Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
February 2, 1957 A dedication ceremony was held for a still-incomplete bridge crossing the Hudson River in southeastern New York. This bridge, which is about 96 miles (154.5 kilometers) north of New York City, serves as a link between the city of Kingston in Ulster County and the hamlet of Rhinecliff (part of the town... Continue Reading →
January 20, 1908 In the north-central region of the State of Washington, the first highway bridge in the United States crossing the Columbia River was officially opened. The Columbia River Bridge, which was built by the Washington Bridge Company over the course of two years, has provided an important link between the city of Wenatchee in... Continue Reading →
December 31, 1909 New York City’s Manhattan Bridge, which crosses over the East River and links Lower Manhattan at Canal Street with Brooklyn at the Flatbush Avenue Extension, was officially opened to traffic. This structure joined the Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges as the suspension bridges carrying traffic over the lower East River. At the time of... 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 →
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 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 →
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 →
September 18, 1831 Automotive pioneer Siegfried Samuel Marcus was born in the town of Malchin in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, which is now part of the Federal Republic of Germany. By the mid-1850s, Marcus had moved to Vienna and worked in that city as a manufacturer of scientific instruments until his death in 1898.... Continue Reading →
August 28, 2018 In England’s North East region, the recently completed Northern Spire Bridge within the city and metropolitan borough of Sunderland was opened to pedestrians. This two-span cable-stayed bridge carries the highway A1231 over the River Wear and serves as a link between the Sunderland suburbs of Pallion and Castletown. The 1,102-foot (336-meter)-long structure... Continue Reading →
August 4, 1900 Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir, who invented the first practical and commercially successful internal combustion engine, died in the French town of La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire (near Paris) at the age of 78. Lenoir had been born in 1822 in Mussy-la-Ville, which was a community in Luxembourg at the time and is now part of Belgium. An... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 