In the late 1920s, the automobile cut railroad passenger service by more than half. The debut of the Pioneer Zephyr heralded a comeback in 1934, touring the country and being seen by some two million people in 222 cities.
USA
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Image Credit: Courtesy Flickr/Steve Wilson (CC BY 2.0)Image Caption: Pioneer ZephyrEra_date_from: 1934
1980
The economic situation in the whale oil business (for lighting), coupled with the increased demand for lubricants, stimulated growth in the U.S. petroleum industry. The drilling of the heavy, sulfurous, and asphaltic California crude began in the 1870s at the Pico Canyon area, using the apparatus and techniques from Titusville, Pennsylvania, developments.
YearAdded:
Image Credit: Courtesy Flickr/Konrad Summers (CC BY-SA 2.0)Image Caption: Pioneer Oil Refinery California Star Oil WorksEra_date_from: 1876
1975
This was the first successful machine for mechanizing the identification and price marking of retail merchandise. At a single stroke of the operating handle, the machine formed a tag from a roll of stock, imprinted it with price and other information, formed a wire staple, and stapled the tag to the merchandise. This means for dispensing with handmade and written tags amounted to a minor revolution in the then rapidly expanding retail industry.
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Image Credit: Courtesy ASMEImage Caption: Pin-Ticketing MachineEra_date_from: 1902
1990
After an initial difficulty in attracting customers (who were used to getting their water from public pumps and private wells and cisterns), Philadelphia's waterworks soon couldn't keep up with demand. John Davis and Frederick Graff designed a complete remodeling of the system in 1811 so that it could supply the city's growing needs.
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Image Credit: Public Domain (National Park Service)Image Caption: Philadelphia Municipal Water SupplyEra_date_from: 1801
1974
Philadelphia City Hall was the largest masonry load-bearing wall building in the world at the time of its completion in 1901, stood as the tallest occupied building in the United States until 1909, and still is the largest city hall in the United States. The building covers 14.26 acres, originally contained 634 rooms with over 1 million square feet of space, and with its tower and statue of William Penn rises a total of 548 feet above the ground. The construction of Philadelphia City Hall began in 1872 and was completed in 1901.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Flickr/elPadawan (CC BY-SA 2.0)Image Caption: Philadelphia City HallEra_date_from: 1901
2005
BreezewoodHarrisburgState: PACountry: USAWebsite: http://www.asce.org/project/pennsylvania-tunpike-(old-section)/Creator: Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission
The Pennsylvania Turnpike was the first American paved highway of the automobile era in which tolls alone were expected to pay all project costs. The 160-mile roadway, which cut an east-west path from Pittsburgh to the state capital of Harrisburg, was considered a revolutionary example of transportation system design and served as a model for the Interstate Highway System.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Flickr/Doug Kerr (CC BY-SA 2.0)Image Caption: Pennsylvania Turnpike (Old Section)Era_date_from: 1940
1988
Water wheels have been used to power mills and pumps for centuries. However, the traditional water wheel was inefficient: water hitting a bucket would splash back against the next bucket, slowing the wheel. This is especially true when water is delivered to the buckets under very high pressure.
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Image Credit: Public Domain (Author's Choice)Image Caption: Pelton Impulse Water WheelEra_date_from: 1878
1973
No image dominates the Midwestern landscape like the monolithic grain elevator, whose present shape and construction owe much to grain company operator Frank Peavy and architect-builder Charles Haglin.
Wanting to improve on the flammability and cost of traditional wood-cribbed construction, Peavy speculated that reinforced concrete, in its infancy at the turn of the century, would outperform other materials. But critics feared that the elevator would collapse due to the vacuum created when grain was emptied from the air-tight structure.
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Image Credit: Courtesy Wikipedia/Original Uploader was Elkman (CC BY-SA 3.0)Image Caption: Peavey-Haglin Concrete Grain ElevatorEra_date_from: 1900
1983
In 1900, Moses Gomberg, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Michigan, confirmed the existence of a stable, trivalent organic free radical: triphenylmethyl. In so doing, he challenged the then prevailing belief that carbon could have only four chemical bonds. Gomberg’s discovery made a major contribution to theoretical organic chemistry and fostered a field of research that continues to grow and expand. Today, organic free radicals are widely used in plastics and rubber manufacture, as well as medicine, agriculture and biochemistry.
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Image Credit: Public Domain (Copyright Exp.)Image Caption: Discovery of Organic Free Radicals by Moses GombergEra_date_from: 1900
2000
"The development of the cotton picker was the most important single factor which enabled the American cotton industry to stay alive," observed Dr. George S. Buck, Jr., director of research for the National Cotton Council recenty.
Some 96% of the 1969 U.S. cotton crop was harvested by machines, points out J.W. Wegener, manager of International Harvester's Memphis Works manager.
"Old Red" was built by International Harvester in 1943, retired in 1959, and restored in 1964.
