Chapter 27
Six years after the Wright Brothers achieved powered, controlled, and sustained flight in a heavier-than-air airplane, the first trade show devoted to aerial locomotion opened its doors in Paris. The 1909 Salon International d’Aéronautique (First International Exhibition of Air Navigation) attracted nearly 100,000 visitors in its first four days. The crush of curious onlookers turned out to see uplifting products from 380 exhibitors, including several French-built planes that had recently set distance and speed records, alongside a menagerie of hot-air balloons that drew breathless comparisons to gilded birdcages. It was a world full of magnificent men in their flying machines who were to the sky what Rudolph Valentino would one day be to the screen.
Expositions, the barometer for the zeitgeist of a time, suggested that flight was in its 2,400-baud stage. Growing out of the 1908 Paris Motor Show, the 1909 Paris air expo was one of several debuting at almost the same time, including the International Exhibition of Aviation in Frankfurt am Main, the International Air Meeting in Reims, France, and the National Aeronautic Show in New York. Altitude and speed records seemed to be set one day and ruptured the next, and zeppelins filled the sky like lighter-than-air mammoths.
The Wright Flyer, which had achieved that first groundbreaking flight in 1903, was at the Paris show, virtually hidden away in a corner, a dowdy and dated relic. But just a year after the expo, the Wright brothers’ exhibition team began thrilling crowds from New Hampshire to North Dakota with aeronautical feats that one headline summarized as “Airmen Play Tag With Moonbeams.” Onlookers fainted at the airborne acrobatics of pilots (often called “birdmen” and “birdwomen”) who earned $20 to $50 a day and ministered any injuries at their own expense—a frequent reality given that few planes then actually had brakes. Such high-altitude demonstrations instilled “airmindedness” in the audience, a zeal for airplanes that embraced a belief that their development could raise humanity higher in more ways than one.
Consequently, airmindedness fueled three major aviation shows in the United States in 1910 alone. The Los Angeles International Air Meet, for example, was promoted by Roy Knabenshue, one of the first to pilot a dirigible successfully, at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis (the dirigible, the California Arrow, ran on a motorcycle engine), drawing 254,000 people over eleven days.
Aircraft were about much more than thrilling air shows and daring exhibitions. Just as the infamous Rule 34 of the Internet says you can make porn out of anything, there is a far older rule, probably ancient when Lucy was an adolescent Australopithecus afarensis, three million years ago, that you can make a weapon out of anything.
Five years before the Great War commenced, at the 1909 Frankfurt Exhibition, Friedrich Krupp AG showed it was miles ahead of the military curve. Believing that dirigibles would play a pivotal part in wars to come, Krupp constructed anti-Zeppelin guns (essentially field howitzers, altered to shoot virtually straight up) which it tested at the expo. Any country not preparing for warfare from the skies, Krupp believed, was coming to a gunfight armed with spoons. France, England, and Russia all concurred, investing heavily in the artillery after the show.
Moreover, the year of the Paris show, the Wright brothers set another kind of aviation record: selling the first airplane purchased by a military. Not to be outdone in martial farsightedness, the Japanese that same year formed the Provisional Military Balloon Research Society. Two years later, in 1911, the first airplane went to war when the Italians used one as its eyes in the sky against the Ottoman Empire in the Italo-Turkish conflict in North Africa. Over the years of World War I, the four main warring powers expended $1 billion on their air fleets. France alone produced some 67,000 planes.
The International Exhibition of Air Navigation ran four more times before World War I, restarting again in 1919. From 1924 on, it became a biennial show, occurring every two years, halting again for World War II. It was revived in 1946; from 1949 to today, it has been staged every odd year. Over the decades, the Paris air show has soared, with crowds exceeding 351,000 people and 2,300 exhibitors. The orders that come out of the show can fly as high as the aircraft themselves: In 2013, for instance, attendees placed $170 billion in orders for aircraft, with Boeing Co. and Airbus SAS alone generating a total of $135 billion for 908 airplanes.
Even more impressive than the show’s bottom line are its debuts of future stars of the sky such as the Aerospatiale-BAC Concorde (the earliest supersonic commercial aircraft), the Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and the world’s first solar airplane, Solar Impulse.