Engineering History
On October 31, 1941 Mount Rushmore was completed. The Mount Rushmore project was an incredible feat of engineering and an integration of art and technology. It is the largest work of art on earth with a face that is 60 feet high. Although the workers regularly used dynamite and heavy equipment, it was constructed with no deaths and very few injuries. The original visionaries of Mount Rushmore had hoped to carve out local heros and were considering General George Armstrong Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody. The local Lakota Indians protested, as did the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, a student of French artist Auguste Rodin. The four presidential figures that make up Mount Rushmore were selected to “create an eternal reminder of the birth, growth, preservation and development of a nation dedicated to democracy and the pursuit of individual liberty.”
On November 27, 1895, the first gasoline powered automobile race in the United States was held. The Duryea brothers - Charles and Frank - created their first gasoline-powered “horseless-carriage” in 1893. The Duryeas were bicycle mechanics who built their first car in a workshop located in a building in downtown Springfield, MA. in September 1893. It was built around a one-cylinder, gasoline engine and a three-speed transmission mounted on a used horse carriage, hitting a stop speed of 7.5 mph. In 1894, Frank developed a second car with a more powerful two-cylinder engine that he drove in America’s first automobile race on Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1895 and ran a 54-mile course from down-town Chicago to Evanston, Il and back. Taking a little over 10 hours, Frank Duryea was the first to cross the finish line, averaging 7.3 miles per hour and winning a prize of $2,000 ($49,500 in today’s money).”
On December, 31, 1968 The Russian TU-144 is the first commercial supersonic airliner flown. Building on their supersonic military jets, the Russians developed the first supersonic commercial airliner called the Tupolev 144. Decades later the U.K. developed the Concorde supersonic passenger jet. Although successful as a collaborative technical effort, it did not survive the marketplace; it was too expensive to maintain, demand was not high enough at the prices required and the public put many constraints on flight paths due to the noise pollution of the sonic boom.
Resources: