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Alki Point Light Station

Alki Point, today part of West Seattle, stretches into Puget Sound to form the southern boundary of Elliott Bay. It is part of a much larger area originally inhabited by the Duwamish Indians. In September 1851, members of the Denny Party, later founders of Seattle, settled the land. One of the group, Charles Terry (1829-1867), claimed it under the Donation Land Claim Act. In 1857, Terry sold it to Dr. David Maynard (1808-1873), who later sold it to the farmer Hans Martin Hanson (1821-1900). According to legend, it was Hanson who in the 1870s hung the first lantern to mark the hazardous Alki shoals and the southern entrance into Elliott Bay. In 1913, a lighthouse was constructed on Alki Point. The Alki Point Light Station, which remains essentially the same today as when it was built, is on the National Register of Historic Places.
File 4197: Full Text >

Benton County -- Thumbnail History

Benton County is located in the southeastern portion of Washington state at the confluence of the Columbia, Snake, and Yakima rivers. The land, part of the semi-arid Columbia Basin, lies in the rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains and is naturally dry. But the soil is fertile and supports native plants such as bunch grasses and sagebrush. This vegetation in turn supported the deer and elk that Native Americans hunted, and later, the cattle and sheep of white settlers. Irrigation began in the 1890s with water drawn from the Columbia River. Farm crops then flourished, including wheat, alfalfa, grapes, strawberries, and potatoes. That same Columbia River was one factor that caused the federal government to choose Benton County for a secret wartime plant, the Hanford Works, that would develop plutonium for the atomic bomb. After the war, Congress created the Atomic Energy Commission, which took over operation of the 600-square-mile Hanford Atomic Reservation, and work continued on government projects that included the use of nuclear energy to generate electricity. Today the county's two main industries are nuclear power and agriculture. Wineries are growing in importance.
File 5671: Full Text >

Boeing 307 Stratoliner Pressurized Airliner

Boeing's little known 307 Stratoliner, affectionately dubbed "the flying whale" for its portly lines, ushered in a new aviation era when it entered into airline service in mid-1940. It was the first in-service pressurized airplane and airliner. It is cabin pressurization (termed cabin supercharging at the time), along with air conditioning and heating that enables today's high altitude passenger jet airliner flights above the weather and turbulence, where the thin air and sub-zero cold could kill passengers within minutes were they unprotected. The Seattle-built, propeller driven Stratoliner took the first practical step on the journey to safe high altitude passenger flight. Although only 10 aircraft were built, it was very successful in airline service; one was reported still carrying passengers in 1986. Remarkably, at least two airframes survive today, the restored Pan American Airways NC19903 Clipper Flying Cloud, which began flying again on July 11, 2001, and the fuselage of a model owned by Howard Hughes, which is now a yacht. As luck would have it, the Flying Cloud was the first in-service pressurized airplane and airliner.
File 3598: Full Text >

Boeing and Early Aviation in Seattle, 1909-1919

Seattle residents saw their first flying machine on June 27, 1908, a balloon flown by L. Guy Mecklem (1882-1973) from West Seattle's Luna Park, and saw another flying machine, a dirigible, in 1909 during the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Charles Hamilton demonstrated the city's first airplane the following year. Herb Munter (1897-1970), a self-educated engineer, was building his own aircraft on Harbor Island by 1915. His efforts attracted the interest of William E. Boeing (1881-1956) and Navy Lt. Conrad Westervelt, who hired Munter to help them build their first airplane, the B&W, in 1916. America's entry into World War I in 1917 lifted the new Boeing Airplane Co. to dizzying heights. Peace two years later sent it into a near-fatal nose dive.
File 5369: Full Text >

Boeing and United Air Lines from Birth to Break Up, 1919-1934

The Boeing Airplane Company nearly collapsed following the end of World War I military orders. Pioneer pilot Eddie Hubbard (1889-1928) helped William E. Boeing (1881-1956) deliver the first bag of international airmail on March 3, 1919, and urged the company to pursue U.S. Air Mail contracts. A skeptical Boeing bid on and won the Chicago-San Francisco route in 1927, and quickly developed faster aircraft culminating in the Model 247, the first true airliner. Boeing developed or purchased airlines to build its own passenger system, United Air Lines. It also expanded its holdings to create the giant United Aircraft and Transportation Company, but federal anti-trust regulators broke up the combine in 1934. An embittered Bill Boeing quit the company and sold his stock that same year.
File 5368: Full Text >

Boeing's Model 314 Clipper Flying Boat

During the 1930s, transoceanic travel was beyond the capability of all but a handful of aircraft. The solution was offered by giant dirigibles such as the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg and by ever larger "flying boats" -- multi-engine airplanes with boat-like hulls. The most elegant and successful of these was Boeing's Model 314, which first flew in 1938 and operated through World War II. The last of a dozen aircraft built was destroyed in 1951.
File 3253: Full Text >

Boeing-Quotient Puzzle, The Wright Stuff: HistoryLink "B-Q" Puzzle published by The Seattle Times on December 17, 2003, centennial of the Wright Brothers' first flight.

