2010 is the centennial year for the Dominguez Hills Air Meet.  Sign up to receive the news releases and our newsletter, IMAGE,  on this event and the Balloon RunAway, Centennial 2009,  as we tell the stories that connect photography, flight, environmentalism, and the beginning of the conflict between open source views of human invention and proprietary views of how we view knowledge.  That clash will define the 20th Century for all time.  AC was a life long believes in what he called "The Knowledge Commons." 

Do we own our DNA?  Can it be patented?  Or does each generation and individual pay forward for the wealth left to them by previous generations.  Ideas are having consequences

Look over these sites, both working on the Air Show Centennial.

Dominguez Rancho Site

California State University Dominguez Hills

AC. chronicled the first air show and then wrote this article about the experience.  Waving at him from the stands on several of the days were the Kids andhis brother, Dr. Ernest Sargent Pillsbury.  

The March issue of Sunset Magazine for 1910, chronicling the Air Show in Dominguez Hills, California earlier that same year.

Many of us have not seen the newer heavier-than-air machines at all; a few of us have seen them in flight, but those who have witnessed their wonderful birdlike soarings have seen then only from the ground.

It was my good fortune to have a solitary seat in a captive-balloon some three-hundred feet above the heads of the people in the grandstand at the Los Angeles aviation field, and to have the “bird-men” circling below, on a level, and at times in the sky above me. I could follow every movement of that king swallow, Paulhan, in his sensation-hunting flights; of Curtiss, the humming-bird, in his swift biplane driven life the wind with his engine of eight lungs; of Willard, he of the delicate touch, who picks up two hundred and fifty-dollar purses by flying from a mark and stopping at the same line three minutes later after circling the track; of Harmon, the gentleman-bird who goes to lunch in his mammoth balloon and flies to his dinner on wings of silk; of Miscarol, practicing with his Bleriot monoplane---a dragon-fly that skimsaround the course with wheels just touching the high spots, then up in the air a few feet, stopping, jumping out, swinging its tail around and  off again in a new direction.

All of these events went on below me and I, from a seat on a few sand-bags in the basket of the balloon, with my legs through the net that held the shallow basket, kept my busy camera outside the met. It was a daily position to be envied really by occupants of the grandstand and boxes who had paid many dollars for their lower vantage points. At a height of three hundred feet about the forty thousand spectators, sounds came in waves and masses, and the shrill barking of souvenir program, hot peanuts and bottled beer venders was like the sharp rattle of small guns in a cannonade. Then, when Paulhan, starting behind the tents in a hollow, and flying almost out of sight, suddenly appeared, and when directly over and about fifty feet above the grandstand, stopped his engines and glided over the heads of the startled people to the field below, I could have heard a pin drop, the noise ceased so suddenly. Then, in a volume, that almost make the balloon tremble, came the cheers, for the American people like to be startled.

Society in the air will soon be the thing, and I think I can claim to have received the first afternoon call. When Roy Knabenshue came circling in his dirigible he did not know or send up his card, but inquired about the weather and how the wind blew, and other bird-society small talk.

Looking down on a flying biplane 

The Paulhan flew by, waving his hand and started to explore some of the farms I could see off toward the ocean. What a scattering of birds and barnyard fowls there was. They must have been panic-stricken at this strange, new fowl with its queer, sparsely-covered skeleton and strange, motionless wings. After sailing over a lake just for the fun of it, came gliding back, rising and falling in great sweeping curves, passed over the grandstand again and flew off to inspect the ruins of an old adobe dwelling over to the east of the field, a mile or so. One could almost imagine him to be a great swallow looking for a suitable place to build his nest, or perhaps hunting for his next meal. But instead of that he is getting some twenty thousand dollars a month to do what is to him his greatest pleasure.

To me, looking down from aloft, the filed is like a vaudeville performance; each “bird-man” comes out and does his little stunt, and if for some unaccountable reason the other engines refuse to go, Paulhan comes out, most willingly and fills the interval.