105 Fun Facts About Transportation

How long did the Wright Flyer's first powered flight last in December 1903?

12 seconds was all Orville managed on the first hop, covering 120 feet; Wilbur stayed up for 59 seconds on the day's fourth flight, before a gust of wind flipped and wrecked the machine.

What was the nickname of the Ford Model T?

Tin Lizzie, a nickname of unknown origin, became the car for the masses: Ford's assembly line cut its price from $850 at launch to under $300, and more than 15 million were built.

Which car overtook the Model T as the best-selling car in history in 1972?

The Volkswagen Beetle passed the Model T's total in February 1972. Conceived in 1930s Germany as Hitler's affordable 'people's car', it outlived that origin and was built in Mexico until 2003.

The first Shinkansen line opened in October 1964, shortly before which event?

The Tokyo Summer Olympics opened nine days after the first bullet trains ran on 1 October 1964, a launch timed for the Games; the fastest services linked Tokyo and Osaka in four hours.

How many passengers died in Shinkansen derailments or collisions during its first 50 years?

Zero: from the 1964 opening through 2014 the Shinkansen carried billions of passengers without a single passenger death from a derailment or collision, despite a 2004 earthquake derailment near Niigata.

Edward Johnston's 1916 sans-serif alphabet was drawn for which network's signs?

The London Underground commissioned the alphabet for its signs and publicity; modelled on classical Roman capitals, it became the forerunner of many modern sans-serif typefaces, including his pupil Eric Gill's Gill Sans.

Which country began building the Panama Canal in the 1880s before abandoning the project?

France started digging in the early 1880s through a private company; engineering problems, malaria and yellow fever ended the effort in 1889, and the United States took over in 1904 and opened the canal in 1914.

Ships transiting the Panama Canal are lifted by locks 26 metres up into which artificial reservoir?

Gatun Lake sits 26 metres above sea level; it was created by damming the Chagres River so ships could cross much of the isthmus afloat instead of through a dug channel.

Which two airlines owned and operated Concorde fleets in scheduled service?

British Airways and Air France were the only airlines to buy Concorde; other carriers dropped their options, so just 14 of the 20 aircraft built ever flew passengers, from 1976 until 2003.

Concorde's cruising speed was held to about Mach 2 because its skin was made mainly of which metal?

Aluminium alloy was light and easy to work, but air friction heated Concorde's nose to about 127°C at Mach 2, close to the most the metal could bear over years of service, so flying faster was ruled out.

J. K. Starley's company, maker of the 1885 'safety bicycle', later became which British car brand?

Rover was the name of J. K. Starley's 1885 safety bicycle, whose two similar-sized wheels and chain drive replaced the high-wheeler; his firm began building cars in 1904, and 'rower' became the Polish word for bicycle.

The Segway self-balancing transporter was invented by whom?

Dean Kamen built the Segway on the gyroscopic balancing of his stair-climbing iBOT wheelchair; unveiling it in December 2001, he claimed it would make cars unnecessary in cities.

The Hindenburg burst into flames in 1937 while docking at a naval air station in which US state?

Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey was the landing site on 6 May 1937; Herbert Morrison's anguished radio report, recorded there, was broadcast the next day and became one of the century's most famous recordings.

What gas filled the Hindenburg?

Hydrogen filled the Hindenburg's 16 gas cells because the United States, the only large helium producer, would not export helium to Nazi Germany; the flammable gas made the 1937 fire catastrophic.

Which airline put the Boeing 747 into commercial service in January 1970?

Pan Am's chief Juan Trippe had pushed Boeing to build the jumbo to ease airport congestion; his airline flew the first 747 passengers from New York to London on 22 January 1970.

Why does the Boeing 747 have its famous hump?

To allow a nose cargo door: Boeing expected supersonic jets to take over passenger travel, so the 747 was designed to convert into a freighter, with the cockpit raised above the main deck.

The Channel Tunnel runs from Folkestone to a terminal beside which French port?

Calais is the nearest port: the French terminal sits at Coquelles on its outskirts. Crews digging from the two coasts met under the sea in December 1990, and the tunnel opened in May 1994.