On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright executed the first controlled flights by a heavier-than-air machine, at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. One century later, The Seattle Times published this little quiz to test readers’ “B-Q� (Boeing Quotient). The puzzle ran one day after Boeing’s formal announcement that final assembly of the planned 7E7 aircraft would be located in Everett, Washington. The text of the original puzzle follows, as written by Walt Crowley and edited by Lee Moriwaki. Answers are provided at the end with Seattle/King County file numbers for corresponding HistoryLink essays to aid your search for background information and sources. Enjoy.
File 4270: Full Text >

Brainerd, Paul (b. 1947)

Paul Brainerd founded the Aldus software company, which produced the first desktop publishing program, Pagemaker. The product transformed printing and publishing almost as dramatically as had moveable type or the rotary press, and it catapulted Brainerd into the ranks of the youthful millionaires of the dot-com boom. In his second career, Brainerd devoted himself to environmental protection and to organizing his contemporaries into useful philanthropic efforts. Seattle-King County Association of Realtors named Paul Brainerd First Citizen of 1999.
File 7657: Full Text >

Business and Industry in Seattle in 1900

A look at Seattle area businesses in 1900 indicates that the economy was simpler, life less complicated, labor harder, travel slower, and that opportunities to enhance one's quality of life were rarer. The modest turn-of-the-century Seattle skyline was that of a town, but within a decade steel-framed skyscrapers poked high crowns into the heavens above a true city. Historian James R. Warren surveys local industries and businesses at the beginning of the twentieth century in this special essay, adapted with permission from the Puget Sound Business Journal.
File 1669: Full Text >

Central Library, 2002-present, The Seattle Public Library

The new Central Library of The Seattle Public Library opened in May 2004 in a startlingly unique and widely praised steel-and-glass building designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. It boasts the most advanced library technology in the nation, and is being called the "first library of the twenty-first century" (The New Yorker, May 24, 2004). The new library was built after Seattle voters approved the "Libraries For All" bond issue on November 3, 1998.
File 4303: Full Text >

Century 21 Exposition -- Forward Into the Past!

This is a Cybertourof the Century 21 Exposition, better known as the Seattle World's Fair of 1962. It was written by Alan J. Stein and designed by Chris Goodman.
File 7042: Full Text >

Covington, Wayne Reinhart (1920-1999)

Wayne Reinhart Covington was a noted Boeing engineer whose 45-year career included work on B-17 Flying Fortress, Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile, and on the Saturn V rocket that launched the Apollo moon missions.
File 1442: Full Text >

Crowley, Walter A. (1917-2008)

Walter A. Crowley (1917-2008), in recent years a resident of Oak Harbor, Washington, was an inventor and engineer who developed the first practical air-cushion vehicle in the summer of 1957 in Detroit, Michigan. The following year, he filed the first patent for an air-cushion vehicle, in this case a high-speed train straddling a triangular track, and built a large "ACV" capable of carrying two adults (now in the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum collection). At virtually the same time, Sir Christopher Cockerell (1910-1999) developed similar concepts in Great Britain. Government funding propelled Cockerell's "hovercraft" to greater fame, but he acknowledged the originality of Crowley's work. Crowley went on invent the flexible skirt used on virtually all hovercraft as well as an efficient air-bearing system later commercialized by the Boeing Company as "Aero-Go." Crowley retired in the 1980s, lived on Whidbey Island with his second wife, Lily, and continued to pursue air cushion research in his home workshop. Walter Crowley died in May 2008.
File 7987: Full Text >

Engholm, Ben (1899-1945): Seattle's pioneering radio loudspeaker designer of the 1920s

At the dawn of the commercial radio industry in the early 1920s, Seattle became an unexpected early hotbed of technological innovation. No less than three different companies began producing radio speaker-horns in those years before more advanced "field coil" cone-speakers were invented around 1928. That trio of innovative firms were the Star Radio Co., Kilbourne & Clark -- and most importantly, Bernard "Ben" A. Engholm's incredibly successful Rola Company.
File 8923: Full Text >

