The Aerochronometer that Almost Crossed the Pacific
A near century-old Watch reunited with its first owner’s purchase record. Address unknown, until now!!
There is a peculiar thrill in the world of serious horological collecting that has nothing to do with the glitter of a famous dial or the prestige of a storied manufacturer. It is the thrill of provenance: of knowing not just what a watch is, but precisely whose hands wound it, whose missions it timed, whose heartbeat it paced through danger. For most watches, that knowledge is lost forever. Serial numbers lead to factory ledgers, and factory ledgers lead to silence. This is not one of those stories.
The Longines Weems wristwatch marked in Longines archives as Pour le Bureau (for the Bureau). A wrist prototype second setting watch with serial 3585868 made in 1928, that was one serial apart from Weems personal watch 3585867 and made on the same day. The piece pictured was hallmarked in 1929 and delivered to Baume the UK Longines agent in unusual circumstances as it was the Technical Bureau’s sample piece. The watch was earmarked for the Bureau Technique of Longines but somehow managed to escape. It was made in 1928 but used a repurposed dual time Turkish pocket watch 18.69N caliber movement noted in Longines archives. The first of these Turkish watches was patented in 1911 and another the Touran with a turning inner chapter ring in 1918. It is one of the Weems second setting wristwatches direct predecessors in the evolutionary chain. The second setting Waltham Aerochronometer pocket watch marked #10 on the inside back was modified post production by Jessops Jewelers in San Diego. It was one half of the pair sold to Lt. Harold Bromley in April 1929 – one regulated for civil and the other sidereal time.
Approximately a year ago, through a trusted fellow collector of more than two decades’ acquaintance, I came into possession of what appears to be an unremarkable Waltham chrome pocket watch at first glance. Its dial carries no Rolex crown, no Patek Philippe Calatrava, no Omega Seahorse. Its case is plain. Its story, however, is anything but.
Inside the case back, a serial number, a manufacturer and a stamped marking: #10. Ten. A number with the quiet confidence of a permanent address.
Because Number 10 is, of course, one of the most famous addresses in the world. Ten Downing Street is the residence of the British Prime Minister: unassuming from the outside, immeasurable in significance within. Albeit diminished in its current state. This watch wears its number with the same paradox: modest in appearance, extraordinary in meaning. For the mark inside that case back is not merely a production identifier. Combined with a cache of original records that have recently come to light, it is a passport stamp: a confirmed entry in the logbook of history. With it, we can begin to trace its significance.
The records establish, that this Waltham pocket watch with inner back case stamped #10 was modified by the master craftsmen at J. Jessop & Sons in San Diego into a precision navigation instrument called an Aerochronometer. It was sold by them in April 1929 as one half of a pair (with one regulated to sidereal and the other civil time) to Lt Harold Bromley who spent years struggling to complete one of the most challenging flights known to aviation at the time – a trans-Pacific crossing.
Ninety-six years after Bromley collected Pair Number 10, one watch and its sale history and purchase record have found each other again. It is, in the language of the collector, a needle-in-a-haystack reunion. In the language of history, it’s something infinitesimally rare. The story starts in the Pacific, within the cockpit of a bring orange monoplane as it strained for altitude over the Pacific.
A Canadian Boy Who Lived on the Edge of the Sky
Albert Harold Bromley was born on 10 November 1898 in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. When he was a young boy of five, the Wright brothers demonstrated flight as possible with the Wright Flyer III, and it captured young Bromley’s heart and attention. He took an interest in aviation hence, and his experience at Kitty Hawk (where the Flyer III first flew) changed the trajectory of his life.1
When The Great War was declared, Bromley enlisted for service within the Canadian army and served for three years as a machine-gunner on the Western Front. Subsequently, he made contact and eventually joined the Canadian unit within the RAF (British Royal Air Force), but his hopes for flight were dashed with the Armistice, which halted all operations concerning aviation. However, his flight lessons from the RAF served him well. Moving to the Northwest post-war, Bromley settled in Olympia, Washington, where he managed a flying school into the 1920’s. In those years, he whet his skills.
Experimental, Bromley was fond of barnstorming and brilliant manoeuvres that stunned onlookers. Such skills eventually found Bromley working for Lockheed as a test pilot; here, Bromley met other significant individuals in history, such as Earhart, Wiley Post and Jimmy Doolittle as they all sought to fly with the Lockheed Vega, and innovative monoplane that had been engineering’s pinnacle at the time.2
In 1927, newspapers brimmed with praise for Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight – entirely alone, a voyage of 3620 miles solo in a little over 33 hours. He’d made history and inspired a new hunger in countless others,3 igniting the Lindbergh Boom. Every serious, long distance aviator, now understood that a new threshold had been created for what was possible. The Atlantic was traversible, which meant near every other record was up for grabs.
The Pacific crossing was perhaps one of the most elusive records that was yet to be completed. The largest and deepest ocean on Earth, stretching over 7,500 kilometres from Japan to the West Coast of the United States, it had yet to be conquered by pilots and was a constant source of irritation to Bromley.4 He had to scratch the itch. He needed to cross the Pacific.
Bromley chose Tacoma in Washington, as his base and also his fundraising. The city’s business community, led by lumber tycoon John Buffelen, raised $25,000 and the Tacoma Chamber of Commerce threw its weight behind him. A special aircraft was ordered: a bright orange low-wing Lockheed Vega monoplane, christened the City of Tacoma, with a 48-foot wingspan, a 425-horsepower engine, and tanks holding 900 gallons of fuel. The Lockheed was impressive, but tiny in such a huge, aggressive ocean. Bromley needed to fly one of the most terrifying and simple routes ever established: Tacoma to Tokyo, all alone, for 7,500 and some kilometres.56
Three Attempts and Three Failures, Infinite Courage
Bromley’s attempts to brave the Pacific were both numerous and unlucky.
His first, on the 28th of July in 1929, the City of Tacoma was lined up on the local runway with overfilled fuel tanks. Such a thing actually caused petrol to flood over both the windscreen and into Bromley’s goggles, which blinded him temporarily. The aircraft veered off of the runway and subsequently found itself wrecked. By miracle, Bromley escaped the accident and recovered his vision.7
His next two attempts to cross the Pacific were equally ill-fated. The next rebuilt Lockheed crashed into a Burbank street in September of the same year, destroying the craft and seriously injuring the test pilot. The third plane crashed and burned in the Mojave Desert during a full-load test flight that ended up killing the pilot, H.W Catlin, altogether. The numerous, repeated tragedies were not only demoralising, but expensive. Sponsors of Bromley’s endeavours had become exhausted.
“The next would-be record breaker to approach Gatty was Canadian-born Harold Bromley, who until recently had been flying for a small Mexican airline. A former Royal Flying Corps pilot, Bromley dreamed of emulating Lindbergh.”
On 30 August 1930 they attempted takeoff from a naval runway near Tokyo but the aircraft was too heavy; Bromley dumped fuel to avoid trees, leaving insufficient reserves to cross the ocean. They tried again on 14 September 1930, departing Sabishiro Beach, 350 miles north of Tokyo. For 1,200 miles they flew over the grey Pacific. Then the exhaust system failed. Carbon monoxide flooded the cabin. Bromley was laughing uncontrollably (a symptom of CO poisoning, not mirth). Gatty was coughing. The artificial horizon failed. The fuel pump failed. Gatty worked the emergency hand pump by hand to keep the engine running.9
“Harold Bromley never made the big time, but he was a magnificent pilot.”
– Harold Gatty, quoted from HistoryNet.com.
They turned for Japan. Fishermen found them semiconscious from the fumes, but alive, 35 miles north of their starting point. The Pacific crossing remained unclaimed until October 1931, when Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon finally made it in a Bellanca.10
Bromley never stopped. In 1932 he tested another Vega for a trans-Pacific attempt, arriving at the Washington departure point just hours after the June 1st prize deadline had expired. The Pacific, it seemed, had a personal arrangement with Harold Bromley, being always just out of reach. He eventually became an American citizen, flew for Braniff Airways, served with Mexican mining airlines, and spent twenty years as a Federal aviation inspector before retiring to California. He died on 20 December 1997, aged 99.11
His life, measured in ambition and courage rather than records achieved, was extraordinary. Very few people ever attempted to fly. Very few pilots ever attempted to cross the Pacific. And very, very few pilots ever attempted it more than once. Bromley may be the only man to have ever tried it five times over. His life was a story of persistence and dogged ambition rather than failure.
Ninety-six years after he collected a pair of pocket watches from a San Diego jeweller’s, one of them is back in recording.
The The button on the Aerochronometer bezel was modified so it could be depressed, allowing the sub-second dial to be set forwards or backwards independently of the second hand by turning the bezel. Weems faced competition from Captain Freeman, Superintendent of the US Naval Observatory, who planned to produce 100 pieces a year. Weems made approximately 60 Aerochronometer pieces across two pocket watch brands – Waltham and Hamilton. Jessops Jewelers of San Diego modified the stock watches and sold them on Weems’ behalf, paying him a royalty of $5 per watch and a profit from each sale.Before settling on Longines, Weems received offers from Hamilton, Waltham, and Curtiss Aviation. He placed Wittnauer order #1395 for 72 pieces in May 1929, a few months before the Great Depression. The Longines Weems production wristwatch was delivered across three dates in 1930. Jessops continued selling the older pocket watch pieces alongside the improved Longines version, discounting them to clear stock; the last sales appear in their records in 1932.
The Instrument of Ambition: The Weems Aerochronometer
To understand why a pocket watch mattered so much to a Pacific-crossing aviator like Bromley in 1929, one must first understand the terrifying navigation problem that every long-distance flyer of the era faced. There were no radar beacons, no GPS, no ILS approaches, no VORs. Over the open ocean, there was nothing at all with which a person could orient themselves. No landmarks, no radio direction-finding beacons of any range, no met satellites, no reliable forecasts beyond a few hundred miles of the coast. Flying over any stretch of water, particularly one as large as the Pacific, required systems of navigation that were more advanced than the ones currently available.
What there was, and had been for two centuries of maritime navigation, was the relationship between time and longitude. The Earth rotates at exactly 15 degrees per hour, or one degree of longitude every four minutes. A navigator who knows the precise time at Greenwich and can measure the altitude of the sun or a star above the horizon can calculate his longitude to within a few miles. If his watch is wrong by even four seconds, his calculated position is wrong by one nautical mile. Over 4,700 miles of ocean, errors accumulate. Small errors become missing islands, miscalculated fuel endurance, and eventually with enough seconds missed, aircrafts that simply did not appear.1213
The Greenwich Time Signal on the Radio
For the first time in history, any navigator anywhere in the world with a shortwave receiver could synchronise their timepiece to Greenwich Mean Time to within a fraction of a second, regardless of their location.
The pips solved one problem and exposed another. The radio signal was now available. But the watches of the era could not be synchronised to it with the precision it offered. To adjust the second hand of a conventional pocket watch, you had to interfere with the entire movement: stopping the mainspring, adjusting the regulation, hoping not to nudge the minute hand in the process. This caused the so called ‘blind minute’, in which with every adjustment, there was potentially an unaccounted span of thirty seconds every time a pilot stopped their watch to try and capture the accurate and already-fleeting second.
The invention of the Second-Setting
Commander Philip Van Horn Weems of the United States Navy was not a man who accepted navigational imprecision as an inevitable condition. In the late 1920s, serving with the Aircraft Squadrons Battle Fleet, he received permission from Vice Admiral Reeves to experiment with modifying two torpedo-boat deck watches (one Hamilton regulated for civil time, one Patek Philippe regulated for sidereal time) to allow the second hand to be set independently of the main movement. The second hand could now be aligned to the BBC pip in an instant, without touching the minute or hour hands.
This was the second-setting principle. It sounds simple, but the implications were profound. A navigator could now synchronise to the radio time signal with the accuracy the signal itself offered. Weems’ second-setting watch essentially handed the navigator the full precision of Greenwich Mean Time in the palm of his hand.
These early instruments did not emerge from a watchmaker’s atelier in Le Sentier. They were brought to life through an unusual commercial partnership between Weems and J. Jessop & Sons (Jewellers, Opticians and Stationers of 952 Fifth Street, San Diego, California): one of the most unexpected addresses in the history of precision navigation.14
The Jessop Workshop
Weems formalised the commercial arrangement in a letter to Armand Jessop dated 16 April 1928. The plan was to purchase standard American pocket watch movements (primarily Hamilton Model 940s, 18-ligne, 21-jewel, and Waltham movements) and modify them post-production to incorporate the second-setting mechanism. The modifications were carried out by three master technicians within the Jessop firm: Ray Nash, Alonzo Jessop, and Dadisman.
A J. Jessop & Sons invoice dated 24 July 1928, stamped PAID 28 July 1928, records the landmark purchase: twelve Hamilton Model 940 watches at $27.25 US each, totalling $327.00, the founding stock of what would become the world’s first commercially available second-setting navigation watches. Weems received a $5 royalty on every example sold15 and a profit on the sale price of pieces.
