Did you know that the first commercial jet airline service began in 1957, fifty years ago? Before that, airliners had propellers. During the prop days, air travel was an expensive luxury reserved for the rich, and although planes were faster than trains or cars, a flying trip was still an adventure that could take a long time.
The most popular passenger plane during the 1940s and early 1950s was the DC-3. A trip from New York to Los Angeles on one of those cost $1,000 ($7,500 in today’s dollars) and took all day, including at least three stops for fuel.
I love old planes and the DC-3 is my favorite. Douglas Aviation also made a military version during WWII called the C-47 cargo plane. I took these pictures at the annual Andrews Air Force Base air show a few weeks ago. This particular DC-3 is a flying museum based at the Carolina Aviation Museum.
The plane at the end of Casablanca is also a DC-3.
We take jet travel for granted now. NY to LA takes about 6 hours with no stops, and tickets can cost as little as $400.
I knew that commercial jet travel began in my lifetime, but I didn’t realize it was 1957 till I saw that detail on the History Channel recently. That got me to thinking about other things that began or ended in the lifetime of fifty-somethings. Here are a few examples that might surprise you.
- Two of our fifty states became states less than fifty years ago, Alaska in January, 1959 and Hawaii in August, 1959.
- Color television wasn’t available on a regular basis till 1961 (Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color) and wasn’t full time till 1966 (on NBC, later on the other networks).
- Black and white children usually went to separate schools until fifty years ago. Racial segregation in public schools was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1954, although the practice continued in many states for many more years.
- Seatbelts became standard equipment in some cars in 1964. They weren’t even offered as optional equipment till fifty-one years ago.
- Self-service gas stations started to take off in the 1970s. Before that, one or two men (yes, it was always men) would pump the gas, check the oil and clean the windows. By the way, self-serve stations are not allowed New Jersey and Oregon. Those laws were passed more than fifty years ago.
- Telephones with buttons were first available to the public in 1962. Before that, phones used a rotary dial. In case young readers have never seen such a thing, here is a picture of one. (Now you know where your parents get the phrase “dialing a number”.
Commercial computers are also a product of our lifetime. The first UNIVAC computer made its debut 56 years ago and only 48 of them were made between 1951 and 1958. The average model was 25 feet by 50 feet in length and weighed 16,000 pounds. There are no typos in that sentence. And this is a picture of one:
It did 1,000 calculations per second; that’s less computing power than a musical Hallmark card. The UNIVAC could store enough characters to spell out 1,000 words.
The laptop I’m using to write this post is less than 12 inches by 12 inches and weighs about 6 pounds. It can store several thousand songs.
At the dawn of the commercial jet age fifty years ago, we were certain that passenger travel to the Moon would be a reality by now. That hasn’t happened, but we can keep dreaming. Many of the events and inventions that fifty-somethings have seen were made possible by dreamers who dreamed big. My dream is that forty, thirty and twenty-somethings continue some of these dreams.
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By the way, this is my 150th post.
2 comments:
Call me crazy, but I actually miss the feel of dialing a phone (we had that phone in black). *sigh*
I suppose that every generation has these kinds of things. My grandfather told me about the first time that he saw a car and how he saw a teeeeeeny black and white television on display (in a post office in Berlin) that was transmitting from a whole 20 miles away. This was pre-WWII. It's amazing what he saw in his lifetime.
We had a black dial phone too. It sat on a little shelf in the hallway and we stood there to have a conversation. Fortunately there was enough wire on the phone that I could stretch it into my room to talk to my high school girlfriend in private. My parents didn't replace that phone till the 1990s when they bought a cordless model.
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