The First U.S. Air Meet, January 1910, Los Angeles

Viewing the aeroplane for the first time – fans attended the first major International Air Meet at Reims, France, in August 1909, with close to 500,000 spectators. It set the standard for all future air shows of the time. To meet the challenge, they built special grandstands, numerous
restaurants, a barbershop, and even press facilities. The main drawing card was the Gordon Bennett Cup Race, a speed contest. In the end, a handful of Americans cheered their countryman Glenn Curtiss to a six-second victory in the Gordon Bennett Cup Race (46.77 mph). The race, and the entire Reims Meet, was a huge success and helped establish air meets as an international spectator sport for fans and dignitaries of Europe and the United States.

Challenged by the Reims Meet, leading St. Louis industrialist and aviation enthusiast Albert Bond Lambert (St. Louis Lambert International Airport’s namesake) who attended the event in France, offered Glenn Curtiss a guarantee of $5,000 (2013 equivalent – $122,000) to fly his Gordon Bennett Trophy winner, the “Golden Flyer,” at the Airship Show in St. Louis, October
1909. Curtiss, who was the fastest man in the air (47 mph at Reims) and the fastest man on the ground (motorcycle at 136.27 mph at Ormond Beach, Fla., in his own V-8 engine design), accepted the challenge and proceeded to St. Louis in late fall for the St. Louis Centennial week-long exhibition. Thousands of St. Louis citizens turned out to watch Glenn Curtiss in his Reims racer – the “Celebrity of the New Air Circuits.” At the time, the newspapers were full of headlines of the Wright brothers suing all the pilots (worldwide) and air meets for infringement of their patents, as they felt they owned the rights to all the heavier-than-air flying machines then extant.

The public’s aviation interest at St. Louis and at Reims inspired a group . . .