page_title: Augustus Post
section_title: Ballooning records
hierarchical_section_title: Augustus Post / Ballooning records
caption_attribution_description: English: Augustus Post and Alan Hawley returning to New York following their record setting balloon flight in 1910.
context_page_description: Augustus Thomas Post Jr. was an American adventurer who distinguished himself as an automotive pioneer, balloonist, early aviator, writer, actor, musician and lecturer. Post pursued an interest in transportation of every form. In 1898, when Post was 25, following his time at Harvard Law School, he circumnavigated the globe by rail and steamship. He then bought one of the first cars ever made and helped found the Glidden Auto Tours, an automotive distance drive and competition used to promote a national highway system. He was the original founder of what is now the American Automobile Association, first known as the Auto Club of America. He established the nation's first parking garage, the first bus service, and also received the first driving tickets in New York.
  In 1907 he was one of the first civilians to descend in a submarine. Two years later he became the thirteenth man to fly solo in an airplane, and was an original founder of the Aero Club of America. In that capacity he served as official timer for Orville Wright's historic 57-minute flight at Fort Myer, Virginia in 1908.
context_section_description: Post participated in balloon races, including the Gordon Bennett races of 1906, 1908, 1909, 1910, and 1911. He 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. The balloon fell 4,775 feet and crashed through the roof of a house, but the men were unharmed.
   
  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.” The race's ten balloons set off from St. Louis, Missouri; two days later, Post and Hawley landed in a remote, uninhabited area of Quebec near Lake St. John. They trekked through the Canadian wilderness, slowed by Hawley, who had injured a knee just after landing. Post, who had been moose hunting in Canada with Ezra Fitch (of Abercrombie & Fitch Co.) in 1905, had some knowledge of the terrain. Also, though he had grown up in Brooklyn, Post had spent summers with his family at the Mohonk Mountain House near the Catskill Mountains of New York, where he had hiked and developed skills as a woodsman. While the balloonists were lost in Canada, Post created lean-tos to keep them dry when snow and rain fell, and he caught fish, using improvised lures, to supplement their food stores.
  Word of Hawley and Post's disappearance ran on the front pages of newspapers across the nation. As the days stretched into a week and the men still had not been heard from, search parties were formed. After ten days in the wilderness, Hawley and Post found a trapper's tent and then ran into two locals, Joseph Pedneaude and Joseph Simard, out on a hunting trip. The men took the balloonists back to the closest town, Chicoutimi, from which they were able to send telegrams to family and friends. They then made their way to a train terminus and then home.
  At Grand Central Station in New York, Hawley and Post were met with a hero's welcome and informed they had set a distance and duration record of 1,173 miles in 44 hours and 25 minutes for travel in a free balloon, a North American Gordon Bennett record that stood for 95 years. Post's role in the adventure, particularly his survival skills, caught the attention of Daniel Carter Beard, who had founded the Society of the Sons of Daniel Boone for boys in 1905. The Society emphasized outdoorsmanship, self-sufficiency, and pioneering spirit. Post became a governing member of the Society, which was merged into the Boy Scouts of America later that same year in 1910 with Post continuing his interest.
caption: Augustus Post and Alan Hawley returning to New York following their record setting balloon flight in 1910.
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