Portland and Seattle

[garbon]

Lovely winter overcast? Has there ever been a sillier phrase?

[Savonarola]

Boeing has a museum in Seattle called "The World of Flight" which covers the history of flight, the history of Boeing, the fighters planes of the First and Second World War and space flight.  It's an enormous museum and covers each of its topics in great depth.  There were a few things that I found interesting:

The original business model for airlines was mail carriage.  As they became bigger mail planes were adapted to carry passengers.

There were about 4000 commercial planes in service in the United States at the beginning of the Second World War.  At the end of the war the military had built 300,000 planes.

One mean to get power to various machines in factories is called a busbar.  Its a single electrified metal bar that multiple machines can be "Plugged" into.  Before electrification of factories what they would have is a spinning rod; this would provide mechanical power to various machines that would be attached to the rod by a leather strap.  This was how the original Boeing aircraft were made.  Given the complexity of modern airplane manufacturing this was surprising to me.

When the US Congress received the request for $125,000 from the army for airplanes at the beginning of the US entry into the First World War some Congressman shot back, "What is this needed for?  We've already bought you one."