These instruments were given a name befitting their purpose: Aerochronometers. The name was Weems’ own, used in his company records and adopted by Jessops in their accounts. It was an era that liked to name its tools according to their destiny.
The standard configuration was a pair: one watch regulated for Greenwich Civil Time (mean solar time), the other for Greenwich Sidereal Time (star time, running approximately four minutes faster than civil time per day). A complete navigation kit required both, since celestial sights on the sun required civil time and star sights required sidereal.
Pairs were therefore purchased together, registered together, and assigned together.16 They were instruments that worked as a partnership, which is why the loss of one half of a historic pair is a wound, and why the survival of one with its original record is a provenance miracle.
Before the arrival of the Longines wristwatch version in late 1929 (the famous Longines Weems that would be produced in far greater numbers and eventually bear Weems’s patent number 2,008,734), only a handful of these Waltham and Hamilton Aerochronometers were ever made. Today, the survivors from this remarkable era can be counted on one or two hands. Each one is a specific historical object with a specific historical owner. Knowing who held which one matters enormously.17
Address Confirmed: Pair Number 10
The Ledger Speaks
The J. Jessop & Sons running account for Commander Weems (a three-page typed ledger preserved in the Wittnauer Collection at the Smithsonian Institution Archives) is one of the most remarkable primary documents in the history of navigation watch collecting. Each entry is a window into a specific transaction from a specific moment in the history of early aviation.
Page 2 of that account, dated 24 April 1929, carries the following entry:
“PAIR NO. 10 WEEMS WATCHES FOR LIEUT BROMLEY: $240.00”
J. Jessop & Sons Running Account for Comdr. P.V.H. Weems, Page 2 (Wittnauer Collection, Smithsonian Institution Archives, April 1929).
Original documents detailing the transactions between the Jessop Workshop, Weems and Lt. Bromley’s transaction with Jessops on the 24th April 1929 for a small fortune. The pair was almost the price of of 9 normal unmodified pocket watches. It was a massive sum of money at the time.
The subsequent page of the same account, dated 6 June 1929, records a royalty credit of $10.00 under “Lt Bromley Watches” ($5 per watch), confirming that both pieces of Pair No. 10 were sold and the royalty duly credited to Weems’s account aside from any shared sale profit.
Two hundred and forty dollars. In 1929 that was the equivalent of several weeks’ wages for a skilled American worker: a serious investment by any measure. Bromley, preparing for his first Pacific attempt, spent that money on precision. He was buying reliability for a journey where the margin between a correct and incorrect celestial fix might be the difference between finding the California coast and disappearing into the North Pacific.
The Waltham pocket watch that came to me through my fellow collector carries, on its inner caseback, the mark #10. The marking corresponds precisely to the Jessop ledger entry for Pair No. 10, the pair assigned to Lieut. Bromley in April 1929. The outer case style, the movement specification, and the modification characteristics are consistent with the Waltham Aerochronometers produced by Jessop under the Weems system in this period.
This was such an incredible rarity for the following reasons.
Of the handful of Waltham Aerochronometer pieces ever made by Weems (perhaps thirty or forty at most, before the Longines versions superseded them), this one carried a number. Of the watches carrying numbers, only one pair belonged to Harold Bromley. Of that pair, only one has surfaced with its original purchase record intact.
The odds of this reunion are, to put it plainly, astronomical. A needle in a haystack? More like a needle in 7,500 kilometers of cold water.
Bromley collected Pair No. 10 in April 1929, three months before his first Pacific attempt ended on the Tacoma runway in a blind, fuel-soaked crash. He kept them through the extraordinary sequence of events that followed: the loss of the second and third Lockheeds in test flights, the reversal of the route, the recruitment of Harold Gatty, the departure from Sabishiro Beach, and those twenty-six hours over the Pacific that ended in carbon monoxide and silence.
When Gatty took his celestial fixes during the 1930 attempt (navigating by dead reckoning through unbroken cloud cover, operating the emergency fuel pump by hand, repairing fuel line leaks with friction tape), It is quite likely that a pair of Aerochronometers owned by Gatty and one half of the Bromley pair were almost certainly in use, ticking out Greenwich Mean Time against which those precious star sights were checked.18
Bromley’s watch is Number 10. This watch is what accompanied Bromley throughout his youth’s struggle to brave the Pacific, through every difficult setback or failure and every harsh, hard turn of weather. Just as lucky, it’s somehow come to my hands almost an entire century later, where its story has finally been carefully patched together.
