The F&CH Cable Railway, which opened in 1887, was designed and built by civil engineer Howard C. Holmes (1852-1921). The line is an amalgamation of the Powell Street Railway and the Park and Cliff House Railway. It was one of the most complicated cable-car systems to run from a single station and had been under construction two years prior to its opening.
Andrew Hallidie, a wire rope manufacturer, devised the first operating cable car in the United States in 1873, which ran on Clay Street hill.
Mechanical
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Image Credit:
Courtesy Wikipedia/Caroline Culler (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Image Caption:
Ferries & Cliffhouse Cable Railway Power House
Era_date_from:
1887
1973
At a time when steam power was finding its first uses in America, Philadelphia opened two steam pumping stations, January 1801, to lift water from the Schuylkill River and distribute it through the city's wooden pipes and mains. By 1811 a new water power works was begun on the river near Morris Hill, and the Fairmount Water Works opened September 7, 1815. These water works represented the first large-scale application of steam pumping to water service in the country.
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Image Credit:
Public Domain (National Park Service)
Image Caption:
Fairmount Waterworks, East bank of Schuylkill River, Aquarium Drive, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, PA View looking northeast at waterworks from across Schuylkill River. Photo taken December, 1984.
1977
Era_date_from: 1815
This outboard motor, designed and built by Ole Evinrude (1877-1934) at the Evinrude Motor Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was quickly accepted by the boating public of the United States. Bess Evinrude called the prototype a "coffee grinder," but it moved a boat through water better than the huge steam- or foot-driven motors available in 1907. She encouraged him to build and sell ten, then twenty, soon resulting in the redirection of their automotive equipment business to outboard motors.
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Image Credit:
Courtesy Flickr/Mr. T in DC (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Image Caption:
Evinrude Outboard Motor
Era_date_from:
1909
1981
The Advanced Engine Test Facility was built in 1964, three years after President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to world leadership in aeronautical science. Conceived and designed by Wernher von Braun, the first director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, this facility was used to perform static tests on the booster of the Saturn V rocket, which launched Apollo 11 to the moon on July 16, 1969.
The stand has four concrete legs, each four feet thick and rising 144 feet to a steel superstructure supporting a 200-ton crane.
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Image Credit:
Courtesy ASME
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Saturn V Rocket being lifted onto the A-2 Test Stand at NASA's John C. Stennis Space Center
Era_date_from:
1964
1993
Late in life, the renowned structural engineer Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923) embarked on aeronautical research. Reliable data and repeatable research methods were rare in the early 1900s, but Eiffel brought an engineer's discipline to the field. In the process, he produced the most accurate aeronautical data of the time, confirmed a long-held theory about fluid flow that had never been unequivocally proven, and established a laboratory that became a model for future practice.
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Image Credit:
Image Caption:
Floor plan of Eiffel's 1912 laboratory at Auteuil, Paris, with two open-return wind tunnels
Era_date_from:
1903, 1912
2005
Edison's simple and unprecedented instrument allowed for the first time the permanent recording and reproduction of sound, especially the human voice. On December 6, 1877, Edison put tinfoil around the cylinder, turned the handle of the shaft and, shouting into one of the diaphragms, recorded a verse of Mary Had a Little Lamb "almost perfectly." From this machine evolved the phonographs and record industries of the world.
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Image Credit:
Image Caption:
Edison with his early phonograph
Era_date_from:
1877
1981
This dynamo, connected directly to a high-speed steam engine, was one of six that produced direct current at Thomas A. Edison's electric power station at 257 Pearl Street in New York City. The Pearl Street Station was the prototype for central station power generation. Edison set out in 1878 to provide an electrical distribution system to bring lighting into the home: His first filament lamp lit on October 21, 1879. With the help of Frances Upton and C.L. Clarke, Edison built his engine-driven dynamo for the 1881 Paris Electrical Exposition.
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Image Credit:
Image Caption:
Edison jumbo dynamo
Era_date_from:
1882
1980
Operated by the Philadelphia Electric Company (PECO), now known as Exelon Corp., Eddystone Station Unit #1 is a 325 MW pulverized-coal-fired plant that pushed the technology of steam-electric generating plants. When built in 1960, engineers sought to make a more efficient plant using higher temperatures and pressures and larger machines. Previous experience at Philo 6 (Zanesville, Ohio, 1957) had demonstrated supercritical steam plants would work, so engineers pushed beyond that frontier to even larger machines and efficiencies.
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Image Credit:
Image Caption:
Eddystone Station
Era_date_from:
1960
2003
Designed by Sam Diescher, son-in-law of the Monongahela's designer John Endres, the Duquesne Incline opened May 20, 1877, as the second of seventeen built and operated in the Pittsburgh area. It has operated with only minor interruptions for the last one hundred years. A preservation group from Duquesne Heights and Mount Washington interceded in 1962 to refurbish this incline to working order. Like the Monongahela, the Duquesne was steam powered and then converted to electric and updated with modern safety devices.
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Image Credit:
Original Image: Courtesy Flickr/Nogwater (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Image Caption:
Duquesne Incline
Era_date_from:
1877
1977
The drilling of this oil well marks the modern phase of the petroleum industry. A series of revolutionary technological changes, unforeseen even by the most prophetic, followed. Drake demonstrated practical oil recovery by applying salt-well drilling techniques, including the use of the derrick, and invented the modern method of driving iron pipe.
While excavation for oil dates back to the 1500s in this area, its uses were not explored until the 1800s. It was first sold as a curative potion and then developed into a illuminant by the 1850s.
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Image Credit:
Courtesy Wikipedia/Zamoose (CC BY-SA 2.5)
Image Caption:
Drake Oil Well
Era_date_from:
1859
1979
Innovations
