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
gmail.com)