The Trans-Siberian Railway runs from Moscow to which Pacific port?

Vladivostok lies about 9,300 km and a week's train ride from Moscow; early through trains cut across Chinese Manchuria until an all-Russian route along the Amur was finished in 1916.

The world's first traffic lights, installed in December 1868, stood outside which building?

Railway engineer J. P. Knight's signal outside the Houses of Parliament in London used semaphore arms by day and red and green gas lamps by night, worked by a policeman; it exploded within a month, injuring its operator.

Which inventor of an early gas mask also patented a three-position traffic signal in 1923?

Garrett Morgan's T-shaped signal added a third position that halted traffic in every direction before the flow changed, a forerunner of the amber light; his smoke hood had been used in a 1916 tunnel rescue under Lake Erie.

Nils Bohlin developed the modern three-point seat belt for which car maker, which made it standard in 1959?

Volvo made Nils Bohlin's three-point belt standard from 1959, first on cars for its home market, then gave the patent to rival makers for free, so the design spread across the industry.

Which US president signed the 1956 act that created the Interstate Highway System?

Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act on 29 June 1956; as a wartime general he had been deeply impressed by how the German Autobahn moved troops and supplies quickly.

Trucking boss Malcom McLean changed world trade in 1956 by loading a tanker with 58 of what?

Shipping containers slashed the cost of moving cargo by sea; watching the Ideal X sail from Newark, a dockworkers' union official said he would like to sink it.

Which crossing took the Golden Gate's title as the world's longest suspension span in 1964?

The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge between Staten Island and Brooklyn beat the Golden Gate's main span by 18 metres; its official name was misspelled with one 'z' until New York corrected it in 2018.

Which diplomat formed the company that built the Suez Canal, opened in 1869?

Ferdinand de Lesseps owed the canal to an old friendship: when Said Pasha became ruler of Egypt in 1854, he invited the former diplomat over and granted him the right to dig it.

Stephenson's Rocket won which 1829 locomotive competition?

The Rainhill Trials of October 1829 were staged by the Liverpool and Manchester Railway to settle whether locomotives, rather than stationary engines hauling ropes, could work its line; Rocket was the clear winner.

Whose wife, Bertha, made the first long car journey in his Patent-Motorwagen in 1888?

Karl Benz had patented the car in 1886; Bertha set off from Mannheim for Pforzheim without telling him, with their two teenage sons aboard, and bought fuel at a pharmacy along the way.

Which airline took the first delivery of the Airbus A380 in October 2007?

Singapore Airlines flew the first A380 passengers from Singapore to Sydney on 25 October 2007; airlines later turned to smaller jets, and Airbus delivered the last superjumbo in December 2021.

Which liner steamed through an ice field to rescue the survivors in Titanic's lifeboats?

RMS Carpathia raced through the ice at top speed after Titanic's distress call and arrived more than an hour after she sank; Titanic's 20 lifeboats, more than the law required, had room for only 1,178 people.

In which city was the Titanic built?

Belfast's Harland and Wolff yard launched Titanic on 31 May 1911; her stern carried the name of Liverpool, her port of registry, a city she never visited.

The Vespa scooter's name is Italian for which insect?

Vespa means wasp in Italian, as in Latin; Enrico Piaggio is said to have named the 1946 scooter on first seeing the prototype, exclaiming that it looked like a wasp.

What has 130 km/h been for cars on Germany's Autobahn since 1978?

A recommended speed, or Richtgeschwindigkeit, is all that applies where no limit is posted: driving faster is legal, but a driver who crashes while going faster can be held partly liable for the damage.

Which entrepreneur published the 2013 white paper describing the Hyperloop?

Elon Musk's 2013 'Hyperloop Alpha' paper sketched capsules riding on air bearings through low-pressure tubes between Los Angeles and the Bay Area; he published the design freely and invited others to develop it.

The word "rickshaw" comes from a term in which language?

Japanese jinrikisha means 'human-powered vehicle', from jin (person), riki (power) and sha (vehicle); the carts appeared around 1869, and English speakers had clipped the word to 'rickshaw' by the 1880s.

What is unusual about the shape of a Venetian gondola's hull?

