Today, let's fly across American in 1930. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Sleepless last night! So I
watched the 1933 movie Central Airport on
TV. It was about two pilots, brothers in love with
the same woman. The action moves from one embryonic
airport to the next, all the way from Los Angeles
to Havana.
By the oddest coincidence I had, just that day,
found two books in a forgotten corner of our
library. One was United Air-lines Guidebook No.
1, Airways of America, published the same year
as the movie, 1933. It describes the route from New
York to San Francisco. It details all the physical
geography of America along the way. No pressurized
cabins yet, and you flew under most of the cloud
cover. In those days you saw the earth
below.
The second book, published four years earlier,
shows the new Curtiss-Wright system of airports. It
gives architectural renderings of twelve completed
airports, and it suggests a vast array of airports
and infrastructure yet to come. Runways are half to
two-thirds of a mile long. Terminal buildings are
one story high.
Both books show an America that knows it's in flux.
Yet no one sees where change is headed. The whole
system is shaped to the one airplane that's become
the workhorse of commercial travel. It's the 1926
Ford
Trimotor -- an American improvement over
the Fokker Trimotor. It would be the basic
carrier until Douglas made the DC-3 in 1934. The Trimotor
carried eleven passengers unless there was a
stewardess. Then it carried only ten. The Trimotor
had one engine under each wing and one in the nose
-- 600 horsepower all told. Its ceiling was 16,000
feet, it cruised at just over a hundred miles an
hour, and its range was a scant 570 miles.
So New York to San Francisco was a two-day trip
with endless stops along the way. The guidebook was
to keep you occupied with mountains and prairies;
nimbus and cumulus clouds; glacial, alluvial, and
volcanic deposits; America opening up before you.
The movie didn't share this interest in making us
comfortable with flight. It showed three airplane
crashes. In fact, the development of the DC-3 began
when football hero Knute Rockne died in a Trimotor
crash. The sky was still a dangerous place. It was
still romantic. You still knew there was ground
down below you.
Now we enter a sealed environment in one city and
leave it another. At just under the speed of sound,
30,000 feet up, we read a book. Seventy years ago
we still felt kinship, not just to Lindbergh and
Earhart, but to Lewis and Clark as well. To fly
across America was to discover it. It meant
watching a sparse population of pioneers below
putting in orchards and wheat fields while they
interspersed them with airports and two-lane
highways.
In 1970, some librarian pasted a
checkout slip across the map of America in the
end papers of the United Airlines book. For the
book was now just a ghost of an old beauty. It'd
become something that made little sense if you'd
never lived it.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
