Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
November 15, 1928 The first commercial use of a rail detector car in the United States took place. Since the advent of the train, a key challenge had been to avert service failures and dangerous derailments along the tracks carrying that mode of transportation. Inventor and entrepreneur Elmer A. Sperry, in response to this challenge, started to... Continue Reading →
Mary Riddle won widespread acclaim as one of the first Native American women to earn an airplane pilot’s license. She was born in the community of Bruceport in Washington in 1902. A lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest, Riddle was a member of both the Quinault Indian Nation in Washington and the Clatsop Tribe in... Continue Reading →
November 14, 1877 Ralph H. Carpenter, who launched and led one of the largest manufacturers of school bus bodies in the United States, was born in southern Indiana. As a teenager, Carpenter set up his own blacksmith shop in the city of Mitchell in the Hoosier State. A significant part of Carpenter’s job as a... Continue Reading →
November 13, 1927 The Holland Tunnel was opened to traffic in the New York metropolitan area just one minute after midnight. This highway conduit, which runs beneath the Hudson River and connects New York City’s island of Manhattan with Jersey City, New Jersey, was the first twin-tube underwater vehicular tunnel in the United States. The tunnel... Continue Reading →
In 1966, Donald Winchester became the first known Native American graduate of the U.S. Coast Guard Academy (USCGA) in New London, Connecticut. (Janet Emerson, USCGA’s class of 1988, was the first known female Native American to graduate from that institution.) Of Cherokee descent, Winchester was also the Coast Guard’s first known Native American aviator. Winchester... Continue Reading →
November 9, 1895 The last horse-drawn streetcar in Detroit made its final run. Banners on each side of the vehicle read “The last horse car.” Two horses pulled it along the Chene Street line, which was the last of Detroit’s streetcar routes to be equipped with electric streetcars. “Detroit takes final leave of the horse... Continue Reading →
November 8, 2008 Construction began on a new and record-setting dual carriageway (divided highway) toll bridge in the Malaysian state of Penang. The Sultan Abdul Halim Muadzam Shah Bridge was formally designated Expressway 28 (E28) and is also known as the Penang Second Bridge. The building of this bridge was originally expected to be done... Continue Reading →
Jerry C. Elliott, a Cherokee-Osage Native American, began his career at NASA in 1966. He started out as a flight mission operations engineer and, in the years since, has risen through the ranks at NASA in progressively more responsible technical and managerial positions in such areas as spacecraft systems, hardware, software, scientific experiments, and astronaut... Continue Reading →
November 7, 1910 The first commercial air freight shipment occurred in Ohio between the cities of Dayton and Columbus. Max Morehouse, owner of the Columbus-based Morehouse Martens department store, asked aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright for help in transporting to him by air a 100-pound (45.4-kilogram) shipment of silk from a wholesaler in Dayton... Continue Reading →
November 6, 1818 In northwestern Pennsylvania, a lighthouse in the borough (now city) of Erie began operations when keeper John Bone lit the oil wick in the new structure. The lighthouse had been built on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie and was specifically located across the water from Presque Isle, a seven-mile (11.3-kilometer)-long peninsula that... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 