Ticket to Ride – A History of Passports

In the past couple of years, I doubt anybody reading this has had cause to use their passport very much, if at all. Those little red, black, blue and green books have been locked away in drawers, cabinets, strongboxes and safes, secure, snug and out of sight…for the foreseeable future, at any rate.

But where do passports come from? How did they come to be? What’s in them and how have they changed over time? Today, we’re going to take a look at the history behind that little booklet of stamps, scribbles and stickers which follows you every step of the way on your world tours and overseas jaunts.

So please have your document open to the information page with the photograph clearly visible, and let’s begin.

The First Passports

Passports in one form or another have existed for centuries, and early forms of passports date back as far as ancient China, among other places. In Europe, King Edward V is believed to have introduced the first type of ‘passport’ that we might recognise today, in the 1400s. By Tudor times, a century later, the Privy Council was in charge of handling these documents, and it was also at this time that the word ‘Passport’ first started being used, originally two words, as in ‘Pass Porte’, from the French ‘Porte’, meaning gate or doorway (ie – a pass to go through the city gates).

A passport from Qing-dynasty China in the 1800s

Passports were originally quite rare, because few people traveled any great distances, and literacy was low. It wasn’t until the 1800s with the rise of steam locomotives and ocean-going liners that passports started becoming issued on a wide scale. So many people were now moving around that while passports were required, the laws governing their examination, use and checking, were pretty lax – there just wasn’t any point in trying to rigidly enforce the rules when it would cause such a massive backlog at train-stations and shipping ports. For example, on the Orient Express, any passengers boarding the train would surrender their passports not to border-control, but to their carriage steward!

As the train stopped at each crossing along its route, border-guards would seek out the steward in each sleeper-car, examine the passports, stamp them, and then leave again. Checking on the passengers wasn’t considered important, since you already had the documents in front of you to read.

Up until this time, a passport could look like almost anything – early British passports, for example, were just a single sheet of paper! How did they come to be the little booklets which we know today?

A single-sheet passport, from 1815

The modern passport was not designed until a little over 100 years ago!

As I said – laws and regulations surrounding passports were pretty relaxed in the 1800s, and rarely (or at least, only loosely) enforced. This culture changed in the 1910s because of the First World War. After the war, the League of Nations – the predecessor to the U.N., held a conference in 1920 to officially set down the standards for what a passport was, what it had to have, how it operated, and what it would look like. Follow-up conferences in 1926 and 1927 tightened up the definitions, and for the first time in history, what a passport was, did, and would look like – were written down on paper, and internationally agreed to.

Types of Passports

Broadly speaking, there are only a few types of passports: Individual passports (the most common kind that you probably have in your desk right now), official passports (for government officials, etc), and diplomatic passports (for those in the diplomatic service). Previously, a fourth type – the family passport – also existed, where the details of an entire nuclear family might be written down in one document, with a group photograph of all the people mentioned on the information pages. However, these are no longer in use.

An old passport from the Colony of Gibraltar

To differentiate between these various types of passports, each one is usually a different colour, and colours vary by country. Passport colours are usually standardised, and common ones include blue (for example, Australia, the United Kingdom and the USA), red (for example, Malaysia, China, Japan, etc), and green (India, Morocco, and most Muslim countries). While most countries conform to this, not all do – for example, New Zealand passports are black!

A Dutch diplomatic passport

The reason for these standard colours is pretty simple – so that passports can be easily recognised. But also, so that different types of passports can be told apart. For example – which passport is your individual passport? Which one is your diplomatic one? It’d be kinda embarrassing if you had to fly somewhere in your diplomatic capacity and you brought the wrong passport along, because they were both the same colour…whoops! It’s for this reason that, in the United States, for example, individual passports are blue – but official passports are red!

Can you imagine being a passport control agent, and having to remember all these things??

Passport Control

Aaah, passport control. You either love it, or hate it. Some people enjoy it, getting to see all the stamps and stickers fill up their little books – inky souvenirs of their travels around the world, and others are frustrated by the seemingly endless questions and forms. But even here, things have changed over time. The most notable one is in passport photographs.

Early on, passport photographs were not standardised. It was common for men, women and children to wear almost anything, and have almost any expression, while having their passport snaps taken. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for a passport bearer to simply stick in just any photograph of themselves that they had lying around, so long as it looked like them. Old passport photos show men wearing hats, ladies wearing glasses, kids smiling…what changed?

More stringent passport-photograph regulations are a relatively new phenomenon. For much of their 20th century history it didn’t matter so much, but as more people began traveling – especially after the jet-age of the 1950s and 60s, being able to compare a passport photo to the person holding it became more and more important, since the process had to be done as fast as possible. This is why, in more recent times, passport-photo regulations have become much more strict, so that anything that obscured the face, or anything that obscured a normal, blank facial expression such as hats, scarves, glasses, and cheeky grins – were out.

Thus ends this rather brief look at the history of passports, the one document that we’ve probably used less than any other over the past two years. So while yours might still be gathering dust and cobwebs in a desk-drawer somewhere, at least now you know where, when, and how they came into being.

Checking your Papers – Sources

Information for this posting was gleamed from the following locations…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3437455/Not-passports-equal-travel-documents-come-different-colours-countries-choose-them.html

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2006/nov/17/travelnews

The Passport Throughout History – The Evolution of a Document

https://thewest.com.au/news/the-history-of-the-passport-ng-ya-377959

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30988833

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/passport-photos-history-development-regulation-mugshots


 

Globetrotting – The Golden Age of Travel (Part II)

This is the long-awaited Part II of my look into the Golden Age of Travel.

You can find Part I here!

In this posting, we’ll be looking at what travel was actually like during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and see just what the pre-war travel experience was actually like. What could you expect? What happened? And how did it perhaps differ from what we might have today? On top of that, we’ll see what changes occurred that meant that the pre-war experience could not be recreated in the decades after the Second World War.

A guard waves his flag. A whistle-chirrup echoes down the platform; a foghorn sounds and the roar of four diesel engines powering a magnificent airship through the air calls us to attention. All aboard for another trip back into the past…

Travel during the Golden Age of Travel

These days, the journey itself is the least luxurious and exciting part of travelling. You get on a bus or train or plane and you just…sit there. For hours at a time, with almost nothing to do. You have a boarding-pass and your passport and nothing else. If you’re lucky, you’ve got the in-flight movie, or you brought a book or your laptop or iPad, with which to while away the time. Or maybe, just maybe, you might actually fall asleep. Only to be woken up an hour later by flight attendants shunting past you with trolleys loaded to the brim with food of questionable quality at best.

And before all this, you had to go through check-in, immigration, luggage-weights, and security checks for you and your luggage, and now, you’ve got a flight in front of you that’ll eat up all of the first day of your holiday and you’re starting to wonder why the hell you ever decided to go to Barcelona. You could’ve stayed home and gone to the beach instead! But what was the travel experience like before all this rigmarole got started? Let’s find out.

Back in the early 20th century, when life on a whole moved at a slower pace, a steamship journey took several days at least. Because of this, the journey itself had to be comfortable, memorable and relaxing – and steamship companies and railroad companies constantly strove to improve their service and amenities in order to lure in as many customers as possible by advertising speed, comfort, luxury, great food, electric lighting, running hot water…anything that would put their service above that of a rival company.

Before you even reached your destination, what was the ‘travel’ part of the ‘Golden Age of Travel’ really like? Let’s go on three imaginary journeys during the 1930s and see what kind of travel experience you could expect. To sample the best of everything, we’ll do the transatlantic crossing, the Orient Express, and to top it all off, a ride in the most famous airship of all. 

Trip No. 1 – The Transatlantic Crossing

Route: London, England to Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

Expected Travel-Time: 7 Days (dependent on weather)

The Transatlantic Crossing – Part I – The Boat Train

A typical trans-oceanic journey of the late 1800s or early 1900s started at a railway station. Let’s say you’re sailing on one of the great Cunard steamships from England to America! What happened?

To get from London to Southampton, you boarded the boat train at Waterloo Station. The boat train was a special express train that ran regular services from major metropolitan stations to port cities around England such as Dover, Southampton and Liverpool. They worked in a similar fashion to airport shuttle-bus services today which scoot you back and forth from major cities to your nearest airport. These trains were in service specifically to make fast, punctual connections between major population centers, and the great ports of embarkation. However, even express, a journey by boat train took a few hours. You might nap, read or eat lunch on the train, depending on the time of its departure. The train of choice from London-Waterloo to Southampton was the Cunarder or Statesman boat train which would whisk you across the south of England to the great ocean terminal at Southampton. 

At Southampton Docks, you got off the boat train with your mountain of luggage and boarded your ocean liner for your ‘crossing’ or ‘passage’ to the New World – the United States. The next leg of your journey would now begin…

The Transatlantic Crossing – Part II – The Crossing

Having arrived at Southampton, you now had to find your ship! Every major shipping company had docks assigned to them, much like how today, every major airline has a terminal and gates at an airport assigned to them. In the 1920s a wide variety of ships were available. If you wanted old world charm, you might sail on the R.M.S. Olympic, sister ship to the Titanic. If you wanted something grander and more modern, perhaps take the Berengaria, notorious for hosting American ‘booze-cruises’, where dried up Americans purchased return tickets and sailed to England and returned to America in a fortnight round-trip where they could drink to their kidneys’ discontent. Not being an American ship, the Berengaria was not subject to American prohibition laws!

Or maybe your ship is the Aquitania, a vessel which, until 2004, held the distinction of being the longest serving ocean liner plying the transatlantic route – thirty-six years! This record was broken in 2004 by the Queen Elizabeth 2, whose service reached 40 years doing the same route! The Aquitania became known as the ‘Ship Beautiful’ and was a common choice for passengers crossing the Atlantic.

RMS Aquitania. Source: Wikimedia Commons

In the old days, much care was taken in selecting which ship you would take to cross the Atlantic. There were loads to choose from, and each ship and company came with different things to recommend them to the discerning traveling public. The two biggest rivals were Cunard and White Star. They competed fiercely for passengers by boasting of larger ships, faster crossings, more luxuries, better food, improvements in safety and an ever-expanding range of on board diversions ranging from swimming-pools, spas and even cinemas.

After boarding the ship and being shown your cabin, you were allowed to settle in. The ship was dragged out to sea by tugboats and then would set sail for New York, a crossing that could take anywhere from five, to seven, to ten days, depending on the ship, the route, and the weather that it encountered on the way. That said, ships were typically expected to be able to make a crossing a week on the transatlantic route, so that passengers would never have to wait more than seven days to get another ship.

Once on board, you now had to find things to do. Southampton to New York takes the better part of a week, or more, depending on your chosen vessel. Are you a gambler or a betting person? Perhaps you should get in on the ship’s pool? No, not the swimming pool on E-deck, the ‘ship’s pool’ was the pool of cash which passengers contributed money to. You all had to bet how far the ship would go in 24 hours. At a prearranged time each day, an officer or steward would stick up a notice on the public noticeboard detailing how far the ship had gone during the night. The passenger whose guess was closest to the actual distance traveled won the pool!

This map of the Atlantic is found in the Grand Saloon of the R.M.S. Queen Mary, one of the most famous ocean liners of the Golden Age of Travel. The two lines track the ship’s routes from Southampton to New York. Small crystal models of the Queen Mary moved along these lines each day, indicating the ship’s progress during the voyage.

Of course, ships did come with actual swimming-pools, and gymnasiums, daycare centers, libraries, barbershops, cafes, restaurants and dining-saloons. During the 1930s, ships also started having cinemas on board, showing the latest films. If you wanted to take in the sea air up on deck, you might take part in a game of deck shuffleboard in which you had to slide painted wooden pucks along the deck using a long wooden paddle. The pucks would slide along the deck and across a painted and numbered grid. The skill in playing deck shuffleboard was in knowing how much force to put into your push to get your puck to slide across the grid and get the highest score – not always as easy as you might think, if the ship was rocking and lurching in the waves.

There was no internet access back during the Golden Age of Travel, no WIFI. But that didn’t stop you from contacting friends and relatives thousands of miles away. Perhaps your ship’s been delayed by storms and you’ll be in New York a day or two late? No problem. Off you went to the purser’s office. Here, you were given a telegraphic form where you could send off a brief message to your friends via the ship’s radio.

Telegrams were charged by the word. For example, it might be a shilling for the first ten words, and then a penny for every word thereafter. Unsurprisingly, telegrams were sent as infrequently as possible and when they were, were kept as short as possible. After filling out the telegraphic form with your message and having paid the fee, the form was torn off the pad and sent up to the radio-room by messenger or by pneumatic tube. The form was rolled up, stuffed in a cylinder and rammed into a pneumatic tube. The air-pressure in the tube or pipe pushed the cylinder up to the radio-room where it was spat out and landed in a basket. The radio-operators would open the tube, take out the message, and transmit its contents to the nearest land-station.

For all its glamour, ocean-travel did not come without risks. Ships were in constant danger of crashing into each other, of running aground, and of course, of sinking. In 1942, the RMS Queen Mary was sailing as a troopship off the coast of Scotland when a rogue wave of an estimated height at least 90ft (approx. 28m) hit the ship broadside. The entire vessel rocked over 52-degrees, and the wheelhouse windows were blown in from the force of the impact. In 1934, the SS Morro Castle, steaming the New York-Cuba route down the Atlantic coast of the U.S.A. caught fire. One of the worst fires at sea, the ship beached itself near the coastline. Passengers who could not escape on a lifeboat (what few which were not burned or made inaccessible in the inferno) jumped overboard and swam to shore, or floated in the water waiting for rescue from passing boats.

The RMS Queen Mary in New York Harbor, 1961.

In 1925, the Cunard Line offices in New York received word that a terrorist bomb had been loaded on board the RMS Berengaria. At the time, the ship was over a thousand miles out at sea. A radio distress-signal was sent to the ship from shore-stations and the vessel was searched. Passengers were herded to their lifeboat stations under the pretext of a fire-drill. The bomb was never found and the threat later turned out to be a hoax.

When shipboard life was calm, however, it could be idyllic. If the weather was fine you might take a stroll around the deck. You might visit the ship’s library, listen to the ship’s band or orchestra, or relax up on deck in a folding, wooden ‘deckchair’. Deckchairs could be rented, or they could be reserved. If you spotted a deckchair in a particular spot that you wanted to use, a steward might tack a card onto it, saying that it was reserved for a particular passenger, that way, you wouldn’t lose your special place in the sun!

The relaxed, carefree nature of ocean liner travel, as well as the friendships and connections that might’ve been made during long voyages around the world was captured in a popular song of the period, simply titled: “On a Steamer Coming Over”, about a blossoming shipboard romance between two passengers previously unknown to each other. Other popular songs of the 1920s and 30s which glamourized the allure and romance of international travel included “A Slow Boat to China”, “On a Sunny Street in Singapore”, and “Nagasaki”. In the 1920s, with America officially under prohibition, the song “I’ll See You In C-U-B-A” (1920) recommended that frustrated Americans should “…plan a wonderful trip, to Havana, hop on a ship, and I’ll see you, in C-U-B-A…”

When a ship docked in New York, customs and health officers and pilots were ferried aboard to begin the docking procedures. After going through customs and ensuring that nobody on board was seriously ill, the ship was permitted to dock and passengers were allowed off.

The Transatlantic Crossing – Part III – The Sleeper Car

Perhaps after landing at New York, you haven’t finished your journey? Then what? Well, another train-trip, of course. From New York, let’s say you travel to Chicago, the Second City, and Mobster Central! To do this, you would head to Grand Central Station in Manhattan, and from there, board one of the most famous trains in the world: The 20th Century Limited.

The 20th Century Limited ran nightly expresses from New York to Chicago, leaving Grand Central at 6:00pm every night, and arriving at Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station at 9:00am the next morning. The 20th Century Limited was so famous, it was featured in a number of films. The train featured in ‘The Sting’ (1972) was the Century Limited. The train featured in ‘North by Northwest’ (1959) again, was the 20th Century Limited.

The Twentieth Century Limited, ca. 1907. Source: Wikimedia Common

To ride the Century Limited was one of the greatest experiences in Golden Era tourism. Catering to first-class passengers and wealthy businessmen, passengers riding the Century Limited were given the Red Carpet Treatment – literally. A broad, red carpet with “Twentieth Century Limited” printed on it in gold letters was run along the platform, parallel to the train, so that passengers could spot it easily and board it without confusion. It was from here that the expression to be given the ‘red carpet treatment’ originated.

Once on board the famous train, you had dinner in one of the train’s dining-cars, eating food prepared on board. The train left New York City at 6:00pm and travelled nonstop through the night. The train didn’t stop to pick up coal or water. Instead, it relied on track-pans – large steel troughs between the railroad lines which collected rainwater, (or if rainwater was not available, were recharged using pipes connected to a reliable water-source) to refill the boiler with water during the trip – a steam-powered vehicle requires more water than fuel when it’s in operation. Upon approaching a track-pan, a crank-and-screw mechanism was operated and a scoop was lowered from the bottom of the locomotive. The force of the train rushing over the pan forced water up the scoop and into storage tanks in the tender. Pipes then channeled the water into the boiler at the front of the train.

On an overnight train journey, dinner would typically be served on board. This wasn’t just some cheap snack-bar with packets of chips, hotdogs and chocolate-bars as we might expect today. Oh no, on the Century Limited, you were treated to a full, silver-service dinner, where passengers could choose from a menu of dishes cooked on board and served in the dining-car which was accessible from other parts of the train. After dinner, you might go to the lounge car or the bar for a drink, a smoke, a game of cards or a chat with friends. If you considered yourself too sleepy, you would retire to your assigned berth or compartment in your assigned cabin. Here, you could stretch out on a bed and relax.

Travel on trains like this wasn’t entirely primitive. You had running water if you had to wash up. And flushing toilets if you had to answer a call of nature (just so long as that call wasn’t while the train was in the station – toilets emptied their contents right between the rails in those days), but in the cramped quarters of railroad carriages, don’t expect to have a bath or a shower – that would have to be reserved for the end of your trip.

Once you arrived at your destination (in this case, Chicago), you alighted the train with your luggage. Depending on how much luggage you had, you might have stored it all in your compartment. If this wasn’t possible, then it was stored in the luggage-van at the back of the train. To offload all your trunks and suitcases and move them around the station, you might need a luggage-trolley. Not one of those tiny things that you see in airports today, a real trolley, capable of carrying up to half a dozen or more bulky, well-packed trunks, cases, boxes and suitcases.

In all, this is a journey that would’ve taken you roughly a week, depending on weather conditions and delays. And this was considered fast! To make connections faster and smoother, things like boat trains, steamship tenders, express services and nonstop water-filling on long train-journeys all aimed to cut out as many of the delays as possible, and give passengers a smooth, fast and comfortable journey as possible.

Trip No. 2 – The Orient Express!

About the Orient Express

Ask any group of people to name the most famous ship in the world, and the argument could go on until the end of time. The Titanic, the Olympic, the Berengaria, the Queen Mary, the Normandie…like a box of Whitman’s Samplers, it would be impossible to try and name them all!

Now, turn the question around. Ask any group of people to name the most famous train in the world. Almost at once, only one answer will come to the minds of most people: The Orient Express.

The Orient Express is a legend, a myth, and a time-machine. It has been running almost nonstop for over 100 years. It’s lasted through two world wars and the Iron Curtain. It’s been marooned in snowstorms, blown up by terrorist bombs, broken up, remade, threatened with closure and bankruptcy, and yet, somehow, it survives, and has outlasted almost all other famous trains in history. But what is it? A very valid question indeed, because the Orient Express is probably THE most confusing journey you will ever take in your life. Why? Simple.

Because there isn’t one Orient Express.

There are FIVE.

The first is the Orient Express, which ran from 1883-2009.

The next is the Simplon Orient Express, which ran from 1919-1977.

The third one is the Arlberg Orient Express, which ran from 1930-1962.

The fourth one is the EuroNight Orient-Express, which ran from 1977-2009.

The fifth one is the Venice-Simplon Orient Express, established in 1982 and which runs to this day as a period recreation of the original Express which ran the transcontinental route started back in 1883.

Confused, much?

On top of that, all these different Orient Expresses didn’t all run the same route. And they didn’t all run the whole route. And they didn’t always run all routes all the time. Routes depended on factors such as passenger-loads, public requirements and of course, the weather. But where and when did the Orient Express start?

Established in 1883, the Orient Express ran through Europe on various routes at various times. The most common short route was Paris, France, to Venice, Italy. The most common long route was the legendary long-haul train journey to beat all train journeys – London, England to Istanbul, Turkey. This is the route that is the most famous of all. It’s the route that everyone has heard about, read about, seen on TV and watched in movies. It’s the route where Hercule Poirot, travelling from Istanbul to London, has to solve the most baffling, famous and morally confusing case of his entire career, that of the ‘Murder on the Orient Express’

Some might think that the Orient Express was supposed to go all the way to Asia, the ‘Orient’. It doesn’t, and never did. The name ‘Orient Express’ comes from the Latin ‘Oriens’ or ‘East’, so literally, ‘The Eastern Express’.

The original Orient Express ran from 1883-2009, with stops and starts and changes along the way. The Express was originally operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits, or ‘International Sleeping-Car Company’ in English. The running of the Orient Express was interrupted at numerous times throughout history, most notably in 1914, 1939, and in the 1960s and 70s during the Cold War.

But what was it like to ride the Orient Express back in the Golden Age of Travel? As it would be too confusing to pick through the minutiae and differences of all the different Orient Express trains, the trip presented here will be one which takes the best of all the Expresses, to give us a general feel of the whole journey. Now for the starting point: London, England.

The Orient Express – Part I – The Boat Train & Boarding the Orient Express

Route: London, England to Istanbul, Turkey

Expected Travel-Time: 3-4 days (dependent on weather)

Just like with any other international trip from Great Britain, your first stop was the boat train. This time, you caught the Continental Express boat train from London’s Victoria Station, to the docks on the south coast. From here, you caught the cross-channel ferry to France. Having arrived in Calais, you would board the Orient Express and ride it from there to its main embarkation point, which was Paris’s Gare de l’Est station, which was where it picked up all passengers not travelling on the Express from Britain.

The Orient Express near Constantinople, 1900

One thing you have to understand is that the Express was not a huge, long train of a dozen grand carriages, hauled proudly along by a gigantic, steam-powered, smoke-belching locomotive chugging ahead through the European countryside. At most it was only a half-dozen carriages at any one time. A typical layout of the Orient Express included the locomotive, its tender, a luggage-van, a couple of sleeper-cars, a dining-car, a galley-car, and another luggage-van. The train made frequent stops along its route, changing and shunting carriages and coaches all the time. Carriages were added and subtracted as the route required it, so that the train wouldn’t be overburdened. But we digress; back to the Gare de l’Est.

It was here (and always from here) that the Orient Express departed when it left from Paris. It left this station for the first time on the 4th of October, 1883, for its marathon run across Europe. The original eastern terminus was not Istanbul, but the port city of Varna in Bulgaria. Here, passengers had to get off the train and take a boat to Istanbul, then called Constantinople. It was on the 1st of June, 1889 that the first, uninterrupted rail journey from Paris to Constantinople was accomplished. Today, the modern Venice-Simplon Orient Express still leaves from the Gare de l’Est on its two different routes, to Venice and to Istanbul. 

Paris Gare de l’Est, Paris, France, 2009. The main western terminus of the Orient Express.

The Express was not a daily service. It departed from London and Paris three days a week, (Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays) for either Bucharest, or Constantinople/Istanbul, depending on the day of the week. Travel-time took three-to-four days, depending on the weather and delays. If the weather was really bad, the train might not make it through at all. In 1929, the Express was trapped in a mammoth snowdrift that took rescuers ten days to dig out. This legendary event hit the newspapers and inspired Agatha Christie’s famous murder-mystery. It’s even referenced in the David Suchet TV production of the novel.

The Orient Express became wildly popular. Travel across Europe had previously taken weeks. Now, you could go from one end to the other in just less than a week! The Express became so popular that other trains with similar names started running similar routes across Europe, to pick up the excess passengers which the original Express couldn’t handle.

