Finding the unexpected in the everyday.
Sampo, a pioneering icebreaker that the British manufacturer Armstrong-Whitworth (AW) had just built for the Finnish government, left the AW shipyard in northeastern England for her second sea trial. The first sea trial for Sampo took place about a month earlier and quickly ended in failure when the new vessel’s bow propeller shaft malfunctioned. Sampo’s... Continue Reading →
Federico Peña made history when President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. secretary of transportation. This appointment made Peña the first Hispanic-American to serve in that role. Peña was born in Laredo, Texas, in 1947. He eventually settled in Colorado, serving in the state’s House of Representatives from 1979 to 1983 and as mayor of Denver... Continue Reading →
More than four months after first being opened to vehicular and pedestrian traffic, a new major bridge in Thailand was dedicated. Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej (also known as Rama IX), who reigned from 1946 to 2016, presided over the ceremony. The event took place on the birth anniversary of his deceased brother and immediate predecessor... Continue Reading →
In 1928, former U.S. Naval Academy midshipman Henry Garcia received a U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) commission. In doing so, Puerto Rican-born Garcia made history by becoming that military branch’s first officially recognized minority officer. A decade later, he achieved another milestone when he was made the captain of the patrol boat USCG Morris. This assignment... Continue Reading →
Airline transport pilot and certified flight instructor Wang Zheng (also known as Julie Wang) became the first Asian woman to circumnavigate the Earth in an airplane, and the first Chinese person to fly solo around the world, when she returned to the Texas town of Addison in the Dallas area 33 days after starting her... Continue Reading →
After the U.S. entry into World War II, a number of women of Puerto Rican descent – living both in Puerto Rico and on the mainland – answered the call to serve on the home front in the global fight against the Axis powers. These women, often facing hardships such as racial discrimination while working... Continue Reading →
Yacht designer Gustaf Estlander was born in the city of Helsinki in what was then the Grand Duchy of Finland (an autonomous region of the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1917). Estlander demonstrated a strong enthusiasm for water transportation early on in life; when he was about 18, for example, he used a canoe to... Continue Reading →
Friday, September 15 marks the beginning of National Hispanic Heritage Month in the U.S. Here is the first of our commemorative posts of Hispanic transportation pioneers. In June 1991, Sidney M. Gutierrez became the first U.S.-born Hispanic astronaut to travel into outer space. (Franklin R. Chang Díaz, who in 1986 had become the first Hispanic-American... Continue Reading →
La Vieille lighthouse on the northwest coast of France was first lit. The stone tower is specifically located on a rock known as Gorlebella (meaning “farthest rock” in the Breton language) at the commune of Plogoff. (That commune is the department of Finistère, an administrative division of France’s Brittany region; Finistère is the Breton phrase... Continue Reading →
The Penang Bridge in the Malaysian state of Penang was officially opened to traffic. The dual carriageway toll bridge, which took about three years to build, carries traffic over the Penang Strait and links the industrial town of Perai in the Central Seberang Perai District of mainland Peninsular Malaysia with the George Town suburb of... Continue Reading →
Transportation History 