[GreenKeys] Giant Concrete Arrows

[Roy Morgan]

On Sep 10, 2013, at 3:32 AM, Norm <normand3 at q.com> wrote:

>  
> I know this has nothing to to do with TTY, but its in the same era,

> Concrete arrows in the wilderness … the Transcontinental Air Mail Route . 
> has anybody ever seen these arrows?

Norm,

No I have not seen the arrows.  But with a small plane and some charts, I bet you could follow the route pretty well and find them.  (If anyone needs a fellow pilot for the trip  - so let me know.  I'm available!)  It would be like taking Route 66 across the country.

There is boatanchor/radio content related to this:

On, I think, the ARC-5 list, there has been mention of the early days of the Air Mail route, and how the Army folks, who tried to run the mail early on, had a very bad record.  This was due as I remember to having none or very bad radios, and no yellow arrows on the land.  This need for improved navigation led to the development of early radio beacons and airborne equipment.  That, in turn, led to the development of the "command" or ARC-5 family of radios that many of us remember or still have.

Teletype content:
The book "Wind, Sand, and Stars" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, tells of his experience flying the mail from Europe down to Africa.  This was in the 1930's.  He tells of messages being sent ahead of his flights to the place(s) he was expected to land.  My guess is that the messages went by telegraph or teletype from Europe to Africa.

Note: 
At least the BBC uses the word "cables" to refer to the messages leaked by the fellow now in Russia about the gathering of intelligence about phone and email messages.  The story of inter-continental cables and telegraph is fascinating.  Not long ago I was at Morse's estate in NY and saw on display both early telegraph machines and samples of the cables that had been laid across the oceans from Europe to the US.  Much later, Western Electric developed amplifiers that were included in the undersea cables.  These used the very best vacuum tubes that could be made.  Some of these tubes now are very expensive, if you can find them.





> and maybe in the first picture those light poles use to be telegraph poles, but I thought it was interesting story.
> By the way, 
>  
> Norm
> WB7WEQ
>> Giant concrete arrows that point the way across America .
>> 
>> <1484b94.jpg> 
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> <1484bb3.jpg> 
>> 
>> What are these giant arrows? Some kind of surveying mark? Landing beacons for flying saucers? Earth’s turn signals?
>> 
>> <1484bc3.jpg> 
>> 
>> No, it's the Transcontinental Air Mail Route .
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>  
>> <1484bd2.jpg>
>> 
>> 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.)
>> 
>> <1484be2.jpg>
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> <1484bf2.jpg> 
>> 
>> 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 there
>> 
>> 
>>  
>>  
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Roy Morgan
RoyMorgan at alum.mit.edu
K1LKY Since 1958