October 7, 2019 • 29 mins
Since the possibility of air travel became a reality, many entrepreneurs were trying to figure out a way to make flight into a business. This first of two parts covers those early efforts, and the growth of the airline industry up to WWII.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracey V. Wilson. Okay, okay.
So this is one of those episodes that I thought
would be, oh, this will be a pretty quick one
to do when I'm traveling and really busy, and then
(00:23):
it ballooned and became two episodes. Uh so it'll be
today in the next episode that we're going to talk
about how commercial aviation developed in the twentieth century. And
it's one of those things that, as I said, it
just kept growing and growing as I worked on it,
because there's a lot of innovation and regulation and tragedy
that have all been part of shaping this relatively young industry.
(00:44):
And even at two episodes, I would still only call
it a brief history of commercial aviation. I feel like
many of the things that come up over the course
of these two episodes are things that we could do
entire episodes on, and in some cases even series on.
And in the interest of expectations aagement, while we are
going to talk about some things that happened on an
international level, I'm going ahead entitling this commercial aviation in
(01:07):
the US, because we do talk a lot more about
US companies and regulation than anything else. And um, speaking
of regulation, this is only going to run up to
the year that the US de regulated the airline industry
in the late seventies. There's a whole lot more that
happens after that, um, But we're going up to that
because to me, that's sort of like the what I
(01:27):
would categorize as the early aviation industry, even though it
spans seventy years UM. And today in Part one, we
are just going to go up to and a little
into World War two. So buckle up, because here we go. Yeah. So,
since the early nine hundreds, when the possibility of air
travel became a reality at all, many entrepreneurs, including Orville
(01:49):
and Wilbur Wright, we're trying to figure out how to
make flight into a business. We've discussed a lot of
other contenders who come up when we're talking about who
gets the true credit the invention of flight. But apart
from that question, the rights put a lot of hustle
into monetizing this new mode of travel. Specifically, they started
(02:09):
talking to the U S Army about possible applications of
their new technology, although they had to do a lot
of convincing to get the Army on board with that. Yeah,
and they I mean they were talking to other people
in other countries as well, but uh, they were really
trying to sell to the Army. And a Navy man
named Charles Furnace had first seen the Rights fly in
(02:30):
nineteen o four when he was on leave for the holidays,
and from that point he became a huge fan, and
after years of following their work, he helped the Rights
by assisting Charles Taylor, who was their mechanic, so he
became their employee officially in the spring of nineteen o eight,
when they desperately needed help rebuilding their North Carolina camp
to prepare for new test flights. They had been away
(02:51):
from it for some time, and when they came back,
thinking that they would do new test flights in prep
for this Army stuff, they're like, oh, this camp is
a mess now, and actually took a lot more effort
to get it back up to the point that they
could work from there than they had anticipated. At that point,
the Rights had cut a deal with the U. S.
Army to build them an airplane and other interested parties had,
like the Army, suggested that they would be willing to
(03:13):
buy if the rights could build a plane that had
the capability to carry a passenger as well as meet
a series of maneuvering and speed requirements. And on the
morning of May fourteenth, eight Wilbur Wright piloted the first
known passenger flight, and he took that man, Charles Furnace,
on a beach flight that lasted less than half a minute,
as a way of thanking Charlie for his help and
(03:34):
support over the years, because even before they hired him,
he would always pitch in when they needed a hand.
And later that day Charlie was once again a passenger
in a much longer two mile flight, this time with
Orville right as the pilot. So eight became a milestone
year in commercial aviation, but it also marked a serious
tragedy in the effort to turn air flight into a business.
(03:56):
On September seventeenth of that year, Orville carried an Army
lieutenant named Thomas Selfridge in a demonstration flight at Fort Meyer, Virginia.
Selfridge was really knowledgeable about aviation. He was a member
of the Aerial Experiment Association and had designed his own airplane.
He was also on the five man committee that the
Army had established to evaluate the White Brothers efforts and
(04:18):
meeting the requirements that were outlined in their contract. And
during the test, one of the plane's propellers had a problem.
It's wooden blade split. An Orville right cut the engine,
which had started shaking very violently, and he attempted to
glide the plane into a landing, but a rear rudder
shifted position and the plane was pretty abruptly tipped nose down.
The flight ended in a very hard crash landing in
(04:39):
which Selfridge's skull was fractured. Selfridge died later that day
and was the first fatality in the commercial aviation business.
Orville Wright broke his leg in several ribs, but he
did recover over time. The Army allowed the Rights some
time to recover and rebuild, and they ran some tests
to determine what had caused the failure in the fort
Meyer test and to try to address it. After another
(05:02):
series of demonstration flights in nineteen o nine, they were
awarded a government contract and they adopted this new technology.
The U. S. Army required their pilots to wear helmets
because of Selfridge's death, the Right brothers continued to diversify
their business strategy to counter the many other entrepreneurs who
wanted to get into aviation. They were definitely not the
(05:22):
only people trying to make planes for money, and one
of the ways that they did so was to open
the first flying school to train commercial pilots in and
they did that just outside of Montgomery, Alabama. The pilots
trained and the Alabama School were taught so that they
could fly for the Rights traveling exhibitions try to drum
up sales, and then they in turn were expected to
(05:43):
be able to teach the buyers how to fly their
new aircraft. The location was chosen because of the warm
weather of the South, offered a longer period each year
to have flight training, and there was a lot of
open flat farmland. Despite the community in this area doing
everything possible to welcome the Rights and their school, including
clearing the land for them and building them a hangar,
(06:06):
the school only operated for a short time and it
only had one graduate, Walter Brooke Ins. A series of
plane malfunctions and the need to start their next tour
led the Rights to leave the Montgomery area after only
a couple of months, and they had left behind Brooke
Ins and some other people to sort of keep it going,
but it really wasn't happening. The farmland that had been
(06:26):
set up for the rights eventually became a repair depot
during World War One, and then it evolved over time
to become Maxwell Air Force Base. In nineteen eleven, the
Burgess Company became the first licensed manufacturer of aircraft. They
operated out of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Sterling Burgess, who owned the company,
had shifted his interest to aviation after running a successful shipyard.
(06:48):
He got to deal with the Rights to build planes
with their patented technology, and they introduced an aircraft called
the Moth that was very similar to the Rights Model B.