Sirkeci Terminal, Istanbul, Turkey. The eastern terminus of the Orient Express.

Whether you got onto the train at Calais, or Paris, what happened next?

Well, first you entered the station and presented your ticket. Your less important luggage was stored in the luggage-vans, and your more important cases were brought on board the train. You were assigned a carriage, and a compartment within that carriage – always a sleeper-car. Your steward (there was one steward for each sleeper-car, whose job it was to look after the passengers under his care) would show you to your compartment, put your luggage safely away, and then he would ask for your passport.

As the Orient Express was a transcontinental train, it passed through several borders and countries (thirteen countries in total!) At every stop along the way, border-officers would board the train to check the passports of each passenger. So that passengers wouldn’t be disturbed at every single border crossing, their steward would handle their passports, and present them to border-guards at each stop, where they would be checked and stamped with a minimum of fuss and disturbance.

A typical compartment on an Orient Express sleeper was very small. Designed to hold two people and their most essential luggage, it came with a double-bunk bed (which could be turned into a couch in the daytime by your trusty carriage-steward), electric lights, a call-button, a hook on the wall for your watch, to stop it sliding around, space for your luggage and clothes, and a closing wash-basin. All packed into a space 5ft wide by 8ft deep by about 8ft high! Pretty snug!

The Orient Express – Part II – Riding the Orient Express

Within the confines of about three or four passenger-carriages, the Orient Express had a surprisingly large number of features. You had electric lights, heaters, a call-button system, hot running water and cold running water provided by cisterns on board, and one flushing toilet per-carriage. But no shower, and certainly no bath! The Express was luxurious, but not that luxurious!

A carriage of the Orient Express in CIWL livery.

During your trip, your constant guide and assistant was your carriage-steward. He handled passports, answered questions, provided assistance, helped with your luggage and answered the light above your door if you called for assistance. But for all his efforts, your poor steward didn’t get too much in return!

For all the services that the carriage-stewards provided, they had almost no personal space of their own. At best, they slept in small, cramped quarters at the end of the carriage, or if not even that, then on padded benches or chairs out in the corridor at the end of each carriage. From here, they could monitor the service-lights above each compartment door, and help passengers if they exited their compartments.

A poster advertising the Orient Express

The Orient Express did not run one route. It ran several routes of varying lengths, with terminations in Athens, Paris, Calais, Venice and Istanbul. Common stops along the longest Express routes included Venice, Krakow, Budapest, Vienna, Belgrade, Munich and Bucharest, until the train finally arrived in Istanbul. The train was a popular mode of transport for the rich and famous. Authors, actors, musicians, dancers, and artists all travelled on the Orient Express. So too did diplomats, since the Express ran through many major European cities. It was also popular with British colonial officials hoping to reach India as fast and as comfortable as possible.

The three-and-half-day journey of the Orient Express meant that comfort and luxury had to be part of the package. Passengers weren’t going to pay to go on just any train if it didn’t come with some sort of draw-card. On the Orient Express, you were served meals cooked fresh and hot in the kitchen-car, which were served in the dining-car. The train was restocked at each stop along the way, so that the kitchen could be cleaned out and empty containers thrown away. Whenever the train stopped at a station, you could get out and send telegrams or letters from the station’s telegraph office or nearby post office, and have opportunities to take photographs and stretch your legs.

At the end of three-and-a-half grueling days, you would arrive at your destination. The eastern terminus for the Orient Express was the Sirkeci Terminus in Istanbul (or ‘Constantinople’ during the early years of the Express). From here, you could travel to countries like Egypt, Persia (Iran), India, Palestine (Israel), or sail further on towards Asia, reaching countries like Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Siam (Thailand), Burma (Myanmar) or the colonial holdings of the Straits Settlements (Malaysia & Singapore), the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) or French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam).

Come Take a Trip in my Air-Ship!

One of the most powerful and enduring symbols of the Golden Age of Travel was the new kid on the block: Airships!

Controlled, powered air-transport had been a reality ever since 1852, when French inventor Henri Giffard took to the skies in the world’s first powered airship. This crude technology was a full fifty-one years before the Wright Brothers made their legendary flight at Kittyhawk in 1903. The Wright Brothers were not the first people to fly. They were not the first people to attain controlled flight. They were the first to do so successfully in an airplane. Airships predated them by half a century!

It was because of this that in the early 20th century, most people put great expectations upon the airship to be the air-transport king of the future! Flimsy airplanes with tiny engines, wooden frames stretched over with cloth and strung together with wires couldn’t possibly transport great numbers of people in speed, comfort and safety! But an airship, floating gracefully through the air, powered along by its propellers, looked big, sturdy and capable, although this was mostly due to publicity rather than fact. Early airships were slow, inefficient and lacked sufficient lift to make them effective modes of transport. In the 1880s and 1890s, experiments were made using batteries (which were too heavy and inefficient), and first-generation internal-combustion engines, which were too slow. It would not be until the turn of the century that the first real strides in airship technology allowed for practical transport.

Throughout the Edwardian era, airship technology, a pet project of Germans such as Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin, and Hugo Eckener, continued to advance. Nonrigid airships (‘Blimps’, we’d call them today) were phased out in favour of dirigibles, or rigid-frame airships, where gas-bags were inflated inside a rigid frame with fabric stretched over it. Airships remained largely experimental until the end of the decade, when the first flights of significant distance were achieved, first across Germany, and then across the European continent. In October, 1910, the first ever airship, the Clement Bayard II, managed to fly from Europe to Britain and made aerial-transport history. The airship captured the imagination of the travelling public like no other form of transport before it. In 1904 the song: “Come take a Trip in my Air-Ship” was published, many years before the airship became a popular form of long distance transport. Despite this, the song’s lyrics spoke of fantastical trips far beyond the vehicle’s capabilities at the time.

The first successful passenger-carrying airships started taking to the air around this time. This growth in confidence and advancement in technology led to the establishment of airship companies towards the end of the decade. In 1908, the Zeppelin Company was established in Germany, headed by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin. In 1909, DEFLAG, or the German Airship Transport Company, was established. DEFLAG stood for Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktein-Gesellschaft, the company’s name in German.

Between the 1900s until the start of the First World War in August of 1914, the Germans had established the world’s first commercial passenger airship companies and a network of routes and airship fields around Germany. German expertise with airships was growing, and growing enough for them to start using airships in bombing raids.

In 1915 during the First World War, airships were used in the first long-range bombing missions ever carried out in wartime over a civilian population. London, although almost out of the effective range of airship technology at the time, was still a big target. The British were largely unprepared for this new form of warfare and had to hastily adopt strategies for attacking and destroying German military airships, as well as warning the public of air-raids (this led to the post-war creation of Air Raid Precautions in 1924). Airships, for all their size, had a notorious Achilles Heel – the fact that they were inflated with highly explosive and flammable hydrogen gas. British fighter-pilots took advantage of this by firing incendiary bullets at the airships as they flew past them in their primitive combat biplanes.

Despite the death and destruction wrought by the German ‘Baby-Killers’ as they were called by the British propagandists during the First World War, airships became wildly popular in the post-war era. By now, Friedrichshafen in Germany was the name that everyone associated with airships. It was where they were built, launched from, and where passengers travelled in order to board. With airplanes still being little more than open air, unpressurised biplanes – unreliable at best and lethal at the worst of times, airships stood to take on the rising market in international air-travel.

The golden age of the airship was truly the Roaring Twenties and the 1930s. Although other countries such as America and Britain had attempted to establish airship programs, either for passenger transport or for military purposes, only the Germans really succeeded in either of these endeavours. The British airship program ended in disaster with the crash of their most famous airship, the R101, in 1930. Similar disasters marred the American airship program in the years to follow. The result was that by the mid-1930s, only the Germans were still operating regular passenger airship routes. Their most famous was airship LZ-129, better known as the Hindenburg.

Trip No. 3 – LZ-129 Hindenburg!

Route: Frankfurt, Germany, to Lakehurst, New Jersey, U.S.A.

Expected Travel-Time: 2½ days (3 days if you were flying Germany to South America)

The Hindenburg – Part I – Boarding the Hindenburg

If the rigid airship or dirigible was the symbol of cutting-edge transport technology in the 1920s and 30s, then the Hindenburg was rightly considered the flagship of this new glamorous and new-age technology – the most famous airship of its age, and of any age. The Hindenburg was to be the pride and joy of the Zeppelin Company, and its design and appointments were expected to rival even the most luxurious of the transatlantic ocean liners chugging across the ocean over which it glided, free of the dangers of Atlantic storms, icebergs, and wrecks with other vessels. It symbolized a bold, new post-war age of scientific advancement and technological skill. But what was it like to ride on? To find out, let’s take a typical flight on the Hindenburg. This would’ve been from Frankfurt in Germany, to Lakehurst, New Jersey, in the United States, a trip that typically took two-and-a-half days.

The Hindenburg’s departures were remarkable events. Docked on the ground, and tethered off, passengers would have their tickets clipped and their luggage loaded on board. As an obvious safety-precaution, passengers’ cigarette-lighters and matches were confiscated upon boarding. You were not allowed to use them, you were not allowed access to them, and you would only get them back at the end of the trip. Smoking in unauthorized parts of the airship was forbidden. Any fire could rapidly get out of hand, and if it did, the risk of explosion was high.

That’s not to say the Hindenburg didn’t have water on board – Water was stored in ballast-tanks and cisterns on board. These tanks controlled the ship’s weight and speed of descent and ascent. At the appropriate time, water was jettisoned from the ballast-tanks, and the tethers and ropes holding the airship down would be released. The Hindenburg floated into the air so quietly and noiselessly that many passengers on board never noticed the takeoff. On many occasions, passengers would ask the stewards why the airship had not yet left the ground! In reply, stewards would simply tell the passengers to look out the window, and they would see that they were already well on their way!

Despite the airship’s size, only a small percentage of its space was given over to passenger and crew accommodations. The majority of the airship’s space was taken up by the metal framework, maintenance shafts and corridors, and the huge gas-bags, which gave the airship its lift. Passenger and crew-quarters were limited to the small cabins or ‘cars’ underneath the airship. The airship had an auxiliary control-car at the rear, a main control-car at the front, and the large combined (but segregated) passenger-and-crew accommodations between them. The ship was powered by four ‘engine-cars’, two slung out on each side, with large propellers to power the ship through the air. They were kept well away from the passenger and crew-quarters, to cut down on noise interference.

Fully loaded, the Hindenburg could house seventy-two passengers in comfort. They were broken up into pairs, and each pair shared a cabin with a double-bunk bed and wash-basin with running hot and cold water. Cabins were housed on A-deck, along with the airship’s promenade area, dining-room, and lounge, complete with grand piano for passenger entertainment. Below, on B-deck, were the mess-rooms for officers and crew, the airship’s kitchen, bathrooms and toilets, the airship’s bar, and beyond the bar, the smoking-room.

The Hindenburg allowed only one functioning cigarette lighter on board, to cut down the danger of fire and the subsequent risk of igniting the hydrogen gas in the gas-bags above. This single cigarette-lighter was an electric one which was fixed to the central table in the smoking-room. To make the room as safe as possible, there was even a double-airlock door between the smoking-room and the rest of the airship.

To look after you once the ship got underway, the Hindenburg had forty crew and officers, and a dozen stewards and cooks to see to passenger comfort and cook the food for all the passengers, officers and crew. Officers, the captain and passengers all ate in the same dining-room.

Food on the Hindenburg was prepared fresh every day. The airship featured an electric stove, roasting and baking ovens, an ice-maker, and a refrigerator. A typical crossing would see the ship’s chef cook his way through 440lbs of meat and poultry, 800 eggs and up to 220lbs of butter!

The Hindenburg – Part II – Travelling on the Hindenburg

The Hindenburg represented the pinnacle of early 20th-century air-travel. It was dignified, smooth, quiet, classy, modern, and comfortable. Airplanes by comparison were considered cramped, noisy and uncomfortable. Given a choice, most people would probably have flown anywhere in an airship, and the world expected these graceful, mechanically-powered balloons to transport people everywhere in style and comfort. The spire at the top of the Empire State Building in Manhattan was originally designed as an airship-dock, although this was later deemed to be so unsafe that the idea was scrapped.

A voyage on the Hindenburg took from 2-3 days, depending on the destination: either Rio in South America, or New Jersey in the United States. Passengers on board could kill time in the smoking-room, the reading-and-writing room, or the lounge. Passengers wanting a drink could go to B-deck, and visit the bar, located next to the smoking-room.

If you wanted to enjoy some music during the voyage, the Hindenburg’s grand piano was available for any and all musically-gifted passengers. This piano might be considered unique in the history of piano-manufacturing. Due to the strict weight-limits that governed the Hindenburg’s maneuverability and lift, the majority of this piano (a baby grand) was manufactured out of aluminum, to make it as light as possible! Even the legs were made of hollow aluminum tubing, to cut down on weight. The instrument’s weight was just 162kg, remarkably light for a piano!

Passengers on the Hindenburg could get amazing birdseye views of the seas and landscapes below by looking through the downward-angled windows on either side of the main cabin.

On opposite sides of the main cabin, both the dining-room and the lounge offered amazing views of the earth below, through down-facing windows. Passengers could lean on balustrades and handrails on the outer sides of these two rooms, and look down through the glass at the world passing by beneath them. If you had a camera on hand (and some passengers did bring them), amazing views of the world from above could be taken from these vantage points.

The Hindenburg – Part III – Landing the Hindenburg

Landing a modern jumbo jet is a fairly straightforward affair. After receiving clearance from air-traffic control, a plane lines up with a runway, slows speed, drops its landing gear, extends flaps and thrust-reversers and touches down, sometimes as smoothly as a landing feather.

Landing a huge airship like the Hindenburg was a significantly more challenging procedure. Here is how it happened:

Once the Hindenburg had been cleared for landing by radio, it would make for the mooring-area – on trips to the United States, this was the Naval Air Base at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The crew on board the Hindenburg would drop mooring-lines out of the airship’s body and ground-crews would grab them and physically pull the ship towards the mooring-mast. A main, central mooring-cable was dropped from the ship’s nose, and this was affixed to the mooring-mast. The cable was then winched in, drawing the ship towards the ground. The extra mooring-lines held by ground-crews would stop the airship from blowing off-target as it was being winched to the ground.

As the airship descended, water from its ballast-tanks would be released. This was to lessen the ship’s weight, and to reduce the chances of the airship crashing to the ground if it landed too heavily. Once near to the ground, mooring-lines would be made fast, and then the stairs and hatches under the airship could be opened so that passengers and crew could get out.

Landing the Hindenburg at Lakehurst in 1936

Bags were unloaded and sorted. Every passenger on the Hindenburg had his bags marked with a company stamp. On the stamp was a letter corresponding to the first letter of his surname. Bags were unloaded and sorted alphabetically, so that passengers could find them more easily. After a two-and-a-half day journey floating across the Atlantic, your trip on one of the great marvels of the Golden Age of Travel was over.

The End of the Golden Age of Travel

The Second World War signaled the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Travel. The powerful changes caused all over the world by this conflict meant that it was impossible to revive the glory days of travel that had existed before the war. Too much had happened and too much had changed or been lost forever, to make this possible. And it would be decades before anything even resembling a tribute to the Golden Age of Travel would be possible once more. Technological changes, as well as political and geographical ones would further speed the end of the Golden Age, as old forms of transport were replaced with new ones, and a whole new way of travelling swept across the world in the 1950s.

Countries once open to travel, like China, were now closed. Ravaged by war and internal political strife, the decadence and grandeur of pre-war Shanghai was lost forever after the Japanese invaded the International Settlement on the 7th of December, 1941 – the Day of Infamy. Foreigners fled the city by the shipload, and one of the most popular tourist spots in the world was abandoned almost overnight. It would be another forty years before Shanghai would open up to the West again, when the Americans re-established their consulate in Shanghai in 1980.

The Dutch, French and British Empires were rocked by powerful independence movements, especially in French Indochina (Vietnam), the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), India and Malaya. This made travel to the Far East unwise at best and dangerous at the worst of times. European countries like Germany, Austria, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands and Greece were heavily bomb-damaged. Malaya and Singapore were still recovering from the Japanese occupation.

The original Hotel Adlon, opened in 1907. Berlin, 1926, near the Brandenburg Gate.

Hotels from the Golden Age which once boasted famous journalists, actors, artists, politicians and diplomats as their guests, had been burned down, shelled or destroyed entirely during the War. The Hotel Adlon in Berlin, a popular haunt of foreign journalists and international celebrities in pre-war Germany, was badly damaged during the Russian occupation of the city. The Adlon has since been rebuilt in a style closely resembling the original hotel, and on the original site that it has occupied since it was opened in 1907. It was from the balcony of his room at the rebuilt Hotel Adlon, that Michael Jackson famously dangled his son, in 2002. However, the Hotel Adlon is a rare example of the Golden Age reborn. Most Berlin hotels destroyed by enemy air-raids or cannon-fire were not rebuilt after the War.

Destroyed by Russian artillery-shells and fire in the Second World War, the rebuilt Hotel Adlon opened in Berlin in 1997, 90 years after, and on the same site as the original. Source: Wikimedia Commons

In Singapore, the world-famous Raffles Hotel was taken over by the Japanese when they overran the island. With the Japanese surrender in 1945, officers committed suicide in its rooms. In 1942, at the start of the occupation, Raffles’ waiters had dug a huge pit in the gardens and threw in the hotel’s silverware and buried it, hiding it from the enemy. When the war ended, the hole was dug up, and the silverware was retrieved, cleaned and put back into service. One of the items dug up was Raffles’ solid silver antique carving-trolley, used to present and serve the Sunday roast. After being carefully restored, it’s still used in the hotel today!

The rise of communism and the Eastern Bloc in Europe meant that as soon as the Second World War was over, it was replaced by the Cold War. And countries and cities which might once have been popular tourist destinations, like Poland, and the Free City of Danzig, were increasingly difficult to visit because of the ‘Iron Curtain’, a word coined by Winston Churchill. The rise of the Iron Curtain also put an end to the traditional Orient Express. It continued to run, but it would be the 1990s before it could reopen its classic London-to-Istanbul route once again.

Airplanes now replaced ocean liners as the main means of intercontinental travel. The disastrous crash of the airship Hindenburg in 1937 and the subsequent Second World War forever squashed any ideas of airships being the primary mode of air transport around the world. Airplanes were faster than airships and ocean liners, and much cheaper. Before long, many shipping companies were sending their ships to sea with half or even one-third capacities. It wouldn’t be until the Queen Mary 2, that grand, ocean liners would cross the seas of the world in grandeur and style once more.

By the 1960s, grand ocean liner travel was something of the past. Ships like the Aquitania and the Queen Mary were either too old to run, or too expensive to rebuild or maintain. Competition from airports and airlines meant falling passenger numbers. And shipping lines could no longer get enough revenue from fare-paying passengers to keep their expensive seagoing ships in good repair. Famously, the Aquitania suffered structural failures late in her career. Corrosion, leaking decks and ceilings and rotting timberwork and unsafe floors resulted in a spectacular incident involving a piano falling through the deck into the dining-room below!

Airports replaced seaports. Luggage restrictions, security scares, hijackings and terrorist plots shaped the travel experience that we have today, and the era of relaxed, glamorous travel which we’ve seen in movies, novels and TV shows vanished forever.

Sources used in the writing of this posting included:

ARCHBOLD , Rick“HINDENBURG – Reliving the Era of the Great Airships – AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY” – Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Publishing Group, London (1994) – Illustrations and artwork by Ken Marschall.

DANKER, Leslie“Memoirs of a Raffles Original”, Angsana Books, Singapore (2010)

DONG, Stella“Shanghai – The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City”, Perennial, New York, U.S.A. (2001)

KRASNO, Rena“Once Upon a Time in Shanghai: A Jewish Woman’s Journey through 20th Century China”, China Intercontinental Press, Beijing, China (2008)

MATTEOLI, Francisca “WORLD TOUR – Vintage Hotel Labels from the Collection of Gaston-Louis Vuitton” – Abrams, New York, U.S.A.

SERVER, Lee“The Golden Age of Ocean Liners”, Todtri, U.S.A., (1996)

“Great Journeys – Travel the World’s Most Spectacular Routes”, Lonely Planet, Victoria, Australia (Aug. 2013)

http://www.airships.net/ – One of the most comprehensive web-sources out there, on the history of airships and the Hindenburg – Accessed 25th, June, 2014

http://mikes.railhistory.railfan.net/r045.html – Mike’s Railway History – ‘The Orient Express’ – Accessed 20th of June, 2014

http://www.seat61.com/OrientExpress.htm#.U7QWjJSSxD1 – Seat61.com – ‘The Truth Behind the Legend – The Orient Express’ – Accessed 21st of June, 2014

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-orient-express-149702768/?no-ist – Smithsonian.com – “A Brief History of the Orient Express” – Accessed 21st of June, 2014

This article was originally posted in the July, 2014 issue of the Australia Times – HISTORY online magazine, and is reposted here with permission.

 

The Long Way Back: The Farthest Flight of the Pacific Clipper

Imagine this – It’s December! You’ve booked yourself an international flight to the Far East to enjoy a balmy, sandy Christmas in the sun! You board the plane and take off across the Pacific headed for Southeast Asia, and settle in for several hours of relaxation, conversation and sightseeing over the ocean.

Before you’ve even reached your destination – your entire world is turned upside-down! Reports come in over the radio that suddenly, the whole world is at war! You can’t fly back, you can’t go on ahead, you have no idea where the plane is even going to land, and you could be shot down at any minute!

This is the terrifying tale of the Pacific Clipper, one of the long-haul luxury passenger seaplanes operated by Pan-American Airways in the 1930s and 40s, and the record-breaking flight that it took around the world in December, 1941, as the South Pacific exploded into war beneath its wings.

What Was the Pacific Clipper?

Introduced in 1938, the Boeing 314 Clipper was, in the late 1930s, the most modern of commercial, long-haul passenger aircraft being sold around the world at the time. Only twelve were ever constructed. Nine went to Pan-American Airways, and the remaining three went to BOAC – the British Overseas Airways Corporation.

The Boeing 314 was a large aircraft for the day, but even it wasn’t able to cover the entire width of the Pacific Ocean in a single, uninterrupted flight. Instead, the accepted practice of the day was to “island-hop” around the world, providing long-distance travel to the paying public by flying from one airbase to another, completing long-haul flights in stages. It wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t exactly glamorous, and it certainly wasn’t cheap!…But it beat the hell out of trying to cover the same distance by ocean liner!

PAA’s ‘California Clipper’ in 1940

The Pan-Am clippers came with most of the stuff that modern aircraft come with: Lavatories, seats that could convert to lie-flat beds, delicious food, and full steward service! However, they differed in many other ways:

First – journey-times were much longer. From California to Hawaii took up to 19 hours! Second – Passenger-volumes were much-reduced – The average pre-war Pan-Am clipper barely carried more than 70 passengers. Third – the Pan-Am clippers were all seaplanes, or “flying boats” – they had no landing-gear – instead, the planes took off and landed on flat bodies of water – large rivers, lakes, or along the coastline during calm weather.

Last but not least – tickets were expensive! A one-way flight from California to Hong Kong was $760 – around $14,000USD in modern prices!

Piloting a Pan-Am clipper was very different from flying a modern aircraft. Because the planes could only take off and land on water, pilots had to be extremely skilled, not only in flying, landing, taxiing and take-off – but they also had to know a lot more about weather, sea-conditions, how to spot a safe stretch of water, and how to read the windspeeds and directions accurately enough to know when, where and how to make a safe water-landing! These days, most pilots hope to only make one water-landing in their entire lives, if they ever have to – but for Pan-Am clipper pilots, it was literally a daily occurrence!

