The conservative Wright Brothers at last realized that the only way in which the public could be taught to understand the possibilities of the airplane was through seeing it perform. They picked a group of intelligent young daredevils and formed a flying team. This Wright flying team and a similar group under the banner of Glenn Curtiss toured the county fairs and brought aviation to the American public. In California, the twenty-year-old Glenn Martin was giving flying exhibitions to earn money with which to build bigger and better airplanes. Truly 1910 was a great year for aviation.
On May 29, 1910, Glenn Curtiss won the New York World prize of $10,000 for the first flight from Albany to New York City. He flew 137 miles at a speed of 54.8 miles per hour. In August another chapter in aërial history was written by the sending of a wireless message to the ground from an airplane in flight.
In September, 1910, 20,000 Bostonians had their first sight of the airplane in action when the Harvard Aëronautical Society sponsored a great aviation exhibition at Squantum, Massachusetts. The prizes, amounting to $100,000, attracted the largest group of pilots and planes ever to assemble in the United States. Claude Graham-White, the Englishman, flew a French Farman biplane and a speedy Bleriot monoplane. Another Englishman, A. V. Roe, who today builds the Avro-Lancaster, exhibited his big triplane, and the spectators were thrilled as the daring Wright and Curtiss pilots demonstrated America’s best planes.
The Boston air meet was followed by an equally successful one at Belmont Park, N. Y., in October, 1910. Here daring pilots flew their planes in rain and wind, and tried many new stunts.
Ralph Johnstone, a daring Wright pilot, thrilled the crowds when he turned his plane sidewise to an almost vertical angle and then descended in a tight spiral. Walter Brookins, another Wright flier, performed his famous “short turn” in which he stood his plane vertically in the air and revolved about one wing as on a pivot. Though these pilots constantly endeavored to create new thrills for the crowds, they unconsciously were testing the capabilities of their airplanes. They also were creating the technique of flying. These early meets were the testing laboratories of aviation.
