What did people think when they saw an airplane for the first time in the 1900s??

Well, I saw his take off and it was such a thrill that I changed my interest from steam locomotives to airplanes on
that day, when I was four and one-half and I never changed my direction since then. That was May 29th, 1910. I was
four and one-half and I remember it quite vividly, seeing that airplane zoom over the trees and disappear over the Hudson
River, at about 100 to 200 feet. Curtiss was the first man to fly across the Hudson River, but he did it lengthwise!
[Laughter] That flight was really an historic flight and it was a very big thrill to everybody. It was in all the newspapers,
with headlines and so forth, it was quite an exciting thing. Today you would never think anything of it. But, then,
airplanes had never been seen here before. That was their very first airplane and many, many people still didn't believe
that airplanes were actually a fact. People actually thought they were a fake. In fact, later when I was barnstorming,
several people would come to me and say, "I think the whole thing is a fake! You've got some secret method of getting
that thing up there." [Laughter] Well, it was secret all right: it was air, which is not visible. I remember distinctly, one
day I was carrying passengers in an old Jenny and a man came along, holding a little boy by the hand. Within my
hearing, the boy asked his father, "What makes it fly!" He replied, "It's just a fake, they've got some secret trick to get
it up there." [Laughter] I actually heard that. [Laughter] Many people at that time thought flying was against God, that
man should never fly, or try to fly because it was sacrilegious and I had people come to me and tell me that, when I was
flying in those days.

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