It was on the first day in July 1912 when pioneering aviator Harriet Quimby made her final flight. The first American woman to receive a pilot’s license, Quimby had become famous for also being the first female to fly across the English Channel. But those achievements were no help during her last flight, in which Quimby flew a demonstration over Boston Harbor in her new monoplane. Everything went well until a sudden, unexplained pitch caused her and her passenger, William Willard, to be ejected from the craft and plummet from an altitude of 1,500 feet to their deaths. In the above classic photograph from the Bain Collection, Quimby sits in a monoplane in the year before she was killed. A section from her July 5, 1912 New York Times obituary:

“Dr. Watson, who in speaking of the career of Miss Quimby, took a chapter from Revelation as his text, said, in part:

‘Her name is added to the long list of those who have freely given their lives in order that the world might be larger and better, in order that life might be greater and grander.

‘But in our sorrow to-night there rests still a joyous note of triumph. For we realize that through this death there has come progress and that, therefore, Miss Quimby’s life was a victory over those very elements which at the end brought on her tragic end. For through such as she was to do we reach nearer and nearer to the far-off goal of our hope.”

The aftermath of the Quimby crash.