When visibility wasn't impaired by weather conditions, the light from the next beacon could be seen from the one currently being flown over. The project was finished in 1929, thereby completing a route from New York to San Francisco. In 1926, the Post Office Department turned management of the beacons over to the Department of Commerce.
Airmail beacon map code#
These course lights flashed a code to identify each beacon’s number. Roughly every ten miles along these paths, mail pilots would encounter 50-foot towers topped with rotating lights at whose base were 50- to 70-foot concrete foundations that from the air looked like arrows. Their yellow paint is gone, their concrete cracks a little more with every winter frost, and no one crosses their path much, except for coyotes and tumbleweeds. The steel towers were torn down and went to the war effort. New advances in communication and navigation technology made the big arrows obsolete, and the Commerce Department decommissioned the beacons in the 1940s. Radio and radar are, of course, infinitely less cool than a concrete Yellow Brick Road from sea to shining sea, but I think we all know how this story ends. The next summer, it reached all the way to New York, and by 1929 it spanned the continent uninterrupted, the envy of postal systems worldwide. By 1924, just a year after Congress funded it, the line of giant concrete markers stretched from Rock Springs, Wyoming to Cleveland, Ohio.
Airmail beacon map series#
Now mail could get from the Atlantic to the Pacific not in a matter of weeks, but in just 30 hours or so.Įven the dumbest of air mail pilots, it seems, could follow a series of bright yellow arrows straight out of a Tex Avery cartoon.
Airmail beacon map generator#
(A generator shed at the tail of each arrow powered the beacon.) Each arrow would be surmounted by a 51-foot steel tower & lit by a million-candlepower rotating beacon. The Postal Service solved the problem with the world's first ground-based civilian navigation system: a series of lit beacons that would extend from New York to San Francisco.Įvery ten miles, pilots would pass a bright yellow concrete arrow.
This meant that flying in bad weather was difficult, and night flying was just about impossible. There were no good aviation charts in those days, so pilots had to eyeball their way across the country using landmarks. On August 20, 1920, the United States opened its first coast-to-coast airmail delivery route, just 60 years after the Pony Express closed up shop. What are these giant arrows? Some kind of surveying mark? Landing beacons for flying saucers? Earth's turn signals? This Really Exists: Giant Concrete Arrows That Point Your Way Across America.Įvery so often, usually in the vast deserts of the American Southwest, a hiker or a backpacker will run across something puzzling: a large concrete arrow, as much as seventy feet in length, sitting in the middle of scrub-covered nowhere. In 1924, in recognition that its pilots needed more help finding their way, the Post Office began erecting combinations of large concrete arrows and lighted beacons along its established airmail routes: Before the advent of radio guidance, mail pilots picked their way along from visible landmark to visible landmark, a system that somewhat served where there were recognizable geological or man-made features to be guided by, but not at all in areas such as vast stretches of empty, repetitive desert. Post Office began experimenting with cross-country delivery of mail by air. The photographs range from detailed close-ups to aerial shots that depict the surrounding landscape – mimicking what an air mail pilot would have seen back in the day.In the 1920s, the U.S. The couple will add the discovery to their encyclopedia. Other photographers get in contact to let the Smiths know if they’ve discovered a “new” arrow. “They want to know if there’s any arrows in their location,” explains Brian. History buffs who stumble across the site often contact the couple to ask for tips on embarking on their own arrow quests. Their arrow-centric site has taken off: “We had over six million hits in the last 12 month period on our website,” adds Charlotte. “We took a bunch of photos in Egypt and we just really liked taking photos, and we had a website.” “When Brian retired, we took a Photoshop class,” says Charlotte. The couple host a comprehensive website featuring photographs, coordinates and information on each of the arrows they’ve found.īrian, 70, and Charlotte, 67, have been photography buffs for a while now. Pictured here: Arrow in Siskiyou County, California, adjacent to Montague Airport on the San Francisco-Seattle airway and San Francisco-Redding section. The beacons were officially decommissioned in the 1970s.
0 kommentar(er)
