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The problem with golden ages like this is that they commit suicide.

Alberto Santos-Dumont could get away with flying his personal dirigible to Maxim's because he was the only one doing so. There were no other aeronauts dashing off for espresso for him to crash into, or to crowd him out from being able to tie his flying machine to the horse hitch in front.

Which is great for the first person to do something. But if the "something" is sufficiently cool -- and I think we can all agree that having a personal blimp would be pretty cool even today, never mind 100 years ago -- other people look at it and think "man, I wish I were able to do that."

So they go off and build their own flying machines, and before long there isn't one aeronaut trying to tie up in front of Maxim's, there's ten or a hundred or a thousand. And, inevitably, because the followers of the genius usually as bright as the genius is, they start crashing into each other or into things and people on the ground.

All of which creates demand for bring order to the chaos in the skies, both from people on the ground and the aeronauts themselves. (The people on the ground are tired of having daring aeronauts fall on their heads; the aeronauts are tired of having to argue every question of who has right of way when two dirigibles meet from first principles.) Which means regulation and licenses and safety requirements. Which closes out the backyard tinkerers.

It's all very sad, if you're a backyard tinkerer. The very thing that made what you were tinkering on so cool eventually makes it impossible for you to keep tinkering on it; you either have to scale up or shut down. But whaddayagonnado? Such is life.

Yes. Here's Lawrence Sperry, inventor of the gyrocompass and the autopilot, landing his Sperry Messenger in front of the U.S. Capitol in 1922. (He needed about 600 feet of clear road to do that, for a 400 foot landing run.) Nobody panicked over this, even though this was after WWI and aerial bombing was known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lawrence_Sperry_at_Capito...

Seems that landing experimental aircraft on the Capitol steps was a thing. Senator Hiram Bingham landed both a blimp (1929) and this "autogyro" (1931) there too:

https://uschs.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/bingham.jpg

(Fun fact: Bingham was the partial inspiration for Indiana Jones).

as recent as 1957, while not Capitol Hill, pretty close though

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_X-13_Vertijet :

>On July 28-July 29, 1957, the X-13 was demonstrated in Washington, D.C. It crossed the Potomac River and landed at the Pentagon.

golden age is created by people. By people who has at least some money, knowledge/skills and most importantly - passion. We have only one Musk, they had hundreds - that is the difference.

With respect to the new frontiers to explore our age isn't less exciting - we have access to DNA to tinker, cyborg-ing, fusion, space.