"Yoko Ono's loving birthday message to John Lennon and son Sean in 1980 gained worldwide media attention."
While driving to the Bay Club Courtside for a steam sauna, I noticed the sun beaming and two long, thick streaks of smoke trailing across a blue sky. After the storm clouds and rain we had over the last few days, it was a welcome sight. I decided to stop my car to take these photos.
As a kid growing up in Hoboken, NJ, I remember laying on the lawn of Stevens Institute of Technology looking at airplanes leaving a white streak above the NYC skyline. It was both joyful and mesmerizing. After a period of time it began to fade and disappear into thin air. I always wondered WOW! How do they do that? The answer to this question went unanswered for many years.
I was further mesmerized in 1980 when Yoko Ono hired skywriter pilot Wayne Mansfield to write a surprise birthday message in the sky over the Dakota at Central Park West in celebration of John Lennon's 40th and son Sean's 5th birthday that read "Happy Birthday John and Sean—Love Yoko." The pilot used a computerized technique called sky-typing that emits a series of dot-like bursts. Again, I wondered how do they do that?
One day, I spoke to a retired airline pilot about this phenomenon. He called these white streaks “artificial clouds" or “contrails” which is short for “condensation trail.” Commercial airplane engines produce an exhaust just like automobile engines. The hot exhaust gases escape into the atmosphere and the water vapor in the fumes hits the cold air causing it to condense. During this process the vapor gases turns into tiny water droplets or crystals before evaporating and creating the cloud-like white streaks we see in the sky. Think of the misty cloud your hot breath forms on a cold winter day!
However, this is different from the trail of smoke created by skywriters who use smaller aircraft at lower altitudes that are equipped with a special smoke machine and fly in a special pattern to create readable written messages—that can be seen from the ground. It is used in advertising, marriage proposals, celebrations like John Lennon’s Birthday mentioned above, and in one case, insulting the then candidate, Donald Trump with a series of messages including “Anybody but Trump” during the 2015 Rose Bowl Parade. Skywriting dates back to the early 1900s. Lincoln Beachey, a pioneer American aviator and barnstormer, who was referred by his peers as “The Man Who Owns the Sky” and “The Master Birdman” was also a skywriter who ended his stunts by writing “Good Night,” until his death in 1915.
The technique of using skywriting for advertising was pioneered by an English aviator named J.C. Savage in 1922. Engine heat is used to turn specially treated paraffin oil into white smoke that is discharged under pressure at heights between 10,000 to 17,000 feet. However, commercial skywriting in the United States wasn’t developed until the early 1930s by Sid Pike, President of the Skywriting Corporation of America. Pepsi-Cola was one of their major clients. These days skywriting has become more sophisticated. Satellite navigation is utilized to program more accurate messages before a flight.
Postscript: "They say it's your birthday, we're gonna have a good time..." Written my McCartney and Lennon who would have been 77 last month.
Image credits:
https:www.wondropolis.org
https:www.theskywriters.com
https://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/skywriting.html
http://beatlephotoblog.com/happy-birthday-john
