1927 | Transportation
Transportation
Britain's Imperial Airways begins air service between Cairo and Basra on the Persian Gulf in January flying de Havilland Hercules airliners (see 1924). It uses three-engined de Havilland Argosy planes for London-Paris "Silver Wing" service beginning May 1, with meals served en route (see 1929).
Charles A. Lindbergh lands his single-engine monoplane Spirit of St. Louis at Le Bourget Airfield, Paris, May 21 at 10:24 in the evening after completing the first non-stop solo transatlantic flight (see 1926; Alcock, Whitten-Brown, 1919). Backed by St. Louis businessmen, Lindbergh paid $10,580 for the plane, designed by Donald Albert Hall, 29, and built by Kansas-born San Diego aircraft designer T. (Tubal) Claude Ryan, 29, with a 220-horsepower, nine-cylinder, air-cooled Wright Aeronautical Whirlwind engine designed by Lenox, Mass.-born aeronautical engineer Charles L. (Lanier) Lawrance, 44. Lindbergh has spent 8 weeks at the Ryan factory supervising every detail of construction and made his first test flight April 28. A crude periscope enables him to see what lies ahead since his forward vision is blocked by the gasoline tank and engine, he has declined a radio in order to save weight for 90 more gallons of gasoline, he took off in the rain from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, at 7:55 in the morning of May 20 with his 2,100-pound plane so heavily laden with 2,800 pounds (451 gallons) of gasoline that he cleared some telephone wires by scarcely 20 feet, has navigated by dead reckoning to cover 3,614 miles (1,000 miles of it through snow and sleet) in 33 hours, 29 minutes, drops a flag over the Place de la Concorde (where it is picked up by New York restaurateur Raymond Orteig, who has been told where it would drop and has been waiting for it), is greeted by 150,000 well-wishers, becomes a world hero, and wins the $25,000 prize offered by Orteig in 1919. Hailed as "The Lone Eagle," Lindbergh rejects motion picture, vaudeville, and commercial offers totaling some $5 million (he visits Mexico City in December, is entertained by U.S. Ambassador Dwight Morrow, meets Morrow's 21-year-old daughter Anne, and will marry her in 1929).
French flying ace Charles Nugesser, 35, vanishes in May while trying to fly the Atlantic. He shot down 45 enemy planes during the war.
Ohio-born pilot Clarence D. (Duncan) Chamberlin, 34, takes off from Roosevelt Field, New York, June 4 in a plane designed by Mario Bellanca, now 41, whose new Bellanca Aircraft Co. will continue until 1954, specializing in private planes for executives (see 1917). Chamberlin flies 3,911 miles nonstop in 42½ hours to Eisleben, Saxony (Germany), carrying junk dealer Charles A. Levine, who has financed the flight.
U.S. Army lieutenants Lester J. Maitland and Albert F. Hegenberger make the first successful flight from San Francisco to Honolulu June 28.
Commander Richard E. Byrd, U.S. Navy, makes the first radio-equipped transatlantic flight June 29 in a trimotored Fokker monoplane piloted by Lieut. Bernt Balchen and Bert Acosta with radioman George O. Noville completing the crew (see exploration, 1926; 1928).
Juan Trippe founds Pan American Airways and obtains exclusive rights from Cuban president Gerardo Machado y Morales to land at Havana (see 1925); Pan Am begins mail service October 28, taking off from a dirt runway at Key West, Fla., for the 90-mile flight and landing 70 minutes later at Havana in the first scheduled international flight by any U.S. airline. Pan Am has 24 employees and just two small wood-and-fabric Fokker F-7 trimotor monoplanes (see 1929).
U.S. commercial planes fly nearly 6 million miles and carry 37,000 passengers (see 1929).
The United States has 1,036 airports by year's end, up from 20 in 1912.
The 14-mile-long sea-level Chesapeake & Delaware Ship Canal opens in May to link the bay with the river. Owned and operated by the Corps of Engineers, it replaces a much narrower, 14-lock canal that opened in 1829, reducing by nearly 300 miles the sea route between Baltimore and Philadelphia; it will be enlarged in the 1960s to make it 450 feet wide and 35 feet deep.
