This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Batchelor.

This is CBSI on the world.

I'm John Batchel.

I welcome the author, David Rooney,

who's going to take us on a journey from North America to Ireland. And that journey is

significant in that here in the 21st century, we're living in the dreams of the men who took

that journey once upon a time. The book is The Big Hop, the first nonstop flight across the

Atlantic Ocean and into the future.

We are the future, so I welcome the author, David Rooney.

David, congratulations, wonderful.

We begin, however, with a man who doesn't fly, but is responsible for this story and perhaps all of aviation, perhaps all of spaceflight.

Don't know.

He popularized it. He was called

formerly the Viscount Northcliff. His real name was Harmsworth, Alfred Harmesworth. I believe he had a

modest beginning and a modest early career. Who was he? Why is he important in 1913 to put up the prize? And what was the prize for? Good evening, David.

Good evening, John. Thank you so much for inviting me on. Lord Northcliffe, what a remarkable character.

In 1913, he put up a prize, not the first prize that he'd put up in the field of aviation for the first to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean.

He'd been born in the 1860s in Ireland, just outside of Dublin, a very modest upbringing.

And rather interestingly, he didn't move into book learning.

He got very interested in magazines and newspapers.

When he reached his early adulthood, he went into journalism,

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