It is asymmetrical along its length: the left side is built wider than the right, which makes the boat easier to handle with its single oar.

Jesse Reno's first working escalator was installed in 1896 as a ride at which amusement spot?

Coney Island's Old Iron Pier got Jesse Reno's 'inclined elevator', a sloping belt with cleats, in 1896; when Harrods fitted a rival design in 1898, staff revived shaken customers with smelling salts and cognac.

Who staged a death-defying demonstration of his safety elevator at New York's Crystal Palace in 1854?

Elisha Otis had the hoist rope cut while he stood on the platform and his safety brake held; the first passenger elevator with it went into the Haughwout store at 488 Broadway in 1857.

The first practical hovercraft famously crossed which body of water in July 1959?

The English Channel crossing came on 25 July 1959, fifty years to the day after Blériot first flew over it; inventor Christopher Cockerell rode aboard and was knighted ten years later.

The 603 km/h rail speed record set in 2015 belongs to an experimental maglev from which country?

Japan's L0 Series maglev reached 603 km/h on the Yamanashi test track on 21 April 2015, a record for a crewed rail vehicle; the superconducting maglev was built for the planned Tokyo–Nagoya Chuo Shinkansen.

Uber's ride-hailing service first launched publicly in 2010 in which city?

San Francisco was where UberCab launched as a black-car app in 2010; that October the city's transit agency and California regulators ordered it to cease and desist, and it soon dropped 'Cab' from its name.

Ferdinand von Zeppelin's first airship made its maiden flight in 1900 over which body of water?

Lake Constance held the airship's floating hangar near Friedrichshafen: the shed could swing to face the wind, which eased LZ 1 in and out for its first flight on 2 July 1900.

Fulton's 1807 North River Steamboat carried passengers between New York City and which city?

Albany lay 150 miles up the Hudson from New York City; Fulton's steamboat made the trip in 32 hours in August 1807, when sailing sloops needed about four days.

The Magic Roundabout, five mini-roundabouts around one island, is in which English town?

Swindon's Magic Roundabout opened in 1972 near the County Ground football stadium; originally named County Islands, it sends traffic anticlockwise around its central island, against the usual British flow.

The world's first fare-paying passenger railway, horse-drawn along a bay, began running in 1807 in which country?

Wales's Oystermouth Railway, later the Swansea and Mumbles line, was built to haul limestone; from 25 March 1807 it also carried fare-paying passengers in horse-drawn carriages along Swansea Bay.

The penny-farthing bicycle takes its name from what?

Two British coins of different sizes: side on, the big front wheel and small rear one looked like a penny leading a farthing; the nickname seems to have caught on only after the high-wheeler's heyday.

In August 1939 the Heinkel He 178 became the first aircraft to fly on what?

A jet engine designed by Hans von Ohain drove the He 178 on 27 August 1939, days before the war began; Heinkel's firm had developed it in secret, and its retractable wheels stayed down for the whole flight.

An aircraft's "black box" flight recorder is, despite its name, normally painted which colour?

Bright orange paint and reflective tape help searchers spot the recorder in wreckage or under water; US rules also allow bright yellow, and the 'black box' nickname has simply stuck.

From 1889 the Orient Express ran by rail all the way from Paris to which eastern terminus?

Istanbul, then called Constantinople, could at first be reached only by finishing the trip on a Black Sea steamer; the first direct train from Paris left on 1 June 1889.

Grand Central Terminal in New York has 44 of what, spread over two levels?

Grand Central's 44 platforms, on two underground levels, are a world record for one station; a plan to build an office tower on top was blocked when the Supreme Court upheld its landmark status in 1978.

Which aircraft carried Charles Lindbergh alone from New York to Paris in about 33 and a half hours in 1927?

Spirit of St. Louis had no front windscreen: a large fuel tank sat ahead of the cockpit, so the only forward view was through a periscope or out of a side window when Lindbergh turned the plane.

US Route 66 ran from Chicago to which Californian city?

Santa Monica marked the western end of Route 66; John Steinbeck named the highway the 'Mother Road' in The Grapes of Wrath, after the Dust Bowl families who drove it west to California in the 1930s.