The S.S. Ile de France arrives at New York on her maiden voyage in late June. The 43,000 ton French Line "Boulevard of the Atlantic" has a dining salon that seats 700. She sets a transatlantic speed record on her return voyage, averaging 23.1 knots per hour, and passengers gather August 28 to witness the plane-launching catapult on her afterdeck hurl a mail plane aloft while she is still 400 miles northeast of Sandy Hook. The new luxury liner has remarkable stability at sea (her motion is sometimes imperceptible) and will make 347 transatlantic crossings.
U.S. railroads begin to introduce centralized traffic control (CTC) that permits automatic control of two-way traffic on single tracks and makes single-track operations nearly as efficient as double-track.
Toronto's Union Station opens August 6 with ceremonies attended by Britain's crown prince Edward, Prince of Wales, who cuts a ribbon with a gold scissors (his brother, Prince George, is also on hand, as is Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Canada's prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, and other political figures. The Canadian Pacific and Grand Trunk railroads negotiated with the city for control of the location after the fire that demolished 14 acres of downtown Toronto in 1904, construction began in 1913, the Grand Trunk collapsed in 1919, the station was completed in 1921, but legal wrangling has delayed its opening. Designed in Beaux-Arts style, Canada's largest and most opulent station features a great hall with a vaulted ceiling of Gustavino tiles, four-story barrel-vaulted windows, walls of Zumbro marble from Missouri, floors of Tennessee marble laid out in a herring-bone pattern. Passenger trains begin using the station August 11 (a ticket to Alberta sells for $71.20).
Tokyo's Chikatetsu subway opens between Asakusa and Ueno. The city's system will grow to have 12 lines with trains operating 19 to 20 hours per day on 282 kilometers of track.
Ford Motor Company introduces the Model A to succeed the Model T that has been the U.S. standard for nearly 20 years. U.S. auto production falls to 3,093,428, down nearly 900,000 from 1926 on account of Ford's stoppage for retooling to produce a car that will compete with Chevrolet. Henry Ford and his son Edsel, now 34, drive the 15 millionth Ford out of the Ford plant, and although Ford has resisted advertising the Model T he spends more in 2 weeks on ads for the Model A than he spent in the entire history of Ford Motor Company up to now. The new model will soon overtake Chevrolet in sales.
Massachusetts enacts the first compulsory state automobile insurance law.
E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG) create Duplate Corp. to make safety glass using DuPont pyrolin and Pittsburgh plate (see 1883; Triplex, 1926). PPG will buy out DuPont's interest in Duplate in 1930 (see 1929). Henry Ford orders safety glass windshields for Model A Fords and Lincolns. Triplex Safety Glass contracts to supply half of Ford's needs and licenses Ford to produce the rest himself.
More than 20 million cars are on the U.S. road by year's end, up from 13,824 in 1900.
The Volvo introduced by Göteborg industrialist Assar Gabrielsson and engineer Gustaf Larsson is the first Swedish motorcar. Gabrielsson and Larsson have built a factory to challenge the dominance of imported cars in the Swedish market, but their four-cylinder engine touring car has a top speed of only 37 miles per hour.
The Peace Bridge opens across the Niagara River June 1 to link Buffalo, N.Y., with Fort Erie, Ontario. Named to mark 100 years of peace between Canada and the United States, the 5,800-foot (1,770-meter) highway bridge has five arched spans, it is the only vehicular bridge on the Great Lakes between Niagara Falls and Minnesota, it makes Fort Erie Canada's chief port of entry from the United States, and it will grow to carry 4,000 trucks per day (see Ambassador Bridge, 1929).
The Holland Tunnel opens November 12 to connect Canal Street, Manhattan, with Jersey City, giving motor vehicles a road link under the Hudson River, the first alternative to New York-New Jersey ferry boats. Regular paid vehicular traffic begins just after midnight with a toll of 50¢. Clifton Milburn Holland, the tunnel's chief engineer, died in the fall of 1924—just 2 days before diggers from east and west met below the Hudson; 13 men lost their lives in the 7-year effort to build the tunnel, whose design and ventilating system are credited to Norwegian-born engineer Ole Singstad, 45 (see Lincoln Tunnel, 1937).