Thursday, September 26, 2013

This is just interesting. Who knew it existed?

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.