In an age when long-haul passenger-flights were limited and the industry was only, quite literally, getting off the ground – flying was far more dangerous than it is today. Engine-failures and emergency-landings happened much more frequently, and a full-service crew flew with the aircraft at all times to tackle all kinds of mechanical incidents that could happen during flight. The crew of the Boeing 314 Flying Boat was 11 in number: The captain, first officer, second officer, third officer, fourth officer, two flight-engineers, two radio-operators, the purser, and his assistant.

It was one of these fantastical flying machines – a Boeing 314 – which came to be known as the ‘Pacific Clipper’.

Pan-American Airways named all its early aircraft, just like how steamship-lines at the time named all their ships. And just like how shipping lines followed naming conventions (Cunard named all ships “-ia” – Carpathia, Lusitania, Muretania, Berengaria, etc, and White Star named all their ships “-ic” – Titanic, Olympic, Atlantic, etc), Pan-Am also followed similar conventions: All their aircraft were called “clippers”, a reference to clipper sailing ships, which were famed for their speed. The names were typically related to the plane’s assigned route.

There was the Atlantic Clipper, the China Clipper, the Caribbean Clipper, the Honolulu Clipper…and the subject of this posting: The Pacific Clipper.

The Farthest Flight of the Pacific Clipper

It is December 2nd, 1941. Off the coast of sunny San Francisco, the Pacific Clipper is preparing for a routine flight across the Pacific towards Auckland, New Zealand. There are twenty-three people on board: Twelve passengers, and eleven crew. The pilot is Capt. Robert Ford, a Pan-Am veteran, well-used to the rigors of long-haul passenger-aircraft flights.

With a range of 5,000 miles, the Pacific Clipper was never able to make the flight from California to New Zealand nonstop, and it was accepted that the plane would land several times during the trip to drop off and collect mail, passengers, food, drinks, trash, and most importantly – fuel! When Captain Ford fired up the engines and took to the skies, nobody on board could’ve imagined what lay ahead.

Pre-war Honolulu in the 1930s

The aircraft’s first stop was San Pedro, California, then out across the ocean. It landed in Honolulu, Hawaii, then Kanton Island near Kiribati, then Fiji, and then finally, New Caledonia. In the preceding days, it had covered over 6,000 miles! The final leg of the journey was still ahead: Auckland, a mere 1,200 miles away – well within the limits of the Pacific Clipper’s operational range.

As the plane took off from New Caledonia and flew southeast towards Auckland, wireless operator John Poindexter was relaxing at his station, his headphones strapped onto his head as the aircraft hummed around him. Right now, he was probably thinking about his wife – the same wife that he had advised, he would be home early for – and to keep dinner for him on the kitchen table.

That was before one of the two radio-operators on the flight pulled out sick, and Poindexter stepped in to replace him. Had he known what was about to happen, Poindexter would’ve told his wife not to bother about dinner, because he was going to be home late.

Very late.

Halfway through their current leg, the radio suddenly crackled to life, and Poindexter scribbled down a message in Morse Code. Ripping it off his pad, he hurried to tell the rest of the crew what had just come in over the airwaves.

It was December 7th, 1941. A date which would live in infamy. Poindexter had just found out about the Japanese aerial attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

As the pilot, his co-pilot, the stewards, navigator, flight engineers and radio-operators all looked at the message, they suddenly realised what a horrible position they were all in!

While they could safely make it to New Zealand, offload their passengers, cargo and mail, refuel and take-off again – it was immediately obvious that there was no way that they could ever go home…or at least…not in the conventional way.

Under normal circumstances, the plane would’ve flown northeast towards Hawaii, where it would land, refuel, and then continue on back to the mainland United States. With Japanese aircraft, warships and aircraft carriers between the South Pacific and Hawaii, however, such a route was impossible – an aircraft bearing American markings would almost certainly be shot out of the sky if it was discovered by Japanese surface vessels.

With Hawaii on high alert, landing and refueling there, even if they managed to evade the Japanese, would be next to impossible. Unable to make the journey back to California without at least one stopover, getting back home seemed impossible!

Landing in New Zealand

The first leg of this epic adventure was relatively easy – landing. Two hours after receiving the world-changing news that the naval base at Pearl Harbor had been blasted by the Japanese, Captain Ford and his crew executed a landing off the coast of New Zealand, taxiing up to Auckland and tying off. Passengers and cargo were offloaded and the plane was prepared for…well…they weren’t exactly sure what for…but they wanted to be prepared at the very least!

Unsure of what else to do, the crew made their way to the American Embassy in Auckland. Here, they managed to contact Pan-American Airways Headquarters…in New York…and waited for further instructions.

With facilities in Hawaii put out of action, the harbor inoperable and any aircraft-fuel being needed for military aircraft, flying back to California was all but impossible.

In the week that it took for headquarters to make up its mind on the crew’s next move, the Pacific was erupting into war around them. The Philippine Clipper at Wake Island had managed to evacuate all Pan-Am employees and a lucky few civilians, taking to the air as Japanese forces rolled in, riddling the aircraft with gunfire as it fought to get out of range. In Hong Kong, another Pan-Am flying boat had been blown up at its dock before it even had a chance to leave.

Knowing that time was running out and that their options were dwindling rapidly, it was eight days before Captain Ford and his crew found out what they were expected to do.

Finally, on the 15th of December, a cypher-telegram was dispatched from New York to the U.S. Embassy, Auckland, New Zealand. It instructed Captain Ford to strip the Pacific Clipper of all identifying marks, fuel-up, and to get home by whatever means were necessary. During the trip, radio silence was to be observed at all times, to prevent the aircraft from being detected by the Japanese, and to land in New York when it arrived back in American waters.

When he found out what he was expected to do, Captain Ford probably thought that it would’ve been better if he’d kept his mouth shut! There was no way the aircraft could fly that far without stopping several times for fuel. There was no way that they’d have enough food, equipment or supplies to last that long! They didn’t even have any money, and because Captain Ford only flew the Pacific routes – he had no maps or navigational charts to guide him across Eurasia, Africa, or the Atlantic Ocean! They were entirely on their own, with orders to make it home by any means necessary.

After refueling the aircraft, Ford and his passengers and crew took off once more, to an uncertain fate.

It was the 16th of December when they left New Zealand, and their first stop was one of their previous legs – New Caledonia. Here, Ford had been ordered to land, refuel, and take on evacuees – the staff of the Pan-Am facility that operated out of the New Caledonian capital – Noumea. Fearing that the island could be captured by the Japanese at any minute, Ford told the Pan-Am staff that they had exactly one hour to grab whatever they could, and flee. This wouldn’t be easy – each passenger was only allowed one bag each!

While the Pan-Am staff scrambled to pack their bags and secure their essentials, the plane was refueled. With everybody safely aboard, the plane took off once more, this time flying west.

The only other major landmass in the region that had not yet been taken by the Japanese was the Commonwealth of Australia – the Pacific Clipper’s next stop. It landed off the Queensland coast near the town of Gladstone, where once again – it started to refuel. While the ground-staff prepared the clipper for its next leg, the crew offloaded the Pan-Am employees from Noumea, judging Australia to be far enough away from Japanese aggression to be a safe evacuation-point.

While this was going on, Ford had to tackle another issue that hadn’t been an issue before last week!…money!

With each flight, the crew was provided with enough funds to cover their expenditures – food, fuel, and any necessary repairs – from California to New Zealand…but Pan-Am in New York had not been able to send them any extra funds for their long-haul flight around the world!

Wondering what to do, Captain Ford was suddenly approached by a young man, who identified himself as a local banker. The aircraft had enough food and fuel to last the trip – but what about money?

“We’re broke!” Ford recalled saying, and explained how they had only been given enough funds to support them there and back – not for halfway around the world!

“I’ll probably be shot for this”, the banker replied, but he went to his local branch, unlocked the vault in the back, and returned with $500 cash-money – American dollars! A not-inconsiderable sum in 1941!

Accepting the cash without another word, Ford handed it to Rod Brown, the aircraft’s navigator – the only person on board with access to the plane’s strongbox. The funds were deposited, and the aircraft prepared to take flight again.

Darwin in the 1930s. A sight like this would’ve been very similar to what the crew of the Pacific Clipper would’ve seen when they landed in the harbour on the 17th of December, 1941

The Pacific Clipper continued its journey westwards, flying across the Australian interior. Being a seaplane, the Pacific Clipper could only take off or land on water – and Australia being one of the driest countries on earth – there ain’t much water around! Certainly not enough to land a commercial aircraft in!

The afternoon of the 17th saw the Pacific Clipper landing in Darwin, the capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. The weather was atrocious and the plane came down in the midst of a tropical thunderstorm. Although it was the capital of the Northern Territory, Darwin was hardly a bustling metropolis! The crew were stunned to discover just how small Darwin was – little more than a large, country town. Even in 2020, Darwin’s population is still barely 150,000 people!

Darwin in the 1930s.

Despite this, Darwin was still an important military base, with an airfield, army-base, aircraft facilities, and a naval base in the deep-water harbour nearby. Darwin was such an army town that the crew found that their refreshment station was actually the local brothel!

While in Darwin, Captain Ford and his navigator, Rod Brown, had to decide what on earth they were going to do next. Australia was likely to be the last friendly nation that they would be able to land in, before they had to strike out on their own and try and make it home across the rest of the world. There would be no way to know where they could land, find fuel, repair the engines if they malfunctioned, could receive medical care, or even communicate with Pan-Am headquarters in New York, if they had to!

Leaving Australia…

After freshening up, the crew had to refuel the aircraft…again. 5,000 gallons of aircraft fuel had to be poured into the tanks before they could take off – not with pumps or hoses or anything as sophisticated as that!…Oh no.

It had to be done by hand.

1,000 5gal. jerry-cans of fuel had to be literally manhandled up the side of the aircraft and poured into the tanks over the wings, passed down, refilled, and then passed back up again! All this in the raging North-Australian heat! It was past midnight before the job was done, and the crew were exhausted! They allowed themselves a few hours’ sleep, and then took off again the moment it was light.

Lifting off from Darwin on the morning of the 18th, Captain Ford and his crew flew north to Surabaya in Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies.

Desperate to hold the island by any means necessary, British and Dutch forces were understandably on-edge when they saw an unidentified aircraft entering Javan airspace. Unable to make radio-contact, the Pacific Clipper was almost taken out by friendly fire! When it finally was allowed to land – the local authorities refused to give them any aircraft fuel! They insisted that their limited stock was for military uses only – but – they didn’t want to be seen as being unsympathetic – there was a war on, after all!…and they graciously informed Captain Ford that he was welcome to help himself to as much gasoline as he could load onto the aircraft! It’s not like anybody was going for a relaxing, Sunday drive right now, so there was more than enough petrol to spare! Even enough to fuel a commercial airliner!

The lower-quality automobile fuel had never been used in an airplane before, and Ford was skeptical about whether it would even operate properly at high altitudes! But he had no choice – it was either take the lower-grade fuel – or run out of fuel entirely, and crash in the ocean!

Erring on the side of caution, Ford ordered his flight engineers to siphon the remaining aircraft fuel into one tank, and fill the other tanks with the lower-grade gasoline. The plane would take off using aircraft fuel, but would carry out the next leg of its journey using the automobile fuel.

Once the plane was airborne, Ford switched the feed-valves on the tanks, shutting off the aviation fuel and switching on the pumps for the lower-grade petrol – the engines gurgled and spluttered and smoke started pumping out, but once they’d gotten over the initial shock of the change in their diet – they started firing once more.

Chasing the Sunset

Determined to put as much space between himself and the Japanese as possible, Captain Ford steered the Pacific Clipper westwards, and out across the Indian Ocean, and over waters which were, quite literally – uncharted! With no detailed maps, Ford, his navigator, co-pilot and the aircraft’s stewards were basically flying blind, only having the vaguest idea of where they were going. Navigator Brown had no navigational documents for this part of the world, and warned Ford that all they had to go on were rough bearings.

Ford decided that their next logical destination had to be a colony of the British Empire – somewhere that the Pacific Clipper would stand a greater chance of a friendly reception. To that end, the plane attempted to find the island of Ceylon – today – Sri Lanka – off the Indian coast.

Had they been traveling by sea, this would’ve been called an “all-red route” – a sea voyage which stopped only in “red” parts of the map – red being the colour of the British Empire. As they flew on, the crew of the Pacific Clipper encountered heavy cloud-cover. Unable to determine his position, Ford dropped the plane below the clouds to get his bearings – a decision he would immediately regret!

As he broke cloud-cover, Ford got the shock of his life when a Japanese submarine appeared below! The Japanese started manning their deck-guns and began firing at the Pacific Clipper and Ford had to quickly manipulate the controls to bring the aircraft back up into the clouds!

Sustaining no damage from the Japanese attack, the Pacific Clipper finally landed in Ceylon and the crew were welcomed by the local British military garrison, where they were invited to a meeting to give them whatever intelligence they could regarding the current state of the South Pacific.

After the aircraft had been refueled, it took off once more. It was now the 24th of December – Christmas Eve, and Captain Ford was about to get a very nasty Christmas present! They had barely flown more than a handful of miles when an explosion in one of the starboard engines made everybody jump! Peering out the window, Ford and his co-pilot were stunned to see smoke and oil gurgling from the #3 engine! Ford shut the engine down and spun the plane around back to Ceylon!

When they landed, Ford pulled the engine coverings off and discovered that one of the 18 cylinders had ruptured and worked itself loose from its mounting, causing the oil to leak out. Repairing the loosened mounting was not difficult…but it did take a long time, and it was Boxing Day before the plane could take off again.

Deciding to stick with their “British-Empire” strategy, Ford and his crew headed for Karachi, then part of British India (today part of Pakistan), and from there to the Kingdom of Bahrain, at the time, a British protectorate.

So far, so good.

Arriving in Bahrain, the crew once again made contact with the British military authorities stationed there, explained their situation, and their onward plans. Captain Ford was warned to avoid flying over Saudi-Arabia if at all possible, due to the potentially hostile reception he might receive – more than a few British aircraft had been shot down over Arabian airspace, and while the Pacific Clipper had, by this time, been stripped of all its identifying marks to avoid enemy attention, there was still a good chance that an unmarked, un-identifiable aircraft might still be targeted by hostile forces.

The Pacific Clipper in flight

Captain Ford provisioned and refueled his plane, and they took off again. With fuel a precious commodity, Ford wasn’t in any position to take a ‘scenic route’ back to America, and so, ended up flying across Saudi-Arabia anyway! To protect against gunfire, the clipper remained in the clouds for the majority of the leg, only dipping down to check their bearings every few miles. They’d been in the air about 20 minutes when Ford took the plane down to check their progress. The crew got the shock of their lives when they realised that they were flying right across central Mecca! Fortunately, anti-aircraft installations did not exist in Mecca, and the Pacific Clipper flew on, unmolested.

The aircraft’s next stop was Khartoum, the capital of the Sudan. Landing on the famous River Nile, Captain Ford and his crew were greeted by representatives of the British Royal Air Force, who helped them refuel the Pacific Clipper, provision it for the next leg of its epic journey, and wished them godspeed.

Exactly where to go next was a bit of a challenge. Flying to Europe was dangerous at best, unwise at worst. While they could probably head to somewhere like Gibraltar, Ford feared that the clipper’s engines, already taxed to breaking-point, would not survive the heat of the Sahara Desert – a forced landing there would be a death-sentence to everybody! This also meant that places like Casablanca, Spain or Portugal were out of range.

Instead, the crew decided to fly to Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo – it would at least be further west, and would take them one step closer to home.

Landing on the river near Leopoldville, the plane was tied up at a jetty and the crew disembarked for their next rest-stop. Upon their arrival in town, they received the shock of their lives! Two Pan-Am employees – an airport manager, and a radio-operator – greeted them! Relieved to see colleagues again, the crew relaxed, had a meal, exchanged news…and thanks to the two Leopoldville employees – enjoyed something that none of the Pacific Clipper crew had had, probably since leaving Australia – a nice, cold beer!

The crew rested in Leopoldville overnight while they planned the next leg of their journey. They also refueled the aircraft and prepared it for the next day’s flying – in fact, they prepared it so well, that come dawn, the plane was almost too heavy to take off! With tanks full of fuel and oil, cargo and crew, and with the soggy, humid air of the equator all around them, the Pacific Clipper narrowly avoided plunging off the edge of a waterfall as it lurched ungainly into the air once more!

The Atlantic Crossing

The next leg was one of the most dangerous – flying across the Atlantic to South America – a journey that took them nearly all day and night! When they finally landed in Natal on the Brazilian coastline, port authorities insisted that the aircraft – by then looking very battered, worn-out and worse-for-wear, due to it serving as the home for the ten crew-members for the past month – had to be fumigated for mosquitoes, which could carry deadly yellow fever. The crew disembarked the plane and started planning the next part of their journey while a team of fumigators boarded the aircraft and got to work.

And boy, did they ever! When Captain Ford and his colleagues returned, the ‘fumigators’ had robbed them blind! Anything that wasn’t nailed down had been stripped off the aircraft! All their personal papers, most of their charts, maps, travel-documents, company papers, and most of their money had been stolen!…a fact they only discovered once they had already left Brazilian airspace!

Finally back in the Americas and in familiar skies once more, Captain Ford flew towards the Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad & Tobago. This was the first place they’d landed in since leaving New Caledonia a month before, that had actual Pan-Am facilities, and Ford was relieved to be among friendly faces once more. The next leg was the last one – the final flight home to New York!

Captain Ford and his colleagues were so eager to get home that they took off almost immediately. It was now the 5th of January, and New York was just a short jaunt away. They left Trinidad so early that when they arrived in New York, it wasn’t even daylight yet! As a result, when Captain Ford contacted La Guardia Airport Air-Traffic Control with the words: “This is the Pacific Clipper, inbound from Auckland, New Zealand! Overhead in five minutes!”, the air-traffic controller called back that the Pacific Clipper was not allowed to land!…for 50 minutes. Only when the sun rose near 7:00am, did the plane finally touch down in American waters once more!

The incredible journey of the Pacific Clipper

In the end, Captain Ford had made history! And in so many ways! Let’s count them, shall we?

The first-ever round-the-world flight by a commercial airliner.

The longest continuous flight made by a commercial airliner.

The first circumnavigation of the world by following the equator.

The longest nonstop flight in the entire history of Pan-American World Airways: 3,583 miles from Leopoldville to Natal.

In the nearly four weeks it took them to get home, Ford and his crew had visited twelve nations on five continents, and had made eighteen landings! They had also made incredible history!

The Pacific Clipper on its arrival at La Guardia Airport, New York. 6th of January, 1942

Want to read more?

Sources included…

The History Guy YouTube Channel.

The Pan-Am Historical Foundation website.

The Navy Times website.

 

Globetrotting – The Golden Age of Travel (Pt I)

In this posting, we’ll be looking at the birth of the ‘Golden Age of Travel’, and exploring how the changes and innovations made to transport and communications during the 19th century, gave birth to the first great age of travel and tourism. We’ll be looking at what tourism and travel was like when it first became available to ordinary people, how the tourist experience differed between then and now, and what we might have lost and gained during the journey.

The Golden Age of Travel’ is defined as the era from the second half of the 1800s up to the early 1940s, when cheap international travel and the tourist trade really started taking off, thanks to technological and transport advances made during the Industrial Revolution. It was an age of wonder and excitement, and was the first time that ordinary people were able to travel in style, speed, safety, and comfort. It was also the first time when people could travel strictly for pleasure at reasonable prices.

The Second World War, and the subsequent geographical, technological and political changes which it forced, irreversibly changed the tourist landscape, making the difference in the travel-experience between the first and second half of the 20th century almost as different as night and day.

The changes brought about by the War made it impossible to return to the elegance, excitement, wonder and grandeur of the pre-war travel experience – it’s something which exists only as a ghost, which lingers in old photographs, antique luggage, hotel and steamship-tickets and the stamp marks found in fading passports. So what was it really like? What was travel and tourism like before and after the War? How did pre-war travel differ from post-war travel, and how did post-war travel morph into what we know today? In this issue, we’ll find out together, on our very own tour through history!

So stamp your passport and clip your tickets. Strap down your trunks and hold onto your Baedekers. We’re about to take a trip back into history. Our ancestors may not have been jetsetters, but they were globetrotters, who still managed to explore the world in a haze of smoke, steam and gasoline. A flag waves, a whistle blows. It’s time now to depart! All aboard!

Before the Golden Age of Travel

For much of history, travel was slow, boring, painful, expensive and dangerous. People rarely travelled any great distance unless it was absolutely necessary, and almost never for pleasure. It was not uncommon for people to be born, live, and die all within the confines of the communities of their birth, or within a very few miles thereof. Travel meant days and weeks on the road. It meant needing money to pay for bed and board, it meant having to guard yourself against those who would wish you harm in any number of ways. Thieves and robbers on the public roads also meant that you were restricted in your travel, largely to daylight hours when it was easier to protect yourself. This limited your travel-time each day, and made travel even slower. And this if you were poor. If you were rich, travel was slightly easier, but still not without considerable risks.

Even if you had the money to allow for travels, and even if you did travel for pleasure, the journey was still slow, costly and potentially dangerous. Money had to be paid for coachmen, horses, carriages, food and lodgings, and servants. And there was the constant danger of being attacked during your journey. Travelling ‘in style’ told every highwayman along your route that you were rich, and that attacking and robbing you would likely gain a highwayman rich rewards for his efforts. This put you in just as much danger of assault and even death, as someone who had almost no money at all. And the manner of your travel did not change these odds at all.

For most people, travel meant walking. And walking was slow. Walking made you vulnerable. Walking along a country road, or through a town, city or village left you open to all manner of dangers – cutpurses, footpads, pickpockets, muggers, rapists, beggars, robbers and thieves who would all do their level best to relieve you of your worldly possessions. But for most people, this was the only way to travel from A to B – horses were expensive to keep, feed and maintain. And only the wealthy could afford carriages. And even those were not as safe as one might think.

Travelling in the relative speed and comfort of a private carriage or stagecoach did not guarantee you protection. Coaches or carriages which ran regular routes, and even private carriages running along busy Highways, risked being held up. Highwaymen created roadblocks to hold up coaches and force them to stop. Once a carriage was stopped, they could rob its passengers of their valuables and money, and even kill them if they wished. Famous highwaymen made names for themselves, like Dick Turpin, who was a notorious outlaw in Georgian-era England.

Before railroads, one of the fastest ways to move around was by mail-coach, which ran regular overland routes between major cities, delivering mail.

If you wanted protection on long journeys, you had to either bring your own weapons and know how to use them, or else pay for armed coach guards, who protected you with swords and loaded blunderbusses, or later, shotguns. To this day, sitting in the front passenger-seat of a motor-vehicle is still called “riding shotgun” – an allusion to the armed coach guard who would sit next to the driver of a stagecoach, to provide armed protection in the event of a holdup.

For all these reasons and more, for much of history, most people did not travel great distances. And if they did, it was rarely for pleasure, but mostly out of necessity – to escape disease, danger, poverty, a troubled home life, or to find employment or other business related reasons. What were the changes that happened in society and technology that allowed people – ordinary people – to travel for pleasure for the first time in their lives? And what was it like to travel and go on a vacation during this first great age of travel? What allowed this to happen?

The Birth of Mass Transport

Widespread travel for pleasure would not be possible without a corresponding development of means of cost-effective mass transport. Spurred on by the Industrial Revolution, the second half of the 19th century, saw efficient, cheap mass-transport becoming a reality, and for the 19th century, and the first half of the 20th century, efficient, cheap transport was symbolized by two great new inventions of the age: The steam-powered locomotive, and the steam-powered, ocean-going passenger-ship – the ocean liner! Where did these machines come from, and how did they change the world?

Steam Boats & Steam Trains

The two vehicles which would allow for the movement of large numbers of people with ease and economy were both invented in the early 1800s. By the start of the Victorian era, the first passenger ships and locomotives powered entirely by steam were plying trade around the world. Locomotives and steamships both originated in England, and it was this steam-powered transport technology that gave birth to the modern travel industry.

Conflicts during the 19th century such as the Crimean War, the Chinese Opium Wars, the American Civil War, and the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s were the conflicts that laid the groundwork for the expansion and improvement of steam technology. Expansion of railroad networks caused by the need for rapid troop movements now allowed for swift, efficient movement of civilian passengers.

Advances in steamship technology for wartime uses now allowed for faster, safer and more comfortable ocean travel in peacetime. No more was it about sleeping in hammocks on rocky, creaky, cramped sailing ships that relied on the wind and weather. Now you could steam across the Atlantic or the Pacific in a berth, or a cabin of your own, in comfort and style, lulled to sleep by the throbbing of the powerful steam-pistons deep beneath the ship, that turned paddle-wheels, and later, screw-propellers, which drove great vessels across the ocean at speed.

No more was travelling by train a smoky, dusty, sooty experience, full of coughing and gasping for air in uncomfortable, windswept, open-topped carriages; now you could travel on a train with enclosed, corridor carriages with separate day-compartments, or if the journey was an overnight ride, in the relative comfort of a sleeper-car. If you found yourself hungry or thirsty, dining-cars and kitchen-cars provided you with food. If you wanted somewhere to relax, the lounge-car provided you with comfortable seating and bright lights to read, write, smoke, or chat with friends on the journey.

By the late 1800s, travel was safer, faster, cheaper and far more comfortable than lurching around inside a horse-drawn carriage with little suspension. It was also open to a wider range of people. You paid a ticket according to your means. First Class, Second Class, Third Class, or on ocean crossings – Steerage. ‘Steerage Class’ on ocean liners got its name from the fact that third-class passengers were often housed at the back of the ship, and deep in the hull, in the smallest cabins, the closest to the ship’s engines, power generators and steerage mechanisms. First- and Second-Class passengers got cabins on the upper decks, with the bright sea-views, away from the throb and rumble of the engines.

Motorised Transport

Along with steam-powered transport, the rise of cheap, personal and public motor-vehicles in the early 1900s also contributed to the Golden Age of Travel. Vehicles like motorcars, motorcycles and buses freed people from the restrictions of train and streetcar timetables, allowing them to make the best and most use of their free time. Planning trips and holidays around the country or continent became much easier and faster when each person or family had their own vehicle with which to travel in, which was not dependent on such variables as horses, timetables or weather, and which was much faster and more comfortable than previous methods of transport.

Cheap cars for the ordinary middle-class worker such as the Model T and Model A Fords in the United States, the Austin 7 in England, and the Volkswagen ‘Beetle’ in Germany meant that more people could go more places, and weekend drives to explore locations previously impractically far from home could now be accomplished in a few hours. Trips to the country or to other cities and towns were now easy and simple. And a car was easier to maintain and faster to start than a horse and carriage!

The Birth of the Golden Age of Travel

Along with steam-powered transport, the rise of more personal transport also contributed to the birth of the Golden Age of Travel. Starting in 1885, you had the world’s first modern bicycles, and increasingly as the Victorian era came to an end, the rise of the motorcar. Able to take people places that the railroads could not reach, these two inventions further improved people’s ability to travel and explore. This led to an increase and improvement of road networks.

Travelling around the country and going from city to city – road-trips – became popular. Rest stops, motels and diners popped up around the United States. The famous “Route 66” in the United States stretched from Chicago, Illinois all the way to Los Angeles, California, passing through many cities and states on the way, making it a popular road-trip and an easy way to visit many famous cities and towns along your tour of the American interior.

With the infrastructure for safe, speedy, comfortable and cost-effective mass transport now in place, and social changes such as the rise of the five-day working week, it was now possible for people to take time off, and time away from home and work, and to start travelling and go on holiday for the first time in history. The Golden Age of Travel had begun!

The Cunard Line advertising travel to all parts of the world! The ship illustrated in the poster is the RMS Aquitania.

Now, it was easy to travel to such places as the countryside, the beach, the bay, or to take day trips into town to go window shopping, to buy gifts, necessities for the house, or to explore cities and towns far from home. It was possible to live far from the city in a new, quiet suburb and commute into town. Journeys that might once have taken days or weeks could now be done in hours or minutes. The amount of free time available to people was beginning to grow. Holidays became popular, with more people getting time off work. People with time off work and money to spend wanted to go travelling, and the number of exciting destinations to visit was growing, catering to all levels of tourist, as were the ways to get there, and places to stay, once you arrived.

As the 20th century progressed, travel became faster still. With the opening of the Suez (1869) and Panama (1914) Canals, long detours around the horns of Africa and South America were eliminated for all but the largest of ships, slicing days off of voyages to Asia, the Middle East, the Mediterranean and the coastal cities of the United States.

The White Star Line advertising travel to the New World on its two most famous ocean liners, The Olympic and the Titanic, ca. 1911.

To lure people away from their homes to far flung destinations, travel agencies, railroad companies and shipping lines produced vivid, colourful posters advertising luxurious travel to the edges of the world in fast, sumptuously appointed ocean liners and railroad-carriages, fast connecting trains and short crossings; anything to part a potential traveler from his living-room, and the money from his wallet.

Steamships of all sizes now plied the oceans, seas and rivers of the world. No longer was sailing from England to the Continent (Europe) a dangerous, costly endeavor. Now, you could buy a ticket. You could get on a ferry and in steam-powered speed and comfort, take a trip across the English Channel to France. With rail-links around Europe, cities like Paris, Berlin, Rome, Milan, Venice and Pompeii became great tourist attractions which were easily accessible thanks to efficient public transport services from the port cities of France, Denmark, Germany and Italy. People could travel all over Europe, America, and Asia, in speed, comfort and safety for the first time in history. All this was what contributed to the birth of the Golden Age of Travel.

Packing for a New Age

As the 19th century progressed into the 20th century, travel became cheaper still. After the hell of the First World War, the United States of America tightened its once open door policy on immigration. No longer were shiploads of poor European refugees allowed to be dumped on Ellis Island for large-scale processing. The ending of this policy in 1924, and the subsequent introduction of immigration quotas (which allowed only a set number of people from different countries or backgrounds to migrate each year to specific countries) meant that steamship companies, which had once made thousands of pounds and dollars a year in the immigrant trade, suddenly had their main passenger base swept out from under them!

In the new, optimistic age of the “Roaring” 1920s, a solution had to be found! The answer was ‘Tourist Class’. Ships no longer transported human cargo from A to B. They now transported fare-paying passengers, or ‘tourists’ in comfort, from their home ports to destinations far and wide around the world, for a reasonable price. Cheap tickets were snapped up by eager holidaymakers with free time on their hands, and international, ocean going travel began!

Travelling by ocean liner to cities and countries all over the world often meant long sea-voyages! Very long! London to Paris might take half a day by steamer and rail. London to New York might take a week or more. Melbourne to Singapore might take three or four days. But it was for the mammoth, long-haul voyages, such as those from Naples to Shanghai (eight weeks by steamer!) for which a whole new kind of luggage was required!

These days, we have check-in luggage and carry-on luggage, and it’s all weighed and measured and assessed and tagged. You can only have 10kg carry-on and 40kg check-in and if you want more you have to pay for more, and you have to repack, redistribute and reorganize everything over and over again, so that the plane doesn’t crash into the ocean and sometimes you wonder whether going on holiday is even worth it?

Packing for a long voyage during the Golden Age of Travel was just as challenging, although those challenges were of a rather different nature. One benefit of travelling by steamship was that there weren’t really any luggage weight restrictions. So long as it fit in the hold, or in your cabin or suite on board ship, you were fine. But even for short holidays, you often brought mountains of luggage. Remember that you did not go on ‘holiday’ or ‘vacation’, you went on ‘tour’ – hence ‘tourist’.

You expected to be away from home for days and weeks at a time – and that might be just the ocean voyage, before you even reached your destination! And having spent days and weeks at sea, you weren’t going to spend just a couple of weeks at your destination and then sail for days and weeks, all the way back home again! You expected to be away for a long, long time. A month or more, at least! So the kind of luggage that our grandparents and great-grandparents brought with them on their epic journeys was significantly different from what we would pack and carry today. So, exactly what kind of luggage would you expect to bring on a long ocean voyage?

The Steamer Trunk

The mainstay of luggage for most of the 20th century, and indeed, for most of history, was the trunk – large, wooden boxes into which everything you might require for a long voyage was packed. Considering that an ocean voyage to any destination could take anywhere from a few days to a few months, such large personal storage space was deemed necessary to fit in all the clothing, accessories and other related travel paraphernalia that might be required for a long time spent at sea.

Antique steamer trunk, complete with brass hardware and locks

Trunks were designed to be tough. They had to withstand being hoisted by cranes, roped up in nets, and being stacked up, lashed down, and rocked around at sea. They had to put up with rough train rides, carriage journeys, motor trips, being dragged around and shunted from place to place by porters, bellhops and stewards. To protect against damage, they were reinforced with wooden ribs and braces. This was to prevent cracking and warping from the weight of extra luggage stacked on top.

Rivets and studs were hammered into corners and joints to strengthen them. Exposed wooden parts of trunks were varnished to prevent wood-rot, or were lined on their exteriors with leather or canvas to provide a weatherproof finish. Corners were again reinforced with brass plates which were again, riveted on, to prevent damage from abrasion and rough handling. Catches, locks and clasps were made of brass. This made the trunks all pretty and attractive, but it also came with an added bonus – unlike steel, brass does not rust, so provided further protection against the moisture and corrosion of seawater.

The Suitcase

These days, most people pack their clothes and belongings into roll-on cabin-baggage when they go travelling. The days of the actual ‘suitcase’ are steadily disappearing. But there was a time when people who went on holiday carried suitcases, and these cases actually contained the suits which provided them with their names.

A typical suitcase of the Golden Age of Travel, from the late 1800s through the early 20th century was made of leather or canvas. It came with two lockable clasps to hold it shut, and depending on the style, may or may not have come with additional leather belts that were strapped over the suitcase. These belts provided a failsafe mechanism if the clasps were broken, but the belts (which wrapped around the entire suitcase) could also be removed from the belt loops around the suitcase and linked together. They could then be used to strap the suitcase on top of other suitcases or luggage, to keep them together, or to secure them to the roof or luggage-rack of a motorcar or horse-carriage during transport, if other storage space was not available.

The Gladstone Bag

Sturdy, of large capacity, secure and easy to carry, Gladstone bags were the backpacks of their day. Everyone who travelled anywhere on a regular basis was likely to have at least one of these, and like backpacks, the humble Gladstone was used to carry as wide a range of items as you could possibly imagine.

The Gladstone was invented by a London bag-maker in the 1800s and named after globetrotting British prime-minister William Ewart Gladstone. It was immediately popular because of its large capacity, and secure, gate-mouth opening. Reinforced with a metal frame, the bag could be opened, and remain open while it was packed. This made it ideal as an overnight-bag into which anything could be packed with haste.

Vintage leather gladstone bag

Once packed, the bag was closed, locked, and then simply carried away. No consideration had to be given to how the bag’s contents might shift upon movement, since it did not have to be tipped onto its side to grasp the handle, unlike a suitcase.

This was likely the reason why this style of bag was so popular with physicians, who commonly carried sharp, dangerous and breakable objects in their medical-kits, which were likely to be broken if they shifted unexpectedly inside a backpack or other type of luggage. The gate-mouth opening also meant that a doctor’s hands were free to dive in and out of the bag to retrieve whatever instruments and medicines might be required in an emergency, without having to constantly pull the bag open over and over again.

The Portmanteau

‘Portmanteau’ is a French loanword for a type of luggage which has all but disappeared from travel in the 21st century. You never see these things anymore unless they’re in museums or in period movies and TV-shows.

A Louis Vuitton portmanteau, or wardrobe trunk

Literally meaning “Coat-Carrier” (‘porte’ as in ‘portable’, and ‘manteau’ meaning ‘coat’), or also called a ‘wardrobe trunk’, this style of trunk was used for carrying your more expensive clothes – your best dresses, favourite suits, your dinner suit or your white tie and tails. It was stood on one end, and then opened up, looking for all intents and purposes, like a portable closet, complete with hanger-rack and separate drawers and compartments for shoes, shirts, trousers, socks, underwear and space for coats, trousers and jackets so that they wouldn’t get crushed during long journeys.

Portable Word-Processing – Vintage Style

Then, just as now, our globetrotting forebears often wished to keep some sort of record of their travels, or wished to inform others of their travels. Or had a need to communicate and write to others during their travels.

If we had to do this today, we’d bring along an iPad or a laptop computer and seek out the nearest establishment boasting free WIFI. And in their own way, our grandparents and great-grandparents had their own methods for keeping in touch and connected with others.

The Writing Slope

The reservoir pen which could be carried around in your pocket, and used anytime, anyplace, anywhere, at a second’s notice, is a relatively recent invention. If you went travelling any time before 1900 and you needed to write while away from your desk, chances are that you probably had one of these things packed in amongst your trunks, boxes and cases:

Antique writing-slope manufactured by Toulmin & Gale of London, ca. 1863

Writing-slopes were the laptop computers of their day. They carried everything that you required for on-the-move communications: Ink, pens, paper, stamps, sealing-wax, seals, spare nibs, matches, envelopes, pencils, paper-knife, eraser, paper-folder, and storage for money, letters, important documents and valuables. The writing box or writing-slope shown here is typical of the more expensive, up-market writing-slopes of the 1800s. It comes complete with desk accessories in elephant-tusk ivory, inset matchbox and inkwell, and an automatic deadlock security system (and the original key!).

Half-closing the writing-box exposes three, flat ivory panels, or an ‘Aide Memoir’. Here, simple notes and reminders could be scrawled on the ivory slates in graphite pencil. They could be erased using a moist cloth, and the ivory could be reused.

Writing boxes were common travelling companions of the educated globetrotter or travelling businessman of the 19th century. They died out at the turn of the century when they were replaced by fountain pens, and by yet another common piece of luggage which might be brought with you on a long voyage during the early 20th century.

The Portable Typewriter

Invented in the 1870s, early typewriters were bulky, heavy things. Weighing up to 15-20kg (about 30lbs+), they were impractical as portable writing machines. As travel increased towards the end of the 19th century, and as typewriters became better designed and more commonplace, a market was realized: Portable typewriters would surely prove popular with the travelling public, if only such a machine could be produced!

The first portable, laptop typewriters came out in the first decade of the 1900s, but their golden age started in the 1920s. Portable typewriters were manufactured by Remington, Royal, Underwood, Corona and countless other typewriter companies. They were snapped up by reporters, authors, journalists, travel writers and businessmen who often had to travel as part of their jobs, and needed to be able to correspond swiftly and neatly while on the road.

This Underwood Standard Portable from the second half of the 1920s was typical of the portable typewriters carried around the world by tourists and writers during the Golden Age of Travel. Newspaper reports, story drafts, letters home, business reports and magazine articles were all typed up on machines like this and sent home across the seas by untold thousands of writers, eager tourists, journalists and businessmen during the early 20th century.

Oddments and Accessories

Along with large pieces of luggage like suitcases, Gladstone bags, trunks and portmanteaus, our globetrotting predecessors also brought with them all manner of smaller boxes, bags and cases for holding almost everything you could imagine. Shoeshine kits, collar-boxes, handbags, hatboxes, stud-and-link boxes, and toiletry cases carrying everything from straight-razors to talcum-powder.

Such large amounts of such small luggage were often packed inside trunks and suitcases, to separate and organize one’s belongings on long trips, but also to keep the items most commonly used closer to hand. Until the 1930s, men’s shirts came in general ‘one-size fits all’ style with longer sleeves, and without attached collars and cuffs (called ‘tunic shirts’). The separate collars and cuffs were stored in collar-boxes. The studs and links to attach these to the shirts were stored in jewellery cases.

As it would be impossible to store all of one’s belongings into a ship’s cabin or berth, or on a railroad-carriage, only the trunks and cases carrying the most essential items were stored close-at-hand. Clothes and other belongings that would not be required until the ship or train reached its destination would be stored in the hold, or in the luggage vans coupled to the backs of trains.

Classic Luggage Stickers

Hotel chains as we know them today did not exist in the early 20th century. Every hotel in town was owned and operated separately, and competition between them was fierce. Every hotel had to be grand, classy, have a catchy and elegant sounding name, and have everything that the guest might desire. Hotels that wanted to stand out had everything custom made. Everything from the stationery, silverware, glassware, china and towels were emblazoned with the hotel’s monogram or logo. And of course, every hotel had to have its own distinct and immediately recognizable set of stylish and colourful luggage-stickers.

Luggage stickers were once like tattoos – unique, colourful, and evidence of a varied and well-travelled past. Just like how sailors who went to sea came back festooned with ink, a steamer-trunk, set of suitcases or a well-travelled Gladstone bag often returned home plastered from lid to base in stickers. Stickers came from almost anywhere and everywhere: from train stations, stickers from shipping companies, and stickers from hotels.

Stickers contained information such as the name of a trunk’s owner, his room number, the train which he had taken, or the name of the ship he had boarded. And if he had boarded a ship, then the sticker might also have his deck and cabin number. If he was on a long train journey and his luggage was stored in the goods-van at the back of the train, his trunk sticker might have his carriage or compartment number.

Today, luggage-stickers are just ugly, black-and-white barcoded, print-out, rip-off, stick-on-and-done affairs. As soon as you arrive at your destination, it’s immediately your mission to remove these stickers as soon as possible, lest their blandness offend the eyes and sensibilities of the delicate. On the other hand, vintage luggage stickers were works of art. They often had bold letters in artistic fonts and colours which spelt out the hotel name, the ship name, the city or port where the sticker was plastered on, and came with decorative pictures or photographs as part of the design. They were like miniature travel posters in their own right and passengers often kept the stickers on their luggage as proof of their travels, and as proof of the extent of their travel. And also because it gave their luggage ‘character’, with the various stickers creating a rainbow patchwork of paper on the bland leather surfaces of their cases and trunks. 

Hotels During the Golden Age of Travel

The rise in the frequency of travel from the late 1800s to the start of the Second World War saw a corresponding rise in the number of hotels. A number of the world’s most famous hotels trace their roots back to this first great age of tourism. In the United States, the Stanley Hotel (1909) was opened by Freelan O. Stanley, co-owner of the famous Stanley Motor Carriage Co., which produced the well-known Stanley steam-powered automobiles of the 1900s-1920s. Notoriously haunted, it gave Stephen King the inspiration for one of his most famous horror novels: “The Shining”. Its guests included Titanic survivor Margaret Brown, musician J.P. Sousa, and President Theodore Roosevelt.

Raffles Hotel. 1, Beach Road, Singapore (opened 1887)

In New York City, the famous Plaza Hotel was opened in 1907. In London, the Langham and Grosvenor Hotels were opened in 1865 and 1862 respectively. The Ritz (1907) and the Savoy (1889) in London remain two of the most famous hotels in the world. In Singapore, Raffles Hotel opened in 1887. But as grand and famous as all these structures are, they all owe a debt to one hotel which has sadly faded into history, no longer operating, and which has been overshadowed by the fame of all the other hotels that have come after it.

The Plaza Hotel, New York City (opened 1907)

The Tremont Hotel, in Boston (closed 1895), one of several hotels named Tremont House or Tremont Hotel scattered around the United States (there were five in total) was the first hotel in the world as we would know them today, which offered amenities like lockable bedroom doors, indoor plumbing, indoor heated baths, indoor toilets, a proper reception area, and bellhops to carry the mountains of luggage mentioned earlier on. Opened in 1829, it predated many of the most famous hotels in the world which still operate, and paved the way for standards in hotel amenities and services which we take for granted today.

As the numbers of hotel guests started to climb as more people found more time and more spare cash with which to travel, hotels started competing with each other. To lure in more customers, they came up with more and newer amenities, better service and furnishings, and all kinds of features and extras which today are considered standards across the hotel industry. In some respects, the service was also much better than what we might be used to today.

These days, we arrive at the hotel and check in. Then, we’re given our key-cards and told our room numbers and left to it, and that’s basically it. In older times, when hotel competition was fierce, this level of ‘service’ was not always acceptable. Back when even a short journey meant bringing a small cartload of luggage with you, the front-desk clerk would ring the counter-bell (similar to the one shown above) to summon a youth who would take your room key and some or all of your luggage, which he either carried upstairs, or loaded onto a hotel luggage-trolley and took upstairs in an elevator. This boy (they were traditionally young men) got his name from the very bell used to summon him – ‘Bellhop’. Once at your room, he unlocked the door for you, helped you carry in your luggage, handed you your key and then left you to your thoughts.

A luxury hotel of the era would’ve come with such amenities as a lobby, hotel restaurants, lounges, bars, and even a ballroom, where a house orchestra or jazz-band would provide music which you could dance to, if you wished. Hotels which had their own house-bands included the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, the Savoy Hotel in London, the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York, and Raffles Hotel in Singapore. Big names like Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman would often broadcast live from the Pennsylvania Hotel at set times each evening, for hotel guests to dance to, and for people at home to listen to via radio.

Popular Tourist Destinations

During the Golden Age of Travel, from the late 1800s through to the mid-20th century, a number of countries became popular, famous, and even infamous destinations for the well-heeled globetrotter of yesteryear. Countries like Canada, the United States, Cuba, Mexico, Germany, Italy, Egypt, Spain, France, Scotland, Ireland, England, Australia, India, the British Straits Settlements, Hong Kong, Japan and China were all popular tourist spots. If you had the time and money, you might take a whole year off, and visit all of them, going on a world tour.

Among the most popular travel destinations were those considered ‘exotic’, such as Egypt, the Middle East, India, the Dutch East Indies, the Straits Settlements, Japan, and one of the most famous of all: The International Settlement of Shanghai.

The Shanghai International Settlement

Shanghai, China’s most famous port city was a free port from 1843-1943, one of several treaty-ports opened and developed by the British after the Opium War of 1839. Anyone could go there and free trade was encouraged, much like Singapore during the same era. Shanghai in the first half of the 20th century, free from the ravages of war in Europe, flourished. It was not only famous, it was notorious.

Tales abounded of gambling, prostitution, drug-trafficking (mostly opium), giddy nightclubs with raucous jazz music, high living, department stores, the Shanghai racetrack, grand ballrooms and luxurious hotels. But Shanghai, for all its glitz and glamour, pulsing nightlife and sheen of neon, also held a seedy underbelly reeking of gangland violence and crime. The police fought riots, stabbings, shootings, kidnappings, rape and an endless battle against the fierce underground opium trade. Shanghai was the original Sin City.

Who wants to go to Shanghai?

Visiting Shanghai in the early 20th century was like visiting Las Vegas today. Its lurid reputation more than anything else, was its biggest draw card. And for the right price, any and all kinds of thrills could be had, if you knew where to look, and who to contact in the crime-infested underworld of the International Settlement.

The Bund of the International Settlement of Shanghai, 1926

One of the first views of Shanghai that you got was The Bund. The Bund, or raised embankment, was the main riverfront thoroughfare of pre-war Shanghai, then called the Shanghai International Settlement. Stretched out along the entire length of the Bund were banking houses, shipping offices, grand hotels, newspaper headquarters, upscale clubs, the Shanghai Customs House, and foreign consulates.

As your ship sailed up the Huangpu River and away from the Yangtze, this was your first view of the city – all its grandeur out on display like some gaudy jewellery-shop window display. The Bund ran the entire width of the British and French Concessions of Shanghai, from Suzhou Creek, and down the west bank of the Huangpu River. And the ships docked right there on the riverside. The moment you got off, you were plunged right into the heart of Old Shanghai. You had your choice of the two best hotels in town: The Palace Hotel, and the Cathay Hotel (which remain there still, along with all the other buildings, which are heritage protected, although the hotels have since been renamed).

The Palace Hotel (left), and the Cathay Hotel (right). Today, they are called the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, and the Fairmont Peace Hotel. In the old days, the Cathay Hotel was also called Sassoon House. Shanghai’s premier retail street, Nanking Road, runs between them.