During the years that Burgess was in business, they got
fairly heated between Sterling Burgess and the Rights as disputes
erupted over royalties and shipping schedules. But the Rights still
recognized that Burgess was really a worthwhile business partner, and
(07:11):
even as Burgess in the Rights also competed in various
competitions to advance the aviation field, they continued this partnership.
The Burgess Company was awarded a military contract during World
War One, but it took a significant effort to meet
the demands of the deal. Just as the war was
coming to a close. On November seven, nineteen eighteen, Burgess
Plant Number two, which at that point was the main
(07:33):
manufacturing facility, was destroyed by fire. This spelled the end
of the company. Outstanding orders were completed by the number
one facility. The five hundred employees of the company were
giving their last paycheck, and then the company was shuttered.
And coming up, we'll talk about the first commercial airline
to open, But first we're gonna pause for a little
sponsor break. While there were a number of flights being
(08:04):
made for money in the nineteen teens, the first actual
airline didn't launch until nineteen fourteen. January one of that
year marks the first time that an actual airline. The St.
Petersburg Tampa Airboat Line opened its doors as a business
with a regular route schedule, and the route was just
as the airline's name advertised. It ran passengers from St. Petersburg,
(08:24):
Florida to Tampa, Florida by going across the bay, and
this flight took less than thirty minutes. That was a
significant improvement over the two hours of steamboat would take
to make the same twenty one mile, it's about thirty
four kilometers run. Of course, going or driving around the
bay would have been even longer than that. The mayor
of St. Petersburg, Abraham C. Field, was the airline's first customer,
(08:46):
and he boarded a so called flying boat designed by
a St. Louis entrepreneur named Thomas bin Wa. Bill had
purchased his ticket by auction. A lot of people wanted
to be the first passenger, and he ended up paying
four hundred dollars or it. It wasn't a perfect flight.
Some minor engine trouble made them make a brief water
landing and then restart before they made it as Tampa,
(09:07):
but this was still considered a success. The St. Petersburg
Tampa Airboat Line did not have longevity. It only ran
for four months because as the winter moved into spring,
most of the wealthy people in the area snowbirds made
their way back north, and then there just wasn't enough
interest or money to keep it going. But in those
four months, the airline made two flights a day, six
(09:28):
days a week, at a ticket price of five dollars. Again,
that four hundred dollar one was an auction to be
first uh and then they had another five dollar charge
that they would make per hundred pounds of freight if
they were carrying freight. Pilot Tony Janis flew a total
of twelve hundred five passengers in that short time that
the airline was in operation. One of the legacies of
this St. Pete Tampa line is an award that was
(09:50):
established in nineteen sixty four by the Tampa and St.
Petersburg Chambers of Commerce, The Tony Janis Award, issued by
the Tony Janis Distinguished Aviation Society. He continues on to
this day and recognizes quote extraordinary accomplishments in the field
of commercial aviation. One of the major steps in the
progression of commercial aviation was the establishment of the U.
(10:10):
S National Airmail Service in August of nine eighteen, and
this new influx of money that it brought into the
aviation industry bolstered that new in the completely burgeoning industry
at a time when passenger fairs were just a few
over non existent. They were there were some people interested
in paying to fly, but they really were not enough
(10:31):
to sustain this. Carrying mail offered a real ongoing business
that provided as much as of all revenue for some companies.
Early airmail pilots were operating on what was called cams
contract airmail routes. They were mapped out by the Post
Office Department. Before the establishment of an official airmail service,
(10:51):
the Post Office was using military aircraft and pilots on
its airmail service roots. They ran between New York, Philadelphia
and Washington, d c. That transition from military craft and
pilots to the Post Office Department managing things on their
own was enabled in part by Army Captain Benjamin Lipstner,
who resigned his commission to become the air Mail services
(11:13):
first Superintendent in nine nine. The oldest carrier in the
world that has retained its original name launched. That carrier
is KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. It merged with Air France
in two thousand four, but it still operates under its
original name, and the following year began offering flights between
Amsterdam and London, a route that it still offers almost
(11:34):
a hundred years later. The first year of KLEM illustrates
what we were saying a moment ago about passengers versus
cargo as the economic drivers of early commercial aviation. The
company's flights transported three d forty five passengers in year
one and twenty five thousand kilos of mail and cargo. Today,
a single flight routinely carries almost as much cargo at
(11:56):
about twenty thousand kilos, and even more passengers, topping out
a more than four hundred. Within a decade caleum Royal
Dutch Airlines was traveling a regular route to Indonesia, which
was still a Dutch colony at that time. By the
mid nineteen forties, they were running flights to Mexico and
New York. The late nineteen teens and early nineteen twenties
was when commercial airports started opening around the globe. London's
(12:19):
Hounslow Heath Aerodrome opened as a commercial airport in nineteen nineteen,
though it had been an airfield used by the Royal
Flying Corps for almost a decade before it became a
commercial entity. Australia Sydney Airport and Minneapolis St. Paul International
Airport both opened in nineteen twenty. East Prussia got a
dedicated commercial airport in nineteen twenty two at Flugavin de Voo.
(12:42):
The first transcontinental NonStop flight took place in nineteen twenty three.
Uh Fokker T two aircraft piloted by two US Army
Air Service officers who were Lieutenant John A. McCready and
Lieutenant Oakley G. Kelly, made this journey from Roosevelt Field,
Long Island to Rockwell Field and Sandy Ago, California. They
did that over the course of twenty seven hours. Their
(13:04):
average speed was yeah, I always uh. That's always a
good reminder, right. Air flight was not speedy. Speedy is today.
On February the Contract Airmail Act, also known as the
Kelly Act, was passed into law in the US and
this essentially let the US Postal Service delegate their work
(13:25):
managing routes, pilots, etcetera. Two contracted airlines and the first
five contracts went to Colonial Air Transportation, National Air Transport,
Robertson Aircraft Corporation, Western Air Express, and Varney Airlines. The
U s Air Mail Service still had its own dedicated
pilots and aircraft. They were running mail along the Transcontinental
(13:47):
Flyway while the contracted airlines were handling shorter regional routes
that changed over a fairly short period of time, though
and by commercial airlines were handling all of the mail.
By the end of the almost four dozen airlines had
postal service contracts. Once again, the airmail business helped move
the industry forward. Prior to the Airmail Act, of a
(14:10):
lot of flight was still really precarious and kind of improvisational.
