Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
September 18, 1948 A first-of-a-kind flight took place in the skies above Muroc Dry Lake (part of present-day Edwards Air Force Base) in the Mojave Desert in southern California. The pioneering jet plane was the Convair XF-92A, which had been designed and built for the U.S. Air Force (USAF) by the aircraft manufacturing company Consolidated... Continue Reading →
September 17, 1965 A day after becoming the first individuals to travel across the English Channel in automobiles, four Englishmen arrived in the city of Frankfurt in what was then West Germany for a major automobile show. The men arrived at the event in the two Amphicars which they had used for the waterborne trip. The... Continue Reading →
September 14, 1716 1729 illustration showing signal cannon in right background The first lighthouse to be built in the present-day United States began operations on what is now called Little Brewster Island at the entrance to Boston Harbor. The first keeper of the structure known as Boston Light was George Worthylake, who also served as... Continue Reading →
September 13, 2008 Legacy Parkway was officially opened in northern Utah. The 11.5-mile (18.5-kilometer)-long four-lane controlled-access highway had been built to provide an alternate route for commuters in the area and significantly reduce traffic congestion in that region of the Beehive State. Legacy Parkway, which is designated as Utah State Route 67, starts at an... Continue Reading →
September 12, 1884 Charles F. Lummis began an ambitious trip from Cincinnati to Los Angeles, using only his feet for a journey of 3,507 miles (5,644 kilometers). The 25-year-old Lummis had been working for several years as a reporter in Chillicothe, Ohio when he was offered a job with the Los Angeles Times as its... Continue Reading →
September 11, 2010 The dry cargo vessel USNS (United States Naval Ship) Washington Chambers was christened and launched at the National Steel and Shipbuilding Company (NASSCO) shipyard in San Diego. NASSCO, a division of General Dynamics, built USNS Washington Chambers for the Navy’s Military Sealift Command. The original crew for the ship included 129 civil... Continue Reading →
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 →
Transportation History 