s e p t e m B e r 2 0 1 8 5 5 dad, Elmer Sperry, had invented the gy- ro compass. Young Lawrence Sperry used his father’s invention to invent the world’s first turn-and-bank indicator, the world’s first retractable landing gear, and the world’s first autopilot, according to www. check-six.com. On November 21, 1916, Sperry and Dor- othy gave his autopilot a test run while aloft in Dorothy’s “personally owned Cur- tiss hydroplane… The gyro-stabilizer…was knocked off, and the plane descended into the waters a half mile off the shores of Long Island’s Great South Bay…” Because such details can be delicate, check-six.com lets Sperry pick up the story: “It was only a trivial mishap. We decided to land on the water and came down per- fectly from a height of 600 feet and would have made a per- fect landing had not the hull of our machine struck one of the stakes that dot the water, which staved a hole in it.” Check.six.com resumes: “The [gashed, sinking] plane became entangled in fish- ing nets” when “a pair of duck hunters who witnessed the plane’s plummet to Earth rowed out to the crash site to help the now waterlogged aviators [hanging onto the debris]. They noticed that both Sperry and [Mrs.] Peirce were naked! “Sperry quickly stated that the force of the crash ‘divested’ both [himself] and Peirce of their clothing.” Because ‘accuracy, accuracy, accuracy’ is the watchword for legends of this nature, check-six.com brings the claim home with, “Sperry later con- fessed to a friend that the duo were involved in the physical act of love, and that he must have accidentally bumped the gyro-stabilizer platform while maneuvering. And although their flight occurred well be- low 5,280 feet, the pair of lov- ers are generally recognized as the first members of the Mile High Club. ...In the end, in the autumn of 1917, Dorothy Peirce filed for divorce [while Waldo was off win- ning the Croix de Guerre for his heroism], citing non-support and cruel treatment. Mr. Peirce did little to contest the divorce– and was rather happy to be separated from Dorothy’s mother, whom he referred to as ‘the umbilicus.’” orothy and Waldo were such a dream couple that Psychology Today points to their breakup as an unnerving cultural phenomenon. News- paper stories from the period grappled with the question of how a relationship between two such perfect—even “eugen- ic”—individuals could fail. The December 9, 1917, issue of the San Francisco Chroni- cle included a full page spread on Dorothy and Waldo’s divorce with photographs of the unhappy couple, entitled “The Sad and Very Imperfect Romance of a Perfect Man and Perfect Woman.” The article stated that when Dorothy and Waldo married in 1912, the public saw it as “the test of a new biological theory—the mating of two per-