Pilots flew a lot closer to the ground between two
hundred and five hundred feet that's between sixty one and
a hundred fifty two. They did this because they were
navigating from visual queues below along with their compasses. There
was not a lot else to the navigation process. But
(14:31):
as air mail made the industry financially sustainable, it also
opened the doors for companies to start offering regular commercial
passenger services with established, consistent schedules. It also was right
on the heels of the Airmail Act that the first
flight touchdown at Candler Field outside of Atlanta in n
on a plot of land that had once been a racetrack.
(14:52):
Handler Field would of course eventually become one of the
busiest airports in the world, and somewhere I spend a
shocking amount of time Heartsfield Jackson International Airport. I spend
less time than you, but I always marvel at how
gigantic it is. As these changes were taking place in
the world of airmail. President Calvin Coolidge signed the Air
Commerce Act of nine into law. This placed a lot
(15:14):
of responsibility regarding the aviation industry in the United States
in the hands of the Secretary of Commerce. The Air
Commerce Act gave the Secretary of Commerce the authorization to
license pilots and aircraft, and to establish and define air
roots and allocate resources to develop navigation aids. That also
gave the Secretary of Commerce the responsibility of investigating aviation accidents.
(15:38):
The international field of commercial airlines continued to grow as well.
Deutsch Lufthansa, which is today simply Luftanza, started offering regular
service in Germany in nine. It operated continuously until after
World War Two, when it was shut down with the
defeat of Nazi Germany, and it reformed in nineteen fifties three,
rebuilding the company from the ground up. We're about to
(15:59):
talk about the beginnings of an airline that's much beloved
by nostalgia enthusiasts. But first we will take a break,
and here from one of the sponsors that keeps our
show going. In seven, Pan American Airways, known more commonly
(16:20):
as PanAm, began running mail service between Key West Florida
and Havana, Cuba. PanAm went on to hit a number
of significant milestones in commercial aviation history over the course
of the late twenties and up through the nineteen forties.
PanAm innovated by being the first to run a regular
schedule over water, the first to carry emergency lifesaving equipment,
(16:41):
the first to develop its own air traffic control system,
the first to sell all inclusive international packages in the
first to provide round the world service in a company
called huff dalind Dusters was operating out of Monroe, Louisiana,
as a crop dusting company that was incorporated as a
new organis station called Delta Air Service, named for the
(17:02):
Mississippi Delta, which was central to its business region. Delta
started offering passenger flights in nine nine, with stops in Dallas, Texas, Jackson, Mississippi,
and Shreveport, and Monroe, Louisiana. It expanded to include Tuscaloosa
and Birmingham, Alabama, Meridian, Mississippi, Atlanta, Georgia, and Fort Worth,
Texas within a year, but a lack of a government
(17:24):
airmail contract meant that not enough money was coming in,
and Delta ceased passenger offerings until nineteen thirty four, when
it finally got its airmail contract. That is also the
year that it began operating as Delta air Lines, marks
a significant moment in commercial airline staffing. Ellen Church was
hired that year as the first female flight attendant Boeing
(17:46):
air Transports who hired her. You would know that company
today as United Airlines. Church's story is one that's both
triumphant and frustrating. It sounds a lot like a lot
of the other stories that we have had about women
in avation. She was a very accomplished woman, including being
a nurse and a licensed pilot, But of course airlines
(18:07):
were not hiring women to pilot their aircraft in nineteen
thirty That would not happen until nineteen seventy three, when
Emily Howell Warner was hired at Frontier Airlines. But Ellen
Church was determined to get into the industry one way
or another, and so she just started making her case
to airline executives. She was quoted in the New York
Times as saying, quote, don't you think it would be
(18:28):
good psychology to have women up in the air? How
is a man going to say he is afraid to
fly when a woman is working on the plane. She
also pointed out that nurses would make excellent staffers to
have on board, and suggested that nurses could be the
ones to help the passengers with their luggage and dispensing
with snacks, which was business at the co pilot had
been handling up to that point. It does not surprise
(18:50):
me that anyone suggests that perhaps a nurse would be
a good person to work as a flight attendant, but
the idea that the co pilot was the person who
had been handing out snacks cracked me up a little bit.
Boeing Air Transports leadership was sold enough on this idea
to start a three month test program that involved hiring
eight women, including Ellen Church, to take care of the passengers,
(19:11):
which freed up the co pilots for other duties, and
then when the three months were over, an entire new
career had been established. It was so successful for the
airline that other airlines quickly started their own similar programs,
and even other travel industries like railway companies started hiring
women attendance to offer hospitality to their customers. Of course,
(19:32):
the career of airline stewardess, as it was called for
a very long time was riddled with a lot of
sexist requirements for the women applying for those positions. They
had to have nursing degrees, they had to fall within
a narrow and very low weight range, they had to
be in their early twenties, and they had to be
pretty and single. And if they met those requirements, they
also had to be willing to clean the plane, be
(19:53):
able to manage heavy lifting, and be ready to serve
as first responders in the event of a medical emergency.
I don't think we really get into it on here,
but then there was also a lot of sexism, and
like the standards of dress for flight attendants, and like
the uniforms were made and what was required to be
worn with them. Um, I mean, it's not sexist to
(20:14):
say that you have to have a nursing degree, but
to say that you have to be young, pretty, single,
thin woman is well, and at the time the idea
of a male nurse was pretty unheard of. So contextually, yes,
to say you have to be a nurse means only
women's right, right. The first modern passenger airliner, the Boeing
(20:36):
TO forty seven, was introduced in n three. It included
a lot of new features, including autopilot and d icing equipment.
United Airlines started offering coast to coast flights within the
US with a bowing to forty seven that same year.
The re required seven stops along the way and it
took twenty hours, which is a lot, but that improved
(20:58):
the earlier time of coast to coast strips by more
than seven hours. It's so funny today that it's like, oh,
tame me six hours. Yeah uh. Two years later, Boeing
introduced the three oh seven Strato Liner, which was the
first high altitude commercial airliner, and that was because it
had the first pressurized cabin. It also had a flight
(21:20):
engineer as part of its crew to manage pressurization and
other aspects of the plane's functions, leaving the pilot free
to focus on flying. Five of the ten Strato Liners
that Boeing built became part of the U. S. Army's
transport fleet during World War Two. The first commercial airline
terminal in North America was opened in ninety five, and
that was the Art Deco style Newark Airport Administration Building,
(21:43):
which was dedicated by Amelia Earhart. That airport has been
running since and for eleven years after the commercial terminal opened.
