Missouri History Museum

Near dawn on October 8, 1909 aviator Glen Curtiss made a 90 second flight that took him three-quarters of a mile at the dizzying speed of 30 miles per hour. The previous day a record crowd estimated at 300,000 gathered at Forest Park and waited for three hours to watch him take flight for only four seconds. Curtiss would only fly at dawn and dusk to avoid winds over three miles per hour that might overpower the 25-horsepower engine in his biplane. Grumbling at Curtiss’s caution, a St. Louis Republic reporter wrote “the heaviest thing upon the Curtiss biplane, ungallant though it be to say it, is Mrs. Curtiss.” The Wright brothers, he noted approvingly, were unmarried.