Niles in the cockpit of his Bleriot preparing for a flight in Japan. Contemporary articles in the Japanese press stated that this aircraft was powered by a 50 h.p. Gnome engine, although for his exhibition flying in the USA Niles had used Gnome engines of greater power, more likely for the type of flying he would undertake.

Another Japanese postcard relating to Charles Niles, this one showing Niles’s Bleriot being wheeled out, probably at the Aoyama Parade Ground in Tokyo. The Westerner directing the move, on the right, may be Niles’s mechanic Frank Murray. By the time of the Japanese tour, Niles had established a reputation for daring aerobatics.

Charles Franklin Niles, born in 1888, learned to fly with Glenn Curtiss in 1912 and participated in a race comprising a circuit of Manhattan against five other aviators in October 1913, in which he came second. This postcard shows Niles in his 75 h.p. Curtiss Headless Model D, apparently built by the Christofferson Aircraft Co.

Using a photograph of somewhat poor quality, this postcard depicts Mars flying above a Japanese crowd. It is likely that most of the spectators at these early public exhibitions had never seen an aeroplane in flight before. James Cairn “Bud” Mars (March 8, 1875-July 25, 1944) made the first flights in Hawaii, the Philippines and Korea.

Bud Mars prepares to take off from the Joto Parade Ground in Osaka, in a biplane based on the Curtiss Model D, for his first display in Japan on March 12, 1911. The flights made that day must have made a remarkable spectacle for the Japanese, less than three months after the first aeroplane flight in Japan

Shriver and several Japanese workers hold back the Curtiss as Mars warms up the engine of the Curtiss pusher biplane before one of his flying displays in Japan in 1911. By the end of that year, Shriver had been killed after falling 200ft (60m) from a Baldwin Red Devil biplane during an exhibition flight in Puerto Rico in December.

James C. “Bud" Mars (left) and Tod Shriver pose beside Mars’s Curtiss biplane in Japan before a flight. The arrival of the American aviators in Japan coincided with a surge in popularity of postcards, and a record of these early flying exhibitions can be traced in the postcards issued to commemorate these events. Such memorabilia served as a valuable vehicle for promoting "air-mindedness" among the Japanese public.

A faked image on a postcard purportedly showing Niles flying inverted in his Curtiss during one of his exhibition flights over the Aoyama Parade Ground. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Niles, in common with numerous other barnstormers of his era, met a premature death, being killed in a crash during an exhibition flight at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on June 25, 1916.

A postcard depicting William B. Atwater taxying towards the shore in one of his Curtiss hydroaeroplanes after a flight over Yokohama harbour in May 1912. The postcard includes a reproduced signature and an inset portrait of Atwater, who apparently ran into financial trouble and bankruptcy back in the USA within a few years.

An image from a postcard commemorating the occasion of the first airmail flight in Japan, showing Japanese spectators inspecting William Atwater’s Curtiss hydroaeroplane on the waterfront in Yokohama. The aircraft rests on a wooden platform which allowed the machine to cross the beach and enter the water in the bay.

Thomas Scott Baldwin was born in Missouri in June 1854 and, after working on the railroads and as an acrobat in a circus, became the first American to descend by a parachute from a balloon, in January 1885, having obtained Balloon Pilot Licence No 1. After experiments with dirigibles, Baldwin developed his own aircraft, the Red Devil series of biplanes, built by Glenn Curtiss. Baldwin died in May 1923, aged 68.