Amelia Earhart, born July 24, 1897: “I knew that I had to fly.”

Born in Kansas on July 24, 1897, Amelia Earhart, took her first flight in 1920, and started working odd jobs to pay for flyingy lessons. Then, in 1923, she earned an international pilot’s license, becoming one of only 16 women in the world to have one.

Aviation in the 1920s was still new—after all, the Wright brothers’ first flight had just happened in 1903—and most pilots were men. Earhart wanted to change that and in 1931 became the first president of the Ninety-Nines, an organization of female pilots. The next year, no one would ever think of pilots as “just men” again.

Amelia graduates from Hyde Park High School in Chicago. She excels in science, only enrolling at Hyde Park after determining that it had the best science program in the area. However, she has trouble making friends — her yearbook caption reads, “A.E. — the girl in brown who walks alone.”

Earhart Music Mix: Amelia, Flying Over Water,Airplane,Airplane Woman. Child Of The Wild Blue Yonder, Fly Like An Eagle, Born To Fly, Little Wing, Fly Away,Take Me Ro The Pilot, Circle For A Landing, Learning To FlyShut Up And Get On The Plane

While in Toronto, she attends a flying exposition with a friend. A stunt pilot dives at Amelia and her friend — but Amelia stands her ground. She points to this incident as a personal awakening — “I did not understand it at the time, but I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by.” Amelia attended an air show on Long Beach with her father. She takes her first ride in an airplane. “By the time I had got two or three hundred feet off the ground, I knew I had to fly,” she recalled.

In 1932, Earhart took off from Newfoundland, Canada. Fifteen hours later, she landed in a cow pasture in Northern Ireland and became the first woman to fly by herself across the Atlantic Ocean. And she didn’t stop there. In 1935, she became the first person to fly solo across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans after she flew from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California. In fact, between 1930 and 1935, Earhart set at least five women’s speed and distance flying records.

Earhart lobbied Congress for aviation legislation. She also lobbied for birth control rights, supported women in politics and business, and endorsed the draft for men, women, and even the elderly to promote equality and peace. In 1935, Earhart became a visiting professor at Purdue University at the invitation of Purdue president Edward Elliott, an advocate of higher education for women, especially in engineering and science. Elliott was interested in supporting Earhart’s flying career and convinced benefactors to purchase a twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra for her.

But Earhart wanted to do something even bigger. On June 1, 1937, she and navigator Fred Noonan took off from Miami, Florida, in an attempt to fly 29,000 miles around the world. By June 29, they had made it to New Guinea (now Papua New Guinea), an island north of Australia in the Indian Ocean. They had only 7,000 miles to go. But something happened as they crossed the Pacific Ocean. July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan depart from Lae. Their destination is Howland Island, a tiny island in the Pacific only 13,200 feet long and 2,650 feet wide. Amelia and Noonan cannot find the island, and they lose radio contact with the Coast Guard cutter Itasca , who can hear that they are lost but cannot return communication.

No other female aviator has had Amelia Earhart’s instant worldwide fame. Committed to aviation, she promoted “airmindedness” at a time when most people were skeptical about airplanes as a form of transportation. Her confident personal and media presence reached millions in the 1920s and 1930s and still resonates today.

Fame made her a role model for women and girls. She encouraged them to take control of their own lives in terms of family, education, and careers. She lobbied for birth control rights, supported women in politics and business, and endorsed the draft for men, women, and even the elderly to promote equality and peace.

What happens when one of the world’s most popular media figures vanishes from the face of the earth? Earhart’s disappearance spawned countless theories involving radio problems, poor communication, navigation or pilot skills, other landing sites, spy missions and imprisonment, and even living quietly in New Jersey or on a plantation in the Philippines.

Earhart’s life, while tragically cut short, was many layered. In addition to the feats accomplished while in a plane, Earhart made an impact in areas from ranging from fashion, to equity, to flying.

RECORDS: 1922—Feminine altitude record of 14,000 feet. 1928—First woman to fly across the Atlantic as a passenger in the Fokker F.VII Friendship. 1929—Feminine speed record. 1930—Feminine speed record. 1931—First woman to fly an autogiro. 1931—Autogiro altitude record of 18,415 feet. 1932—First woman (and only the second person) to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic. Also first person to cross the Atlantic twice by air. 1932—First woman to fly solo and nonstop across the United States. 1933—Reset her transcontinental record. 1935—First person to fly solo from Honolulu, Hawaii, to the U.S. mainland (Oakland, California). 1935—Speed record between Mexico City and Washington, D.C. 1935—First person to fly solo from Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey. SOURCE:National Geographic, Smithsonian; P.B.S.