Word: airship
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Franklin D. Roosevelt and Marshall Field were among a handful of businessmen planning the first commercial "airship" line between Chicago and New York...
...dead, and that "there were very few present at the service." It was a cruel epitaph for a man who had lived 92 years and responded so creatively to an inventive age. Porter was the creator of more than 100 machines and gadgets including a washing machine, an airship, a portable, prefabricated house, an automobile run on steam, and an elevated train. He was the founder of the Scientific American, which has just reached its 125th year...
Much of what she found concerned Porter's interest in new-fangled machines. Trudging behind his portable studio as a young man, he had conceived of an airship with the possibility of freeing Napoleon from St. Helena. Most of his notions were more down to earth. With typical inventor's zeal, he sought to devise easy solutions to practical problems. When he saw his wife laboring over the scrub board, he invented a washing machine. In 1846 he published plans for a Broadway elevated railroad, preceding by two decades the first...
...diagrams that he made for his machines. But within a year of its founding, he sold it. He had an idea for a rifle with a revolving chamber and foolishly sold it to Samuel Colt of Hartford for $100. In 1849, Porter tried to promote his old St. Helena airship as a safe way to fly gold rushers to California in three days. The years passed. No one would listen; he was ahead of his time, a crackpot, an eccentric. None of his inventions left a mark, but Porter's portraits and murals remain to testify...