Melvin Vaniman, the voyage’s innovative aerial photographer, holds Kiddo. Vaniman perished two years later in the wreck of the Akron.

“Roy, come and get this goddamn cat” was, in 1910, the initial radio message ever transmitted from air to ground. The occasion was the attempt of Walter Wellman’s dirigible America to cross the Atlantic, the first time a flying machine ever tried to accomplish the feat. The ship was outfitted with a wireless, also a first for an airship, and the message it relayed was about Kiddo, the journey’s feline mascot, apparently taken along because a skittish animal with sharp claws and balloons go together so well. (Before on-board cats became a short-lived craze, stuffed teddy bears, a much saner option, were apparently the mascot of choice for air trips.)

Though the voyage failed roughly 1,000 miles from its starting point in Atlantic City, all six passengers–seven if you include the troublesome Kiddo–were rescued by a passing liner. Wellman, a working class Ohio kid with a public-school education who became a newspaper editor and, later, a bold aviator and explorer, lost a lot of “battles” in the air, but his work paved the way for others to win the “war.” From a story about Wellman and his kitty in the November 20, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“When Walter Wellman and his crew of adventurers climbed into the basket of the great balloon America, at Atlantic City, a few weeks ago, to make their now world-famous effort to cross the Atlantic Ocean by air route, there went with them a cute little gray kitten about two months old.

“Moisant makes few trips these days without taking along his little gray kitten named Paree.”

Besides earning for itself the reputation of being one of the two cats to go up in the air so high, Miss Atlantic City Pussy did something else on that memorable voyage. She and another kitten–the one taken aloft by John B. Moisant, in his famous aeroplane trip from Paris to London–were the means of starting a craze that has every prospect of spreading to all quarters of the country. These kittens caused the cat tribe to be so noticed that cat worship is scarcely too strong a term to apply to the popularity that is theirs.

Moisant makes few trips these days without taking along his little gray kitten named Paree. A number of other aviators impressed by the fortunate end to the Wellman expedition are thinking of adopting the same sort of mascot.”