did, though obviously not in the way anyone involved would have liked.
Later this year, the Purdue Research Institute will partner with the Archeological Legacy Institute on an expedition to Nikumaroro, a coral atoll roughly 350 miles southeast of Earhart’s intended destination, to investigate the Taraia Object, a visual anomaly located in a lagoon discovered through satellite imagery, to determine whether it’s a plane. But for now, almost a century after her disappearance, Purdue’s most famous visiting professor remains both an inspiration and one of history’s biggest mysteries.
Timeline of Amelia Earhart
1897: Earhart is born in Atchison, Kansas, on July 24.
1920: She takes her first airplane ride and is immediately hooked on flying.
1921: She obtains a pilot license.
1923: She becomes only the 16th woman to receive an international pilot license through the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.
1928: She flies as a passenger across the Atlantic to Europe, the first woman to do so.
1932: She becomes the first woman (and second person, after Charles Lindbergh) to fly solo, nonstop, across the Atlantic Ocean; receives the Distinguished Flying Cross.
1933: She launches a “functional fashion” line including garments made of parachute silk and trousers for women, which at the time were controversial.
1935–37: She’s employed by Purdue University.
1937: Earhart disappears over the Pacific, inspiring theories debated to this day.