The modified bezel with a button that when depressed would enable the gear wheel connected to the subseconds dial to be turned allowing synchronisation of the second hand with a known accurate source.
The world is full of significant and beautiful things, and one of the most significant parts of piercing history together is provenance. Without a place to call home, things may simply be relegated to beautiful objects. A painting without a signature is just a painting. A painting, signed, can be traced back to a certain artist, a certain time within their lives and even what worldly events influenced such a piece of work at the time.
The same principle applies to watches. A 1930’s Waltham pocket watch is rather common find, but an Aerochronometer piece with a post production second setting modification is extraordinarily rare- better yet, it’s historically significant in the annals of air navigation history. It’s creation precedes the Longines Weems wristwatch replacement and was sold and used by names that read like a private aviation Olympus: Byrd, Gatty, Ellsworth, Lindbergh, the US and Japanese Navy and of course Lt. Harold Bromley.
The Jessop records that have recently come to light (invoices, ledger accounts, royalty credits, movement numbers and case numbers) do for the Aerochronometer what a ship’s manifest does for a historic vessel. They establish identity, assignment, and sequence. They allow us, for the first time, to map this tiny production run with something approaching precision: who owned what, when, for how much, and in what configuration. The cache of documents held in the Wittnauer Collection at the Smithsonian is extraordinary in its detail.
It’s a miracle that the watch survived multiple crashes during aviation’s so called Golden years and that the sales records and a little more of their history has been unearthed.
If you own a Hamilton or Waltham Aerochronometer pocket watch with a second-setting inner dial modification, potentially from the late 1920s or early 1930s then I may possibly able to add some colour from the discovered records. The Jessops/Weems ledger accounts name customers. They record pair numbers. They record individual movement and case numbers on occasion. Send photographs of the dial, movement, and any markings on the case back, and every effort will be made to trace its history. These watches played a quintessential role in Air Navigation history.
Bromley’s Legacy
Harold Bromley never crossed the Pacific. He lived, instead, to the age of 99, dying on 20 December 1997 in Palm Desert, California: a long, remarkable life that stretched from the trenches of the Western Front to the jet age. His New York Times obituary ran to 40 column inches with two photographs, a life measured, in the end, in column inches rather than oceanic crossings.19
But the failure to cross the Pacific is not the measure of Bromley’s significance. What matters is what he represented, and what he drove. His repeated attempts demanded better instruments, better navigation, better planning. The fact that he hired Harold Gatty (the finest aerial navigator of his generation) for the 1930 attempt is itself a statement about his understanding of what the Pacific required. He knew the limit of dead reckoning. He knew that time mattered. He spent $240 on the eve of the Great Depression for a pair of Weems second setting Aerochronometer pocket watches that could be precision regulated to the Greenwich Time Signal .
That investment, and that understanding, is why the Aerochronometer stamped Number 10 exists. And why, ninety-six years later, it is worth telling the story of this remarkable Flightbird. It has a special place in air navigation history and was developed by the man, P.V.H Weems who played the greatest role during aviation’s so called golden years and beyond.
The Timeline of Harold Bromley and Number 10
10 November 1898: Albert Harold Bromley born in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.
1914 to 1918: Serves three years as machine-gunner in the Canadian Army; joins a Canadian unit of the Royal Air Force; the war ends before he flies operationally.
1920s: Runs flying school in Olympia, Washington; test pilot for Lockheed in Burbank; familiarises Earhart, Doolittle, and Post with the Lockheed Vega.
16 April 1928: Weems writes to Armand Jessop formalising the commercial Aerochronometer arrangement.
24 July 1928: First batch of 12 Hamilton Model 940 watches purchased by Jessop for modification at $27.25 each.
24 April 1929: Jessop ledger records: “PAIR NO. 10 WEEMS WATCHES FOR LIEUT BROMLEY: $240.00”.
28 July 1929: First Pacific attempt. The orange City of Tacoma Lockheed Vega crashes on takeoff from Tacoma Field; Bromley blinded by fuel, unhurt.
September 1929 to May 1930: Two replacement test aircraft lost; one test pilot killed.
30 August 1930: First attempt from Japan (Sabishiro Beach); aborted due to weight; insufficient fuel remaining after jettisoning.
14 September 1930: Second attempt from Japan with Harold Gatty as navigator. Exhaust system fails at 1,200 miles over the Pacific; CO fumes incapacitate both men; returned to Japan.
March 1931: Bromley signs with Braniff Airways.
