Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
November 12, 1901 Industrial designer Alexis de Sakhnoffsky was born in the Ukrainian city of Kiev in what was then the Russian Empire. He fled his homeland by 1920 in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and ended up pursuing a wide-ranging design career that included many transportation makes and models. Throughout a large part of... Continue Reading →
November 10, 1949 The first flight of the multi-purpose Sikorsky S-55 helicopter took place in the skies above Bloomfield, Connecticut. This helicopter was built by Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation, which had been established by aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky in 1923 and originally known as Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation. (Sikorsky Aircraft has been part of Lockheed Martin... Continue Reading →
In March 1914, Red Fox James began a journey of approximately 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) on horseback from the Crow Indian Reservation in southern Montana to Washington, D.C. He made this ambitious nine-month trip on a horse named Montana. “The ride was made for the purpose of creating interest in a proposal to establish a... Continue Reading →
November 6, 1998 The Raftsund Bridge in the northern region of Norway was officially opened to traffic. This structure provides a road route across the Raftsundet strait between Austvågøya and Hinnøya, which are among the larger islands of the Lofoten archipelago in Norway’s Nordland county. The Raftsund Bridge measures 2,333 feet (711 meters) in length and... Continue Reading →
November 5, 1893 Industrial designer Raymond Loewy was born in Paris, France. Loewy would spend most of his professional career in the United States, and his wide range of design efforts included many with a transportation theme of some kind. These efforts started at an early age. When he was only 15 years old, for example, Loewy... Continue Reading →
In 1968, construction began on Puerto Rico Highway 52 (PR-52). This project was completed seven years later. PR-52, which is maintained by the Puerto Rico Department of Transportation and Public Works, covers 67.4 miles (108.5 kilometers) between Puerto Rico’s capital of San Juan in the north and the city and municipality of Ponce on the... Continue Reading →
November 3, 1900 The first major automobile show in the United States opened on a Saturday evening at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The next day’s edition of the New York Times reported, “From the hour the doors of the big building swung inward until midnight a throng of spectators variously estimated at from... Continue Reading →
Joseph Robert Toahty, who was half Pawnee and half Kiowa, established notable records for Native Americans during his service in the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG). Toahty was born in Oklahoma in 1919. He inherited the name Le-Tuts-Taka (meaning “White Eagle”) from his Pawnee ancestor Chief White Eagle, who had served as a U.S. Army scout... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 