One Summer: America, 1927

$3 billion. Their personal wealth was put at something over $100 million – from almost nothing ten years earlier.
    While building their empire, they also quietly but significantly changed the world. At a place called Turkey Ridge outside Cleveland they built a new town from scratch and called it Shaker Heights. Shaker Heights was the first planned dormitory community in America, and as such it became the model on whichnearly all other suburbs were built. In like manner, the Union Terminal complex neatly anticipated the modern American shopping mall.
    Unfortunately, their empire was essentially an inverted triangle. If any part of it at the bottom failed, the whole mighty edifice would come tumbling down, and that is just what happened. Though they could have no idea of it at the time, the topping out of the Union Terminal complex on 18 August was in every sense the high point of their careers.
    When the Great Depression came they were desperately exposed. Their money was nearly all in railways and real estate – two of the most vulnerable places to put it – and they were grossly overextended in any case. They had bought Missouri Pacific stock at $101, but by the early 1930s it was trading at $1.50. They were unable to pay off bonds that came due or interest on loans. The Missouri Pacific and the Chicago & Eastern Illinois failed and brought the whole precarious enterprise down with them.
    In the end, nobody better personified the giddy recklessness and folie de grandeur of the 1920s than the Van Sweringens. The stress and disappointment proved too much for Mantis, who died of heart failure aged fifty-four in 1935. Oris sat with him for the last ninety minutes of his life. Mantis was conscious, but they didn’t exchange a word. Mantis’s estate was valued at $3,067.85, half of which consisted of seven horses. Lost without his brother, Oris died eleven months and ten days later of heart failure of his own. His estate was worth even less than his brother’s.
    They were buried in a shared grave in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery. The gravestone records their names and their dates of birth and death beneath a single word: ‘Brothers’.

C HAPTER 22
     

     
    THE SUCCESSFUL FLIGHTS across the ocean of the America , Columbia and Spirit of St Louis had a galvanizing, if not always entirely realistic, effect on expectations for the future of aviation.
    Almost at once people began to dream of ways of converting the summer’s heroics into practical actions. In Paris, Charles Levine briefly attracted the attention of reporters by announcing that he would launch a regular passenger airline service between America and Europe, and would invest $2 million of his own money in the venture. How he would safely convey passengers in both directions when no plane was yet capable of a successful westward crossing was a matter he failed to explain. As with so many Levine schemes, it was quickly forgotten.
    Edward R. Armstrong, a Canadian-born engineer, approached the problem from the opposite direction. Rather than try to increase the range and load-carrying capacity of planes, his idea was to cut the distances they needed to fly by building a string of floating landing fields – eight in all – at 350-mile intervals across the Atlantic. These ‘seadromes’ would each be 1,100 feet long, weigh 50,000 tons, and be anchored to the ocean floor by steel cables. All would have restaurants, gift shops, lounges and viewing decks. Some would have hotels. The cost of each platform would be $6million. A trip from New York to London, Armstrong calculated, could be done in about thirty hours.
    Armstrong formed the Armstrong Seadrome Development Company in 1927 and gradually secured financial backing. On 22 October 1929, he announced plans to begin work in sixty days. Unfortunately that was the week of the stock market crash and his financing fell apart. Armstrong continued for years to try to get his plan launched, reducing the number of proposed platforms to five and then three as planes became more powerful. Eventually, of course, they were not needed at all and his dream was never realized, but his seadromes did form the basis of modern offshore oil platforms. Armstrong died in 1955.
    Two million people a year sailed between Europe and America in the 1920s, so the potential market for air passengers was considerable. From our modern time-harried perspective, ocean crossings look glamorous and romantic, but they were also