May to June 1932: Final abortive Pacific plan; misses the Seattle prize deadline.
1997: Bromley dies 20 December, aged 99, Palm Desert, California.
2024 to 2025: Number 10 and the J. Jessop & Sons records are reunited. Provenance confirmed.
This article is dedicated to Harold Bromley, who never stopped trying.
Footnotes
- “The ALBERT HAROLD BROMLEY Page of the Davis-Monthan Airfield Register Website.” Dmairfield.org, 2026, dmairfield.org/people/bromley_ah/index.html. Accessed 3 May 2026.
↩︎ - Davis-Monthan Airfield Register, Albert Harold Bromley page (revised 2013), based on NASM biographical folder CB-784000-01; Northwest Room, Tacoma Public Library, Accessions BOWEN G12.1-093B and C162610-6 (ca. 1929).
↩︎ - Wikipedia Contributors. “Charles Lindbergh.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 May 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lindbergh. Accessed 6 May 2026.
↩︎ - Wikipedia Contributors. “Transpacific Crossing.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Jan. 2026, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpacific_crossing. Accessed 4 May 2026.
↩︎ - Hollway, Don. “First across the Pacific Non-Stop.” HistoryNet, 23 Sept. 1998, historynet.com/first-across-the-pacific-non-stop-sidebar-november-98-aviation-history-feature/. Accessed 4 May 2026.
↩︎ - “The ALBERT HAROLD BROMLEY Page of the Davis-Monthan Airfield Register Website.” Dmairfield.org, 2026, dmairfield.org/people/bromley_ah/index.html. Accessed 3 May 2026.
↩︎ - Hollway, Don. “First across the Pacific Non-Stop.” HistoryNet, 23 Sept. 1998, historynet.com/first-across-the-pacific-non-stop-sidebar-november-98-aviation-history-feature/. Accessed 4 May 2026.
↩︎ - “EMSCO B-4 Cirrus – Cavalcade of Wings.” Cavalcade of Wings, 26 Mar. 2024, www.cavalcadeofwings.com/product/emsco-b-4-cirrus/. Accessed 10 May 2026.
↩︎ - Hollway, Don. “First across the Pacific Non-Stop.” HistoryNet, 23 Sept. 1998, historynet.com/first-across-the-pacific-non-stop-sidebar-november-98-aviation-history-feature/. Accessed 4 May 2026.
↩︎ - Staff, HistoryNet. “Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon, Jr.: First to Fly Nonstop across the Pacific.” HistoryNet, 12 June 2006, historynet.com/clyde-pangborn-and-hugh-herndon-jr-first-to-fly-nonstop-across-the-pacific/.
↩︎ - Goldstein, Richard. “Harold Bromley, Aviator Lacking Lindbergh’s Luck, Dies at 99.” The New York Times, 11 Jan. 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/01/11/us/harold-bromley-aviator-lacking-lindbergh-s-luck-dies-at-99.html.
↩︎ - Van Horn Weems, Philip. Air Navigation. 1931. Hassell Street Press, 22 July 2023.
↩︎ - Weems, Philip . Possibility of an Adjustable Rate Clock. 1928. 1st Edition ed., Proceedings of the U.S Naval Academy Institute.
↩︎ - Letter, Weems to Armand Jessop, 16 April 1928, Wittnauer Collection, Smithsonian Institution Archives.
↩︎ - J. Jessop & Sons Invoice to Comdr. P.V.H. Weems, 24 July 1928 (paid 28 July 1928), Wittnauer Collection, Smithsonian Institution Archives.
↩︎ - J. Jessop & Sons Running Account for Comdr. P.V.H. Weems (Pages 1–3), Wittnauer Collection, Smithsonian Institution Archives.
↩︎ - Letter, Weems to Lindbergh, 17 February 1930, Tennessee State Archives; J. Jessop & Sons Running Account for Comdr. P.V.H. Weems (Pages 1–3), Wittnauer Collection, Smithsonian Institution Archives.
↩︎ - “Harold Gatty: Aerial Navigation Expert.” HistoryNet, 12 June 2006, historynet.com/harold-gatty-aerial-navigation-expert/. Accessed 3 May 2026.
↩︎ - Goldstein, Richard. “Harold Bromley, Aviator Lacking Lindbergh’s Luck, Dies at 99.” The New York Times, 11 Jan. 1998, www.nytimes.com/1998/01/11/us/harold-bromley-aviator-lacking-lindbergh-s-luck-dies-at-99.html.
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