Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1911, 1910, 1909, 1908, 1900s
[p. 130] Hollywood and aviation . . . developed side by side in Southern California as parallel industries . . . By 1908 Los Angeles already supported an Aero Club of California, which had two hundred members by 1909. In Janurary 1910 the Chamber of Commerce sponsored a pioneering international air meet on Dominguez Hill, a table-like plateau half-way between Los Angeles and the ocean. Glen Curtiss established a new speed record of sixty miles an hour, and the French aviator Louis Paulham . . . [p. 131] established a new altitude record of 4,165 feet.
On 20 February 1911 Charles Walsh of San Diego, the first licensed pilot in California took his wife and two children for the first recorded passenger flight in American history. . . .
[p. 132] "The distance and load capacity of the Spirit of St. Louis had more than peacetime implications. Throughout the 1920s General Giulio Douhet of Italy and Brigadier General William (Billy) Mitchell of the United States were advocating the high-level precision bombing of long-range military targets. As early as the Dominguez Hill air meet of January 1910, German representatives had been on hand to see aviator Roy Knabenshue demonstrate, for the first time in aviation history, the practicality of dropping explosives from a lighter-than-air ship . . .