4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 3 December 2024
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… an ad for cigarettes?! For the past 102 years, people have been using airplanes to turn exhaust into ads, political slogans, birthday greetings, and more. But where did this strangely brilliant idea come from? What kind of sorcery do pilots use to make it happen? And why is it at risk of becoming a lost art?
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0:00.0 | Once upon a time, Amazon Music met audiobooks and listeners everywhere rejoiced. |
0:05.8 | Oh yeah. |
0:06.6 | Because now they could listen to one audiobook title a month from an enormous library of popular audiobook titles, including romanticity, |
0:15.3 | autobiographies, true crime, and more. |
0:19.3 | Suddenly listeners didn't mind sitting in traffic or even missing their |
0:22.6 | flight. Amazon Music Unlimited now includes audible. No way. Download the Amazon Music app now to start |
0:28.4 | listening. Terms apply. It's hard to read the news these days without asking yourself, |
0:33.1 | how did we get here? Fiasco is a history podcast for the co-creators of Slow Burn. |
0:38.6 | In our first season, Bush v. Gore, we examined an unmistakable turning point in American politics, the 2000 election, which resulted in a high-stakes stalemate, ended with one of the most controversial rulings in Supreme Court history. |
0:51.5 | So if you're trying to make sense at the present moment, check out Fiasco, Bush v. Gore. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. |
1:03.8 | You're listening to Part-Time Genius, a production of kaleidoscope and IHeart Radio. |
1:12.7 | Guess what, Mango? |
1:14.0 | What's that, Dave? |
1:14.9 | So you probably had this marked in your calendar already, but last week was actually the |
1:20.2 | 1002nd birthday of commercial skywriting in America. |
1:25.0 | I did not have that on my calendar for some odd reason. But I really am surprised we can |
1:30.9 | pin down an exact start date for such an old medium. Like, I know there are so many candidates |
1:36.1 | for like the first newspaper ad or the first billboard and there's a lot of confusion there. |
1:41.6 | That's true, but it's a little different. When the ad appears out of thin air, 10,000 feet above Time Square. |
1:47.6 | Somebody's going to keep track of that. |
1:49.2 | And that's exactly what happened on November 28, 1922, when British pilot Captain Cyril Turner took to the skies above New York City. |
1:58.4 | Using a specially designed exhaust system, he spelled out, |
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