It was the only airport serving the Greater New York area.
That was the case until LaGuardia opened in ninety nine,
and the origin story for a Guardia is based in
New York Mayor Feararello LaGuardia's unwillingness to deplane in Newark
(22:06):
in ninety four, the mayor refused to exit the plane
that had carried him from Pittsburgh to Newark on the
basis that the destination listed on his ticket was New York.
The t w A flight that he was on continued
from Newark to Brooklyn, where it landed in Floyd Bennett Field,
and there the mayor disembarked, along with several reporters he
had arranged to come along for the ride because it
(22:27):
was a publicity stunt. He then held a press conference
to announce that New York needed its own commercial airport
and they were not going to depend on New Jersey anymore.
They wrote ground in Queens for a new airport in
nineteen thirty seven, on a five hundred fifty eight acre
plot of land that had once been an amusement park.
New York City Municipal Airport was opened on October fifteenth,
(22:49):
nineteen thirty nine, and then had a name changed to
New York City Municipal Airport, LaGuardia Field two weeks later,
and then LaGuardia Airport in nineteen forty seven. A lot
of people were like, you should have just called the
Lagortia from the beginning. As New York and New Jersey
were competing for airport dominance in the region, airlines were
expanding their route offerings to progressively wider ranges. In ninety six,
(23:12):
PanAm started offering flights crossing the Pacific Ocean, something that
had taken a great deal of planning the year before.
In ninety five, the company had tasked Captain Edwin Music
with running survey flights to plot the route out, and
that route eventually ran from San Francisco to China, with
stops on islands owned by the US, where PanAm had
established hotels because that trip took sixty hours and it
(23:35):
included four overnight stops along the way. PanAm started its
transatlantic passenger service on thirty nine, when a Boeing B
three four team called Dixie Clipper took twenty two passengers
from New York to Europe. Similar to the Pacific route.
The company had surveyed route across the Northern and the
Southern Atlantic, depending on the final destination and the years
(23:57):
before World War two, PanAm established service to fifty two
countries around the world. In The Civil Aeronautics Act was
signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on June
and this established the Civil Aeronautics Authority, which included the
Civil Aeronautics Board to oversee aircraft and pilot certification, and
the Civil Aeronautics Administration to manage airway development, air traffic control,
(24:20):
and safety programs. World War two really brought a lot
of the commercial airline industry to a halt. We mentioned
already some specific planes that had been commercial airliners, and
they became part of military efforts once the war started.
That really wasn't unusual. Two hundred of the three hundred
sixty airline aircraft that were active in the airline industry
were requisitioned by the military. The Air Transport Command was
(24:44):
established in ninety two and managed the use of commercial
planes to transport materials and people around the world during
the war. In earlier wars, similar things happened with people's
like personal ships also, so it's like the whole idea
was not a totally new no. Uh, non military air
travel essentially stopped as priority was given to war related
(25:06):
travel needs. The Office of Defense Transportation started printing posters
with the text is your trip necessary? Needless travel interferes
with the war effort. Airlines like pan Am that had
already established global roots were especially valuable to the military,
and both airliners and staff were contracted through the Air
Transport Command. During the war, President Roosevelt became the first
(25:29):
US president to fly while serving in office. And that
is where you will end Part one and part two
will look at a stretch of a little over three
decades during which the airline industry went through incredible growth.
And we will also have a special guest at the
end of the show. Yeah, it's like a little bonus
episode at the end of the next one where we
get to have a fabulous person on to check with
(25:50):
longtime friend of the show joining Holly. Yeah. I think
about this stuff a lot, and it's the reason I
wanted to do this episode is because I have been
flying so much this year. Um, and I occasionally ruminate
on like how did we get here to the point
that everything that seems so uh sort of mundane to
us and like part of just part of everyday life.
(26:10):
I gotta go to the airport get on a plane.
But literally a century ago that was like a mind
boggling concept. Yeah. Well, and for a lot of people,
like it still is a totally like not part of
their experience at all. Like when like my family, my
my parents did some flying before I was born because
my dad was an army and like we deployed to Vietnam,
(26:30):
you did it on a plane. Um, But the like,
we never had a family vacation that involved air travel
at all. And I never got on a plane until
I was in college and went to a conference. Um,
and then I was reading a thing before we came
in here. Like something like eight percent of people in
the world have never been on a plane, but only
like twenty of Americans have never been on a plane. Yeah.
(26:54):
I Also my dad was career Air Force. We never
took a plane anywhere for me. Yeah, even if we
were going very far, we always drove it. Um. One
of those reasons we'll talk about a little bit in
Part two. But it was not uh cost effective for
family to fly at all. Commercially, so there are many
(27:14):
barriers for a lot of people. Yeah, we had that,
plus my mother being terrified of flying, which is something
I kind of inherited from her and then had to
deal with as I became an adult whose job required
some air traveled. Yes. Uh, I never was afraid of
flying as a kid. Had a little period where I
became afraid of it after a little scared. Now I'm
over at a file of time. Uh. I have a
(27:37):
little bit of listener mail from our listener Catherine, and
I love it because she sent us a postcar bush.
She put it in an envelope, so I have no um,
none of the smearing that we occasionally get. She writes,
High Tracy and Holly. My name is Catherine and I
started listening to your podcast earlier this summer. I work
on cruise ships as a costumer, and one of my
friends who I work with introduced me. I'm a huge
(27:58):
fan of history as my dad as a history teach
your thank you to your Dan for being an educator,
and she says, and I particularly love your spooky episode.
Since my birthday is Halloween, I look forward to more
spooky episodes of this October Best Catherine, PS, I hope
you enjoyed this postcard. I picked it up while I
was working on a ship that traveled to the Mediterranean,
specifically Malta, my friend Olivia who started me listening, and
(28:19):
I thought you would like it. It's a beautiful picture
of Malta. Thank you so much, Catherine, and also, um,
one cool job too. Happy birthday coming up? It will
not It will only be a couple of weeks away
when this episode airs, So I hope you have a
wonderful October and Halloween birthday season. That sounds fantastic to me. Yeah. Uh.
If you would like to write to us, you can
(28:41):
do so at History Podcast at house to Works dot com.
You can also find us everywhere on social media as
Missed in History and on the Internet as Missed in
History dot com. If you would like to subscribe to
the show, we sure would enjoy that. You can do
that on the I Heart Radio app, at Apple podcast
or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in
(29:04):
History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracey V. Wilson. Okay, okay.
