I wonder how many
of you knew about this. I
never did.
Giant Concrete Arrows... Just in case you
missed it on the first go around…
This
Really Exists:
Giant
Concrete Arrows That
Point
Your Way Across America...
Every
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.
What
are these giant arrows? Some kind of surveying
mark?
Landing
beacons for flying saucers? Earth’s turn
signals?
No,
it's...
The
Transcontinental Air Mail Route.
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.
There
were no good aviation charts in those days,
so
pilots had to eyeball their way across the country using
landmarks.
This
meant that flying in bad weather was difficult,
and
night flying was just about impossible.
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. Every ten
miles, pilots would pass a bright
yellow
concrete arrow. Each arrow
would be surmounted by a
51-foot steel tower
and lit
by a million-candlepower rotating beacon.
(A
generator shed at the tail of each arrow powered the
beacon.)
Now
mail could get from the Atlantic to the Pacific not in a matter of
weeks,
but in
just 30 hours or so.
Even
the dumbest of air mail pilots, it seems, could follow a series of
bright
yellow
arrows straight out of a Tex Avery cartoon. By 1924, just a year
after
Congress funded it, the line
of giant concrete markers
stretched from Rock Springs,
Wyoming
to Cleveland, Ohio. 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.
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. New advances in communication and navigation technology
made
the big
arrows obsolete, and the Commerce Department decommissioned the
beacons
in the
1940s. The steel towers were torn down and went to the war
effort.
But the
hundreds of arrows remain. 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.
But
they’re still out there.
I fear
that technology will surpass our
human interaction. The world will have a generation of
idiots.