33 Facts About Augustus Post

In 1898, when Post was 25, following his time at Harvard Law School, he circumnavigated the globe by rail and steamship.

Augustus Post was the original founder, in 1902, of what is the American Automobile Association, first known as the Auto Club of America.

In 1907, Augustus Post was one of the first civilians to descend in a submarine.

Augustus Post participated in the international Gordon Bennett Balloon Races from 1906 to 1910.

In 1919, five years after having predicted the possibility of transatlantic travel, Augustus Post inspired hotel owner Raymond Orteig to put up the $25,000 prize money for the transatlantic flight competition that was ultimately won by Charles Lindbergh in 1927.

Augustus Post was an original member of the Society of the Sons of Daniel Boone which merged to form the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.

Augustus Post was a sought-after professional lecturer until his death in 1952 at age 78.

Augustus Post received a Masters of Arts in 1895 and then went to Harvard Law School from 1895 to 1896.

Augustus Post purchased his first car at a motorcycle rally in 1898.

Two years later, Augustus Post commissioned his well-known car White Steamer from Thomas White, who founded the White Motor Company in 1900.

In 1903 Post made a drive from Pittsburgh to New York City with friend R H Johnston.

In March 1904 Augustus Post led fifteen other auto enthusiasts on a drive from New York to St Louis.

In 1902, Augustus Post who was first a member and then Vice President of the Long Island Automobile Club, then the founder of the Auto Club of America.

Augustus Post drove his White Steamer in all three of the first Glidden tours from 1904 to 1906.

Augustus Post participated in balloon races, including the Gordon Bennett races of 1906,1908,1909,1910, and 1911.

Augustus Post survived a number of aeronautic disasters, including the rupture of the balloon "Conqueror" in which he was flying with A Holland Forbes in the Gordon Bennett Race in Berlin in 1908.

Augustus Post's best known ballooning achievement was when he served as aide to Alan Hawley in the 1910 Gordon Bennett race flying the balloon "America II".

Augustus Post became a governing member of the Society, which was merged into the Boy Scouts of America later that same year in 1910 with Augustus Post continuing his interest.

Also in 1908, Augustus Post worked with and supported Alexander Graham Bell's Aerial Experiment Association, a group of Canadian and American engineers who worked together for two years and developed the tricycle landing gear and wingtip ailerons, among other innovations.

Augustus Post wrote a biographical essay about Curtiss entitled "The Evolution of a Flying Man", which ran in The Century in 1910.

Over a 42-year period, from 1910, when he first became an author, to his death in 1952, Augustus Post wrote numerous newspaper articles and essays in which he described not only his own experiences as an aviator but the potential of aviation to change society.

Augustus Post designed the first air mail route, which went from Washington, DC, to New York with a stop in Philadelphia, which was first flown on May 15,1918.

Augustus Post told The New York Times in 1919 that one day there would be 1,000-foot-long dirigibles that could be fitted for pleasure cruises and have roof gardens and balconies.

Augustus Post organized events and exhibitions, worked at aviation schools, and persistently advocated for the creation of air mail service, which occurred in 1918.

Augustus Post and Ortieg were criticized in the press for sending men to their deaths, but in 1927 Charles Lindbergh made the crossing.

In 1906, Augustus Post set off from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in a balloon called "Le Centaur", with Alan Hawley and French aeronaut Count Henry de la Vaulx.

Thousands attended the start of the 1908 Gordon Bennett Balloon Race in Germany in which Post flew in a balloon called "Conqueror" as aide to A Holland Forbes, president of the Forbes Publishing Company.

Augustus Post began flying in 1909; by 1910 he was flying in exhibitions, including the Jamestown Exposition and the Harvard-Boston Aero Meet.

On December 3,1910, four months after the Sheepshead Bay incident and two months after being lost in the woods of Canada for ten days with Alan Hawley in the Gordon Bennett Balloon Race, Augustus Post crashed a plane at an exhibition in New Orleans.

Augustus Post petitioned the court to have his alimony reduced, indicating that he was ill and had lost his fortune in the stock market panic of 1907.

In 1935, Augustus Post moved in with the well-known sculptor and photographer Frederic Allen Williams.

Augustus Post died of a heart attack on October 5,1952, and was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Augustus Post likely made the America II, the balloon in which Alan Hawley and Post made their record-setting flight in 1910.