Which aviation pioneer took the controls himself for the first flight of his VS-300 helicopter in 1939?

Igor Sikorsky had built a helicopter in 1909 that failed to fly, made his name with aeroplanes instead, then returned to the idea 30 years later; he insisted on making the first flight of each new design himself.

Which city opened the first subway in the United States in 1897, seven years before New York's?

Boston's Tremont Street subway opened on 1 September 1897 to get trolley cars off its traffic-clogged streets; the first section of New York's subway followed in October 1904.

Christopher Cockerell tested his hovercraft concept using a hairdryer and two tin cans that had held what?

Cockerell used tins that had held coffee and cat food, one nested inside the other, and blew air down the gap between them; the ring of fast-moving air formed the peripheral jet that kept the cushion in.

Which company originally owned 'Hovercraft' as a trademark?

Saunders-Roe, the Isle of Wight flying-boat builder that constructed the first hovercraft in 1959, registered 'Hovercraft' as a trademark, so rivals used names such as air-cushion vehicle; its hovercraft work passed to the British Hovercraft Corporation in 1966.

Which three animals became the first passengers in a hot-air balloon, flown before Louis XVI at Versailles in 1783?

A sheep, duck and rooster stayed aloft for about eight minutes and drifted some three kilometres. The sheep, named Montauciel, was picked as a fair stand-in for a human body.

The cover of the Beatles album Abbey Road shows the band walking across which animal-named pedestrian crossing?

Zebra crossings are named for their black-and-white stripes. The one outside the Abbey Road studios was given Grade II listed status in 2010 for its cultural importance.

Which supercar maker was founded in 1963 by a tractor manufacturer unhappy with the clutch of his Ferrari?

Lamborghini was the work of Ferruccio Lamborghini, who had grown rich building tractors, boilers and air conditioners. By his own account, Enzo Ferrari brushed off his complaint.

What did North American railroad companies introduce in 1883, decades before Congress made it law?

Standard time zones replaced a tangle in which every line kept its own clock time, so some junctions needed a separate clock for each one. Congress adopted the zones in 1918.

Which American vehicle got its standard colour because black lettering shows best on it in dim light?

School bus yellow was settled at a meeting organised by Frank Cyr, a Columbia University professor since nicknamed the father of the yellow school bus.

Which aviator landed in a Northern Irish pasture in 1932 as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic?

Amelia Earhart was asked by a farm hand whether she had flown far, and answered that she had come from America. The crossing had taken just under 15 hours.

Which billionaire piloted the enormous wooden Spruce Goose flying boat on its only flight, in November 1947?

Howard Hughes disliked the nickname, and it was wrong anyway: wartime limits on aluminium meant the aircraft was built almost entirely of birch.

Alaska's Iditarod, a race of roughly 1,000 miles from Anchorage to Nome, is run using which mode of transport?

Dog sleds once delivered mail, firewood and gold ore along the same trail, because the northern harbours were icebound from October to June.

What are Thailand's three-wheeled motorised taxis, a familiar sight in Bangkok traffic, popularly called?

Tuk-tuk is onomatopoeic, copying the noise of a small two-stroke engine. About 20,000 were registered as taxis across Thailand in 2017.

Which shape, picked for US stop signs in 1922, lets drivers recognise one even when facing the back of it?

Octagon signs were not always red: from 1924 to 1954 American stop signs carried their lettering on a yellow background.

Which luxury car maker's bonnet mascot, the Spirit of Ecstasy, was modelled on a motoring editor's secret lover?

Rolls-Royce received the figurine from sculptor Charles Sykes in 1911. It is also called the Flying Lady, the Silver Lady or simply Eleanor, after his model, Eleanor Thornton.

Which gull-winged car with an unpainted stainless-steel body is the time machine in the Back to the Future films?

DeLorean chose stainless steel mainly to get around a paint-finish problem, and recovered the extra cost by skipping paint altogether. Three cars were plated in 24-karat gold.

Which motorcycle maker assembled an early prototype in a ten-by-fifteen-foot backyard shed in Milwaukee?

Harley-Davidson later moved the original shed to its Juneau Avenue factory, where it stood for decades as a tribute to the firm's beginnings.

