Fledgling Los Angeles Tries Out Its Wings
By the time Los Angeles began paying attention to those crazy flying machines in 1910, the city was already a good seven years behind one of the hottest fads of the era.
But it caught up quickly.
The first Los Angeles air show was held in January 1910, a spectacle that drew thousands to Dominguez Field to watch one of the top flying innovators of the day, Glenn Curtiss of Hammondsport, N.Y., sputter and roar in a biplane that barely broke 20 mph, covered about a mile and never climbed higher than the top reaches of a eucalyptus tree.
Billed at the time as the first powered flight west of the Mississippi, the demonstration made Curtiss the talk of the town.
“It marked an epoch in the affairs of the West,” according to a Los Angeles Times article from Jan. 10, 1910. “[N]ative sons were skeptical of its accomplishment until they actually set eyes on the performance.”
While the article waxed enthusiastic, powered flight then was seen more as an awe-inspiring extreme sport, not as a meaningful or practical event that would change how people travel across long distances and transform trade and the very demographics of the planet.
A century ago, moving across the country sometimes meant never seeing your family again. Now, people crisscross the continent in a few hours for holiday visits. Similarly, trips to the other side of the world that once took weeks to accomplish now take less than a day.
As a result, air travel has meant a more mobile, peripatetic society where people change the region they call home, sometimes several times in a lifetime. It has played a role in our perception that the Earth, as solid as it is, is shrinking.
And where less than a century ago the only fliers were innovators and barnstormers, today anyone with the price of a ticket can fly. In fact, U.S.-owned airlines flew 614 million passengers more than 619 billion miles in 1998, according to the Air Transport Assn. Interestingly enough, one of the few things journalists did foresee was that flying would take an important part in military defense, although with a twist; another Los Angeles Times front page depicted a giant hovering aircraft over Los Angeles, protecting it from enemies.
In 1910, the coverage given to Curtiss’ Los Angeles flight was a quantum leap from the inattention that met the first powered flight, that of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903. The flight was short--12 seconds, and 120 feet. Famous now, at the time the brothers were considered to be just a couple of tinkerers with a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio.
The lack of public attention didn’t exactly bother the Wright brothers, who were more focused on improving their designs than on public attention.
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The next year, the brothers returned to Kitty Hawk, which offered the open space and steady winds their experiments needed, and invited reporters to watch them fly. But conditions were bad, the plane didn’t get off the ground and the Wrights lost credibility in the eyes of the press.
“The reporters who witnessed this felt these guys probably can’t do what they said they can,” said Peter Jakab, curator of aeronautics at the Smithsonian Institution.
“That didn’t bother the Wrights too much because they saw it as, ‘Now, they won’t bug us.’ ”
By 1908, though, the brothers had perfected their machine and became the toast of the nation and Europe.
At first, the commercial implications of the airplane weren’t clear, although the Wright brothers did convince the federal government that their machines had military potential. Most people, though, viewed flying as entertainment.
“Many people saw it as the mark of the modern era and that it was going to lead to all sorts of wonderful things,” Jakab said. “The Futurists and the Cubists were heavily into it. Whether it was going to take hold as a commercial entity, that took a few years to kind of develop.
“Entertainment was the focus. It was a spectacle kind of thing. There’s always been this public fascination with danger, like auto racing.”
It was also the venue of the inventor. The Wright brothers’ research resolved some basic problems in aerodynamics, discovering the key to enabling heavier-than-air machines to fly. Curtiss fell into flying by happenstance. A manufacturer of motorcycles, he became interested in flying after designers of airships--which never became a practical application--asked him to convert his lightweight motorcycle engines to power their machines.
Curtiss went on to design a plane that could take off and land on water, an innovation that led to the first scheduled air service Jan. 1, 1914, when Thomas Benoist, an auto parts maker, built a seaplane based on Curtiss’ design and flew a passenger 18 miles across Tampa Bay in Florida.
About This Series
For the remainder of the year and ending Jan. 1, 2000, The Times will reproduce a page from its archives recording events that shaped the history of the 20th century. An accompanying essay will help place the events in historical context.
Many major moments were fully covered in The Times. Yet the pages also illustrate the limitations of newspapers as omniscient chroniclers. Albert Einstein’s publication of the general theory of relativity during World War I, for example, did not result in newspaper coverage until many years later.
Although the pages will be published sequentially, not every year will be represented. Any list of this sort is necessarily subjective. The editors sought a balance of local, national, international and cultural events to provide current readers with a sense of how The Times covered the century.
To supplement that effort, we invite your participation. In 200 words or less, send us your memories, comments or eyewitness accounts of events you believe shaped the century. We will publish as many as we can on this page until the end of the year. Write to Century, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053, or e-mail century@latimes.com. Because of the volume of mail, we regret we cannot acknowledge individual submissions.
