Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
November 5, 2011 Better late than never . . . In southeast Australia, a lighthouse at Cape Wickham on King Island in the state of Tasmania was officially opened 150 years after first going into the service. This ceremony finally took place in 2011 because, during preparations to commemorate the lighthouse’s sesquicentennial, it was discovered... Continue Reading →
November 4, 1877 The Maria Pia Bridge in northern Portugal made its public debut. (At the time, the country was a constitutional monarchy formally known as the Kingdom of Portugal.) The railway bridge, which spans the River Douro and connects the city of Porto with the municipality of Via Nova de Gaia, resulted from a competition... Continue Reading →
In 1920, racecar driver John Riley Boling became the first Native American to compete in the Indianapolis 500. He finished 11th in a field of 23 drivers. (This was only the eighth running of the world-famous annual automobile race, which takes place at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.) Boling had been born in 1895 in Bloomfield,... Continue Reading →
October 31, 1956 [Photo courtesy of McDonnell Douglas.] The first-ever aircraft landing at the South Pole took place as a key part of Operation Deep Freeze II, the codename for a series of U.S. missions to Antarctica during 1956-57. The U.S. Navy plane used for this touching down at Earth’s southernmost point was a ski-equipped... Continue Reading →
October 30, 2007 The M1 motorway made its debut in northwestern Pakistan. This east-west highway was officially inaugurated by Syed Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan from 2001 to 2008. The 96-mile (155-kilometer) M1 motorway connects the city of Peshawar (capital of the province of Khyber Pakhtunkwa) with the metropolitan area encompassing the cities of... Continue Reading →
October 29, 1987 A new trolleybus system was inaugurated in Mongolia’s capital city of Ulaanbaatar (also known as Ulan Bator). These trolleybuses have become a heavily used part of the city’s overall transit network, which also includes regular bus lines and a hodge-podge of privately owned passenger vans that are collectively called “microbuses.” The sometimes... Continue Reading →
October 28, 1888 In Japan, the first line of the Iyotetsu (Iyo Railway) Company went into service in the Ehime Prefecture on the main island of Shikoku. The Takahama Line, covering 5.8 miles (9.4 kilometers) between the Ehime Prefecture’s capital city of Matsuyama and the port town of Mitsuhama, made its debut a little over... Continue Reading →
October 25, 1873 John North Willys, a leading automobile industrialist, was born in Canandaigua, New York. His original career involved selling bicycles, but all that changed when he saw his first automobile in 1899. Willys (pronounced Will-is), realizing the automobile’s potential, started selling models of that type of transportation instead. By 1907, Willys’ high volume... Continue Reading →
October 24, 1891 A new railway station was officially opened along the Øresund strait at the city of Helsingør (best known in English as Elsinore) in eastern Demark. This building continues to serve as Helsingør’s principal railway station, and it was constructed to replace a station that had been in existence elsewhere in the city... Continue Reading →
October 23, 1906 Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont made the first sustained and officially witnessed flight in a powered heavier-than-air machine in Europe when he piloted his 14-bis biplane in Paris, France. Santos-Dumont came from a family of wealthy coffee producers in his native Brazil, but devoted his life instead to the study of human flight... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 