Which mail service of the American West went bankrupt after only 18 months when the telegraph arrived in 1861?

Pony Express riders cut the time for a message to cross between the coasts to about ten days, yet the business lost money despite a heavy subsidy.

Which crewed car with a rooftop lookout was traditionally coupled to the end of North American freight trains?

Caboose crews kept watch over the wagons ahead for shifting loads and overheating axles. The cars now survive mainly on maintenance trains and heritage lines.

What name is given to a bicycle built to be ridden by two people seated one behind the other?

Tandem describes the seating, one rider behind another, and not the head count: a version built for five people is called a quint.

Which Italian city's main international airport, at Fiumicino, is named after the polymath Leonardo da Vinci?

Rome has flown passengers from Fiumicino since 1960, a year before the airport officially opened. Florence named its own airport after the explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

What is the name of the notoriously hard street-memorising test that drivers of London's black cabs must pass?

The Knowledge covers 320 set routes through central London and typically takes three to four years to pass, with at least twelve oral exams on the way.

Which country's Darjeeling Himalayan Railway climbs some 2,000 metres using six zigzags and three loops?

India's mountain line, which starts at New Jalpaiguri only about 100 metres above sea level, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999.

Which country is home to Jungfraujoch, Europe's highest railway station, reached by a tunnel through the Eiger?

Switzerland opened the station in 1912, sixteen years after work began. It stands 3,454 metres up, and most of the line runs inside the mountains to escape snow and storms.

Which airline, founded in 1919, is the world's oldest still operating under its original name?

KLM was granted its royal title by Queen Wilhelmina in September 1919, before the company had even been formally founded. Qantas followed just over a year later.

Which capital opened mainland Europe's first electric underground railway in 1896 to mark a national millennium?

Budapest ran the line under Andrássy Avenue so that no surface tracks would spoil the elegant street, and Emperor Franz Joseph came to open it.

In which present-day state was the golden spike driven in 1869 to complete America's first transcontinental railroad?

Utah was still a territory when Leland Stanford swung at the spike and missed. The telegraph operator flashed the news across the country all the same.

Which American industrialist gave his name to the luxury railway sleeping cars he began building in the 1860s?

George Pullman charged for comfort: each car cost more than five times the price of an ordinary carriage, and his Delmonico of 1868 was the first devoted to fine dining.

Which streamlined blue British locomotive set the world speed record for steam, 126 mph, in July 1938?

Mallard touched the speed for barely a second during a brake trial, and its designer Nigel Gresley would only publish 125 mph. The record has never been beaten.

Which Australian city runs the world's largest operational urban tram network, with about 250 km of double track?

Melbourne also once ran one of the biggest cable tram systems anywhere, opened in 1885, with 75 km of double track and 1,200 gripcars and trailers.

What kind of hillside railway joins two counterbalanced cars by one cable, so one climbs as the other descends?

Funicular engines only have to haul the difference in passenger weight between the two cars, which made the design a cheap way up a steep slope.

Which engineer, who vanished from a steamer on his way to London in 1913, gave his name to a type of engine?

Rudolf Diesel built an engine that needs no spark plug, because the heat of compression alone ignites the fuel. How he came to go overboard from the SS Dresden has never been explained.

Which vet developed the first practical air-filled tyre in 1887 to smooth the ride of his young son's tricycle?

John Boyd Dunlop had no idea that a fellow Scot, Robert William Thomson, had patented an air-filled tyre some four decades earlier.

Which country's colourful jeepney minibuses were first built from surplus US Army jeeps left behind after World War II?

The Philippines got the word by blending jeep with jitney, period slang for a cheap shared taxi. Hundreds of the surplus vehicles were sold or given away as troops left.

Karl Drais's running machine of 1817, regarded as the first bicycle, lacked which part that riders now take for granted?

Pedals only arrived in the 1860s, when cranks were fixed to the front wheel hub. Riders of the earlier dandy horse pushed themselves along with their feet on the ground.

Which car maker's four-ring badge stands for the four firms that merged to form Auto Union in 1932?

Audi shared the badge with Horch, DKW and Wanderer, the other three companies in the merger. The Audi name itself was relaunched in 1965.