Shanghai was so popular that in the United States, some young men joined the United States Marine Corps (USMC) hoping to be posted to the 4th Marine Regiment, also called the ‘China Marines’, because they were based in Shanghai, a city of exotic and oriental wonder! Due to the city’s cheap labour and high standards of living, even humble soldiers lived in relative luxury while deployed to Shanghai. Here, their main tasks were protecting the boundaries of the city and the American Concession, and enforcing the laws of the International Settlement, although this second duty was also carried out by the multi-ethnic Shanghai Municipal Police, whose job it was to enforce law and order within the Settlement.

The SMP was originally largely British, but also included Chinese, Indian, French, and American officers as well. In 1917, famous American songwriter, Irving Berlin, wrote a now, almost-forgotten song called ‘From Here to Shanghai’, which spoke of the singer’s longing to experience something more exotic than just a trip to ‘dreamy Chinatown’. 1922 saw the publication of ‘Goodbye, Shanghai’, and in 1924, one of the most famous jazz standards of the day, ‘Shanghai Shuffle’ was published, showing how popular this destination was among travelling Europeans and Americans.

Travelling to Shanghai from Europe, or even America, took several weeks. Most ships did not sail to most of their destinations directly. Even the largest ocean liners didn’t do that. There was far more money to be made by making regular stop-offs along the way, which at any rate, were necessary to re-coal the ship, drop off mail and passengers, pick up more mail and more passengers, restock the ship for the next leg of its voyage, and then carry on. A ship sailing from England to China might stop at Cherbourg, Casablanca, Marseille, Naples, Port Sa’id, Bombay, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Tokyo before finally dropping anchor at its final destination: Shanghai. You can see now, why such a trip would take up to two months to complete! 

The Shanghai International Settlement went by many names. ‘The Paris of the East’, and ‘The Whore of the Orient’ were two of the most common, reflecting both its ritzy, exotic nature, and its Devil-May-Care way of life.

The Peking Legation Quarter

For tourists wanting to visit the old capital of China (it was moved to Nanking in 1927), you either caught a train from Shanghai to Tientsin, and then to Peking, or else sailed to Tientsin directly and caught a train from there. And while in Peking, you stayed at the famous Peking Legation Quarter, at the Grand Hotel de Pekin, or the Grand Hotel Des Wagons Lits. The Legation Quarter, like the International Settlement to the south, was the Western expatriate enclave within a larger, Chinese city.

After the famous Siege of the Legations in 1900, the entire compound was surrounded by walls and gates to protect it against possible future uprisings, making it look like a walled city. The Grand Hotel Des Wagons Lits was operated by the same company which ran the famous Orient Express, the Compagnie Internationale Des Wagons Lits (“International Sleeping-Car Company”). In Peking, just like in modern Beijing, chief tourist destinations were the Great Wall, and the Forbidden City. After the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, the Forbidden City was opened to the public as the Palace Museum in 1925, a position it has held ever since.

Singapore: The Crossroads of the East

Another popular tourist stop was Singapore. Called ‘The Crossroads of the East’, Singapore was ideally situated for a quick stopover on your inspection of the South Pacific. A British colony since the 1810s, Singapore was widely considered to be one of the nicest, grandest, most exotic, and safest places in the world to have a holiday. After all, it had one of the finest military airbases in Asia, as well as some of the best coastal fortifications. For this reason, it was also proudly touted as the ‘Gibraltar of the East’, as well.

The place to stay at while in Singapore was of course, Raffles Hotel. Opened in 1887, Raffles has housed all manner of celebrities, from Noel Coward to Rudyard Kipling and even British royalty. Raffles’ main slogan in the early 20th century came from a review given by Kipling in 1887, months after the hotel opened. Glowing with praise, Kipling had said: “When in Singapore, feed at Raffles!” – however, Raffles was careful not to publicise the rest of his review, which continued: “…and sleep at the Hotel De L’Europe!” – The Hotel De L’Europe was Raffles’ main competition in Singapore at the time! Unlike the Hotel De L’Europe, however, Raffles survived the Great Depression. The De L’Europe, by comparison, closed its doors in the mid-1930s due to falling guest numbers.

As a free port and main stopover for ships plying the passenger trade from Europe to Asia, Singapore boasted excellent shopping. A visit to Orchard Road was almost mandatory, to seek out the latest oriental wonders brought to the colony by ships sailing back from China and Japan.

Berlin: Cultural Center of Europe

Despite the scourge of the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, during the late 1800s and early part of the 20th century, the city of Berlin, Germany, was a popular tourist-spot for the well-to-do. Renowned as a center of culture, art, music and politics, Berlin attracted writers, journalists, politicians and famous actors.

Hotels like the Adlon became famous as haunts for foreign newspaper-reporters and visiting VIPs. As the Hotel Adlon in particular was (and still is) located in the governmental and diplomatic quarter of Berlin, it was the ideal place to stay for journalists wishing to cover German politics. Foreign embassies and the Reichstag were all nearby. Even today, the Russian and British embassies in Berlin are located just a few blocks from this famous hotel, which was rebuilt in the 1990s on its original location.

Before the scourge of Nazism in the mid-1930s, Berlin was famous for its café culture, its jazz-music and its contributions to film and theatre. European cabaret flourished in Germany during this period and developed its own unique, raunchy humor in the nightclubs and taverns of Berlin. The center of commercial and social life in Berlin was Potsdamer Platz, one of the city’s main squares. Originally formed by the intersection of five different roads, this large, open space was an ideal hub in the center town from which almost anything could be reached. Grand hotels were built nearby, the Potsdamer Platz railroad station was built near this location, and in 1897, the Wetheim department-store was opened near the square. By the 1920s, it was the largest department-store in Europe.

The Nazi rise to power spelt the end to almost all of this. Many of the actors and musicians were at least partially Jewish, and they fled Germany in droves to escape persecution. Many of the actors in the famous 1942 film “Casablanca” were German, Austrian or Czech Jewish refugees which had been actors in their home-countries. They fled to America during the 1930s and reestablished themselves in Hollywood, when it became clear that they could no-longer act in Nazi-controlled countries. German cabaret, which had a strong focus on political and social satire, was all but abolished by the Nazis.

Baedeker Guide Books

Any eager tourist heading off to far-flung destinations today might consult TripAdvisor, or read up on their Lonely Planet guidebooks. If you went anywhere during the Golden Age of Travel, most likely, you stopped off at your local bookshop or travel agency, and asked to be shown their current stock of ‘Baedekers’.

‘Baedeker’ was a German publishing house established in 1827. Throughout much of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, the Baedeker family became famous for printing guidebooks. Published in German and English, ‘Baedekers’ covered everything from countries around the world, to counties or states within countries, to cities and towns within states, and could be remarkably detailed. From the mid-1850s, Baedeker guides, which were regularly updated, covered countries all around the world. They started being printed in English in 1861, when company founder, Karl Baedeker, realized that for their firm to be successful, they had to appeal to as many languages as possible.

Countries which had Baedeker guidebooks written about them included: Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, France, Palestine, Syria, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Mexico, Canada and the United States! And that’s just from 1861-1900! Other countries that were included in editions printed in the 20th century included Spain, Portugal, Austria-Hungary, and Russia. Cities which earned their own guidebooks were numerous, and extended from London, to Paris to Peking, in China!

Stop and consider for a minute what a challenge it would’ve been to amass such a stockpile of information in an age before the internet. Imagine having to write guidebooks on cities and countries thousands of miles away, and having to rely on steam-post and electric telegraph for communications. Imagine the effort and time it took to send people thousands of miles away to far-off countries to research and gather this information. Far-off countries? In 1914, Baedeker published its first guidebook (in German) on the South Pacific, covering the British Straits Settlements (Malaya, Singapore) and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). A journey from Germany to Singapore took over a month by steamship!

An Ongoing Journey

The number of things that a person could say and write about this exciting and romanticised element and era of history are almost endless. I’ll be making another posting soon, about the three most famous vehicles of the Golden Age of Travel – the Hindenburg Airship, the Queen Mary, and the Orient Express!

 

“Tickets, Please!” – A History of Trams, Trolleys and Streetcars.

I’m lucky enough to live in a city with one of the largest, and oldest tram networks in the world. For over 130 years, virtually every type of tram or streetcar that has ever been invented has, at one point or another, rattled, rumbled and clattered along the streets of Melbourne, the capital city of the state of Victoria, in Australia.

So, living in such a place as this, it seemed only logical that I should write a posting about the history of trams, or streetcars as they’re known Stateside. I’ll be using both terms interchangeably (along with others) throughout the posting. Anyway, let’s begin…

Horse-Drawn Trams

Apart from horse-drawn taxi-cabs (or ‘hackney-coaches’ as they were sometimes called), the tram or streetcar is the oldest form of urban public transport in the world, and certainly the oldest form of mass transit in the world. But why did they come to be in the first place? Why on earth would you have something that rides on rails? Surely it’s just cheaper to have something that rides along the road-surface instead, just like everything else, right?

Commencing operations in 1807, the Swansea & Mumbles Railway, as it was called, was the first horse-tram line in the entire world.

Well, running wheels on tracks or rails had one big advantage over running wheels over the road – tracks, made of wrought iron or steel, were smooth and flat. This meant that there was less friction. Less friction meant a smoother, easier ride – particularly important, when you consider that early trams were pulled by horses! The bumpy, rough, friction-inducing nightmare of dragging a carriage through the streets was much harder than simply gliding along smooth rails of steel and iron. Making the trams easier to pull meant that the horses which pulled them could go faster, further and more frequently, and could pull heavier loads with more comfort, important if they were going up or down hills all day!

Mule-tram in Houston, Texas, 1870. Even before the end of the century, small, inefficient horse-trams like this were already starting to be seen as old-fashioned.

These first, horse-drawn trams operated as early as the 1800s, but it wasn’t until the 1850s that permanent horse-tram lines and networks started being established in England, Europe, and the United States. Although moderately effective, horse trams came with a variety of issues that made them undesirable.

First, they couldn’t go appreciably faster than a horse and carriage. Secondly, they were limited largely to flat, or gentle sloping areas. Thirdly, horses could be injured on the job. They also required rest, food and water, medical attention and specialist equipment to do their jobs. And horses had to be replaced regularly if they got tired or ill.

While horse-trams could pull heavier loads with greater ease while the trams remained on the tracks, the simple fact was that eventually, there would be a load that would be too heavy for the horse to pull – especially uphill. This was dangerous if the horse suddenly lost its grip and the tram went sliding back down the hill instead of up it! By the 1870s and 1880s, more effective methods of urban mass-transit were being explored that were safer, faster, smoother and cleaner.

Cable-Hauled Streetcars

The next major advancement in tram technology was the development of the cable-hauled streetcar. The system was surprisingly advanced for the day, but also relatively simple to operate, even though it required a fair bit of infrastructure in order for it to work.

Using huge steam-engines, large driving-wheels pulled enormous steel cables through a trench or ‘slot’ between the two guiding-rails along a streetcar’s route. The trams themselves had no motive force. To move, a steel clamp fed down into the slot gripped around the cable as it slid past.

Once firmly clamped onto the cable, the grip allowed the streetcar to be pulled along the tracks at the speed of the cable, which was dictated by the speed of the driving-wheels and pulleys in the powerhouse at the end of the streetcar line. Wheels and pulleys set into the tracks also helped guide the streetcar up and down hills, and around corners.

Experiments in cable-hauled transport date back to the 1820s, but many early attempts failed miserably, and were eventually replaced by steam-powered locomotives. It wasn’t until the early 1870s that the technology was truly viable.

The first really successful cable-streetcar was established in the suitably hilly city of San Francisco, a city where then-conventional horse-trams couldn’t possibly hope to operate. After witnessing a horrible horse-tram accident while living in the city by the bay, it is said that English-born inventor Andrew Hallidie decided to use his expertise in manufacturing ‘wire rope’ (what today we’d call ‘steel cables’) to see whether he could design a really effective, and safer cable-hauled streetcar system.

That system, the first, last, and today, only original cable-streetcar network still functioning in the world in modern times, was opened in San Francisco in 1873. Between 1873 and 1900, several miles of track were laid out across San Francisco.

The city’s neat, grid-layout of streets made the laying of streetcar lines easy and by the turn of the century, it had one of the most extensive cable-streetcar networks in the world. Strategically-placed powerhouses operated the massive wheels required to pull the cables between the tracks and one powerhouse could, if properly sited, power the cables for two or three different lines all at once.

Operating a Cable-Streetcar

Cable-hauled streetcars were the most technologically advanced form of public transport yet devised. The system operated by having a steel cable running through a trench (‘slot’) in the road between the two running tracks of the streetcar line. The cable moved at a constant rate of speed and at a certain tension. The streetcars themselves had no engines or motors. They moved by sliding a clamp (‘the grip’) through the slot in the road. The grip-jaws locked around the cable by mechanical force, and this grip held onto the cable and the car was pulled along the street as the cable moved through the slot.

Cable-streetcars typically had two or three brakes – a standard track-brake (blocks of wood which clamped down on the track to create friction and stop the car) and wheel-brakes, operated by the crew using wheels and cranks.

A cable-streetcar typically had two crew-members: The driver or ‘gripman’, and the conductor.

The gripman operated the heavy grip-levers used to ‘pick up’ (grasp) or ‘throw’ (drop) the cable. As this was done entirely by brute force and mechanical movement, you needed considerable strength to pull the levers back and forth to operate the heavy steel jaws that clamped onto the cable running beneath the car. The gripman also kept his eyes on the road ahead, and above him in the gripman’s dummy-car, was a rope and handle for ringing the main bell at the front of the streetcar to announce stopping, staring, and to clear the road ahead.

Knowing when to ‘throw’ and ‘pick up’ the cable was vital – usually, this was done when the streetcar was entering or exiting the car-barn at the start or end of a shift, or else when it was crossing intersections with tracks from other streetcar lines running perpendicular. If you didn’t drop the cable at the right time, then the grip-jaws would snag against the cable of the streetcar tracks running the other way across the intersection. It was a job that required a fair bit of concentration, and a lot of brute strength!

A cable-hauled streetcar in Melbourne, around 1890. The grip-car at the front is the dummy, the enclosed carriage behind is the trailer. The grip-mechanism is housed between the two benches in the dummy-car and are operated by the gripman (behind the bench, wearing the peaked cap).

While the gripman operated the actual movement and control of the streetcar, his second-in-command, the conductor, did everything else. Conductors were in charge of helping passengers on and off the cable-tram, of issuing tickets and collecting fares, operating the emergency brake (usually located at the back of the tram) in the event of an emergency, and of communicating instructions to the gripman.

To communicate orders to the gripman, the conductor used the smaller communications bell mounted to the underside the dummy-car’s roof. A cable ran around the inside of the streetcar, through guide-rings bolted to the ceiling. Pulling the cord and ringing the bell once, was the signal to stop. Ringing the bell twice was the signal to proceed. Ringing it three or more times was the signal that the streetcar needed to make an emergency stop. This bell was either operated by the conductor, wishing to communicate with the gripman, or by the passengers themselves, wanting to board or alight the streetcar at various stops along the way.

The Spread of the Cable-Hauled Streetcar

Although costly to install, cable-hauled streetcars were popular around the world because of their relative ease of operation, and ability to operate under conditions that older, horse-drawn streetcars could not. They could move faster, smoother, were more controllable, they could climb hills and descend slopes with greater speed and safety, and they did not require the streetcar companies to maintain a whole heap of horses.

Because of all these benefits, cable-hauled streetcar systems spread all over the globe. At one time they could be found in San Francisco (where they originated), but also New York, Melbourne, Chicago, Cincinnati, Denver, Philadelphia, St. Louis, London, Birmingham, Wellington…as you can see, their use was quite extensive!

Extensive, popular, but also, relatively short-lived. Just as cable-hauled trams were becoming the norm (around the turn of the last century), new methods of streetcar propulsion started becoming popular. In Europe, experiments in gasoline-fired trams, steam trams, and electric trams were underway. As early as the 1890s, some cities were already creating (or converting) streetcar-lines that operated on electrical power.

Despite this, cable-hauled streetcars remained in use for a considerable length of time. The expense of changing over to electricity, the high price of early automobiles, warfare, the Great Depression, and other stalling factors kept them going. However, by the early 1900s, most were on the way out, and after the Second World War, only a handful of cities still had them (Melbourne’s cable-tram network was finally shut down in 1940, for example).

Electric Streetcars

By the 1890s, cable-hauled streetcars were already becoming obsolete, being replaced by much faster, smoother-operating electrically powered models. Although they weren’t any quieter than cable-cars, electrically-powered models could do away with things like centrally-positioned cable-slots, guide-wheels, powerhouses and heavy engines to drive the machinery needed to operate a vast cable-hauled streetcar network. Electric trams could have lights, hydraulic brakes and doors, and they didn’t need so much physical strength to operate them.

The oldest electrically-powered tram in Melbourne is the Hawthorn Tramway Trust’s No. 8, from about 1910, shown here in the early 2000s. When not out and about, it resides at the Melbourne Tram Museum in Hawthorn.

With the aid of a trolley-pole (which today has been replaced by the more reliable pantograph), electrical power was delivered from overhead wires to the streetcar. The electrical power operated the little motor and ran through the circuitry inside the body of the streetcar to move it forwards or backwards, and to power the lights. Moving the streetcar was then simply a matter of increasing or decreasing the amount of power sent to the wheels beneath the chassis, which controlled the speed.

Since electrical streetcars did not have to rely on a cable to pull them through the streets, they could be made much larger and could carry far more passengers. Various configurations of electric trams were developed in the late 1800s and early 1900s, to try and fit as many passengers on in as many ways as possible. Open and closed compartments, and seats and doors in different configurations were all trialed and tested to find designs that would work.

The Decline of the Streetcar

Trams or streetcars remained popular in countless dozens of cities all over the world for the better part of fifty or sixty years. From Canada to Britain, America to Europe, China to Australia and New Zealand, all kinds of trams, trolleys and streetcars of all varieties, were being used from the period spanning roughly 1850 – 1960. And then suddenly – most of them just…disappeared! Cities that once boasted extensive networks saw them vanish in the space of a few years, or even months!

Why?

In the postwar “Long Boom” of the 50s and 60s, trams were seen as old-fashioned. They were heavy, loud, they took up road-space, they were rattly and could only travel along fixed routes. They were seen as a relic of the Victorian era, when people didn’t have cars, and therefore needed trams to get around.

But now people had cars! So why on earth would they still need trams? And if they need trams, why not replace them with buses? So much more flexible!

It was thinking like this which caused many cities to rip up the vast majority of, or in some cases, even all, their tram-tracks and replace them with dedicated bus-lanes. Melbourne in Australia, my home town, was one of the very, very few cities which retained its network when all over the world, from Los Angeles to Shanghai, Cincinnati to New York, cities were disposing of the tracks, the sheds, the rolling-stock…everything! In the whole world, Melbourne, Hong Kong, San Francisco, and a handful of other cities, were the only major population-centers to cling onto them. And of all those, only Melbourne really bothered to expand on their networks and keep it going as a viable means of public transport.

Buses Replace Trams

Starting in the 1940s, buses started replacing trams in big cities, and this trend only increased in the 1950s and 60s as more and more cities started removing streetcar lines from their streets. In most developed countries, most people could now afford cars, and the freedom to go where-ever they wanted, because of them. This meant that there was less need for public transport, and therefore a decrease in interest in trams. But replacing them with buses meant that there was only another set of wheels on the road which was loud, heavy, polluting and which couldn’t move any faster than the traffic itself.

On top of that, buses needed to stop regularly for everything else that a car needed to – oil-changes, refueling, replacing tires, fixing punctures, engine-repairs…these all cost money, but it also means that buses didn’t last as long as trams did.

A Streetcar-named Desire!

In the early 21st century, trams, trolleys and streetcars – whatever you wish to call them – have been seeing a huge resurgence in popularity around the world. In cities where such networks already exist, news tracks are being laid. In cities where streetcars didn’t exist, routes are being opened. In cities where streetcars once rolled, old stock is being pulled out of retirement and being put back into service.

Since 2000, at least a dozen cities in the United States have started experimenting with streetcar networks, including Portland in Oregon (which has one of the largest modern streetcar networks in the USA), Cincinnati in Ohio, and London in England.

An original New Orleans vintage streetcar, still in operation today.

Along with Melbourne and Hong Kong, other cities which never shut down their streetcar lines include New Orleans in Louisiana, Toronto in Canada, Vienna in Austria, and San Francisco in California, which still maintains a total of five routes (three cable-routes, and two heritage streetcar routes running vintage streetcars imported from around the world).


One of Melbourne’s vintage, W-class trams, which were popular in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s. When I was a kid, you could still find these vintage relics clattering around town. Today they’re a pretty rare sight, although you can still sometimes find them.

Why Are Streetcars Coming Back?

Honestly? Because they’re cool. And because people are finally realising the error of their ways.

While it’s true that buses are more flexible in the sense that they don’t need rails to move on, buses had a number of disadvantages which meant that they simply could not outperform trams.

Buses were limited in size, they burn fuel and emit fumes, they require regular maintenance and tire-changes and repairs, and they need to deal with all the other issues that public transport has to handle. Trams by comparison could be made very long, with lots of space inside them for passengers. They could last on the road far longer than buses, they didn’t emit fumes, and they use electricity to move around with, which can be produced from clean sources that don’t emit harmful gases.

Just like Melbourne, trams have remained a fixture of public transport in Vienna, Austria, since the 1880s.

Trams don’t have much in the way of maintenance. Apart from regular cleaning and the occasional motor-check, there’s no fuel to replace, and steel wheels and tires last a lot longer than rubber ones, and by their nature, tram-routes are typically limited to wider streets and boulevards, meaning that they’re less likely to delay traffic, even if they do break down. On top of that, tram or streetcar networks give a city in the 21st century – just as they did in the 19th century – a look of progress and modernity.

It’s for all these reasons and more, that trams are making a comeback. While some cities struggle with the idea of miniature train-lines running through their streets, the number of large cities around the world which are successfully embracing, and even expanding on their tram-networks are proof that over 100 years ago, our Victorian ancestors knew what they were on about!

 

Now Boarding: A History of Airports

Every day, hundreds of thousands of people travel through airports and millions of people travel by airplane. You grumble and bitch and complain about everything, don’t you? It’s far to walk, your bags are too heavy. You can’t take this, that, the other, and another thing, onto the plane. The gates and terminals are miles apart and you’re running late. Security-checks, baggage snafus, X-rays, immigration, and that endless standing and watching and waiting and walking and running…and at all possible hours of the day and night!

Airports are such a pain in the ass.

So, who do we have to blame for this nightmare? While you’re waiting for that flight which is three hours late, and which will last twelve hours from London to Singapore, why don’t you sit back and find out about the history of airports?

Before Airports

From the 19th century up until the 1950s and 60s, almost all international travel was done by railroad or ocean-liner. You rode in comfortable and luxurious Pullman cars across the vast expanses of the United States. You rode the Orient Express across the Continent. From ports like Southampton, New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Calais, Port Sa’id, Tokyo and Bombay, your ship or ocean-liner took you all over the world. Shipping lines such as the Hamburg-America, White Star, Red Star, French, Nippon Yusen Kaisha (better known as the NYK Line) and Pacific & Oriental (better known today as P&O) were world-famous, and shipping lines were all in direct competition with each other to grab as big a slice of the customer pie as possible.

Ports and railroad stations were major hubs. Victoria Station in London, Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong. The Port of Shanghai, New York Harbor, Grand Central Terminal, Union Station, King’s Cross, Paris Gare du Nord, Victoria Dock in Melbourne; all names which were once as familiar to us today as United Airlines, Qantas, British Airways, Singapore Airlines, and Pan-American.

We think that the Golden Age of Travel, the era when international large-scale passenger transport was possible for the first time, was confined solely to smoke-belching trains and ocean-liners, but even in the 1910s, airplanes and airports were beginning to make a name for themselves. And this is their story.

The Airfield

Starting in the mid-1910s, airplanes started becoming a serious form of transport. The First World War saw the first large-scale use of airplanes, for bombing, reconnaissance, artillery-spotting and the most thrilling of all – aerial combat – dogfights!

