Background
Aida de Acosta Root Breckinridge was born on July 28, 1884 in Elberon, New Jersey, the daughter of Ricardo de Acosta, a merchant, and Micaela Hern ndez de Alba. She was of Spanish-Cuban ancestry.
Aida de Acosta Root Breckinridge was born on July 28, 1884 in Elberon, New Jersey, the daughter of Ricardo de Acosta, a merchant, and Micaela Hern ndez de Alba. She was of Spanish-Cuban ancestry.
Aida was educated at the Sacred Heart Convent in Paris.
On June 29, 1903, Aida de Acosta became the first woman to solo in a dirigible: under the instruction of Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian air navigator, she made a five-mile flight over Paris. Upon hearing the news, her parents ordered her home.
Breckinridge's career interests spanned the fields of child health, welfare, and aid to the handicapped. During World War I she sold Liberty Bonds valued at a record $2 million, and after the war she worked abroad with the American Committee for Devastated France. Upon returning home she became director of the department of publications and promotion of the American Child Health Association, serving in that capacity from 1923 to 1932.
She served as assistant director for public relations of the 1929 White House Conference on Child Health and Protection. Breckinridge also worked with the American Red Cross, the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and the Commission for the Prevention and Relief of Tuberculosis.
In 1935, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia named Breckinridge head of the Municipal Art Committee for New York City, the purpose of which was to promote La Guardia's plans for a municipal art center. The committee was unable to realize this goal, but it promoted exhibits in a municipal art gallery, operas in city schools, song contests, and publication of the magazine Exhibition, edited by Breckinridge. She resigned this post in 1939.
She also served as chairman of the advisory committee on fine arts of the New York World's Fair of 1939-1940, and she headed the women's division of the Associated Willkie Clubs of America during the 1940 presidential campaign. Breckinridge's major public activity was her work in aiding the blind. She first became interested in eye diseases in 1922, when both her eyes became inflamed during a holiday in Southampton, New York.
The infection led to glaucoma. After visiting a number of physicians, none of whom was able to diagnose the problem, Breckinridge was referred to Dr. William Holland Wilmer of Washington, D. C. Wilmer performed several operations, but he was able to save only a small amount of the vision in her left eye--less than 20 percent.
After the operation Breckinridge began a fund-raising effort to build a hospital where Wilmer might pursue research on restoring sight and instruct other doctors in his surgical techniques. With foundation support she raised more than $5 million to establish the Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute at Johns Hopkins University in 1929. It was the first eye institute of its kind in the United States.
In 1944 one of Wilmer's former students, Dr. R. Townley Paton, approached Breckinridge to suggest the founding of an eye bank. Research had established the effectiveness of corneal tissue transplants in restoring sight when human eyes could be obtained and utilized within seventy-two hours after removal from the body.
Paton proposed to establish a facility for eye donations, and he asked Breckinridge to head the fund-raising, educational, and organizational effort. Within a short time she had established an office and raised $50, 000. The Eye-Bank for Sight Restoration was incorporated in February 1945, with headquarters at the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital. The major organizational difficulties related to locating and transporting corneas within the time limit.
Ample publicity, the use of donation forms, and the enlistment of the airlines and the Red Cross for transportation arrangements were Breckinridge's solutions. She continued to serve as executive director during the first ten years of the Eye Bank's operation.
From 1945 until she retired in 1955, it had received 4, 500 human eyes. In a large percentage of the corneal graft operations sight was restored.
She died in Bedford, New York.
Aida de Acosta Breckinridge became the first woman to fly a dirigible solo making a five-mile flight over Paris. Because of sufficient decrease in her vision that she experienced later in life, it inspired her to organize a fund-raising campaign that resulted in $3 million to fund the establishment in 1925 of the Wilmer Eye Institute in Johns Hopkins Hospital, the first eye institute in the United States. As promotion director of the American Child Health Association, serving in that capacity from 1923 to 1932, Breckinridge's major accomplishment was the designation of May 1 as Child Health Day, proclaimed nationally by President Calvin Coolidge in 1928. She went even further and in 1945 became an executive director of the Eye-Bank for Sight Restoration for its first ten years. Mrs. Breckinridge had been a leader in many causes, the most dramatic of which was the eye bank. It provided a center where human corneas could be stored until they are transplanted. At the time of her retirement in 1955, the organization had trained more than seventy doctors in the corneal graft technique, 4, 500 corneas had been transplanted, five affiliated eye banks had been established, and more than 175 hospitals had joined in the work. For her work in aiding the blind, Breckinridge received the Migel Medal, the highest award of the American Foundation for the Blind, in October 1956.
In her later years, Aida de Acosta was suffering from glaucoma that caused her to lose sight in one eye.
Aida de Acosta married Oren Root, the nephew of United States Secretary of State Elihu Root, on November 5, 1908. Root was a director, and later president, of the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad Company. They had two children. The marriage ended in divorce in 1923.
On August 5, 1927, Aida de Acosta Root married Henry S. Breckinridge, a lawyer and former assistant secretary of war (1913 - 1916). The Breckinridges were divorced in 1947.
aviator
1875–1929
1880–1970
1891–1978
1886–196
1853–1921
1870–1886
1881–1945
1886–1911
1837–1907
