1921 | Transportation
Transportation
The Port of New York Authority created April 30 will administer marine terminals, tunnels, bridges, and other facilities that will include airports, helicopter pads, rail and bus terminals, and office buildings. Eugenius H. Outerbridge, now 61, has campaigned for years to have the waterways of the metropolitan area treated as a single entity rather than in piecemeal fashion. New York State and New Jersey have set up the authority to prevent mutually ruinous competition between the two states and enable them to work on a cooperative basis (see bus terminal, 1950).
Berlin's Avus Autobahn opens to traffic September 10. Originally planned in 1909 and nearly complete when the Great War stopped construction, the Autobahn has been designed by Pforzheim-born engineer Fritz Todt, 30, built almost entirely with hand labor, and is the world's first highway designed exclusively for motor traffic and with controlled access (on ramps, off ramps, overpasses). It runs 6.25 miles from the Grunewald to the suburb of Wannsee, a 26-foot-wide grass mall separates its two 24.6-foot-wide carriageways, and it is spanned by 10 ferroconcrete bridges (see 1932).
A Federal Highway Act passed by Congress November 9 begins to coordinate state highways and to standardize U.S. road-building practice. The United States has 387,000 miles of surfaced road by year's end, up from 190,476 in 1909 (see 1930).
More than a million trucks travel on U.S. roads and highways, up from 100,000 in 1909.
Generators become standard equipment on Model T Fords, which account for 61.34 percent of all U.S. motorcars sold.
Durant Motors is founded by W. C. Durant, who has again been forced out of General Motors but has raised $7 million to start a new venture (see 1916). Durant acquires the Bridgeport, Connecticut, plant of the bankrupt Locomobile Co. to build a Durant luxury car that will supplement the $850 Durant Four and the medium-priced Durant Six made at Muncie, Indiana, and he pays $5.25 million to acquire the Willys plant at Elizabethport, New Jersey, which is the world's most modern auto factory (see Duesenberg, 1919). Willys-Overland has gone bankrupt and its receivers sell Durant the Willys design for a new medium-priced Flint motorcar that Durant intends to market (see Star, 1922; Willys-Overland, 1936).
GM's share of the U.S. motorcar market reaches 12 percent; the company begins a rapid expansion.
Pneumatic tire inventor John B. Dunlop dies at London October 23 at age 81.
The first transcontinental U.S. day-night flight encourages Congress to support airmail service (see communications, 1918). Mail pilot Jack Knight lands at Omaha February 22 after a 248-mile flight from North Platte, Neb., learns that no pilot is available for the next leg, flies on through heavy snow to Iowa City and refuels, and proceeds to Chicago, covering 672 miles in 10 hours; two other pilots take the plane through to New York, setting a transcontinental flight record of 33 hours, 20 minutes (see Doolittle, 1922).
English pilot Harry G. Hawker dies July 12 at age 29 in a crash of the Nieuport Goshawk he is testing for T. O. M. Sopwith's Hawker Engineering Co., Ltd., which Sopwith renamed in Hawker's honor last year (see 1912; 1919).