What nautical nickname did settlers give the white-topped covered wagons that took them west across America?

Prairie schooner came from the white canvas cover, which looked like a sail crossing a sea of grass. The heavier Conestoga wagon rarely went west of the Missouri River.

Which American test pilot became the first person to break the sound barrier in 1947, flying with two broken ribs?

Chuck Yeager had fallen from a horse two nights earlier and had a civilian doctor tape him up in secret, afraid the injury would cost him the flight in the Bell X-1.

In which country do commuters ride Mi Teleférico, a cable car network strung between La Paz and El Alto?

Bolivia built the lines because the two cities are separated by a steep slope about 400 metres tall and were once joined only by winding, congested roads.

Which roadless jungle region between Panama and Colombia forms the only gap in the 30,000 km Pan-American Highway?

Darién interrupts the road for about 106 km, between Yaviza and Turbo. Environmental organisations and indigenous groups have opposed finishing the missing section.

Which German made over 2,000 glider flights in the 1890s and was credited by the Wright brothers as an inspiration?

Otto Lilienthal died in a gliding crash in 1896. Berlin's Tegel airport later carried his name until it closed in 2020.

Which arid Australian region is crossed by the world's longest dead-straight stretch of railway, about 478 km?

Nullarbor track runs so straight that astronaut Andy Thomas said it shows from space like a very fine pencil line drawn across the desert.

Which Soviet airliner, nicknamed Concordski, made the first flight by a supersonic passenger jet in December 1968?

Tupolev Tu-144 beat its Western rival into the air by two months. Concorde's own first flight had been planned for early 1968 but slipped to March 1969.

Which word did the Royal Navy adopt in 1844 for a ship's left side, because larboard sounded too like starboard?

Port was already the side that faced the quay, because early ships hung their steering oar on the right. At night it carries a red light and the opposite side a green one.

What kind of boat rides on underwater wings that lift its hull out of the water as it gathers speed?

Hydrofoil pioneers included Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone inventor, who began experimenting with the idea in 1908 alongside his chief engineer Casey Baldwin.

What name is given to the mark on a ship's hull that shows how deeply it may legally be loaded?

Plimsoll line honours Samuel Plimsoll, who took up the cause against strong opposition in his 1873 book Our Seamen. His original mark was a circle with a bar through it.

What was the name of the balsa raft on which Thor Heyerdahl crossed the Pacific from Peru in 1947?

Kon-Tiki sailed for 101 days before smashing into a reef at Raroia. Heyerdahl's idea that Polynesia was settled from South America is overwhelmingly rejected by scientists.

What is the Italian name for the public water buses that run scheduled services along the canals of Venice?

Vaporetto could be translated as little steamer, a nod to the steam-driven boats that once did the job. Venice relies on them because there is no room for trains or a metro.

Which twin-hulled boat takes its name from a Tamil term for logs tied together?

Catamaran entered the language in the 1670s as the name of a log raft. The Tamil original described three to seven tree trunks lashed together, with only a single hull.

Which American submarine, the first nuclear-powered vessel, crossed the North Pole beneath the ice in August 1958?

USS Nautilus was sent north as a technological showpiece after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, and surfaced near Greenland after 96 hours under the ice.

Which city's Star Ferry has carried passengers across Victoria Harbour to Kowloon since the nineteenth century?

Hong Kong's service began in 1888 as the Kowloon Ferry Company, founded by a Parsee merchant, and took its present name ten years later.

Which narrow boat, driven with a double-bladed paddle, was first used by Inuit, Aleut and Yupik hunters?

Kayak builders each made their own, closely fitted to their body so that it would turn nimbly. The design is believed to be at least 4,000 years old.

Which giant container ship ran aground and blocked the Suez Canal for six days in March 2021?

Ever Given held up more than 300 vessels at both ends of the waterway, and it finally took fourteen tugs to pull her free.

The Scottish railway bridge behind the saying about a never-ending painting job crosses which stretch of water?

Firth of Forth trains have crossed the cantilever bridge since 1890. The saying rests on a mistaken belief that repainting restarted the moment the last coat was finished.