Evolution of Aviation

Navigating a trip is easy because mobile phones have GPS.

Stand alone GPS receivers are still around, and I have one, but updating it would be costly. There have been new roads laid in the last decade.

GPS phone apps are easier to use. My favorite navigating app is WAZE, and it is on my mobile phone.

The map on WAZE is like others but the app alerts you of issues along the way and allows you to alert other drivers of construction or traffic delays, road closures, anything that might motivate you to slow down.

A hundred years ago aviation was still new. The first flight was in 1903, and before someone thought of hauling passengers, there was a need to hurry up with the mail.

In the mid 1800’s, a letter from Missouri to the west coast took twenty-four days via overland stage coach. The Pony Express was a good idea that cost too much but still delivered mail from St. Joseph, MO, to Sacramento in ten days.

After WWI, airplanes and pilots were abundant, and mail by air was not a new idea.

The first coast-to-coast mail was flown by day and switched to railroad at night. There was no observable advantage.

The first air mail flying by night was attempted in 1921 using bonfires on the ground to show the way. It worked well so long as someone remembered to strike the match.

Later the country was carved up by routes of light beacons every few miles on fifty foot towers. In some places the lights were powered by generators and others by acetylene gas.

Calcium carbide pellets were kept in a container with a container of water above. Water dripped on the pellets via a needle valve releasing acetylene gas.

Early auto headlights were carbide lamps. Carbide lamps lighted homes and miners’ helmets. They are still used by campers.

The company that provided the pellets and home gas systems, “Union Carbide,” is still around.

From my grandmother’s yard I could see the beacon on top of the hotel on Lookout Mountain.

Most of the beacon sites of the transcontinental airway system have been swallowed up.

A mile from my house in the Bill Arp community stood beacon tower “DG3278.” The “78” indicates it was the seventy-eighth beacon on the airway from Ft. Worth to Atlanta.

The concrete slab is easy to overlook until you consider that it is a historic remnant of the transcontinental airway system. There are only a few left.

Today I can send a text message to nearly anywhere in seconds. I feel a twinge of guilt for doing that knowing that my ancestors would be aghast that such a system was used to pass jokes.

joenphillips@yahoo.com