So this is one of those episodes that I thought
would be, oh, this will be a pretty quick one
to do when I'm traveling and really busy, and then
(00:23):
it ballooned and became two episodes. Uh so it'll be
today in the next episode that we're going to talk
about how commercial aviation developed in the twentieth century. And
it's one of those things that, as I said, it
just kept growing and growing as I worked on it,
because there's a lot of innovation and regulation and tragedy
that have all been part of shaping this relatively young industry.
(00:44):
And even at two episodes, I would still only call
it a brief history of commercial aviation. I feel like
many of the things that come up over the course
of these two episodes are things that we could do
entire episodes on, and in some cases even series on.
And in the interest of expectations aagement, while we are
going to talk about some things that happened on an
international level, I'm going ahead entitling this commercial aviation in
(01:07):
the US, because we do talk a lot more about
US companies and regulation than anything else. And um, speaking
of regulation, this is only going to run up to
the year that the US de regulated the airline industry
in the late seventies. There's a whole lot more that
happens after that, um, But we're going up to that
because to me, that's sort of like the what I
(01:27):
would categorize as the early aviation industry, even though it
spans seventy years UM. And today in Part one, we
are just going to go up to and a little
into World War two. So buckle up, because here we go. Yeah. So,
since the early nine hundreds, when the possibility of air
travel became a reality at all, many entrepreneurs, including Orville
(01:49):
and Wilbur Wright, we're trying to figure out how to
make flight into a business. We've discussed a lot of
other contenders who come up when we're talking about who
gets the true credit the invention of flight. But apart
from that question, the rights put a lot of hustle
into monetizing this new mode of travel. Specifically, they started
(02:09):
talking to the U S Army about possible applications of
their new technology, although they had to do a lot
of convincing to get the Army on board with that. Yeah,
and they I mean they were talking to other people
in other countries as well, but uh, they were really
trying to sell to the Army. And a Navy man
named Charles Furnace had first seen the Rights fly in
(02:30):
nineteen o four when he was on leave for the holidays,
and from that point he became a huge fan, and
after years of following their work, he helped the Rights
by assisting Charles Taylor, who was their mechanic, so he
became their employee officially in the spring of nineteen o eight,
when they desperately needed help rebuilding their North Carolina camp
to prepare for new test flights. They had been away
(02:51):
from it for some time, and when they came back,
thinking that they would do new test flights in prep
for this Army stuff, they're like, oh, this camp is
a mess now, and actually took a lot more effort
to get it back up to the point that they
could work from there than they had anticipated. At that point,
the Rights had cut a deal with the U. S.
Army to build them an airplane and other interested parties had,
like the Army, suggested that they would be willing to
(03:13):
buy if the rights could build a plane that had
the capability to carry a passenger as well as meet
a series of maneuvering and speed requirements. And on the
morning of May fourteenth, eight Wilbur Wright piloted the first
known passenger flight, and he took that man, Charles Furnace,
on a beach flight that lasted less than half a minute,
as a way of thanking Charlie for his help and
(03:34):
support over the years, because even before they hired him,
he would always pitch in when they needed a hand.
And later that day Charlie was once again a passenger
in a much longer two mile flight, this time with
Orville right as the pilot. So eight became a milestone
year in commercial aviation, but it also marked a serious
tragedy in the effort to turn air flight into a business.
(03:56):
On September seventeenth of that year, Orville carried an Army
lieutenant named Thomas Selfridge in a demonstration flight at Fort Meyer, Virginia.
Selfridge was really knowledgeable about aviation. He was a member
of the Aerial Experiment Association and had designed his own airplane.
He was also on the five man committee that the
Army had established to evaluate the White Brothers efforts and
(04:18):
meeting the requirements that were outlined in their contract. And
during the test, one of the plane's propellers had a problem.
It's wooden blade split. An Orville right cut the engine,
which had started shaking very violently, and he attempted to
glide the plane into a landing, but a rear rudder
shifted position and the plane was pretty abruptly tipped nose down.
The flight ended in a very hard crash landing in
(04:39):
which Selfridge's skull was fractured. Selfridge died later that day
and was the first fatality in the commercial aviation business.
Orville Wright broke his leg in several ribs, but he
did recover over time. The Army allowed the Rights some
time to recover and rebuild, and they ran some tests
to determine what had caused the failure in the fort
Meyer test and to try to address it. After another
(05:02):
series of demonstration flights in nineteen o nine, they were
awarded a government contract and they adopted this new technology.
The U. S. Army required their pilots to wear helmets
because of Selfridge's death, the Right brothers continued to diversify
their business strategy to counter the many other entrepreneurs who
wanted to get into aviation. They were definitely not the
(05:22):
only people trying to make planes for money, and one
of the ways that they did so was to open
the first flying school to train commercial pilots in and
they did that just outside of Montgomery, Alabama. The pilots
trained and the Alabama School were taught so that they
could fly for the Rights traveling exhibitions try to drum
up sales, and then they in turn were expected to
(05:43):
be able to teach the buyers how to fly their
new aircraft. The location was chosen because of the warm
weather of the South, offered a longer period each year
to have flight training, and there was a lot of
open flat farmland. Despite the community in this area doing
everything possible to welcome the Rights and their school, including
clearing the land for them and building them a hangar,
(06:06):
the school only operated for a short time and it
only had one graduate, Walter Brooke Ins. A series of
plane malfunctions and the need to start their next tour
led the Rights to leave the Montgomery area after only
a couple of months, and they had left behind Brooke
Ins and some other people to sort of keep it going,
but it really wasn't happening. The farmland that had been
(06:26):
set up for the rights eventually became a repair depot
during World War One, and then it evolved over time
to become Maxwell Air Force Base. In nineteen eleven, the
Burgess Company became the first licensed manufacturer of aircraft. They
operated out of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Sterling Burgess, who owned the company,
had shifted his interest to aviation after running a successful shipyard.
(06:48):
He got to deal with the Rights to build planes
with their patented technology, and they introduced an aircraft called
the Moth that was very similar to the Rights Model B.
During the years that Burgess was in business, they got
fairly heated between Sterling Burgess and the Rights as disputes
erupted over royalties and shipping schedules. But the Rights still
recognized that Burgess was really a worthwhile business partner, and
(07:11):
even as Burgess in the Rights also competed in various
competitions to advance the aviation field, they continued this partnership.
