Lincoln was a chubby lonely kid born close to the end of the 19th century. Being socially inept, the young Lincoln decided on a slightly different method for making friends. That method involved doing crazy stunts like riding a bike with no brakes down San Francisco's famous hilly streets. By the time Lincoln was a teenager, bike riding had become boring, so he set his focus on becoming an aviator. This was not an easy task, given that airplanes had just been invented two years prior, which really made it unlikely that anybody was going to let some crazy seventeen year old kid pilot one. Lincoln had to settle for the next best thing: being a test pilot for experimental dirigibles, which involved sitting in a basket under a huge balloon full of hydrogen gas. It was exactly as safe as it sounds. After five years of somehow not dying in a fiery explosion or ground impact, Lincoln finally got his big break while attending an air show where the pilot of a bi-plane became too sick to fly. Despite having no idea what he was doing, Lincoln volunteered. He flew the plane up 3,000 feet and promptly put it into a death spiral. By some miracle Lincoln managed to land the plane, and with that, an American hero was born.
Lincoln went to work for Glenn Curtis as a stunt pilot, again, with almost no flying experience. Lincoln, nonplussed, taught himself how to fly by crashing three planes. At first Lincoln just repeatedly did his death spiral maneuver, but when that got old he moved on to racing trains in his plane, flying under low bridges, and down Niagara Falls. He was the first pilot to perform figure 8's and the first to do vertical drops to achieve terminal velocity. When he got tired of flying down, he flew straight up, setting altitude records above 11,000 feet. Lincoln then performed the first night flight, dropping flares and noise makers over Los Angeles for a gag, and the first indoor flight, taking off and landing inside the same building. All of this is even more impressive considering this was a time when planes were made of wood and canvas, and that Lincoln was doing all of his flying in a business suit. In 1914, 17 million people came to his airshows, 20 percent of the whole U.S. population at the time.
When Lincoln wasn't acting crazy, he was playing pranks. These included dressing like a woman and then flying erratically to make fun of fellow aviator Blanche Scott, dive bombing the White House, and blowing up a replica of a U.S. battleship. However, things weren't all laughs. Lincoln's fame as a crazy man who flew airplanes straight at the ground garnered a lot of copycats, many of whom strangely died in airplane crashes. Feeling guilty, Lincoln retired from flying and tried his hand at selling real estate. This lasted a few months, until another aviator performed the first loop de loop. Horrified that someone else was doing new tricks before he did, Lincoln got back into the biz, painted his name in huge letters on his plane, and not only started doing multiple loops, but also started flying upside down.
The remainder of Lincoln's career largely involved doing loop after loop, sometimes as many as eighty in a row. However, loops didn't pay the bills, so he also raced his plane against the famous race car driver Barney Oldfield, letting the car win sometimes just to keep things interesting. Lincoln was forced into retirement for a second time in 1915 when at age 28 he plowed an experimental monoplane into San Francisco Bay. Lincoln survived the crash, but drowned before rescuers could reach him. Across the country, children mourned him by making up a jump rope song about what a crazy idiot he was.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lincoln_Beachey_with_his_Curtiss_biplane_at_the_Dominguez_Hills_Air_Meet_1912_CHS-11683.jpg