1940 - Transportation

Transportation

A British shipyard completes the world's largest passenger liner and the government puts her to use as a troop transport. Powered by steam turbines that develop 168,000 horsepower and give her a normal sea speed of 28.5 knots (32.8 miles per hour), the 83,673-ton vessel is 1,031 feet in length overall and will go into commercial service for the Cunard Line after the war as the S.S. Queen Elizabeth.

The first commercial flight using pressurized cabins takes off July 8 as a Transcontinental & Western Air Boeing 307-B Stratoliner goes into service between La Guardia Airport and Burbank, Calif., with a stop at Kansas City. The plane carries 33 passengers by day and 25 at night (24 of the seats are in compartments convertible into 16 sleeping berths), and flying time is 14 hours going west, 11 hours, 55 minutes going east.

The Jeep has its beginnings in a lightweight four-wheel-drive, general-purpose (GP) field vehicle designed by Karl K. Pabst, consulting engineer to Bantam Car Co. of Butler, Pa. (Its design will also be credited to English-born U.S. engineer Arthur W. S. Herrington, 49.) Willys-Overland assures the U.S. Army that it can produce the vehicle at the rate of 125 per day, Bantam cannot match that volume, and Willys submits prototype models; code-named Quad, the two prototypes are delivered for testing November 11 at Camp Holabird, Md., and the army promptly orders 1,500 more, each powered by a four-cylinder Willys Continental engine. The U.S. Army places orders for 70 pre-production models, but it tells Willys that it will have to share the work with Ford Motor Company, which has more capacity (see 1941).

Automotive pioneer Walter F. Chrysler dies at his Great Neck, Long Island, estate August 18 at age 65; tire maker Edouard Michelin at his home in Orcines August 25 at age 84, having headed Michelin et Cie. for 51 years; Stanley Steamer co-inventor Freelan Stanley dies at Boston October 2 at age 91.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge opens July 1 with a two-lane highway that connects the Seattle area with the Olympic Peninsula at the only point on the 20,000-square-mile Puget Sound where the peninsula comes close to the Washington State mainland. Engineer Ralph Modjeski has died at Los Angeles June 26 at age 70, having designed highway bridges, but not this one. The 5,939-foot Tacoma bridge has a 2,800-foot main suspension span that oscillates so much that motorists soon call the bridge "Galloping Gertie," and it oscillates so wildly in an unprecedented 42-mile-per-hour wind November 7 that several suspenders tear loose, the bridge collapses into the water below (one car was stranded, and although its driver scrambled to safety before the collapse his vehicle and his dog were lost). The Federal Works Agency appoints an investigating committee whose members include bridge engineer Othmar H. Ammann and Budapest-born California Institute of Technology research engineer Theodore von Kármán, 59. It will conclude that the collapse was due to "forced vibration caused by random action of turbulent winds"; further investigation will reveal that while its deck was stiffened by plate girders the deck was only eight feet deep, its engineers had understood the aerodynamic behavior of thin decks, they had given the deck little vertical and almost no torsional stiffness, and the failure ends a trend in bridge building toward lightness, grace, and flexibility (see 1950).

The Pennsylvania Turnpike that opens October 1 is the first tunneled U.S. superhighway. Of its seven tunnels, six were drilled in 1883 by William H. Vanderbilt's engineers for a rail line that was never used, but diesel-powered earth-moving equipment has dug out 26 million cubic yards of soil and rock to make way for the turnpike. Begun as a WPA project and built in just 2 years at a cost of $70 million, the four-lane, 160-mile toll road (toll: $1.50) links Carlisle with Irvin, 11 miles east of Pittsburgh, and speeds traffic through the Alleghenies in 2½ hours, bypassing towns. The remaining 40 miles to Pittsburgh takes another hour or more. Some 20,000 cars use the turnpike on opening day; there are no speed limits.

The Arroyo Seco Parkway dedicated in December is the first Los Angeles freeway. In 30 years, some 60 percent of downtown Los Angeles will be taken up with highways and parking lots as the freeways transform the city to make L.A. a sprawling collection of suburbs dependent on the automobile and seemingly doomed to a smoggy environment.

The United States has 1.34 million miles of surfaced road, up from 694,000 in 1930, plus 1.65 million miles of dirt road (see 1950).

New York's Queens-Midtown Tunnel opens November 15 to link Long Island City with East 36th Street in Manhattan. Designed by Ole Singstad, financed by the federal Public Works Administration and the Reconstruction Finance Corp., and built under the East River in just 4 years, it has two 6,300-foot-long tubes for cars and trucks. The 200,000th car goes through December 1, the 500,000th December 25. So many cars pour into Manhattan that Borough President Stanley M. Isaacs bewails the lack of an underground connection between the new tunnel and the Lincoln Tunnel.

The privately-owned parts of New York's subway and elevated system become publicly owned June 1, the Ninth Avenue El stops running June 11, and the last sections of the Sixth Avenue El come down beginning December 20 (see 1938). The scrap metal has been sold to Japan before enactment of the Export Control Act.

Some 26,630 trolley cars serve U.S. transportation needs, down from 80,000 in 1917. The number will drop to 1,068 by 1975.

A new Chevrolet coupe sells for $659, a Pontiac station wagon for $1,015, a Studebaker Champion for $660, a Nash sedan for $795, and a Packard for between $867 and $6,300 (lowest prices advertised).