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Image Credit: Photo Courtesy of ASABEImage Caption: "Old Red" now resides in the National Museum of History & Technology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.Era_date_from: 1943
1978
Innovations
Duck Creek Aqueduct is a rare surviving example of a covered timber aqueduct. It was one of several similar structures on the Whitewater Canal, which operated between the Whitewater Valley and the Ohio River from 1839 to 1865. After being displaced by the railroad, the canal supplied hydraulic…
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The Edger station was the first steam electric plant produced that could tolerate over 1000 psi of pressure. Initially conceived by Mr. Irving Edwin Moultrop, then Assistant Superintendent, Construction Bureau of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Boston. He guided his company and the…
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The Portsmouth Navy Yard is a United States Navy shipyard in Kittery on the southern boundary of Maine near the city of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Founded in 1800, PNS is U.S. Navy's oldest continuously operating shipyard. Today, most of its work concerns the overhaul, repair, and modernization…
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The Belle Isle gas turbine was installed in 1949 and was the first gas turbine built in the United States for the purpose of generating electric power. Its low cost and consistency aroused considerable interest in the electric utility industry, both here and abroad. This led ultimately to the…
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The Old Lock Pump House, whose first element was built in 1837, preserves a feature of the old canal, which relied on locks and pumps to move vessels over the low divide of the Delmarva Peninsula between Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay. Because there are no large rivers on the peninsula, water…
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The Magma Copper Mine AC system designed by the Carrier Corporation was the first underground mechanical air conditioning system in North America. The initial installation of refrigerated cooling equipment in the Magma Mine at Superior, Arizona was necessary due to the increase in temperature…
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The Broadmoor Manitou and Pikes Peak Cog Railway (also known as the Pikes Peak Cog Railway) is a cog railway that climbs one of the most iconic mountains in the United States, Pikes Peak in Colorado. The base station is in Manitou Springs, near Colorado Springs.
Construction on the line…
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The crawler-transporters, formally known as the Missile Crawler Transporter Facilities, are a pair of tracked vehicles used to transport spacecraft from NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) along the Crawlerway to Launch Complex 39. They were originally used to transport the Saturn IB and…
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In the 1940s, researchers Irvine Page, Maurice Rapport, Arda Green and Betty Twarog made pioneering discoveries that transformed modern neuroscience. While investigating hypertension at Cleveland Clinic, Page, Rapport and Green helped identify and isolate serotonin (5-hydroxy-tryptamine). Twarog…
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The antihistamine Benadryl has provided temporary relief from allergy symptoms for millions of people since it was developed by George Rieveschl at a University of Cincinnati laboratory in the early 1940s and later approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Rieveschl was originally…
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Trials of the new product were launched in the 1950s at Indiana University (IU), in Bloomington. There, a dentist instructed children to brush their teeth — in whichever way they normally did — with a new kind of paste. After six months, the kids came back for a checkup. These local children…
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Sloss Blast Furnaces has been designated a National Historic Landmark. This site possesses national significance in commemorating the history of the United States of America.
1981.
ASM International has designated Sloss Furnaces an historical landmark.
Sloss Furnaces,…
The first production of usable nuclear electricity occurred on December 20, 1951, when four light bulbs were lit with electricity generated from the EBR-1 reactor. Experimental Breeder Reactor No.1 was designated a Registered National Historic Landmark in 1966.
ASM International - The Materials Information Society - has designated the Eli Whitney Armory an historical landmark. "On this site between 1798 and 1825, Eli Whitney built the first significant independent American armory. The development of materials processing innovations began the tradition…
Read MoreASM International has designated Brownsville - Route 40 Bridge an historical landmark. This bridge, designed by and built under the supervision of Capt. Richard Delafield in 1839 to improve the "National Road", is the first cast iron bridge to be built west of the Allegheny Mountains.
ASM International - The Materials Information Society - has designated Heroult Electric Arc Furnace an Historical Landmark. In 1907, at Shasta County, the first electric arc furnace in the western hemisphere was utilized for the direct production of iron from this area’s indigenous resources of…
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University of Wisconsin-Madison biochemist Karl Paul Link and his lab isolated an anticoagulant compound from spoiled sweet clover hay in 1939, after a Wisconsin farmer's cattle began hemorrhaging from the moldy feed. Their research led to warfarin, marketed first as a rat poison in 1948 and…
Read MoreIn the 1970s, microbiologist Satoshi Ōmura at Japan's Kitasato Institute isolated a soil bacterium that produced compounds effective against parasitic worms. Working under a partnership with Merck, parasitologist William C. Campbell's team refined these compounds into ivermectin, a veterinary…
Read MoreHammondsport is the proud hometown of Glenn H. Curtiss, a legendary figure in early flight and the Father of Naval Aviation. It was here, between 1904 and 1915, that Curtiss collaborated with other aviation pioneers, including Alexander Graham Bell, to foster significant advancements in the…
Read MoreBeginning in 1961, at what was then the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation, the dedicated employees of Space Park designed and built more than 100 of the world’s most technically challenging satellites, rocket engines and astronomical observatories. The technologies they developed and continue to…
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