Does Anyone Remember Skywriting?

Tweet

It was usually a small airplane flying around with a smoke generator and a skilled pilot who could fly precisely enough to form big white smoke letters in the sky. I recall seeing them pretty often when I was growing up in Texas. An article I read about it says that you could even use canola oil to make the smoke, so I guess it was fairly harmless. If you have never seen this done, you might wonder why anyone would do it. The word is advertising and it goes as far back as 1915 in the US at the San Francisco World’s Fair and even earlier in England. I thought about this at first because some the best ideas I have for writing anything seem to appear just before sleep, almost like they are skywriting in the darkness.