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Category: Aviation

Cover of a Christmas card with busy people, a rushing car, and speeding streamlined train at the bottom foreground, silhouetted skyscrapers with a setting sun beyond in the background, and a passenger plane flying overhead.

Dreaming of a Slow Christmas

Posted by: Josh Levy

Sometime in the mid-1930s, an aeronautical engineer sent out a particularly un-Christmassy looking Christmas card, one that featured a sleek aircraft soaring above a speeding train and automobile, with an art deco cityscape in the background.

Posted in: Aviation, Holidays

Published engraved image showing a crowd observing the balloon "Intrepid," leaving the ground in the distance.

Nothing Happens in Washington without a Purchase Order: William J. Rhees and Thaddeus Lowe’s Balloons, 1861

Posted by: Michelle Krowl

In summer 1861, William J. Rhees, chief clerk of the Smithsonian Institution, wrote to his wife about Professor Thaddeus Lowe’s balloon experiments on the National Mall . . . including the reason one ascent never got off the ground. Because (almost) nothing in Washington happens without first securing a purchase order or an appropriation.

Posted in: Aviation, Civil War, Science and Technology, War and Society