Love Is in the Air

All you need is Love... and a little paraffin oil injected into a plane's scalding engine exhaust.

What a surprise Saturday to look into the early evening sky over Northridge and see a formation of planes spelling out "LOVE LOVE" in dot-matrix fashion.

But who would have thought you could write out messages across the heavens? The origins may be in dispute, but here are a couple of events.

In 1915, the New York Times reported that Art Smith, who offered flying exhibitions at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco "did skywriting, always ending his breathtaking stunts by writing 'Good night.'"

And Major Jack Savage, former RAF pilot who had a squadron of skywriting aircraft in England in the 1920s and 1930s, brought the practice to America as well, according to Wikipedia.

But it took Americans to turn an aerial stunt into a powerful advertising medium. 

Viewers on the ground were mesmerized, watching one letter after another appear in the sky when Pepsi-Cola spelled out it's slogan from 1931 to 1953, according to the Library of Congress.

Soon, the technique was so popular that even the Wicked Witch of the West flying on her broom was spelling out "SURRENDER DOROTHY OR DIE" in 1939's Wizard of Oz.

Fun Facts from the Library of Congress:

• Most sources attribute the development of skywriting (1922) to John C. Savage, an Englishman. In that year, Captain Cyril Turner wrote "Daily Mail" over England and "Hello USA" over New York. The American Tobacco Co. then picked up the technique for their Lucky Strike cigarettes.
• The first skywriting for advertising was in 1922.
• April 8, 1924, Savage received a patent for “Method of producing advertising signs of smoke in the air” (US Patent 1,489,717).
• A letter can be as high as one mile and take 60-90 seconds to create.
• A message can stretch up to fifteen miles.
• The best conditions of course are few clouds, little or no wind, and cooler temperatures. Then the letters may be seen for 30 miles in any direction and can last 20 minutes.
• Writing occurs usually at altitudes from 7,000-17,000 ft.
• The paraffin oil vaporizes at 1500° in the heat of the plane’s exhaust and is environmentally safe.
• The skywriting that appeared in the movie, Wizard of Oz, was done by special effects in a tank with an oil and water mixture.
• One company in New York “writes” more than 50 marriage proposals a year in the sky.

Follow us on Twitter | Like us on Facebook | Sign up for our daily newsletter