There’s an excellent interview about aviation history at the Browser with Joseph Corn, author of The Winged Gospel. An excerpt:

“Material and popular culture provided plenty of support for your thesis that the world expected manned flight to magically transform humanity. Please cite some of that colourful evidence for us.

Joseph Corn: ‘An Airplane in Every Garage’ was the name of an article that appeared in Harper’s Magazine in 1930, a publication for the intellectual elite. During the wind-down of World War II, as the defeat of the Germans and Japanese became obvious in late 1944 and early 1945, Ladies’ Home Journal asked its readers whether they expected to own an airplane and an amazing percentage said yes – 30-odd percent, as I recall, and this was at a time when a far smaller percentage of people had cars. The percentage of people who actually got airplanes was less than 1% at its peak. Planes per population peaked in 1946 and basically it’s been going down ever since.

Remember, America rapidly moved from the development of the Model T to mass automobility by 1915. England didn’t reach the level of car ownership that California had in 1906 until 1956. So people thought, first we had horses and carriages and then we had bicycles and then we had cars and next, soon, it’ll be airplanes. And there was a brief moment after the war when the evidence suggested that the dream of owning an airplane would be within reach of almost anyone. Macy’s Department Store in New York sold airplanes in 1946. One newspaper article reported that the elevator men would call out, ‘Furniture, bed settings and airplanes 5th floor.’. Another bit of evidence of ‘the winged gospel’ – there was a movement, centred at Columbia University Teachers College to push ‘air-age education’ into all schools. Textbooks were written on subjects like ‘air-age English,’ ‘air-age geography’ and ‘air-age mathematics.’ Geography made some sense because the airplane seemed to be shrinking the globe. 

…

Perhaps the best evidence were the ritualistic observances that went along with ‘the winged gospel.’ People would go up in airplanes to get married and at least in one case a couple parachuted out to start their honeymoon. One woman in Florida took off with her husband piloting when she was in labour and her obstetrician delivered her baby at 5,000 feet – she named the girl Aero Jean. These little observances are all testimony to the tremendous excitement people had for flight and their tremendous optimism as to how flight was changing the world.”