The Wright Brothers had flown just six years earlier. By January 1910, aviation was still close enough to its birth that many Americans had never seen a flying machine. The Los Angeles International Air Meet, held January 10 through 20 on Dominguez Field southwest of present-day Rancho Dominguez, changed that for 254,000 people — an astonishing turnout for an era before radio, before freeways, before mass entertainment. The Los Angeles Times called it 'one of the greatest public events in the history of the West.' Organizers Charles Willard and A. Roy Knabenshue had chosen the site for its mild winter weather: a gentle hilltop on land from the old Rancho San Pedro Spanish land grant, served by a Pacific Electric Railway station they expanded specifically for the crowds. Grandstands rose to hold between 50,000 and 60,000 spectators at a time.

The cast of characters at Dominguez Field reads like a founding mythology of American aviation. Glenn Curtiss, aviation pioneer and founder of what would become one of America's first great aerospace companies, flew demonstrations. Louis Paulhan of France set world records in altitude and endurance. Lincoln Beachey, who would soon become the most famous stunt pilot in America, was present. The Wright Brothers themselves attended — not to fly, but to serve papers. Orville and Wilbur had brought their lawyers to court, trying to block Paulhan and Curtiss from flying on patent infringement grounds. The injunctions failed, and the flights proceeded. Nine-year-old Florence Leontine Lowe attended with her grandfather, aviation pioneer Thaddeus Lowe. She would later become 'Pancho' Barnes, one of the most celebrated pilots of her generation. William Randolph Hearst received his first airplane ride from Paulhan. The field crackled with money, ambition, and altitude records.

Beyond the famous names, Dominguez Field attracted a remarkable carnival of dreamers. A $1,500 prize for the best locally designed and built aircraft that successfully flew brought out an extraordinary range of California inventors. Los Angeles resident James Slough Zerbe brought his 'Multi-plane,' a contraption with five separate planes of wings. It hit a hole in the field during takeoff and collapsed. There were ornithopters — flapping-wing machines — gyroplanes, and monoplanes of every description. None matched the achievement of the established aviators, but the spectacle of so many ordinary people attempting to build flying machines in their garages and barns was itself a revelation about the new age arriving.

The Los Angeles area that hosted the 1910 Air Meet was already growing fast, but aviation supercharged its trajectory. The field occupied land that would eventually become part of one of the world's most important aviation-industrial corridors. The Los Angeles Basin's manufacturing capacity, the ports nearby, and the year-round flying weather that had drawn Knabenshue and Willard to the site in the first place — all of it combined to make Southern California the center of American aerospace for the next century. The ten days at Dominguez Field planted a seed that became Boeing, Lockheed, Douglas, and Northrop.

The site of the 1910 Air Meet is marked today by a California historical landmark. Dominguez Field itself is gone, absorbed by the industrial sprawl of Rancho Dominguez, but the Dominguez Rancho Adobe nearby still stands as it did when pilots were camping in its shadow. The event's records — photographs, films, programs, participant lists — are preserved at California State University, Dominguez Hills and the Los Angeles Public Library. Among those records is the story of the $10,000 grand prize, offered to any machine that 'carrying two or more persons, breaks all world records for duration, altitude, distance and speed.' The prize went uncollected. The machines of 1910 were not yet ready for that level of ambition. Within a decade, they would be.