Dorothy Rice Sims a mutual friend, George Biddle, and wrote in her 1938 autobiography, "Curiouser and Curiouser", "I inquired Waldo’s height—he was six feet two. This seemed a dignified height. I told George to produce Waldo, which he did. We got married in Madrid, in a German Methodist Church, with the American vice-consul, who was a Filipino, to make it legal.” A website using the name "Mile High Club" regards the "Club's" "founder" as pilot and design engineer Lawrence Sperry as the "Club's" "founder", along with "socialite Mrs. Waldo Peirce" (Dorothy Rice Sims) citing their flight in an autopilot-equipped Curtiss Flying Boat near
1910 London to Manchester air race that take-off and landing were to be at locations no more than five miles from the newspaper's offices in those cities. Powered flight was a relatively new invention, and the newspaper's proprietors were keen to stimulate the industry's growth; in 1908 they offered £1,000 for the first flight across the English channel (won on 25 July 1909 by the French aviator Louis Blériot), and £1,000 for the first circular one-mile flight made by a British aviator in a British aeroplane (won on 30 October 1909 by the English aviator John Moore-Brabazon). In 1910, two men accepted the newspaper's 1906 challenge;