'What a woman can do': Ruth Law's record-breaking long-distance flight landed in Hornell

On Nov. 19, 1916, Ruth Law climbed into her already-obsolete Curtiss pusher biplane and took off from Chicago. Six hours (and 590 miles) later she touched down at the fairgrounds in Hornell, shattering every American record for long-distance flight, and every world record for distance flights by a woman.

After servicing the airplane she flew on until she was benighted at Binghamton. The next day she reached her destination of New York City, where she had a contract to fly exhibitions to celebrate the first illumination of the Statue of Liberty.

Ruth took her first flying lesson in 1912 -- the day she watched Harriet Quimby and William Willard fall to their deaths when their airplane suddenly inverted. She quickly became a much-demanded exhibition pilot, using a Wright biplane.

She later decided she needed a superior, more maneuverable aircraft, which meant a Curtiss, and came to Hammondsport to buy one. But many manufacturers had their own pilot control systems in those days, and she didn’t want to take the time to retrain. So she hired Curtiss men to work after hours on their own time retrofitting the Curtiss airplane with Wright controls (two large levers, one for each hand). For acclimation to her new aircraft, she made test flights from the ice on Keuka Lake.

The airplane had no cockpit, which made a six-hour flight in November challenging (to say the least!). Besides rigging up a screen to cover her from the knees down, Ruth donned a silk suit, a chamois suit, two suits of woolen underwear, an outer suit of soft leather, a woolen cap, an aviator’s woolen helmet, and a leather helmet.

This was very exciting locally, for by 1916 the Steuben County flying days were gone because of World War I. Thomas Brothers had moved from Bath to Ithaca, and Curtiss’s original Hammondsport plant, now the smallest in his empire, made only engines and would close right after the Armistice.

Ruth may have been satisfied, a year later, when her American distance record was broken – also by a woman (Katherine Stinson) flying a more up-to-date Curtiss airplane for 610 miles. The NEXT year, Stinson set a NEW American distance record of 783 miles, plus holding the Canadian record at 175. After the Great War Ruth Law herself set a new American altitude record, at 14,700 feet.

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A historic marker was recently erected near Hornell High School – the location of the Hornell fairground, where Ruth Law landed from Chicago in 1916. Her feat was so spectacular that even President Wilson (still only a tepid supporter of women’s suffrage) praised Ruth warmly, and attended a dinner in her honor.

Historian Harold Morehouse wrote, “She … was determined to prove that she, too, could do anything the men could, and did.” Admiral Peary proclaimed, “Miss Law’s splendid accomplishment has shone so that the whole world may read what a woman can do.”

-- Kirk House, of the Steuben County Historical Society, writes a history column appearing in The Corning Leader and The Spectator.

This article originally appeared on The Evening Tribune: 'What a woman can do': Ruth Law's record-breaking long-distance flight landed in Hornell