But what to do when the war was over?

Yes, airplanes had proved their worth, but for the large part, airplanes were still very experimental – most of them were made of nothing but wood and canvas, with struts and wire stays to hold the whole flimsy thing together.

But with the end of the war, there was suddenly a surplus of planes…and skilled pilots…who were suddenly out of a job!

So began the first experimental passenger flights, in the early interwar period.

With the first flights, came the first ‘airfields’.

Early airfields were nothing fancy – quite literally a field, with precious little besides, and usually belonging to, or purchased from a farmer. Fields owned by farmers were of necessity, flat, smooth, dry, and free of stones, tree-stumps and other impediments; ideally suited for aircraft landing. There were no terminals, no control-towers, not even any runways to speak of – nobody envisioned that air-travel would be used for anything more than the delivery of mail, anyway!

Early airfields were simply open fields…with grass. Handy for landing, not so great for taking off. Grassy fields created drag on the undercarriage and landing-wheels of early aircraft, which inhibited takeoff. Things were improved slightly when someone got out the lawnmower and the grassy field was replaced by dirt runways, but even these had issues – in wet weather, dirt runways turned to roads of sludge, making it impossible to take off, or land! It was clear that proper aircraft-handling facilities were required.

So when and where did the first airports pop up?

The World’s First Airports

The oldest airport still in operation was built so long ago, it was barely older than the machines it was built to handle! Opened in 1909 by Wilbur Wright, the College Park Airport, in Maryland, the United States, is the oldest airport in the world!

Originally, the College Park Airport was a training-ground, for the Wright Brothers to show off their new invention – the airplane! But by 1911, it had become an established airport, with wealthy civilians using the area to land and house their own machines. Among other historic events, College Park saw the first experimental helicopter test-flights in the 1920s.

In the postwar period of the 20s and 30s, large-scale passenger transport was still done with ocean-liners and steam-trains. But eventually, airlines started being formed, and they blossomed into the companies which we know today.

In Australia, a company called the Queensland And Northern Territory Aerial Services commences operations in 1921. In 1926, Germany establishes Deutsche Luft Hansa (three words). The same year, Northwest Airways is established…wasn’t that in a movie somewhere, starring Cary Grant?

A year later in 1927, in the United States, something called Pan American World Airways first takes to the skies, in 1927 with its famous seaplanes.

In Europe, where there was an established flying culture because of the First World War, and where short distances between countries made early passenger flights practical, the first airports were established.

In 1927, Tempelhof Airport was built near Berlin. Around the same time in England, land near an old race-course is used for aerodrome purposes. In 1930, it will become the famous London Gatwick Airport.

The old Tempelhof Airport, Berlin

Early Airlines and Airplanes

Aerial services were slow to catch on in the United States. With such vast amounts of land to cover between major cities from state to state, it wasn’t possible for many early airplanes to make the distance. They simply didn’t have the size or the fuel capacity to fly that far. Instead, the Americans focused on transatlantic flights.

With the establishment of the famous Pan Am Airways in 1927, America had an airline that could fly its passengers to countries like those in South America, but also to Europe and up and down the east and west coasts of the United States. The early passenger planes were romantically called the Pan Am Clippers. The word ‘clipper’ comes from a type of fast sailing ship, so fast that it ‘clips’ or skims along the water. The analogy was transferred to aircraft which would ‘clip’ through the air. An age of romantic and stylish air-travel had begun.


Pan American route-map, 1936

Travelling by Pan Am clippers was expensive, and could only be done from certain cities – all the planes were seaplanes, which took off from, and landed at, coastal regions. Pan Am was one of the first airlines to offer transatlantic flights.

The limitations of aircraft in the 1930s meant that not all flights were direct. Although Pan Am was flying the latest seaplanes, as designed by the famous Boeing aircraft-manufacturers, sometimes, a plane flying from America to Europe might stop at Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland for refueling, before finally arriving in France or the United Kingdom. Some simply did not have the fuel-capacity or size to brave direct routes across the Atlantic Ocean. To restore passenger confidence, Pan Am had among the best pilots in the world – specially trained and carefully selected for their long-haul routes, where pilots were expected not just to fly the plane, but also fix it, if it had to make an emergency landing on the ocean, and get it back into the air again!

Come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away…
A Pan American clipper seaplane, typical of the 1930s and 40s

Despite technological limitations of the times and low passenger-capacities, the old ‘clipper’ seaplanes did have one advantage which most modern aircraft do not. As they were designed to take off and land on water, the likelihood of surviving an emergency landing on water (a real possibility in those days!) was generally quite high. One such Pan Am aircraft, the Honolulu Clipper, flying Pacific Ocean routes, was forced to land in the middle of the ocean in 1945, when its starboard engines failed. The plane made a safe water-landing, but the pilots were unable to restart or repair their dysfunctional engines. Radio-contact with passing ships saw the passengers safely offloaded, but attempts to tow or fly the plane back to a coastal service-area failed, and it was left to drift and sink.

The same thing happened again in 1947, when another Pan Am ‘clipper’ (this time, the Bermuda Sky Queen) ran out of fuel halfway across the Atlantic! In the middle of a fierce storm, the aircraft was forced to make a crash-landing on the heaving Atlantic Ocean. Against all probability, the seaplane survives the impact with the water, and remained afloat for 24 hours! Long enough for pilots to send out distress messages, and to offload passengers into inflatable life-rafts stored on the airplane. The U.S. Coast Guard responds to the radio call for help, and rescue all passengers and crew.

It was incidents like this that assured the flying public of Pan America’s safety, boosting their numbers of passengers and increasing the need for better airports. Even if their ‘clipper’ got into strife, they knew that they would be able to land safely and be reliably rescued, thanks to radio communications.

Airships

From the 1900s until the late 1930s, what with airplanes being unable to travel long distances with safety, most people thought that the way forward for air-travel lay in the famous Zeppelin airships made famous by the Germans. Airships were slower than planes, but faster than ocean-liners, and could carry passengers in comfort. However, a series of devastating crashes in the 1930s, most famously, that of the Hindenburg, scared the flying public away from airship travel. And at any rate, by the end of the Second World War, aircraft design and capabilities had improved enough to make airships a thing of the past!

Airport Development

As air-travel becomes more and more appealing and romantic, the larger numbers of passengers all around the world means that serious thought must now be given to airport design and functionality. Below, we’ll find out about the origins of some of the features that would be found in any modern airport today.

Air-Traffic Control

A crucial component of all airports is one which most people never notice. Air-traffic control. Without it, no airport could possibly operate with any degree of safety or efficiency.

Air traffic control as we might know it today, has its origins in 1920s London. At Croydon Airport outside of the city, the first radio-operated air-traffic control systems are put in place in the early 1920s after two aircraft, one flying towards, and one away, from the airport, collide in midair.

To get better fixings on airplane-locations in the future, all airplanes are fitted with radio-beacons which send out waves. Three receivers around the airport bounce back the radio-waves, and by using three points of reference, are able to get an accurate fix on the location of any one aircraft at a time. This is the birth of modern aircraft tracking and positioning, which is eventually improved in the 1930s and 40s, with the arrival of 1st-generation RADAR.

Gates

As airports began to be more established in the 1930s, serious thought was finally being given to airport design. At the height of the Art Deco craze, airports of the 1930s were typically modeled after the only other example of large, passenger-handling buildings familiar to architects and designers at the time – grand railroad stations.

Modelling airports after the great railroad stations of Europe and the Americas had their pluses and minuses. Having large halls and gathering areas was convenient, but it could be tricky when it came to separating arriving and departing passengers. It would be too easy to get lost in the big central terminal which comprised the bulk of early airports. It was now that architects realised that some way of separating and organising passengers would need to be inbuilt into any future airport designs.

The idea of airport gates as we might know them today, came about in the 30s with London’s Gatwick Airport.

In order to load, offload and service as many airplanes as possible, Gatwick’s main terminal was built in a stylish “Beehive” shape:

The ‘Beehive’ meant that planes could circle around the central terminal, load up or offload passengers, and then taxi away smoothly, without the danger of crashing into other aircraft. This also allowed for passengers to be spread out, and be more easily organised, instead of being huddled up and being channeled through two or three doors. Corridors, walls and partitions inside the circular building could divide passengers into arrivals and departures. Now, they could move smoothly through the building, and in and out through multiple entrances and exits, speeding service and easing congestion.

Welcome to…’The Beehive’!

The first prototype gates were introduced at Gatwick. Previously, boarding a plane was an unpleasant experience – you left the terminal and crossed the tarmac and climbed a set of boarding-stairs onto the aircraft. This was bearable during good weather, but when it was rainy or windy, or even snowing, you probably felt more comfortable taking a train!

To provide passengers with greater comfort and protection from the elements, Gatwick Airport installed the first retractable, telescopic corridors ever to be used in airports – and which are the grandparents of all the covered boarding-ramps which we have today.

Numbering six in total, the telescoping corridors slotted neatly into each other and could be retracted when a plane was taxiing into position, and then rolled out once the aircraft was in place for boarding. Having six gates allowed for greater passenger organisation, and prevented overcrowding.

As airports boomed in the 1950s and 60s, with the arrival of the jet-age and the ‘jet-set’, and the vast advances made in aircraft design during the Second World War, airport improvements struggled to keep up. Organising passengers, providing amenities, providing parking, baggage-handling and other services became constant struggles.

Terminals

Terminals, large buildings which organise passengers, and provide them with the facilities and amenities which they need and require, are a key part of every airport in the world.

Imagine trying to board a plane, when you have to run from one building to another, to another, to another, then out onto the tarmac, and then onto the plane…

You’d rather walk from San Francisco to Chicago.

It was buildings such as the ‘Beehive’ (mentioned further up) that showed how all airport facilities could be housed, and how passengers could be sorted, all inside one building – comfortably, efficiently and without wasting time or money.

Airport terminals continued to evolve in the postwar period. Larger passenger-numbers meant that organisation was crucial. New York’s famous La Guardia Airport, which opened in the late 1930s, took the Gatwick model and upgraded it for even larger passenger loads, and better organisation.

The difference was that the ‘Beehive’ terminal at Gatwick is just one level – restaurants, ticket-counters and facilities are all on the ground floor – and upstairs is all offices. And arriving and departing passengers are all handled in that one, ground floor area. Yes, you can sort them out as they enter or leave, but not while they’re in the actual building. For the city which coined the phrase a ‘New York Minute‘, having thousands of passengers wandering around aimlessly inside their new airport terminal is a huge waste of time!

La Guardia Airport, 1940s. Note the seaplane dock, for Pan Am ‘clippers’

To nip this problem in the bud, the terminal at La Guardia is built on two levels! Departures are upstairs, arrivals are downstairs! They never mix, they never mingle, there’s no chance for someone to get lost. Passengers arriving at La Guardia can go straight in, where waiting friends or relations can meet them on the ground floor, without having to find their way upstairs and get lost. Departing passengers head to the upper level when they reach the airport, and wait for their aircraft, well out of the way of arrivals from overseas or other parts of the country. Also located in the departing area were restaurants, bathrooms, shops, lounges, public telephones and other facilities which allowed a departing passenger to kill the time between arriving at the airport, and actually sauntering out to his airplane.

Airport Security and Baggage Check-In

The one thing which everyone can’t stand – airport security. Metal-detectors, x-ray machines, dipweeds standing around waving wands up and down trying to find stuff on your body that ain’t there, and all eating up valuable time which you could be using to buy duty-free items. Like those chocolates. Or wine. Books for the flight, or CDs for your friend back home.

In the postwar era, airport security became a serious issue. With more and more people boarding aircraft and with more people flying, it became increasingly difficult to run security checks. Skyjackings forced the hands of many airports to try and find ways to stop terrorists at airports, before they boarded the planes.

Skyjackings were at an all-time high in the 60s and 70s; up to forty attempts were made on American aircraft in 1969 alone! Airports could not turn a blind eye to this. If people were afraid to fly, then airports would be bleeding money and losing customers nonstop, which would be a disaster.

The first airport metal-detectors and luggage-scanners entered terminals in the 1970s, taking inspiration from the log-scanners used at sawmills, to detect foreign bodies buried in tree-trunks, such as nails and bullets. Electromagnets on all sides scan a person as he goes through the metal-detector, and any metal on the body is reflected back to the magnets, which triggers that annoying beeping sound that we all hate so much!

At around the same time that airport security started becoming an issue, airport baggage-handling was taking a step up.

Previously, all luggage was handled by human bag-handlers. And generally, most of it still is. But the innovation came in how bags were sorted and organised in the airport. The way forward was shown in the mid-1970s, when barcodes, like those found on almost every type of consumer-product today, started becoming commonplace.

The idea of barcodes started back in the 1940s, but it wasn’t until the 70s that reliable printing methods (which didn’t smudge the ink, rendering the codes illegible) allowed barcodes to become part of everyday life. Poor printing of barcodes meant that the laser-scanners which read the codes could not distinguish between the different bars, when the ink smudged or ran together.

Now, when you check in, a tag is stuck onto your suitcase or roller-bag, with a barcode on it. And a simple scanning of the code tells the conveyor belts and baggage-handling systems where any particular bag is meant to be, and which flight it is destined to.

The Golden Age of Flight

The 1930s-1960s was the ‘Golden Age’ of commercial aviation. The time when it was new, exciting, and changing all the time. Yes, it’s still changing, but now it’s part of everyday life, and it’s frustrating and boring and just a means for getting from A to B. How much air-travel has changed since this period up to the modern day is staggering. And not just because now, we all have our own little movie-screens in our seatbacks, and can no-longer pack knitting-needles and crochet-hooks into our carry-ons.

Differences between aircraft travel then, and now, is the incredibly relaxed nature of older air-travel. Not just in security and luggage-allowances and whatnot, but also in the positioning of seats and greater attention being paid to style and passenger comfort, which to a certain extent doesn’t exist anymore.

For one, aircraft interiors were designed to be much more open-plan, in a manner which most (unless it’s a private aircraft) are not, today. This flexibility and openness is sadly missing, from much of modern air-travel, where people have to fight for leg-room and moving-space, instead of being crammed into airplanes like sardines. The idea that ‘legroom’ was an issue on older aircraft is probably laughable! And before the days of personal video-screens, passengers had much more creative ways of killing time during those long flights.

Bored? Why not show off your music chops on the keys, and provide some live entertainment for fellow passengers? If they vote you off, a parachute is stored under the piano-bench.

Our Final Approach

The next time you’re hauling your luggage through the terminal, patting yourself down to make sure you didn’t forget your tickets, passport, wallet, photographs, iPad, pens, favourite book, keys, or other essentials, spare a thought for the long, trial-and-error journey that the modern airport took.

It’s come a long way from a farmer’s field that’s had a once-over with a lawnmower. The modern airport has everything from hotels, restaurants, shops, medical clinics, cinemas, internet-access and prayer-rooms. Even a multistory slide, if you’re stuck in Singapore’s Changi Airport for a few hours with nothing to do.

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!

Few other buildings have had the challenges of airports – organisation, people-management, security, luggage-handling, segregation and amenities. And yet without them, modern air-travel would be thoroughly impossible.

Want more information?

Documentaries:

Big, Bigger, Biggest:

Episodes – ‘Aircraft’, ‘Airports’.

Modern Marvels: ‘Airports’

Ten Things We Miss About Air-Travel

 

A Story on Two Wheels: The History of the Bicycle

In the history of transport, fewer inventions were more compact, innovative, liberating, practical and enjoyable than that of the bicycle. And yet, the bicycle as we know it today is only just over 100 years old. What is the story behind this invention? Why was it created? And how did it reach the design which we know so well today? Let’s take a ride…

The World Before the Bicycle

Before bicycles came onto the scene with their dingling bells and rattling drive-chains, transport was slow, dependent, and/or crowded. You had ships, boats, carriages, horseback, or your own two feet.

When it came to pre-bicycle travel, you had three options available when it came to the characteristics of the journey that you were likely to receive:

Fast, Private, Comfortable.

You may pick only two.

If it was fast and comfortable, such as a railroad-train, you were resigned to sharing the carriage, and even the compartment, with others.

If it was private and comfortable, such as a carriage, then it certainly wasn’t fast. The average speed of horse-drawn transport in the 19th century was about seven or ten miles an hour at best. In the same bag is walking. Private and relatively comfortable, but don’t expect to get anywhere in a hurry.

If it was fast and private, such as riding on horseback, alone, then it certainly wasn’t going to be very comfortable, being jolted around in a saddle for hours on end.

What was needed was a fast, relatively comfortable, individual mode of transport, that relied purely on the rider for propulsion, and which didn’t need to fed, fired, stabled, stoked, sailed, steamed or otherwise externally operated.

With the internal combustion-engine still a dream, and coal-fired steam-carriages being large, loud, slow and unpredictable (to say nothing of dangerous), there was a serious market for a convenient, fast, practical machine which a rider could use for individual transport: The Bicycle.

The First Bicycles

The first serious attempt at a bicycle-like machine was the German-made ‘hobby-horse’ or ‘dandy-horse‘ machine of the 1810s.

The ‘Dandy Horse’ bicycle was a fascinating…um…experiment. It was hardly what you could call a bicycle, and it was never utilised as a serious mode of transport. It was seen more as a toy, for the use and amusement of the ‘dandy’, the well-dressed, leisured, upper-class gentleman of Regency-era Europe. As you can see, the Dandy Horse has no seat to speak of, no driving-mechanism, no pedals, not even a real handlebar! Steering and propulsion are rudimentary at best, and without any form of suspension, riding one of these on the rough, dirt roads of 1810s Europe would’ve been hard on the back and spine!

You didn’t so much ‘drive’ or ‘operate’ the dandy-horse as you ‘glided’ on it, similar to a skateboard. You kicked it along the ground with your feet to build up speed and then coasted along until the momentum gave out. An amusing gimmick for a Regency garden-party, but hardly a practical form of transport!

During this time, the word ‘bicycle’ was not even coined. And wouldn’t be for several decades. Human-powered, wheeled land-machines were called ‘Velocipedes‘, from the Latin words for ‘Fast’ (as in ‘Velocity’), and ‘Foot’ (as in ‘pedestrian’). And as the 1800s progressed, there was a growing range of fantastical and ridiculous ‘velocipede’ machines with which to delight the population of Europe.

The next advancement in bicycle technology came from France, and we look to Joseph Niepce and his contraption known as the…um…’velocipede‘.

Any long-term readers of this blog may fancy that they’ve heard the name ‘Niepce’ before on this website. And you’d be right. Apart from tinkering with bicycles, he was also instrumental in the development of modern photography. 

Joseph N. Niepce’s contribution to the bicycle came in the early 1860s, although it wasn’t a great departure from what had existed before.

The Niepce ‘velocipede’ differed from the earlier ‘dandy-horse’, but only a couple of ways: The front wheel now had pedals, and a proper seat or saddle which was adjustable to the height of the rider, along with proper handlebars and steering. But other than these minor additions and improvements, the French velocipede was not much of an improvement.

A French ‘velocipede’, as invented by Joseph Niepce. Note the presence of the handlebars and steerable front wheel, and the centrally-mounted saddle

The Ordinary Bicycle came next. Invented in the late 1860s, the Ordinary was the first machine to be specifically called a ‘bicycle‘, using the two words ‘bi’, meaning ‘two’ and ‘cycle’.  The Ordinary also introduced something which has become commonplace among all bicycles to this day: Wire-spoked wheels!

The Ordinary was variously called a High Bicycle, a Boneshaker (due to its lack of suspension), or, most famously of all – a Penny Farthing, after the largest, and smallest denomination coins in circulation in Britain at the time.

The Ordinary was the first bicycle for which there was any serious commercial success, and they became popular for personal transport, as well as being used as racing-machines!

Despite its relative popularity, the Ordinary had some serious shortcomings: There were no brakes, there was no suspension, and they were incredibly dangerous to ride! The immense front wheel could tower up to six feet in the air, which made mounting and riding these machines quite a feat of acrobatics in itself! Accidents could cause serious injury and stopping, starting, mounting and dismounting were all big problems. Something better had to be devised!

The Safety Bicycle

The Ordinary or ‘Penny Farthing‘ was one of the first practical bicycle designs, but its many shortcomings and dangers meant that something better had to be found. Enter the ‘Safety Bicycle’.

The ‘Safety Bicycle’ is the direct ancestor to all bicycles manufactured today.

The prototype ‘safety bicycle’ came out in the late 1870s, in response to the public dissatisfaction with the fast, but dangerously uncontrollable Penny Farthing.

Henry John Lawson (1852-1925) developed the first such machine in 1876. Lawson, the son of a metalworker, was used to building things, and loved tinkering around with machines.

Lawson’s machine differed from others in that the rider sat on a saddle on a metal frame. At each end of the frame were spoked wheels of equal size, with a handlebar and steering-arrangement over the front wheel. The rear wheel was powered by the use of a simple crank-and-treadle-mechanism, similar to that used on old treadle-powered sewing-machines, a technology familiar to many people at the time.

The great benefit of Lawson’s bicycle was that the front wheel was used solely for steering, and the rear wheel was used solely for propulsion, and the rider’s legs were kept well away from both of them! On top of that, the wheels were of such a size that the rider’s feet could easily reach the ground, should it be necessary to stop, or dismount the machine in an emergency. Lawson was certainly onto something!

Lawson updated his machine in 1879, with a more reliable pedal-and-chain driving-mechanism, but sadly, although innovative, his bicycle failed to catch on. All the extra parts and the radical new design meant it was hard to produce and too costly to be sold to the general public.

Although Lawson’s machine was a commercial failure, his invention spurred on the development of this new contraption: The Safety Bicycle! Building on what Lawson had already established, over the next few years inventors and tinkerers all over the world started trying to produce a bicycle that would satisfy the needs of everyone. It had to be practical, fast, easy to use, safe to ride, mount and dismount, it had to stop easily, start easily, and be easily controlled.

All manner of machines came out of the workshops of the world, but in 1885, one man made something that would blast all the others off the road.

His name was John Kemp Starley.

Starley, (1854-1901), was the man who invented the modern bicycle as we know it today. And every single one that we see on the road today, is descendant from his machine.

Building on the ideas of Mr. Lawson, Starley rolled out his appropriately-named ‘Starley Rover’ safety bicycle in 1885.

The Starley Rover was revolutionary. Like the Lawson machine, it had equal-sized (or near-equal), spoked wheels, a diamond-frame made of hollow steel, a seat over the back wheel, handles over the front wheel, and a pedal-powered chain-drive in the middle, linking the drive-wheel and the rear wheel with a long drive-chain.

By the late 1880s, the modern bicycle had arrived. It was Starley who had brought it, and he cycled off into the history books on one of these:

This model from the late 1880s has everything that a modern bicycle has, apart from a kick-stand. And this is the machine that has revolutionised the world of transport ever since!

The ‘Rover’ was so much better than everything that had come before it. It was easy to ride, easy to mount, easy to dismount. It was close to the ground, but did not compromise on speed with smaller wheels, because of the 1:2 ratio between the pedal-wheel and the rear wheel. You could reach tremendous speeds without great exertion, and you could stop just as easily!

The Bicycle Boom!

At last! A functional, fun, fast machine. Something you could ride that was safe, quick, light, portable, quiet, comfortable, practical, and which could get you almost anywhere you wanted to go!

With machines like the Rover, and the ones which came after it, all other bicycle-designs were considered obsolete! The Rover had shown the way, and others would follow.

With the success of this newly-designed bicycle came the cycling boom of the the 1890s! For the first time in history, you didn’t need a horse to get anywhere! You needn’t spoil your best shoes in the mud! You didn’t have to worry about smoke and steam and soot! Just roll your bicycle onto the road, hop on it, kick off, and down the road you went. What a dream!

With a truly practical design, the true practicality of the bicycle was at last, fully realised. At last, the ordinary man or woman on the street had a machine which they could ride anywhere! Although, that said, most bicycles in the late Victorian era were expensive toys for the wealthy. But nonetheless, they were used for everything from cycling through the park, cycling around town running errands, cycling to and from work, cycling to visit friends and relations across town, cycling to take in the sights! What a wonderful invention!

