Ads That Are Writ in Air
While the word skywriting was coined in 1904, only a year after the Wright Brothers' inaugural 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk, the phenomenon truly took off in the early 1920s. A 1923 New York Times Magazine article chronicled the development.
Albeit with some obvious exaggerations:
Look through a telescope at the moon five years from now and you will see superimposed on the silver face of Luna a pickle ad done by a sky-writer.
...
The skyline of the world used to be the Himalayas, the Alps, the Eiffel Tower, and the Woolworth Tower. But we are changing all that. Above the Himalayas, the Alps, and the Eiffel Tower will be soap, cigarette, and pickle ads.
If future generations wish to get a glimpse of the heavens as we saw them in our youth, they will be compelled to have themselves catapulted to the moon (a la Jules Verne) and look zenithward.
As this Google Books Ngram Viewer graph demonstrates, the word skywriting only truly took off in popularity around 1922 or 1923:
Side note: look at the tail end of that graph. Does anybody know why the word skydiving has completely dropped off a cliff since about 2014? Is it because that's around the time everybody started looking down at their phones, instead of up at the skies?
If you have an alternate explanation, please leave it in the comments.
Ads That Are Writ in the Air
Published: Sunday, June 17, 1923