Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
September 10, 1932 The George Westinghouse Memorial Bridge was officially opened in the borough of East Pittsburgh in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County. One newspaper characterized the debuting bridge as “the most recent link in Pennsylvania’s maze of beautiful highways.” The 1,598-foot (487.1-meter)-long bridge, which consists of five spans and carries U.S. Route 30 over the Turtle... Continue Reading →
September 7, 1970 Arctic explorer Donald Baxter MacMillan, a lifelong New Englander who made seminal contributions to transportation in the world’s northernmost regions, died at the age of 95 in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In recounting MacMillan’s final years as a resident of that Cape Cod community, the New York Times highlighted his steadfast love for sailing... Continue Reading →
September 6, 1996 In the Netherlands, a recently completed bridge was officially opened by Queen Beatrix in the city of Rotterdam. This combined cable-stayed and bascule bridge was named after the prominent Dutch Renaissance humanist Desiderius Erasmus, who is also known as Erasmus of Rotterdam. The Erasmus Bridge (“Erasmusbrug” in Dutch), which crosses a distributary... Continue Reading →
September 5, 1927 “Trolley Troubles,” a transportation-themed cartoon short produced and directed by Walt Disney and distributed by Universal Pictures, made its debut. The film, which is about six minutes in length, is notable because it marked the first appearance of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. This character would serve as the basis for Disney’s better-known... Continue Reading →
September 4, 1783 Frederic Tudor, a businessman who became known as the “Ice King” for creatively transporting ice to various regions of the globe from his native New England, was born in Boston. Long before the advent of electric refrigerators, Tudor came up with the idea of harvesting block ice from frozen freshwater lakes and... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 