The Burgess Company was awarded a military contract during World
War One, but it took a significant effort to meet
the demands of the deal. Just as the war was
coming to a close. On November seven, nineteen eighteen, Burgess
Plant Number two, which at that point was the main
(07:33):
manufacturing facility, was destroyed by fire. This spelled the end
of the company. Outstanding orders were completed by the number
one facility. The five hundred employees of the company were
giving their last paycheck, and then the company was shuttered.
And coming up, we'll talk about the first commercial airline
to open, But first we're gonna pause for a little
sponsor break. While there were a number of flights being
(08:04):
made for money in the nineteen teens, the first actual
airline didn't launch until nineteen fourteen. January one of that
year marks the first time that an actual airline. The St.
Petersburg Tampa Airboat Line opened its doors as a business
with a regular route schedule, and the route was just
as the airline's name advertised. It ran passengers from St. Petersburg,
(08:24):
Florida to Tampa, Florida by going across the bay, and
this flight took less than thirty minutes. That was a
significant improvement over the two hours of steamboat would take
to make the same twenty one mile, it's about thirty
four kilometers run. Of course, going or driving around the
bay would have been even longer than that. The mayor
of St. Petersburg, Abraham C. Field, was the airline's first customer,
(08:46):
and he boarded a so called flying boat designed by
a St. Louis entrepreneur named Thomas bin Wa. Bill had
purchased his ticket by auction. A lot of people wanted
to be the first passenger, and he ended up paying
four hundred dollars or it. It wasn't a perfect flight.
Some minor engine trouble made them make a brief water
landing and then restart before they made it as Tampa,
(09:07):
but this was still considered a success. The St. Petersburg
Tampa Airboat Line did not have longevity. It only ran
for four months because as the winter moved into spring,
most of the wealthy people in the area snowbirds made
their way back north, and then there just wasn't enough
interest or money to keep it going. But in those
four months, the airline made two flights a day, six
(09:28):
days a week, at a ticket price of five dollars. Again,
that four hundred dollar one was an auction to be
first uh and then they had another five dollar charge
that they would make per hundred pounds of freight if
they were carrying freight. Pilot Tony Janis flew a total
of twelve hundred five passengers in that short time that
the airline was in operation. One of the legacies of
this St. Pete Tampa line is an award that was
(09:50):
established in nineteen sixty four by the Tampa and St.
Petersburg Chambers of Commerce, The Tony Janis Award, issued by
the Tony Janis Distinguished Aviation Society. He continues on to
this day and recognizes quote extraordinary accomplishments in the field
of commercial aviation. One of the major steps in the
progression of commercial aviation was the establishment of the U.
(10:10):
S National Airmail Service in August of nine eighteen, and
this new influx of money that it brought into the
aviation industry bolstered that new in the completely burgeoning industry
at a time when passenger fairs were just a few
over non existent. They were there were some people interested
in paying to fly, but they really were not enough
(10:31):
to sustain this. Carrying mail offered a real ongoing business
that provided as much as of all revenue for some companies.
Early airmail pilots were operating on what was called cams
contract airmail routes. They were mapped out by the Post
Office Department. Before the establishment of an official airmail service,
(10:51):
the Post Office was using military aircraft and pilots on
its airmail service roots. They ran between New York, Philadelphia
and Washington, d c. That transition from military craft and
pilots to the Post Office Department managing things on their
own was enabled in part by Army Captain Benjamin Lipstner,
who resigned his commission to become the air Mail services
(11:13):
first Superintendent in nine nine. The oldest carrier in the
world that has retained its original name launched. That carrier
is KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. It merged with Air France
in two thousand four, but it still operates under its
original name, and the following year began offering flights between
Amsterdam and London, a route that it still offers almost
(11:34):
a hundred years later. The first year of KLEM illustrates
what we were saying a moment ago about passengers versus
cargo as the economic drivers of early commercial aviation. The
company's flights transported three d forty five passengers in year
one and twenty five thousand kilos of mail and cargo. Today,
a single flight routinely carries almost as much cargo at
(11:56):
about twenty thousand kilos, and even more passengers, topping out
a more than four hundred. Within a decade caleum Royal
Dutch Airlines was traveling a regular route to Indonesia, which
was still a Dutch colony at that time. By the
mid nineteen forties, they were running flights to Mexico and
New York. The late nineteen teens and early nineteen twenties
was when commercial airports started opening around the globe. London's
(12:19):
Hounslow Heath Aerodrome opened as a commercial airport in nineteen nineteen,
though it had been an airfield used by the Royal
Flying Corps for almost a decade before it became a
commercial entity. Australia Sydney Airport and Minneapolis St. Paul International
Airport both opened in nineteen twenty. East Prussia got a
dedicated commercial airport in nineteen twenty two at Flugavin de Voo.
(12:42):
The first transcontinental NonStop flight took place in nineteen twenty three.
Uh Fokker T two aircraft piloted by two US Army
Air Service officers who were Lieutenant John A. McCready and
Lieutenant Oakley G. Kelly, made this journey from Roosevelt Field,
Long Island to Rockwell Field and Sandy Ago, California. They
did that over the course of twenty seven hours. Their
(13:04):
average speed was yeah, I always uh. That's always a
good reminder, right. Air flight was not speedy. Speedy is today.
On February the Contract Airmail Act, also known as the
Kelly Act, was passed into law in the US and
this essentially let the US Postal Service delegate their work
(13:25):
managing routes, pilots, etcetera. Two contracted airlines and the first
five contracts went to Colonial Air Transportation, National Air Transport,
Robertson Aircraft Corporation, Western Air Express, and Varney Airlines. The
U s Air Mail Service still had its own dedicated
pilots and aircraft. They were running mail along the Transcontinental
(13:47):
Flyway while the contracted airlines were handling shorter regional routes
that changed over a fairly short period of time, though
and by commercial airlines were handling all of the mail.
By the end of the almost four dozen airlines had
postal service contracts. Once again, the airmail business helped move
the industry forward. Prior to the Airmail Act, of a
(14:10):
lot of flight was still really precarious and kind of improvisational.
