Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
November 20, 1954 Clyde Cessna died in Wichita, Kansas, at the age of 74. By the time of his passing, he had left a large and longtime imprint on the transportation world as an aircraft designer and aviation entrepreneur. Cessna was born in 1879 in Hawthorne, Iowa. When he was only two years old, he... Continue Reading →
November 19, 1921 A recently completed railway station was officially opened in the village of Bjorli, which is located along the Rauma river in southern Norway. Bjorli Station was built as the western terminus for the first section of the Rauma Line. That section covered 35.3 miles (56.8 kilometers) between the village of Dombås and... Continue Reading →
The State Board of Public Roads of Rhode Island was established in 1902 to oversee the construction, maintenance, and improvement of the Ocean State’s highways system. Up until the establishment of this board, there had been no state-level entity in place to supervise and monitor work on public roads within Rhode Island; those duties were... Continue Reading →
November 17, 2007 A “rededication” ceremony was held for the McKinley Bridge, which crosses the Mississippi River and links St. Louis, Missouri, with Venice, Illinois. This bridge had been designed by renowned engineer Ralph Modjeski and it first opened in 1907. Contrary to a widespread assumption, the bridge was not named after President William McKinley; the... Continue Reading →
Ola Mildred Rexroat, who achieved fame as the only Native American to serve as one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II, was an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe. She was born in Argonia, Kansas in 1917. Early on in her life, Rexroat moved with her family to South... Continue Reading →
November 13, 1940 In western Kentucky, the Livermore Bridge was officially opened. This through truss bridge starts at the city of Livermore in McLean County, crosses over the Rough River, spans a small part of Ohio County, and then ends up on the south bank of the Green River back in McLean County. That design for... Continue Reading →
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 →
Transportation History 