Great Northern Tunnel -- Seattle

The Great Northern Tunnel is a one-mile-long tunnel that runs beneath downtown Seattle from Alaskan Way (below Virginia Street) on the waterfront, to 4th Avenue S and Washington Street. The Great Northern Railway built it in 1904, at the insistence of Seattle City Engineer Reginald H. Thomson (1856-1949), to help alleviate rail congestion on Railroad Avenue (now Alaskan Way) and it is still in use today. In its heyday, the Great Northern Tunnel was the largest, although not the longest, tunnel in the nation. It cost $1,500,000 to build and was intended for use by both the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific Railroads, which split construction costs. Today the tunnel is owned and operated by the Burlington Northern -- Sante Fe Railway.
File 4029: Full Text >

Hadley, Homer More (1885-1967), Engineer

Engineer Homer M. Hadley designed several unique concrete bridges throughout the state of Washington during his lifetime, including many early American applications of the European innovation of concrete hollow-box, or cellular construction. This economical method of construction was used extensively throughout Europe, but was not widely used in the United States until the 1940s and 1950s. It was Hadley who originally conceived the design of a floating bridge across Lake Washington, the large lake that separates Seattle from Bellevue and Kirkland (the Eastside). He visualized a floating roadway made up of a series of hollow concrete barges. Homer Hadley's unusual work reveals the effects of a single innovative engineer on bridge design within the state.
File 5419: Full Text >

Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension Center, WSU Prosser

Washington State College (later WSU) established the Irrigation Experiment Station at Prosser in 1919. The Washington Irrigation Institute recommended such a program to study the problems faced by farmers, orchardists, and ranchers in the dry central part of the state. The station employed scientists from the college in Pullman, who partnered with scientists from the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). In the early years a road was built and water was pumped from the Sunnyside Canal. Crops such as potatoes, corn, and wheat were planted. The station contended with weeds and dust storms. It grew slowly, with budget cuts during the Depression years. Then World War II brought a huge demand for increased crop yields. The station's research in how to combat plant diseases and pests, how to irrigate, and how to increase crop yields led to increased crop production in the Columbia Basin and across the state. After the war, the station grew as funding came in from industry organizations such as the Washington Hop Commission. The Irrigated Agriculture Research and Extension Center, as it is now known, continues to provide support and research for Washington state irrigated agriculture. Irrigated agriculture, including grapes for the wine industry, wheat, hops, alfalfa, and apple and cherry orchards, comprises some 60 crops that add up to two-thirds of the state's agriculture and bring in some $3 billion in revenue annually. The center is one of the major employers of Prosser.
File 7684: Full Text >

Kennewick Man

A man who lived more than 9,000 years ago along the Columbia River in what is now central Washington's Tri-Cities area became the center of worldwide attention and heated controversy following the 1996 discovery of his nearly complete skeleton at a riverside park in Kennewick. Area Indian tribes sought to rebury the man they called the Ancient One and revered as an ancestor. The federal government agreed, but eight anthropologists and archeologists sued for the right to study the skeleton, widely known as Kennewick Man. The case dragged on for years, attended by controversies over the handling of the bones, the burial of the discovery site, and statements by some plaintiffs, amplified and distorted in popular accounts, that appeared to suggest Kennewick Man was "Caucasian" and that Europeans may have reached America before Indians did. Scientific studies, ironically conducted by the government in an effort to support its decision to turn the remains over to the Indians rather than allow studies by the plaintiffs, showed that Kennewick Man was not like Europeans, Indians, or any modern peoples. In early 2004 an appeals court affirmed a prior decision that the plaintiff scientists would be allowed to study Kennewick Man.
File 5664: Full Text >

King County Landmarks: Hilmar and Selma Steen House (1911), Vashon, Vashon Island

Address: 10924 SW Cove Road, Vashon, Vashon Island. The Steen House, built in 1911 for Norwegian immigrants Hilmar and Selma Steen, is an outstanding example of Craftsman style architecture in rural King County. The large two-story house features a spacious inset porch, as well as corner bay windows with beveled glass in the upper sash, a clinker brick foundation and river rock bases for the porch piers. The remarkably unaltered interior of the house is trimmed with dark-stained fir. An elaborate art glass window lights the stair hall. When the house was built, Hilmar and his brothers were operating a lumber mill with a log pond and a short spur logging road on the logged-off property. The mill supplied the house with electricity, making it one of the earliest electrified houses on Vashon Island.
File 2353: Full Text >

King County Landmarks: Prescott-Harshman House (1904), Fall City

Address: 33429 Redmond-Fall City Road, Fall City. The Prescott-Harshman house was built in 1904 on a prominent corner lot facing the main road through Fall City. Its elegant porch, tall, narrow windows, and hipped roof reflect the influence of the Queen Anne style. Julia and Newton Harshman, who purchased the house in 1912 from the Prescotts, played an important role in expanding telephone service in the rural community.
File 2379: Full Text >

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