The ‘Gay Nineties‘, as this period of history is fondly called, saw the first big boom of the bicycle. Or a medium-sized one, at any rate. There were still a few problems: Bicycles were still rather expensive. And it was considered scandalous for a woman to ride a bicycle! Women opened their legs for one thing, and one thing only. How dare they sit, mounted…on a bicycle! Lord knows what other things they might be mounting next!

Women and Bicycles

A woman on a bicycle? Who’da thunk it?

The mere idea of this radical collaboration sent Victorian men into a tizz! Famously straitlaced and buttoned-up, Victorian morality dictated that a woman’s legs remained covered and obscured at all times. In fact, legs of ANY kind had to be covered at all times. Some people even draped floor-length covers over their pianos to prevent offense to visitors!

Women were generally expected to ride a horse side-saddle. But it was impossible to do this on a bicycle, since both legs were required to drive the pedals. And it was also impossible to ride a bicycle with the huge, floor-sweeping dresses and skirts of the era.  Something had to be done!

Fortunately, tailors came up with a solution!

The second half of the 1800s saw the arrival of the Rational Dress Movement, also known as the Victorian Dress Reform. Aimed mostly at women, this movement said that it was impractical for women to wear the clothes that they did, and still be expected to do all their wifely and womanly duties. The clothes were too bulky, too restricting and far too uncomfortable! Especially for such activities as sports, riding, walking and bicycling! Something had to be done! And fortunately, something was.

It came about in the 1850s, when Elizabeth Smith Miller of New York State, invented a sort of pair of baggy trousers for women. When their legs were together, they looked like a full skirt, but they parted company quite easily, for greater comfort and freedom of movement.

Women’s Rights advocate Amelia Bloomer, a strong supporter of more sensible women’s attire, liked the idea of these newfangled trousers, and they were eventually named after her: ‘Bloomers‘.

With bloomers, a woman could ride a bicycle safely and comfortably. But even if she didn’t have bloomers, a woman could still ride a bicycle in a skirt. She simply had to buy a woman’s bicycle!

Instead of a regular bicycle with a diamond-shaped frame, a woman could buy a step-through bicycle, like this one:

A step-through was identical to a regular bicycle in every way, except one. Figured it out yet?

Without a central bar between the handles and the seat, it was possible for a woman wearing a skirt to ‘step through’ the frame, so that she could get her feet either side of the pedals. Then, she simply hopped onto the seat, put her feet onto the pedals, and cycled away!

If that wasn’t handy enough, a woman could also purchase bicycle-clips, or ‘skirt-lifters’, which clipped onto the waist of her dress or skirt, and trailed down the sides of her skirt. Here, they were clipped onto the fabric to keep the hem of the skirt or dress off the road, but also, away from the pedals, where the fabric might get caught and tangled in the drive-chain!

The Safety Bicycle was ideal for women. Even with bloomers or bicycle-clips or skirt-lifters, it was almost impossible for a lady dressed in Victorian or Edwardian garb, to operate a Penny Farthing! The bikes were too big, too cumbersome, far too unstable, and generally unladylike to ride!

With the safety bicycle, a woman was able to ride with much greater comfort and security. The risk of accidents was smaller, they were easier to mount and dismount, and much easier to operate and control.

The Social Impact of the Bicycle

From the mid-1880s onwards, the bicycle became more and more popular, as safer, easier-to-ride models were invented, produced, and put on sale to the general public around the world. Bicycles caught on quickly, and were popular then, as they are now, for the very same reasons.

They provided free, motorless, quiet, smooth, quick transport, without the need of a horse. They were relatively easy to ride and control, and with a little practice, you could use one to get almost anywhere, and so much faster than walking!

A bicycle also had load-bearing capabilities, and could be used to transport and carry all kinds of things, provided that they could either fit in the front basket, or were strapped securely enough to the rear luggage-rack. Some bicycles even had side-satchels which hung over the back wheel for even greater storage.

Bicycles allowed people who previously couldn’t travel very far, the chance to explore much further afield. Women and children were no-longer restricted to riding in carriages or on railways, or horseback – they could climb onto a bicycle and ride around the village, go to the park, cycle through town, ride along the canal-paths. They did not need men, or older people around, to operate a horse and carriage, or a railroad train, or a steam-powered canal-boat. They simply needed two functional legs, and a decent sense of balance.

This ease of use and versatility allowed the bicycle to be used for almost anything. It was a commuting vehicle for office-workers and labourers. It was a cargo vehicle for anything from the weekly trip to the high street, to a day on the town. With the spread of bicycles came the rise of home-delivery and advertising. Now, bicycles could be used by butcher’s boys and apprentice bakers, shop-boys and telegraph-delivery boys, to provide effective and swift home-delivery of everything from bread, to meat, parcels, mail, telegrams and pre-ordered items of clothing or other items that might be small enough to be delivered safely on a bicycle.

Their open, light frames meant that it was possible to hang signs from the horizontal connecting-bars between the seat and the handlebars. Local businesses could paint advertisements on these signs, or on the mudguards of their store-owned bicycles. At the same time, a business could deliver merchandise or produce, and tell strangers where these things could be purchased.

Cycling clubs became incredibly popular. Friends and relations would gather and ride around the countryside for a day’s outing. They might go picnicking, or they might ride from town to town, visiting new shops, restaurants and public houses. This kind of freedom of movement had never been possible before. Not with a horse, that you had to feed and rest and saddle, not with a carriage which was slow and cumbersome. Not even with a steam locomotive and carriages, which was restricted to the railway lines. Before the rise of the automobile, only a bicycle allowed this level of freedom. No waiting, no fuss. Jump on, kick off, and pedal down the road.

Bicycles in Literature

The impact of the bicycle can be seen by its inclusion in literature of the late Victorian and Edwardian age. In ‘The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist‘, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes’ client is a piano-teacher who uses her bicycle as her main mode of transport, and who is shadowed everywhere by another cyclist.

In the mid-1890s in Australia, Andrew Barton ‘Banjo‘ Paterson, wrote the famous comic poem, “Mulga Bill’s Bicycle“. The cocky Mulga Bill declares that he can control absolutely any form of transport, even this newfangled ‘safety bicycle machine’. He purchases it from the local store and cycles off down the street with it, before losing control of the machine and spectacularly crashing it into a pond, deciding thereafter to stick to riding a horse!

The Bicycle in Wartime

During times of war, the bicycle proved to be a very popular mode of transport. Driving off-road was almost impossible, and at any rate, petrol was often in short supply and severely rationed. On the home-front and on the battlefront, civilians and soldiers often left motor-vehicles behind and fell back to the old-fashioned, reliable bicycle to get themselves around. During the First World War, British soldiers even formed bicycle infantry units! Bicycles didn’t need to be fed like horses, they were quieter, and they could get troops moving a lot faster!

During the Second World War, bicycles were used extensively by both sides. The Allies developed folding bicycles which soldiers could strap to their backs and jump out of airplanes with. Once they landed, they threw away their parachutes, unfolded their bicycles, braced them up, and cycled off to their rendezvous points.

The soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army, maybe even to mock the British and their severe lack of preparation, invaded the Malaysian Peninsula and Singapore…on bicycles! It was impossible to drive tanks through the thick Asian jungles, but a bicycle on a dirt track could go anywhere!

As well as being used for military transport, bicycles were also highly popular on the home front. With petrol-rationing strictly enforced, driving became almost impossible. Unless you were in a reserved occupation (you had a job which was essential to the war-effort), or had some other important status which allowed you a larger petrol-ration, chances were that your car was going to be up on blocks for the duration of the war.

Bicycles don’t need petrol. They only needed whatever strength you could muster from your new diet of rationed food. At any rate, it would be easier to cycle through the bomb-shattered streets of London, Coventry, Singapore and Shanghai, than to drive a car! Most roads were so covered in craters, downed powerlines or the rubble from collapsed buildings that even if your car had fuel, it wouldn’t be able to make it down the road for all the obstructions!

Bells and Whistles

As bicycles became more and more popular during the Edwardian era, more and more features were added to them. One of the most famous additions is the bicycle-bell!

The idea of some variety of warning-device on a bicycle goes back to the 1870s, when the safety bicycle was in its infancy. The modern, thumb-operated bicycle-bell, which you clamp onto the handlebars of your machine, was invented in 1877 by John Richard Dedicoat, an inventor and eventual bicycle-manufacturer in his own right.

The bicycle bell works on a very simple spring-operated lever system. Pressing the button on the side of the bell rotates gears inside, which vibrates a pair of discs which jangle and ring when they move, a bit like a tiny pair of cymbals. This dingling noise is amplified by the bell-housing. Then, the spring simply pushes the bell-button back, ready for the next ring.

Dedicoat also invented a sort of spring-loaded step for helping people mount their bicycles. When Penny Farthings were still the rage, the step was designed to give the rider a boost into his seat. It worked rather well, but if the spring was more powerful than the rider was heavy, it might accidentally shoot him over the handlebars, instead of giving him a helping leg up onto his bicycle-seat!

The popularity of the safety bicycle meant that it was ridden at all times of the day, and night! To make it safer to ride at night, bicycle lamps were clipped to the front shaft, underneath the handlebars.

As with automobiles of the Edwardian era, bicycle headlamps were gas-fired calcium-carbide acetylene lamps. The reaction of water and calcium-carbide produced a flammable gas which could be ignited, and produced a bright, sustained glow. These lamps and their reaction-chambers were small enough to clamp onto the handlebars of early safety bicycles.

Pellets or chunks, or even powdered calcium-carbide was stored in the lower reservoir of a two-chamber reaction-canister. Water was poured into the upper chamber, and a valve between the two chambers allowed water to drip from the top canister onto the calcium-carbide stored in the lower canister. The reaction caused the production of acetylene gas, which escaped through a valve into the headlamp, where it could be ignited, producing light.

Increasing or decreasing the amount of light coming from your bicycle lamp was a simple process of adjusting the opening of the water-valve on the reaction-canister. The more water, the greater the reaction, the greater the amount of gas, which caused the flame to burn brighter. Less water meant fewer chemical reactions, which reduced the overall supply of gas to the headlamp.

At the dawn of the 20th century, bicycles could also be fitted with dry-cell battery-powered headlamps, and alternating-current dynamo-systems. A dynamo really works very simply: You clip the headlamp to the front of the bicycle, and clip the dynamo and its lead, near to a wheel on your bicycle, usually on the mudguard, or on the frame if there isn’t a guard. Engaging the dynamo presses a small wheel against one of your bicycle wheels. As the bike wheel spins, it rotates the dynamo generator, which produces the electricity necessary to power the lamp.

The Bicycle Today

Whether it be a racing-machine, a manner of commuting, an A-to-B mode of transport, a delivery-wagon, a cargo-bicycle or a method of exercising, the humble 1885 safety bicycle remains essentially unchanged since its entrance onto the transport stage back in the closing decades of the Victorian era. The bicycle remains popular because of its simplicity, ease of use, and its seemingly endless practical advantages over various other forms of transport.

The Bicycle World Record


‘Flying Pigeon’ bicycle manufactured in China

Based in Tianjin, in northeast China, the Flying Pigeon is the most popular make of bicycle in the WORLD. In fact, it’s the most popular VEHICLE in the world. That includes motor-cars. The Flying Pigeon company was established in Tianjin in 1936. The Flying Pigeon model, after which the company was renamed, came out in 1950. The communist government in China demanded that the company produce a strong, practical, easy-to-use, and aesthetically pleasing bicycle. It had to ride good, and look good. And it’s been doing that for the past sixty-odd years. Cars were expensive in China, and bicycles were far cheaper and more practical for the average working Chinaman. So much so that the Flying Pigeon was seen as a sign of prosperity in China.

Echoing Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Chinese president Deng Xiaoping said that prosperity in China meant that every household would own its own Flying Pigeon bicycle.

Most popular car in the world: Toyota Corolla
Units made: 35,000,000+

Most popular bike in the world: Flying Pigeon
Units made: 500,000,000+

I think we have a winner.

More Information?

I found the documentary “Thoroughly Modern: ‘Bicycles‘”, to be very helpful. I wonder why…At any rate, it’s fascinating watching.

World’s Top Five Most Successful Cars

 

Packing with Style – Vintage Luggage

Some time back, I wrote a piece about the “Golden Age of Travel“; the period from the third quarter of the 1800s, to the late 1930s, when for the first time in history, it was possible for ordinary people of moderate means, to travel cross-country, and around the world. Social changes and technological improvements in transport and communications meant that for the first time in history, it was really practical for the middle-class couple, single, or family, to go on a holiday!

This posting will look at the various bits and pieces of luggage which people brought with them on their whirlwind tours of the Continent, the American interior, the Dominion of Canada, the Far East, the Mediterranean, or the South Pacific. The kinds of bags and cases which would’ve been checked onto trains, steamships, taxi-cabs, and in and out of hotel-lobbies in cities ranging from Melbourne, London, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Toronto, Shanghai, Singapore, Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Rome, Nanking, Saigon and Hong Kong. The sort of luggage which is plastered with those old steamship-tickets, hotel-room numbers, claim-tags and name-tags. The kind of luggage that went around the world and back again in a haze of smoke, steam and gasoline.

The Appeal of Vintage Luggage

There are people out there who collect vintage luggage. Some people use it when they travel, some people use them as coffee-tables, storage-spaces, decorative items or as photography-props. But what is their appeal?

Vintage luggage was made with care and attention. Back before the days of excessively widespread travel, and before the days of airplanes and jetliners, luggage was made to be pretty and attractive. Because back then, it was unlikely that somebody would throw around a 500-pound steamer-trunk.

The luggage of the Golden Age of Travel reflected very much, the types of transport available at the time, together with the fashions of the period. It’s this, being-of-its-time, its style and the “stories it could tell”, that makes vintage luggage so appealing to collectors and nicknack-snatchers. Here is a typical vintage luggage setup which you might find on someone’s bed, or strapped to the back of an old car:

These are actually my own vintage luggage-pieces. From left to right, we have an old hatbox, a gladstone bag, a typewriter-case, and a suitcase (underneath). I’ll break them down, piece by piece and look into their history and their significance, but I’ll also be discussing other pieces of luggage which aren’t shown here.

Hat-Box

Back in the 20s and 30s, it was almost taken for granted that a man owned at least one hat. Either a Panama, a trilby, a fedora, a homburg, or a bowler. On instances where a man traveled and took more than one hat with him, the hat not worn on his noggin would be stored in the hat-box.

The boxes were made rigid and circular, so that any hats (typically felt hats) could be stored inside without fear of being crushed, misshapen or otherwise damaged during travel. If you’re looking for one, hat-boxes are very distinctly shaped, with a circular profile to hold their contents. Some hat-boxes even came with their own hat-brushes for keeping the hats stored within clean during travel.

Typewriter-Case

With the rise of travel during the early 20th century came a corresponding rise in communications. Companies such as Underwood, Corona, Royal and Remington, were among the first manufacturers of typewriters to produce portable, carry-anywhere machines. Granted, they could still weigh as much as 10lbs (about 5-6kg), but they were considered a damn sight more portable than the enormous desktop typewriters of the period (weighing up to 30-50lbs).

Portable typewriters took a while in coming. While the basic form of the typewriter was pretty-much agreed-on by all the major manufacturers by ca. 1900, the portable didn’t really show up until the early 20th century.

There were a few false starts in the 1890s, but  it wasn’t until after World War One that portables became truly practical. The issue was trying to shrink down all the major elements of a larger desktop typewriter into a small enough, but also practical enough, size and form so that it could be used reliably.

Starting in 1919, companies such as Underwood, Remington, Corona and Royal produced the first practical portable typewriters. They advertised that their new machines could be used ANYWHERE on earth! One Remington advertisement from the late 1920s said that their machines could even be carried up to the top of Mount Everest, where they would still function perfectly!

The public were quick to grab onto these new portables, and soon, there was fierce competition among typewriter-companies to produce better, stronger, smaller, more stylish, more feature-filled machines. Just as larger typewriters were variously called “Office”, “Standard” or “Desktop” machines, smaller typewriters were called “Juniors”, “Travel” typewriters, “portable” and even “Household” typewriters, to differentiate them from their larger cousins.

The case which you see there belongs to my 1920s Underwood Standard Portable. Here’s the case, opened, with the typewriter inside:

Gladstone Bag

The humble “Gladstone” has been a fixture of luggage for over a century. It was invented by English leather-worker and bag-manufacturer J.G. Beard in the late 1800s. Beard was a strong supporter of the British Prime Minister; at the time, one William Ewart GLADSTONE (1809-1898). Gladstone was a prolific politician. He was elected to the office of P.M. not once, nor twice, but FOUR TIMES during his long life.

Mr. Gladstone was obviously a popular man, but he didn’t hang around much. He was famous for charging off all over Europe at a moment’s notice, and was one of the most-traveled politicians of his age. Putting two-and-two together, Mr. Beard named his new creation after the long-serving P.M., and his love of travel.

The Gladstone Bag, in its various permutations – Strapped, strapless, square-profiled or curved, was a constant companion to the tourist of the Golden Age of Travel. Everyone from Dorian Gray, to Sherlock Holmes, and countless actual, real-life people, carried one of these bags around with them where-ever they went!

Gladstone bags were used for everything! They were tool-bags for tradesmen, briefcases for lawyers, overnight-bags and weekend-cases for travelling salesmen, and sample-cases for company-representatives.

Undoubtedly, however, the Gladstone is most famously remembered in the 21st Century, as the kind of bag which old-time family physicians carried around with them. Back in the days when doctors still made house-calls, you could count on him to show up at your front door in a three-piece suit, homburg hat and his trusty Gladstone bag.

It’s become so common for these bags to be associated with physicians that sometimes, an eBay or Google search under “Gladstone bag” will yield nothing, whereas a search for “Doctor’s bag” will bring up everything, and then some.

Why was it that Gladstones were so popular with doctors? What was it that made them stick so firmly to this particular profession? And why, decades after most family practitioners stopped making house-calls, are they still called doctor’s bags?

The Gladstone bag is unique among bags and cases in the sense that it is both hard, and soft-sided.

A Gladstone bag is held shut by a combination of catches, hooks, straps and buckles (not all Gladstones have straps and buckles, but some do). When these fastenings are released and the bag is pulled open, the steel frame around the mouth snaps rigid, (or it should, if your bag’s in working order!).

With the mouth reinforced and held in-place with the steel frame, it would be easy for a doctor to shove his hand into the bag and grab whatever necessary and essential piece of equipment he would need in the event of an emergency. Much more easily than if he had to fumble with the soft, sagging, floppy sides of a knapsack, a backpack, a messenger-bag or other type of hold-all.

Also, because the bag closes smoothly in the center, over the top of the storage compartment, and not down one side like with a conventional briefcase, there’s no danger of the contents, which might include glass bottles and needles, spilling everywhere and smashing to pieces when the bag was carried for transport.

Don’t forget that in the early 1900s, it was still common for many operations to be carried out in the home, by your doctor. He could show up after a telegram, a telephone-call or a private message, to perform anything from stitches to dressing, to removing your appendix. And he’d do it right there on your dining-room table. Having a bag which he could easily access in an emergency was essential for his job to run smoothly.

Vintage Suitcase

This suitcase is not an antique. But it is representative of the style of suitcase carried by almost every traveler and tourist during the early 20th century, when steamships and railways were in their prime.

Back when men still wore suits on a regular basis, and suits were stored in suit-cases, travel-bags of this style were common around the world. Not all of them featured expandable tops and reinforcing straps such as this one, but in almost every railway-station, bus-depot and on every dockside in the world, suitcases like these could be found in abundance. Made of leather, lined in cotton and reinforced with rivets and studs as seen here, suitcases like these are highly popular today among vintage luggage collectors. They have an enduring charm and style that transcends time.

Several months back, a cousin of mine was over for a visit. He was hunting for antiques as gifts for his girlfriend. When he saw the suitcase, he was instantly attracted to it. But I couldn’t bring myself to part with it. I’ve owned it for longer than I care to admit, and don’t use it nearly as often as I might, but it is certainly a conversation-starter.

Suitcases of this style were sometimes part of an entire suite or set of luggage. Such a suite might include a set of matching suitcases, and a variety of smaller suitcases, all of the same style, which went together as one big set. Such as shown here by this beautiful set of Louis Vuitton cases:

Larger cases stored clothes such as jackets, coats and suits. Smaller cases stored shirts, shoes, collars, cuffs, scarves, gloves and undergarments. Still smaller cases might be used to store important items such as jewellery. The smallest cases were used to store toiletries and grooming-supplies, such as shoe-polish kits, brushes, combs, razors, and tooth-brushing supplies.

Steamer Trunk

Oh, for the days before luggage-weight restrictions, when you could carry a whole piano onto a ship, and the only thing the load-master would say was: “That better not rock around when the ship’s underway”.

Enormous carriage trunks and steamer-trunks, similar to the one shown above, were common sights on railway platforms and steamship docks around the world during the Interwar Period of the 20s and 30s. When going from one place to another meant a long sea-voyage, you had to pack into a steamer-trunk absolutely everything that you needed when you traveled.

Did I say long?

Southampton to New York = 7 Days by steamer.

Naples to Shanghai = 8 Weeks by steamer.

Melbourne to San Francisco = 2 Weeks by steamer.

San Francisco to Chicago = 7 Days by train.

Southampton to Sydney = 9 weeks by steamer.

A round-the-world cruise (not an uncommon event back then), could take the better part of a year. On a long voyage, a steamer-trunk was an absolute must-have!

Don’t forget that you weren’t going from A-to-B directly, in most cases. On a trip from Italy to China, you might leave Naples. But then you’d dock in Cairo, drop off passengers and mail, pick up more passenger and mail, take on coal and provisions. Then you’d sail through to the Indian Ocean, drop anchor at Bombay, drop off and pick up passengers, mail, coal and provisions, then sail to Singapore. The process was repeated. Then to Hong Kong, where it was repeated again. Until you finally reached Shanghai, in China.

It would be a very long time at sea.

Portmanteau 

A portmanteau is a really rare bit of travel-kit these days. You don’t see them very often. Back in the days of steamship travel in the early 1900s, a portmanteau was used for storing shoes, coats, suits and other items which were too bulky or oddly-shaped or delicate to be just thrown into a suitcase or stuffed into a steamer-trunk. They were basically portable wardrobes, into which you could hang your clothes without fear of them being creased, crushed or otherwise damaged. In the closing scenes of the movie: “Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban“, Professor Remus Lupin is seen packing his luggage at the end of the school year. One of his travelling-trunks is a portmanteau. Portmanteaus are mentioned at least once in Bram Stoker’s novel: “Dracula”, in which there is a lot of travelling, as Dr. Van Helsing and his friends attempt to destroy the evil vampire lord, Count Dracula.

Luggage like this is either impractical or quaint today. Sometimes both! Certainly, you couldn’t get a steamer-trunk or a portmanteau onto an airplane these days! At least, not as carry-on baggage! Some people who dash around from place to place, such as pilots, still use gladstone bags as handy and compact overnight bags to store basic supplies in, when they might only be staying a night or two, in any one location.

Largely, though, luggage like this is relegated to storage, display or to film and TV sets, museum exhibits and photography-props. But there was a time, not too long ago, when they steamed off around the world on ocean-liners and steam-trains, faithfully accompanying their masters on their travels around the world.

 

‘The Underland Route’ or the History of the Subway

In the 1860s in the years during and after the American Civil War, two railroad companies completed America’s first transcontinental railroad, colloquially called the “Overland Route”. This cut down the travel-time from cities such as Chicago in the East, to Los Angeles and San Francisco in the West, from several weeks or even months by wagon-train…to a few days by steam-powered locomotive. Instead of stocking up on rifles and muskets, provisions and supplies…a person could pack his steamer-trunk or suitcase, buy a ticket and ride the rails in what was then a fast, comfortable and convenient way to travel.