Pilots flew a lot closer to the ground between two
hundred and five hundred feet that's between sixty one and
a hundred fifty two. They did this because they were
navigating from visual queues below along with their compasses. There
was not a lot else to the navigation process. But
(14:31):
as air mail made the industry financially sustainable, it also
opened the doors for companies to start offering regular commercial
passenger services with established, consistent schedules. It also was right
on the heels of the Airmail Act that the first
flight touchdown at Candler Field outside of Atlanta in n
on a plot of land that had once been a racetrack.
(14:52):
Handler Field would of course eventually become one of the
busiest airports in the world, and somewhere I spend a
shocking amount of time Heartsfield Jackson International Airport. I spend
less time than you, but I always marvel at how
gigantic it is. As these changes were taking place in
the world of airmail. President Calvin Coolidge signed the Air
Commerce Act of nine into law. This placed a lot
(15:14):
of responsibility regarding the aviation industry in the United States
in the hands of the Secretary of Commerce. The Air
Commerce Act gave the Secretary of Commerce the authorization to
license pilots and aircraft, and to establish and define air
roots and allocate resources to develop navigation aids. That also
gave the Secretary of Commerce the responsibility of investigating aviation accidents.
(15:38):
The international field of commercial airlines continued to grow as well.
Deutsch Lufthansa, which is today simply Luftanza, started offering regular
service in Germany in nine. It operated continuously until after
World War Two, when it was shut down with the
defeat of Nazi Germany, and it reformed in nineteen fifties three,
rebuilding the company from the ground up. We're about to
(15:59):
talk about the beginnings of an airline that's much beloved
by nostalgia enthusiasts. But first we will take a break,
and here from one of the sponsors that keeps our
show going. In seven, Pan American Airways, known more commonly
(16:20):
as PanAm, began running mail service between Key West Florida
and Havana, Cuba. PanAm went on to hit a number
of significant milestones in commercial aviation history over the course
of the late twenties and up through the nineteen forties.
PanAm innovated by being the first to run a regular
schedule over water, the first to carry emergency lifesaving equipment,
(16:41):
the first to develop its own air traffic control system,
the first to sell all inclusive international packages in the
first to provide round the world service in a company
called huff dalind Dusters was operating out of Monroe, Louisiana,
as a crop dusting company that was incorporated as a
new organis station called Delta Air Service, named for the
(17:02):
Mississippi Delta, which was central to its business region. Delta
started offering passenger flights in nine nine, with stops in Dallas, Texas, Jackson, Mississippi,
and Shreveport, and Monroe, Louisiana. It expanded to include Tuscaloosa
and Birmingham, Alabama, Meridian, Mississippi, Atlanta, Georgia, and Fort Worth,
Texas within a year, but a lack of a government
(17:24):
airmail contract meant that not enough money was coming in,
and Delta ceased passenger offerings until nineteen thirty four, when
it finally got its airmail contract. That is also the
year that it began operating as Delta air Lines, marks
a significant moment in commercial airline staffing. Ellen Church was
hired that year as the first female flight attendant Boeing
(17:46):
air Transports who hired her. You would know that company
today as United Airlines. Church's story is one that's both
triumphant and frustrating. It sounds a lot like a lot
of the other stories that we have had about women
in avation. She was a very accomplished woman, including being
a nurse and a licensed pilot, But of course airlines
(18:07):
were not hiring women to pilot their aircraft in nineteen
thirty That would not happen until nineteen seventy three, when
Emily Howell Warner was hired at Frontier Airlines. But Ellen
Church was determined to get into the industry one way
or another, and so she just started making her case
to airline executives. She was quoted in the New York
Times as saying, quote, don't you think it would be
(18:28):
good psychology to have women up in the air? How
is a man going to say he is afraid to
fly when a woman is working on the plane. She
also pointed out that nurses would make excellent staffers to
have on board, and suggested that nurses could be the
ones to help the passengers with their luggage and dispensing
with snacks, which was business at the co pilot had
been handling up to that point. It does not surprise
(18:50):
me that anyone suggests that perhaps a nurse would be
a good person to work as a flight attendant, but
the idea that the co pilot was the person who
had been handing out snacks cracked me up a little bit.
Boeing Air Transports leadership was sold enough on this idea
to start a three month test program that involved hiring
eight women, including Ellen Church, to take care of the passengers,
(19:11):
which freed up the co pilots for other duties, and
then when the three months were over, an entire new
career had been established. It was so successful for the
airline that other airlines quickly started their own similar programs,
and even other travel industries like railway companies started hiring
women attendance to offer hospitality to their customers. Of course,
(19:32):
the career of airline stewardess, as it was called for
a very long time was riddled with a lot of
sexist requirements for the women applying for those positions. They
had to have nursing degrees, they had to fall within
a narrow and very low weight range, they had to
be in their early twenties, and they had to be
pretty and single. And if they met those requirements, they
also had to be willing to clean the plane, be
(19:53):
able to manage heavy lifting, and be ready to serve
as first responders in the event of a medical emergency.
I don't think we really get into it on here,
but then there was also a lot of sexism, and
like the standards of dress for flight attendants, and like
the uniforms were made and what was required to be
worn with them. Um, I mean, it's not sexist to
(20:14):
say that you have to have a nursing degree, but
to say that you have to be young, pretty, single,
thin woman is well, and at the time the idea
of a male nurse was pretty unheard of. So contextually, yes,
to say you have to be a nurse means only
women's right, right. The first modern passenger airliner, the Boeing
(20:36):
TO forty seven, was introduced in n three. It included
a lot of new features, including autopilot and d icing equipment.
United Airlines started offering coast to coast flights within the
US with a bowing to forty seven that same year.
The re required seven stops along the way and it
took twenty hours, which is a lot, but that improved
(20:58):
the earlier time of coast to coast strips by more
than seven hours. It's so funny today that it's like, oh,
tame me six hours. Yeah uh. Two years later, Boeing
introduced the three oh seven Strato Liner, which was the
first high altitude commercial airliner, and that was because it
had the first pressurized cabin. It also had a flight
(21:20):
engineer as part of its crew to manage pressurization and
other aspects of the plane's functions, leaving the pilot free
to focus on flying. Five of the ten Strato Liners
that Boeing built became part of the U. S. Army's
transport fleet during World War Two. The first commercial airline
terminal in North America was opened in ninety five, and
that was the Art Deco style Newark Airport Administration Building,
(21:43):
which was dedicated by Amelia Earhart. That airport has been
running since and for eleven years after the commercial terminal opened.
It was the only airport serving the Greater New York area.
