Pioneer aviator Wiley Hardeman Post was born on November 22, 1898, in the community of Corinth in Van Zandt County to William Francis and Mae Laine Post, and his family later moved to Oklahoma when he was a boy. Inspired as a youth to learn to fly, he obtained flight training in the late 1920s, made his first solo flight, and acquired an air transport license. Despite losing one eye in an oil field accident, he worked as a barnstormer, commercial pilot, and flight instructor. Post set many flight records, won the national air races in 1930, circled the world with Harold Gatty in 1931 by flying 15,474 miles in less than 9 days, and soloed around the world in less than 8 days in 1933. He invented and developed the first pressurized flight suit, explored stratospheric flight, used an early Sperry autopilot mechanism, worked with the U.S. Army Air Corps on an experimental automatic direction finding radio compass, and was a pioneer in the use of liquid oxygen for high altitude flight. Post and humorist Will Rogers died in a plane crash on a trip to Alaska in 1935, and his plane the "Winnie Mae" is in the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.