Born in Ohio, 1893. Died October 30, 1976.
Clarence Duncan Chamberlin, born in Ohio in 1893, first began flying while working at an aerial sign-towing company, then won his wings in 1918 after enlisting in the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps. After a tour of barnstorming he became a dealer in surplus aircraft sales, as well as a company pilot for Wright Corp.
When 1927 a $25,000 prize was offered in to the first pilot to cross the Atlantic in solo flight, Chamberlin was eager to try. That spring Charles Levine’s powerful Wright-Bellanca WB-1 Columbia proved it could endure the time barrier of an ocean flight when Chamberlin and Bert Acosta remained aloft for 51 hours over Roosevelt Field. Unfortunately, Levine was still puttering with the plane and arguing with his pilot and Giuseppe Bellanca when Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris on May 12.
However, on June 4 he and Levine flew non-stop to Germany, and his trip of some 43 hours and 3,905 miles later—which bettered Lindbergh’s distance record—landed on a small field near Eisleben. There they refueled with 20 gallons of fuel brought by a local farmer, and using a quart-size coffee pot to fill the tank, then headed for Berlin, but got lost and landed east of the city at Kottbus, where they received a small but tumultuous welcome. They did finally land at Tempelhof Airport the next afternoon to a crowd of more than 100,000 cheering Berliners.
He designed his own line of Crescent monoplanes, and flew one in the 1929 Air Races, then acquired a diesel-powered Lockheed Vega, in which he set a world altitude record of over 19,000 feet in 1932. He next formed Chamberlin Airline between New York and Boston, but when it seemed doomed for failure, he used its four Curtiss Condors for a barnstorming group during the next five years, plus having his own flight school and aircraft dealerships. When war clouds threaten in Europe, he opened a series of aviation trades schools vital for the war effort. After the war, he served briefly as sales manager for Bellanca Aircraft Corp for a time.
In 1939 he acquired the Rover rights from Jean Roché while in Jersey City NJ.
All Aero 