That was the case until LaGuardia opened in ninety nine,
and the origin story for a Guardia is based in
New York Mayor Feararello LaGuardia's unwillingness to deplane in Newark
(22:06):
in ninety four, the mayor refused to exit the plane
that had carried him from Pittsburgh to Newark on the
basis that the destination listed on his ticket was New York.
The t w A flight that he was on continued
from Newark to Brooklyn, where it landed in Floyd Bennett Field,
and there the mayor disembarked, along with several reporters he
had arranged to come along for the ride because it
(22:27):
was a publicity stunt. He then held a press conference
to announce that New York needed its own commercial airport
and they were not going to depend on New Jersey anymore.
They wrote ground in Queens for a new airport in
nineteen thirty seven, on a five hundred fifty eight acre
plot of land that had once been an amusement park.
New York City Municipal Airport was opened on October fifteenth,
(22:49):
nineteen thirty nine, and then had a name changed to
New York City Municipal Airport, LaGuardia Field two weeks later,
and then LaGuardia Airport in nineteen forty seven. A lot
of people were like, you should have just called the
Lagortia from the beginning. As New York and New Jersey
were competing for airport dominance in the region, airlines were
expanding their route offerings to progressively wider ranges. In ninety six,
(23:12):
PanAm started offering flights crossing the Pacific Ocean, something that
had taken a great deal of planning the year before.
In ninety five, the company had tasked Captain Edwin Music
with running survey flights to plot the route out, and
that route eventually ran from San Francisco to China, with
stops on islands owned by the US, where PanAm had
established hotels because that trip took sixty hours and it
(23:35):
included four overnight stops along the way. PanAm started its
transatlantic passenger service on thirty nine, when a Boeing B
three four team called Dixie Clipper took twenty two passengers
from New York to Europe. Similar to the Pacific route.
The company had surveyed route across the Northern and the
Southern Atlantic, depending on the final destination and the years
(23:57):
before World War two, PanAm established service to fifty two
countries around the world. In The Civil Aeronautics Act was
signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on June
and this established the Civil Aeronautics Authority, which included the
Civil Aeronautics Board to oversee aircraft and pilot certification, and
the Civil Aeronautics Administration to manage airway development, air traffic control,
(24:20):
and safety programs. World War two really brought a lot
of the commercial airline industry to a halt. We mentioned
already some specific planes that had been commercial airliners, and
they became part of military efforts once the war started.
That really wasn't unusual. Two hundred of the three hundred
sixty airline aircraft that were active in the airline industry
were requisitioned by the military. The Air Transport Command was
(24:44):
established in ninety two and managed the use of commercial
planes to transport materials and people around the world during
the war. In earlier wars, similar things happened with people's
like personal ships also, so it's like the whole idea
was not a totally new no. Uh, non military air
travel essentially stopped as priority was given to war related
(25:06):
travel needs. The Office of Defense Transportation started printing posters
with the text is your trip necessary? Needless travel interferes
with the war effort. Airlines like pan Am that had
already established global roots were especially valuable to the military,
and both airliners and staff were contracted through the Air
Transport Command. During the war, President Roosevelt became the first
(25:29):
US president to fly while serving in office. And that
is where you will end Part one and part two
will look at a stretch of a little over three
decades during which the airline industry went through incredible growth.
And we will also have a special guest at the
end of the show. Yeah, it's like a little bonus
episode at the end of the next one where we
get to have a fabulous person on to check with
(25:50):
longtime friend of the show joining Holly. Yeah. I think
about this stuff a lot, and it's the reason I
wanted to do this episode is because I have been
flying so much this year. Um, and I occasionally ruminate
on like how did we get here to the point
that everything that seems so uh sort of mundane to
us and like part of just part of everyday life.
(26:10):
I gotta go to the airport get on a plane.
But literally a century ago that was like a mind
boggling concept. Yeah. Well, and for a lot of people,
like it still is a totally like not part of
their experience at all. Like when like my family, my
my parents did some flying before I was born because
my dad was an army and like we deployed to Vietnam,
(26:30):
you did it on a plane. Um, But the like,
we never had a family vacation that involved air travel
at all. And I never got on a plane until
I was in college and went to a conference. Um,
and then I was reading a thing before we came
in here. Like something like eight percent of people in
the world have never been on a plane, but only
like twenty of Americans have never been on a plane. Yeah.
(26:54):
I Also my dad was career Air Force. We never
took a plane anywhere for me. Yeah, even if we
were going very far, we always drove it. Um. One
of those reasons we'll talk about a little bit in
Part two. But it was not uh cost effective for
family to fly at all. Commercially, so there are many
(27:14):
barriers for a lot of people. Yeah, we had that,
plus my mother being terrified of flying, which is something
I kind of inherited from her and then had to
deal with as I became an adult whose job required
some air traveled. Yes. Uh, I never was afraid of
flying as a kid. Had a little period where I
became afraid of it after a little scared. Now I'm
over at a file of time. Uh. I have a
(27:37):
little bit of listener mail from our listener Catherine, and
I love it because she sent us a postcar bush.
She put it in an envelope, so I have no um,
none of the smearing that we occasionally get. She writes,
High Tracy and Holly. My name is Catherine and I
started listening to your podcast earlier this summer. I work
on cruise ships as a costumer, and one of my
friends who I work with introduced me. I'm a huge
(27:58):
fan of history as my dad as a history teach
your thank you to your Dan for being an educator,
and she says, and I particularly love your spooky episode.
Since my birthday is Halloween, I look forward to more
spooky episodes of this October Best Catherine, PS, I hope
you enjoyed this postcard. I picked it up while I
was working on a ship that traveled to the Mediterranean,
specifically Malta, my friend Olivia who started me listening, and
(28:19):
I thought you would like it. It's a beautiful picture
of Malta. Thank you so much, Catherine, and also, um,
one cool job too. Happy birthday coming up? It will
not It will only be a couple of weeks away
when this episode airs, So I hope you have a
wonderful October and Halloween birthday season. That sounds fantastic to me. Yeah. Uh.
If you would like to write to us, you can
(28:41):
do so at History Podcast at house to Works dot com.
You can also find us everywhere on social media as
Missed in History and on the Internet as Missed in
History dot com. If you would like to subscribe to
the show, we sure would enjoy that. You can do
that on the I Heart Radio app, at Apple podcast
or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in
(29:04):
History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit
the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows,
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Tracy Wilson
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Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.