Around the same time that the Americans completed their “overland route”, a hop across the pond called the Atlantic Ocean to England would see the British people’s first…”underland route”…and the birth of the modern subway system.

The London Underground: The World’s First Subway

The London Underground (more commonly called ‘The Underground’ or ‘The Tube’ today), is the world’s oldest and is one of the world’s largest subway systems. It’s famous all over the world for its stations, its red, white and blue logo or ’roundel’ and the similiarly-coloured, tubular railway carriages. It’s famous for being used as air-raid shelters during the Second World War and for appearing in a James Bond movie where an invisible Aston Martin is delivered to Bond on a flatbed railway carriage.

Beneath all this fame and glory and fortune, people tend to forget that the London Underground is the world’s first and oldest underground railroad and is now nearly a hundred and fifty years old and still running. The story of the London Underground is the story of the development of the modern subway system and the story of one is generally entwined with the other.

The Need to go Under

Subway systems are not built for their novelty aspect or because “they can”. In each particular city where a subway exists, there are reasons for their construction. But what was it that led to the whole idea of the “under ground” railroad to begin with?

To understand this, we must flashback to London in the 1850s and 60s. Here, we meet a city which is the center of an empire, which is increasing in population every day due to the vast changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution and which is suffering the consequences of such rapid population-growth…traffic congestion.

By the 1850s, railroads were fast becoming the most popular way to move around. It was quick, comfortable and convenient. While cities had several large railroad stations for big, main train-lines, the problem was that once passengers arrived in town, they clogged up the roads with horse-drawn carriages and taxi-cabs. It was reasoned that if there were trains right in the heart of town, they would be able to move people around more effectively and cut down on congestion. This wasn’t easy in a city as old as London, though. Railroad lines took up a lot of space and with congestion as bad as it was, threading railroad lines all over the road was hardly the best solution. Instead, it was decided that the best method of getting trains into the city was to go underground. It would be relatively easy to follow the roads, stops and stations could be easily planned and it would provide valuable employment to the thousands of unemployed people living in London in the second half of the 19th Century.

The First Subway

The first part of the first subway, the London Underground, was born in 1863 as the Metropolitan Railway and stretched from Paddington Station north to Farringdon Station, via King’s Cross. The man responsible for this new, quite literally groundbreaking task of an ‘under ground’ railroad was Charles Pearson, a London lawyer and Member of Parliament. Throughout the 1830s, 40s and 50s, Pearson had campaigned for an ‘underground railroad’ to help ease the increasing traffic congestion in central London during the mid-19th century. After numerous government meetings, debates and discussions, an act of Parliament was passed for the construction of the first stage of what would become the world’s first subway system.


The Metropolitan Railway under construction near King’s Cross Station; February, 1861

To make things easy, the Metropolitan Railway was constructed using the ‘cut-and-cover’ method of tunnel-construction. This involves digging a huge trench in the middle of the street, right down to the level where the railroad lines would go. The rail-lines would be laid and the tunnel walls and roof would be built above it. Once the roof was completed, the excavated rubble and soil was dumped back over the top to reform the original roadway, giving the process its name of ‘cut and cover’. While relatively easy, safe and quick to carry out, Pearson probably won himself a great deal of enemies by building his railroad this way – the Cut and Cover method meant that entire roads and city blocks had to be shut down for construction-purposes. Building the railroad took nearly three years, from February, 1860 – January, 1863. Unfortunately, Pearson wouldn’t live to see his masterpiece open for operation; he would die on the 14th of September, 1862, of dropsy. He was 68 years old.

Underground Trains

Having built the subway, it was now necessary to get trains into it. Obviously, conventional steam-trains were out of the question. They were huge, bulky, noisy digusting things, far too unsuitable for subway tunnels. Instead, an entirely new form of railroad locomotive had to be invented. While still coal-fired, steam-powered engines, these new machines were significantly smaller than their above-ground counterparts.


Metropolitan Railway A-Class subway locomotive. Engine #23 was made in 1864

The steam-engines developed for the London Underground were compact, fat, low-profiled tank-engines. Despite the obvious problems of smoke and steam from these newly designed machines, the London Underground proved popular with Victorians. Nearly 27,000 passengers were using the Metropolitan Railway within the first few months of its opening in January of 1863.

Electrification of Subways

It’s hard to imagine that from the 1860s until the early 1900s, the world’s first, oldest and at the time, biggest subway system, was pulled along using nothing but steam-power. In the crowded, cramped and claustrophobic environment of the London Underground, steam-power was hardly ideal. In fact, it was very uncomfortable riding in the Underground during this period and adequate ventilation had to be installed if the Underground was to maintain a practical, working public service for the people of London. Electrification of the Underground was proposed as early as 1880, but it wasn’t until about 1905 that electrical technology and understanding had progressed far enough to make this a practicality. Starting in the early 20th century, many of the original steam-trains that pulled carriages through the Undergorund were scrapped and replaced by modern, electrically-powered locomotives. Very few of the original Underground steam-locomotives from the 1860s and 70s survive today.

Under and Outwards

With the initial success of the original Metropolitan Railway, other underground railroad companies sprang up, almost overnight. Throughout the second half of the 1800s and the early 1900s, private companies dug and developed their own subway lines throughout London. As the 20th century progressed, the subway became more and more familiar and important to London. By the end of WWI, England had over a hundred big and small railroad companies. In the end, many of these were merged together with the Railways Act of 1921. Nationalisation of the railway system was completed in 1947 with the Transport Act. By the Second World War, the London Underground had grown immensely. By the early 1940s, there were many abandoned stations and stretches of the Underground which were never completed, due to a lack of money or a lack of necessity. Stations that were too close together were considered unnecessary and were closed down. Many of these were converted to air-raid shelters during The Blitz. Many of these stations still exist today and some are set aside specifically for filming-purposes by film-production companies, so that the actual London Underground won’t be disrupted by camera-crews and actors.

The Subway Goes Global

After the success of the London Underground, the subway began to spread around the world. The next subway opened in Glasgow, Scotland in 1891. The first American subway was opened in Boston, Massachusetts in 1897! The New York City Subway system was started in 1904. Previous to this, New York City had been serviced by its famous elevated railroad (commonly called the ‘El’). A horrific blizzard in 1888 dumped several feet of snow all over New York, which brought its above-ground train-service to a screeching halt.


Manhattan’s famous elevated railroad. Started in the 1860s, it lasted until the 1960s when it was gradually destructed. This photo was taken in 1944. The affect of heavy winter snowfalls on the New York elevated railroad was what prompted the construction of the now, world-famous New York City Subway in 1904

To prevent a repeat of this, the New York City Subway was constructed. Subways continue to be popular in countries where snow can affect above-ground railroad traffic, such as in Russia, Germany and Canada. While today subways are seen as modern, bright, fast and wonderful, or at times, a pain in the ass when your train comes late or it’s cramped or overcrowded, remember that they were born in an age of steam and steel, bricks, mortar and feverish industrial revolution.

 

An Impossible Dream: The History of Flight

For centuries, man has wanted to do lots of things. He has wanted to ride in a wheeled vehicle unpowered by a walking manure-factory. He has wanted to sail the open seas…without sails. He has wanted to communicate long distances without having to travel long distances, he has wanted to invent a form of illumination that won’t set the house on fire and he’s wanted to explore under water without ending up under ground. But of all the dreams that mankind has had, none has been stronger than man’s desire…to fly.


Mr. Wile E. Coyote provides a historically-accurate practical demonstration of mankind’s early experiments with flight

For centuries, flight was considered impossible – the dream and fancy of fools, a pipe-dream, a hallucination, an idiotic fantasy. And yet today, we can fly halfway around the world within twenty-four hours. How? And…Why? This article will explore the history of manmade aircraft – anything that didn’t come with a beak, claws and a feathery lining, from the first experimental aircraft to airliners as we know them today.

Flight of Fancy

Since time immemoriam, man has looked at the skies, and has seen birds. Or maybe bats. Probably even flies. On the off-chance, even a mosquito. He puzzled and fumed and fussed over the fact that all these things could do the one thing that he couldn’t – Fly.

Mankind has had dreams of flight for centuries. Even the famous inventor and painter, Leonardo from Vinci, invented a bloody helicopter before the word had even been thought up! But even with wonderful sketches, ideas, dreams and brainstorming, man couldn’t make a successful flying machine. To many, it was considered impossible. Man did not understand what made something fly and, once it was flying, how to keep it flying and, once it was kept flying, how to make it stop flying!


Leonardo’s fantasmagorical flying machine…would it ever have really worked?

The very first flying machines never left the pages that they were drawn on. Leonardo, who created the world’s first helicopter prototype as well as a primative parachute, never actually manufactured his inventions, although modern reconstructions and testing has shown that, with enough persistance, the right materials and a whole heap of chutzbah, it could be done! So…when did man first take to the air?

Full of Hot Air

The first real flying machines that mankind created out of his own hands which really worked were primative hot-air balloons. Hot air balloons had been known for centuries; they were toys and novelties. Cute little fun displays to be seen at garden parties, a toy for the children to marvel at and something for older people to ponder: “What if…?”

The first unmanned hot-air balloons were introduced into the world centuries ago. Early experimenters realised two things about the air which we breathe: Cold air descends. Hot air rises. By this logic, if you put hot air (produced by a continuous heat-source, say, a candle) inside a sealed compartment (like a paper bag), then the hot air would cause the bag to rise, once it had been filled up enough. This proved to be the case, and the hot air balloon was invented.

The idea of travelling by hot air balloon took a while to ehm…get off the ground, though. It wasn’t until the early 18th century that the first experiements by European scientists and inventors were begun. The big problem confronting these early experimenters was weight! For this fancy-schmancy ‘hot air balloon’ gizmo to actually lift anything of value off the ground, it would need a massive envelope (the big ‘balloon’ part) and it would need even more hot air! It was all these scary weight-concerns that kept mankind grounded for so long. For a balloon flight to be successful, weight had to be kept to an absolute minimum!

It wasn’t until November 21, 1783 that the world’s first manned balloon-flight happened. The two lucky fellows in the basket on this historic day were Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d’Arlandes, a physics teacher and a soldier, respectively. The balloon being flown was a creation of the famous Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne. One likely reason why it took so long for man to take to the skies in hot air balloons was because of how long these things took to make! Apart from the exhausting testing that the Montgolfier brothers carried out on their balloons, there is also the physical size of the balloons themselve to consider. The historic balloon which took de Rozier and d’Arlandes into the air on that day in November, 1783 was absolutely massive! Here are the technical specifications of that famous balloon, as translated from the original French document:

Height of Globe: 22.7m (75ft).
Weight of Globe: 780kg (1,700lbs).
Diameter: 14.9m (49ft).
Lifting capacity: Max approx 830kg (1,800lbs).
Volume of Globe: 2,000 cubic meters (73,000 cubic feet).
Gallery (a doughnut-shaped basket attached to the envelope): 1m wide (3ft).

Needless to say, getting such a massive balloon into the air was not easy, but when it happened, history was well and truly written and made. The Montgolfier brothers’ success was so amazing that King Louis XVI elevated the entire Montgolfier family to the French nobility as a reward! If the Montgolfiers had known that the French Revolution was just a few years away, they might have decided to take the second prize of a two-door, 4hp carriage with guilded windowframes instead…


The hot air balloon created by the Montgolfier brothers

The Hot Air Balloon was now here to stay, and from the late 18th century until the early 20th century, it dominated flight around the world. Hot air balloons were popular attractions at public events, they were used as observation-posts during warfare and for the first time in history, man could fly over the land he owned and see everything from a bird’s eye view.

Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines

Although the hot air balloon allowed mankind its first proper view down on the world, it did have one major drawback – Hot air balloons were slow, hard to navigate and dangerous to fly. They could only move where the wind blew and could only move as fast as the wind allowed. This was deemed unsatisfactory, by some, and it was decided that what mankind really needed was a flying machine that could be completely controlled by man – A machine that could take flight, stay in the air, go where the pilot wanted it to, and land when and where he wanted it to land.

Like the balloon before it, the aeroplane was slow to take off. As Betty Boop says in one of her cartoons, “It was called insane by ‘most every man!”…and it was! The idea of a heavier-than-air flying machine was proposterous! How could such a thing ever work?

At the turn of the last century, mankind was only just beginning to understand aerodynamics, or how airflow affects moving objects. Chief among this group of people who were studying aerodynamics was a pair of brothers named Wilbur and Orville.

Orville and Wilbur Wright, (born 1871 and 1867, respectively) are the two men credited with inventing the world’s first controllable airplane, and it took some doing, too. And it’s proof that you don’t have to have a college education to be a genius…neither of the Wright Brothers attended university!

The Wright Brothers initially led very different lives. In 1885, Wilbur was hit in the face by accident during a game of hockey. There was no significant damage done (although he did lose a few teeth), but the shock of the blow did make him more introverted than he used to be. He spent most of his time at home, reading and looking after Susan Wright, the Wright Brothers’ mother who was by this time, dying of tuberculosis (she did eventually pass away in 1889).

Orville Wright worked as a printer after dropping out of highschool. Wilbur, getting rather bored with sticking around at home all the time, joined his brother in business, and the two boys worked together as editor and publisher respectively, of various small-town newspapers.

In the 1880s, a new machine was invented. It was light, fast, easy to ride and safer to operate than its predecessors, allowing the rider to balance on its frame more easily and control its speed and movement more comfortably.

The bicycle had been introduced to the world.

Wanting to make as much money as they could, the Wrights packed up their printing press and jumped onto the cycling craze, opening a bicycle repair and manufacture-shop in the 1890s. Throughout the 1890s, flight pioneers were constantly making the headlines, with newer, ‘better’ flying machines. All this talk of flying got the brothers thinking. Wilbur was the one who really got interested in flying, and he set about trying to make a flying machine. Orville joined in later, once Wilbur’s work was showing a sufficient degree of promise.

The Wright brothers started out small, practicing their flying first with kites and then with gliders before attempting anything that we’d recognise today as a conventional airplane. Wilbur studied the movements of birds to try and discover the secret ingredient to Lift, the necessary component of flight to compensate for gravity. The Wrights theorised that it was the gliding motion of birds and the movement of air over their wings that allowed them to fly like they did, rather than the actual flapping motion which some inventors had tried for years to reproduce.

The brothers made a breakthrough when they discovered wing-warping, that is, bending or angling a pair of wings to create the correct kind of airflow to provide lift for the aircraft as well as giving it the ability to turn, rise and fall through the air. It was easy enough to bend a wing – just make it out of something light and flexible. The problem was how to control wing-warping. Left to their own devices, early wings would warp of their own accord, depending on wind-conditions. By attaching ropes and pulleys to the edges of their wings, the Wright brothers were able to pull on the cables and affect wing-warp themselves, giving them for the first time, an aspect of control over their aircraft!

Throughout the early 1900s, the Wright Brothers experimented with gliders to give them an idea of how wings and angling these wings affected flight and lift. To aid them with this, they built one of the world’s first wind-tunnels! With wind on demand, the boys were able to test their flyers more and more often and were able to record data more effectively.

Powered Flight

The dream of mankind was to have powered, controlled flight. By the early 1900s, the Wrights were already working on the “control” part, but they still needed to address the issue of power. They knew from their experiements that any power-source onboard an airplane would have to be as light as possible. Fortunately, their experience working on bicycles meant that the Wright Brothers already had some grounding in light and powerful machines.

The world’s first airplane, Wright Flyer I, took to the air in 1903. Using a custom-made internal-combustion engine created in their own bicycle-shop (after no established engine-manufacturers of the time were able to make one small, light and powerful enough for their needs) and propellers made of wood, tested relentlessly in their wind-tunnel, the Wright brothers were ready to fly.

For obvious reasons, this milestone was fraught with danger. Steering a glider, launching a glider and landing a glider was relatively safe – there were no moving parts. But with their new airplane, the boys had to be careful of the rotating propellers, which were literally revolutionary at the time, since nobody had yet figured out how an airplane’s propeller actually worked!

The historic first flight took place on the 17th of December, 1903.

Actually, more than one flight took place on the 17th of December, 1903, on the beaches near Kittyhawk, South Carolina. Four flights in total were conducted. A number of people came out to witness this historic event: Adam Etheridge, Will Dough, W. C. Brinkley, Johnny Moore, a local lad who was on the scene at the time, and John T. Daniels, a member of a nearby lifesaving station.

Of the four flights taken, the first, third and fourth were photographed. The famous “First Flight” photograph (With Orville at the controls and Wilbur jogging alongside) was taken by John T. Daniels, the lifesaver, and a man who had never operated a camera before (or since!). Daniels had been given instructions by Orville to take the shot when he saw the machine move in front of the camera. Daniels, too excited by what was going on around him, nearly forgot to take the photograph! At the last minute, he tripped the shutter and history was made…

The Airplane Takes Off

If the Wright Brothers thought that their newfangled “flying machine” (Oh what an absurd notion!) was ever going to be a wonderful, amazing, popular, attention-grabbing, imagination-stimulating, sought-after and life-changing machine!…They were wrong.

In fact they were so wrong they probably wondered why the hell they started in the first place. The truth was that very few people were actually interested in their new flying-machine. It didn’t make the headlines that they’d expected it to (probably because so many other flying-machines had done so, and they’d all failed!) and the military was not in the least bit interested. The planes were too light, too flimsy, too dangerous to fly. What possible military application could they have?

The Rise of the Airplane

Just like early anythings, planes were not seen as having much application in the world of the time. Cars were slow, tempermental things, new on the scene, expensive and prone to breakdowns. Similarly, planes were seen as expensive, rich, playboy toys which could never have any practical application in the real world. This changed during the years of the First World War when armies soon discovered the advantages of having an aerial wing which could fly over battlefields, bombing and strafing the enemy, which could take photographs and which could report on enemy troops and movements. By 1918, the airplane had proven itself as a practical and important machine in warfare.

If the 1900s were the experimental stages of airplane-operation, then the 1910s and the 1920s became the era of aircraft endurance-testing. All kinds of famous airplane-related events took place in the 1910s and 1920s, many of which are still fondly remembered today. Here’s a list of them:

1912 – April 16th. Harriet Quimby is the first woman to fly across the English Channel (Dover-Calais, in 59 minutes). Unfortunately, her moment in the sun and her chances of making the front pages were dashed when a little-known watercraft called the R.M.S. Titanic sank in the Atlantic Ocean the night before…

1927 – May 20-21. Charles Lindbergh flies the Spirit of St. Louis from New York City to Paris, France, in the world’s first solo nonstop crossing of the Atlantic Ocean.

1928 – 31st May-9th June. Sir Charles Kingsford Smith & Co make the first crossing of the Pacific Ocean in a three-leg journey from California, USA, to Hawaii, Hawaii to Fiji, Fiji to Brisbane, in Australia.

The 1920s also saw the founding of several famous commercial airline companies. United Airlines is founded in 1926 as Boeing Air Transport. The famous Australian airline company Quantas is founded in 1920. The German airline company Lufthansa is founded in 1926. Pan Am, the American airline is founded as Pan-American Airways in 1927.

Luxury Travel

From the second half of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century, luxury long-distance travel was to be had in only one way. That one way was in an amazingly grand and luxurious ocean-liner, which would transport you across vast stretches of water from England to America, America to Australia, Australia to Asia, Asia to Europe and so-on. The largely experimental status of aircraft in the early 20th century meant that the ocean-liner trade was still going strong well into the 1950s, but things were all about to change.

The 1920s showed everyone that airplanes, just like steamships, could safely travel amazing distances, and what’s more, they could do it in significantly more comfort and at faster speeds! This led to the 1930s boom of the airline industry.

Sometimes we like to kid ourselves that airline travel today is really luxurious…little personal TV screens, computer-games, telephone and internet access, luxurious onboard dining and crayons and those cheap, crappy plastic model-airplanes for the kiddies are all the luxury that we need.

In the 1930s, though, there was a whole new kind of luxury…the airship!

The airship was like a hybrid between the airplane and the hot air balloon. Invented in the 1900s, the airship had its golden age from the 1910s-1930s. Less noisy, larger and capable of carrying more passengers than early conventional, fixed-wing airplanes, the airship became the way to travel in style, comfort and most importantly…speed, in the early 1900s. A number of countries operated airship lines, from the United Kingdom, the United States and most notably of all…Germany.

Although large and amazing, airships were dangerous machines. The hydrogen gas which inflated the huge envelopes of many airships was highly explosive and extensive precautions were taken to prevent fires – in Germany, for example, you couldn’t take your camera or your cigarette-lighter onboard an airship – They were confiscated by the crew and locked in a special cargo-area, to be returned by the crew when the ship had reached its destination. The sparking of a cigarette-lighter or the burning flash from early, magnesium flash-bulb cameras was seen as a fire-hazard.

Due to their large size, airships could be difficult to control in bad weather. When the weather was fine, flying in an airship was an exciting and wonderful experience, but when there was a storm, heavy rains or lightning around, the experience could become quite frightening. Winds could rip at the cloth covering of the airship’s enevelope, dangerous static-electric charges could build up on the airship’s frame (although this could also create a spectacular display of ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ to dazzle and awe passengers!) and heavy winds and rain could affect handling and manuverablity. The airship USS Akron crashed in April of 1933 due to flying in a storm after spending only 18 months in civilian service. Of the 76 passengers and crew onboard, only three people survived and were picked up by US. Coastguard watercraft after the crash.

The most famous airship crash is, of course, that of the Hindenburg, which spectacularly erupted into flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey in early 1937 and crashed and burned to the ground in a matter of seconds! Of the 97 passengers and crew onboard, roughly one third (36 people) of them died, including one member of the ground-staff. Destroyed after just over a year in service, the Hindenburg’s demise saw the end of grand airship travel, which was written off as just being far too dangerous.


The Hindenburg Crash. The structure on the right is the airship mooring-tower

To understand why the public was so drawn to airships, these flying death-traps, one has to see what they were really like and what they meant to people at the time. Airplanes are faster, but they’re smaller, more cramped, more uncomfortable.

The interiors of German commercial airships that flew through the air during the 1920s and 30s were bright, modern, luxurious, airy and with plenty of space to move around and stretch your legs. Passengers even slept in their own cabins, instead of trying to sleep strapped into their chairs like we have to do these days. Add to this the fact that travelling by airship was so much faster than travelling by…ship-ship. Steaming from England to America took at least five days using the fastest and most modern ocean-liners in the 1930s. Flying from Germany to America by airship in the 1930s took two or at a stretch, three days. For speed and convenience, the airship certainly won out here.


A period airship advertisement from the 1930s boasting a two-day crossing from America to Europe, which was three times faster than a similar crossing by ocean-liner

The risks of airship travel and the spectacular crashes that involved airships soon spelt an end to their aerial dominance, though. They were seen as just being far too risky a thing to use. Why speed up your trip by a few days when you risked crashing, falling from the sky and being killed when you could cross the ocean in a week by ship? And even if the ship was to sink, you could still get into a lifeboat and radio for help! By the late 1930s, the glory days of the airship were over.

Postwar Boom

The 1950s saw many things – the emergence of the Cold War, television, rock and roll and do-wop music. But it also saw the downfall of many things, such as the gradual dying-out of the transatlantic passenger-ship industry and the end of the airship industry. But from the ashes of the airship industry, a new form of transport was to emerge…

…the modern airliner.

Capable of transporting more people to more places with more speed, airliners were the thing of the future. Although the airliner of today probably shares several characteristics with the airliners of the past, early airliners had various perks such as the ability to smoke onboard planes (thank god that’s over with!) and being served meals with real cutlery, chinaware and glassware (something that doesn’t happen today!) and being able to listen to live piano-music! Yes, believe it or not, but early airliners used to have (specially made) pianos onboard them, usually in First Class, where passengers could listen to live music!


An airliner’s piano-bar in the 1960s

Continued safety-concerns and space-restrictions mean that spaces reserved for piano-bars, cocktail lounges, drinks bars and other public-seating areas on airplanes where passengers could mingle and chat, are now a thing of the past, leaving us with nothing but tantilising images of what is, what was, and what might have been…