#Airmail beacon map series#

With more than 15 million books in print, the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series is the longest-running, most popular series of its kind in the world.Scattered across the United States are a network of mysterious concrete arrows. Since 1987, the Bathroom Readers’ Institute has led the movement to stand up for those who sit down and read in the bathroom (and everywhere else for that matter). You’ll get the scoop on the latest “scientific” studies, weird world news, surprising history, and obscure facts. And now this extra-special 30th anniversary edition has everything you’ve come to expect from the BRI, and more! It’s stuffed with 512 pages of all-new articles sure to please everyone, from our longtime readers to newbies alike. Uncle John and the Bathroom Readers’ Institute! Every year for the past three decades, Uncle John and his team of tireless researchers have delivered an epic tome packed with thousands of fascinating factoids. This article is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s OLD FAITHFUL 30th Anniversary Bathroom Reader. There was even talk of using light ships or anchored buoys to create routes across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It worked so well that other countries imitated it. The Transcontinental Airway System, as it was called, was a technological marvel. The concrete arrows were painted bright yellow to make them more visible from the sky.īy the late 1920s, 284 beacons had been built in a line along the 2,665-mile route from New York to San Francisco. For that reason, the foundations for the beacon towers were poured in the shape of giant, 70-foot arrows, which pointed the direction to the next beacon. That worked in clear weather, but on a day when it was overcast and visibility was poor, the pilot might need help finding the next beacon. The beacons were spaced close enough together so that when a pilot was passing over one of them, the next one would be visible in the distance. At each location, a 50-foot-tall steel tower was erected with a rotating spotlight installed at the top. From San Francisco through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York, planners devised a system of beacons and emergency runways spaced from 10 to 30 miles apart, depending on the terrain. Two years later, Congress appropriated additional funds to create a lighted airway across the entire United States. The very next day, Congress voted to give the Air Mail Service $1.25 million to develop the system further. That’s about 65 hours faster than sending the mail by train. But the other eastbound plane made it all the way to Hazelhurst Field in New York, delivering the mail just 33 hours and 20 minutes after it left San Francisco.

And one of the eastbound flights ended when the pilot, William Lewis, crashed his plane and was killed. The westbound flights were grounded in Chicago when a snowstorm hit. That was how the experimental flights were supposed to go, but that’s not exactly what happened. As the planes made their way across the country, small towns along the route lit the way by keeping large bonfires burning through the night. When the pilots landed, their mail sacks were transferred to another airplane with a fresh pilot, who flew the mail to the next stop. The planes were flying the first stretch in what was, in effect, a cross-country relay, much in the way that the Pony Express had operated 60 years earlier. On February 21, 1921, the post office launched a night-flying experiment when it sent two planes east from San Francisco, and two more west from New York. If airmail service was going to survive, it was going to have to get much faster, and that meant flying at night. At that rate, it took about three and a half days to get mail from New York City to San Francisco, only a day less than sending it entirely by rail, and at much greater risk and expense. Then the mail was loaded onto a new airplane and flown again until dark. The mail they were carrying was then loaded onto trains, which hauled it through the night until daybreak. When these landmarks weren’t visible, they didn’t fly.Īt dusk, airborne planes landed at designated airfields near railroad lines. The pilots who transported the mail navigated by following roads, rivers, railroad tracks, and prominent landmarks as they made their way across the country. In an age before sophisticated navigation systems, flying after dark was just too dangerous.

Post Office introduced airmail service in 1920, the mail could only be flown during daylight hours, when pilots could see where they were going. The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader