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Why is it that Utah is known as the cross roads of the west? Well I wanted to find out so I decided to research (and with another long about two hour lecture form my Dad) I "soon" got my answer. I discovered that a lot of things such as the pony express, the telegraph, the rail road, air mail, space shuttle parts, and even an early version of the internet came to meet hear right here in Utah.
Lets start with the pony express. In the early 1850's major Gorge Chorpenning jr. and his associates made several attempts to carry mail form California to Salt Lake City. These attempts met with attacks form native American tribes and harsh blizzard conditions. Many men died. And on one attempt the animals froze to death and the mail had to be carried by hand. Notice my mention of the word Salt Lake City. Even so, an even more crazy idea was gaining traction; carrying mail by horse from Missouri, and not just Utah.
A lot has been written on the history of the Pony Express, but most of it is about where it started and where it ended. When the first riders form the west and the east came with the first "Mochillas" carrying mail to the next stop the past each other in (Lo and behold) Utah. Perhaps with a quick wave as they galloped past each other, this was the half way point for both sides. Nobody knows who these first two riders were to pass each other, but I'm betting one of them was the guy in this paragraph I found on the internet. He was a Mormon Pioneer in the first wagon train west, and became a famous guide for Gold Diggers before becoming Brigham Young's final bodyguard.
Major Howard Egan was the superintendant of the Pony Express between Salt Lake City and Roberts Creek, Nevada. He was also the rider that brought the first pony express mail to Salt Lake City. His son, Howard Ransom Egan, wrote the following account:
"When all was supposed to be ready and the time figured out when the first Express should arrive in Salt Lake City from the east, they thought that, on account of the level country to run over, that they would be able to make better time on the eastern division than on the western from Salt Lake to California. Therefore, the two riders that were to run between Salt Lake and Rush Valley were kept at the city."
"Father alone of all the officers of the line thought his boys would make as good a record as the best and, if they did, there would be no rider at Rush Valley to carry the Express on to the city. So to be on the safe side Father went himself to Rush Valley. And sure enough his boys delivered the goods as expected, and he started on his first ride. It was a stormy afternoon, but all went well with him till the home stretch."
"The pony on this run was a very swift, fiery and fractious animal. The night was so dark that it was impossible to see the road, and there was a strong wind blowing from the north, carrying a sleet that cut the face while trying to look ahead. But as long as he could hear the pony's feet pounding the road, he sent him ahead at full speed."
"All went well, but when he got to Mill Creek, that was covered by a plank bridge, he heard the pony's feet strike the bridge and the next instant pony and rider landed in the creek, which wet Father above the knees, but the next instant, with one spring, the little brute was out and pounding the road again and very soon put the surprise on the knowing ones. And here let me say, that it was a very long time before the regular riders came up to the time made on this first trip, if they ever did."
(From Pioneering The West, Major Howard Egan, Howard Ransom Egan.)
Major Howard Egan was 46 when he made that ride.
Utah-bound Mormons found gold when they were working at Sutter's Mill, and soon the California gold rush was underway. But it took six months to carry mail form the east to California by boat. Things in Washington were heating up as our nation faced the prospect of Cival war. Forty-Niners and prospectors in the California territory were anxious to know what was going on the other side of the continent. Somebody needed to devise a way to get mail quickly form east of the Mississippi to settlements in the west. So that's when the pony express came into play. The pony express could get the mail there in ten days but that's still a far cry from C.N.N.'s 24 hour news coverage.
Thus in June of 1860 efforts got underway to crate a telegraph system that spans the United States. Congress granted forty thousand dollars per year to Hiram Sibley to oversee the construction form his post as the president of Western Union. Wire was strung from Virginia city to Salt Lake by the Pacific Telegraph Company. Meanwhile the Overland Telegraph Company strung wire form Omaha to Salt Lake City landing our fair city right in the middle of things.
Omaha was also the launching point for the transcontinental railroad line being built by the union pacific railroad. The Central Pacific line began in Sacramento and planed to meet somewhere in the Midwest. Both companies planned to bypass Salt Lake which infuriated Brigham Yong, who was one of three major share holders in the Union Pacific Railroad. It is interesting to note that Interstate 80 follows the original railroad lines pretty closely, except in the State of Utah, where it passes right through the middle of Salt Lake City.
In any case, everybody knows that the transcontinental railroad was completed in Utah, with the help of a lot of Mormons, who were by all accounts the best laborers to be had. They didn't drink, they didn't cuss, they didn't gamble and then come begging for a loan, they even showed up for work on time! They did not get paid as promised, however, and many were ruined financially by the dirty dealings of the company that Enron copied.
Once the trains were connected, the Overland Stage Coach Service was no longer needed. In fact, Major Howard Egan's last day on the job at the Overland Stage Coach was the day that the golden spike was driven. Most people don't realize it, but nearly all stage coach rides from the east ended in Salt Lake City. From here, people would board other stages, such as the Well Fargo with service to California and Oregon.
Salt Lake City was a hub for transportation and freight back then, just as it is today. Freight comes in by train or Semi truck, and then is dispatched to places all over the west. Most western cities are a day's drive from Salt Lake City, according to a brochure you can pick up at the Chamber of Commerce. Phoenix, Cheyenne, San Diego, Albuquerque, Denver, Las Vegas, Reno, Idaho Falls, you name it. England is probably the largest trucking company with a headquarters in Utah, but there are plenty of others who have major operations here.
Almost nobody you talk to knows this, but the first Airline service in the United States began here in Salt Lake City. In fact, you probably still don't believe me, so my Dad and I have collected several pieces of evidence that this is exactly where airline service started. The first air mail service was in New York, but Salt Lake had a unique player in the air mail business back in the 1920's.
Thursday, December 4, 2003
Utahns were quick to embrace aviation and help achieve mastery of the skies
By Carma Wadley
Deseret Morning News
In 1925, when the government was ready to turn mail service from military to private contractors, a company called Western Air Express came into being. After being awarded the mail contract between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, the company, looking for other ways to generate revenue, hit upon the idea of passengers. Two folding chairs were installed in the mail compartment in front of the pilot's cockpit, and on May 23, 1926, Western inaugurated passenger service on both its north- and southbound planes.
Four passengers made that first trip, but prominent Salt Lake businessman and aviation enthusiast Ben F. Redman was first with his down payment on the $90 one-way ticket, and thus claimed the privilege of being the first passenger. Maude Campbell became the first woman passenger a couple of weeks later.
By the close of 1926, the airline had carried 209 passengers, and, according to a company history, "established a perfect safety record despite 38 forced landings along the rugged route, and made a net profit of $1,029.21."
Western Air Express evolved into Western Airlines and continued to use Salt Lake City as a hub of operations. In 1987, it merged with Delta Air Lines.
Metro Business Report
Tune in to the daily metro business report on KSL presented by Lane Beattie from the Salt Lake Area Chamber of Commerce
Here's a Chamber History Fact: On this day in 1926, the Chairman of the Chamber's Aviation committee, Ben F. Redman, along with businessman J.O. Tomlinson, became the first commercial airline passengers in the country to fly on a regularly scheduled air route. The Western Air Express flight from Salt Lake to Los Angeles began at 9:30 in the morning and ended in Los Angeles at 5:30 pm. Pacific Time. The carrier later changed its name to Western Airlines.
From http://www.earlyaviators.com/ejames.htm
ONLINE RESOURCES - 2
If you search for "Jimmie James +aviation", using the Google search engine, (10-03-03), you will find about 197 links! Only about two of them appear to be relevant..
SALT LAKE CITY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
"1926 The first commercial passenger flight took place at Woodward Field. Ben F. Redman and J.A. Tomlinson perched atop U.S. mail sacks and flew with pilot C.N. 'Jimmy" James on his regular eight-hour mail delivery flight to Los Angeles. This Western air Express operation was the beginning of Western Airlines, which later merged with Delta Air Lines."
Excerpt from website
The paragraph excerpted above is one of many from the page "History of the Airport" which is found on the website of the Salt Lake City International airport. It refers to one incident in the career of Jimmy James who apparently was active in the beginnings of the Air Mail Service. You can access the site by clicking on the title above. I think you will want to read the whole story of the history of the airport while on the site.
Douglas Propliners DC-1 - DC-7
by Arthur Pearcy
copyright 1995
Airlife Publishing Ltd.
p.14. "In General only mail and express packages were carried, but two companies in the west, Western Air Express and Pacific Air Transport, the latter bought by Boeing on 1 January 1928, also carried passengers. Western's mail operation was so successful that within a month, on 23 May 1926, it began the first scheduled and sustained passenger service in the United States."
The Interstate Highway system and the transcontinental railroad have replaced all previous modes for transporting cargo, unless you count boats and planes. Utah is not exactly the center of the shipping lanes. However, Utah has had a significant impact on other methods of moving people from place to place.
Utah has not really impacted air cargo all that much in the United States, unless you count the contributions made by Harrold Dean Wilsted. Wilsted was a major player in the NACA (a precursor to NASA), and was responsible for massive improvements in the design of jet engines, and helicopter propulsion methods. When searching for him on Google, you find more listings under the names H. Dean Wilsted, and HD Wilsted. His wife told my Dad on the phone that he would not like to be called the inventor of these things, because he always worked with a team. We think he was one of the directors of the NACA.
Utah is home to Thiokol, which makes the rocket engines for the Space Shuttle. Because these engines are carried to Houston by train, they needed to fit on the trains, and pass through a few tunnels along the way. Although no sources are cited, a web site we found says that the engines are the size they are because of the tunnels they have to go through. I'll bet this is probably true.
Other interesting "people movers" include the chair lift for skiers. Alta's Collins lift was the second chair lift in the USA, and the first to be elevated high off the ground. Our neighbor Paul Elhert designs chair lifts for ski resorts all over the world, and his office is in Salt Lake City. The skis themselves, of course, are people movers, and Utah has had a lot to do with the development of modern ski equipment. Many companies have either started here, or had significant holdings, but a few bear special mention. Daleboot was the first company to offer fully custom made ski boots. Winterstick made one of the earliest snowboards, probably the very first "hands free" design. And inventor Earl A. Miller held the most patents of anybody for ski equipment designs, including the multiple release ski binding, the strapless ski pole, and the ubiquitous ski brake.
Besides the ski industrty, there is the Medical Helicopter, which was pioneered in many ways by the folks at the University of Utah, and by Terry Clemmer at LDS hospital. Dr. Clemmer based his idea on the helicopters used in the Viet Namm War by the Army, but there was also a hospital in Texas that bought a helicopter for rescuing people in hard to reach areas.
A Company in Clearfield named Arrow Dynamics invented the tubular steel roller coaster track when they designed the Matterhorn ride for Disneyland. They make some of the fastest and some of the coolest roller coaster rides in the country, and test a lot of their designs at Lagoon before building giant rides for bigger amusement parks.
You may have heard that ZCMI was the very first Department Store in America. It was the first to incorporate, it was the first Co-operative mercantile (way before REI), and it was the first to have a chain of stores. Older companies have become department store chains, so you may have difficulty arguing that ZCMI is the oldest. But it was the first place in the western United States to have an escalator, and ZCMI's people even invented the hydraulic elevator. If you don't believe me, ask Martha Sonntag Bradley, author of "ZCMI: America's First Department Store".
Okay, so people movers are a happening thing in Utah, but what of the mail that was so important in the 1800's? One could argue that John Brownings guns created an efficient way to give people a "message", but they weren't really designed to do that. But does Utah have anything to do with mail today, or with the other ways people get information?
To put it mildly, yes we do. The television would not have been a success, if Utahn Philo T. Farnsworth had not created a picture tube that included a half-toning process for breaking the picture up into little dots or lines. Other people had video cameras and picture tubes before Farnsworth, but you couldn't tell what you were watching. Mr. Farnsworth eventually founded a college called ITT, which is still around today.
My Dad met a man who claimed to have created a circuit board that went into most color television sets. This circuit had to do with the NTSC color system, which made it possible for televisions to understand color. An old joke among technicians, is that NTSC stands for Never the Same Color. We can't find any evidence to back up Mr. Allen's claim to have invented the NTSC decoder.
A man named Ivan Sutherland was among the first to hook television picture tubes up to a computer. At the request of David Evans, Sutherland came to teach at the University of Utah. Together they taught students who invented many fields in computer graphics; Video Arcade Games (Nolan Bushnell who founded Atari), 3D Animation (Ed Catmull who founded Pixar), Postscript and scalable fonts (John Warnock who founded Adobe), Word Processing (Alan Ashton, founder of Word Perfect), Web Browsers (Jim Clark, founder of Netscape), and many, many others.
Professor Sutherland created an early VR machine called the video headmounted display. He also wrote "Sketchpad", which was the first pixel painting program. If you've ever used MacPaint, PC Paintbrush, Photoshop, Painter, Claris Paint, Photopaint, Paintshop Pro, Ofoto, or other programs like them, you've seen the basic sketchpad idea. After leaving the University of Utah, he joined Dr. Evans in creating a company called Evans and Sutherland. They designed the first computer flight simulators, and helped create the star shows at most of the planetariums in the world.
Another of their students, named Alan Kay, deserves to be mentioned in this paper. He invented the GUI (graphical user interface) for the computer. Before the Macintosh, and even before there was windows, Dr. Kay invented the idea of overlapping windows. He also invented one of the earliest personal computers (the Alto), and one of the very first laptops. The reason I mention him, is that he helped make the University of Utah the fourth node on the ARPA net, and the first school outside California to join the ARPA net.
ARPA net, so you know, is now the internet. The military wanted a computer network that could keep on working even if one of the computers got blown up or something. Older networks didn't work if even just one computer got turned off. Alan Kay was at the University of Utah when the ARPA net was being planned, and the University was supposed to be one of the four test sites before the project even started. Here's what we found on the internet about Dr. Kay:
In the autumn of 1969 the first ARPANET computer was connected to the ARPANET's IMP node at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Doug Engelbart's hypertext-project computer at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was the next. By the end of the year, the network also included the computers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the University of Utah, i.e. four in all. All the computers used different operating systems and they were able to talk to each other across the network with equal status. Some years later, RFC1000 tells the story of these days of the birth of the Internet, in which enthusiastic students played an important part.
U. alumnus honored with 2004 Kyoto Prize (Deseret News Article)
Alan Kay, who has several ties to Utah, was honored Wednesday by being named the 2004 Kyoto Prize Laureate for Advanced Technology in the field of information science. Kay was honored for his work in visualizing the PC and laptop in the 1960s and his work to develop them since.
Kay received his M.A., with distinction, in computer science and physiology from the University of Utah in 1968. A year later, he received his Ph.D., with distinction, in computer science from the U. for inventing the first graphical object-oriented personal computer.
Kay was an ARPA research assistant at the university in 1966-69 and an assistant professor at the U. in 1969-70.
He also is a member of the Utah Information Technology Association's Hall of Fame.
Kay's work also has taken place at Stanford University, the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Atari, Apple Computer, the Walt Disney Co., the Viewpoints Research Institute Inc., the Hewlett-Packard Co. and the IPA Exploratory Software Project.
The Kyoto Prize is presented annually by the nonprofit Inamori Foundation of Japan to recognize those who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual development of mankind. The Kyoto Prizes have been presented annually in the categories of advanced technology, basic sciences and arts and philosophy.
Alan Kay, Ph.D. 1969
So you see, Utah was involved in the internet long before anybody else had even heard of DARPA or ARPA. The University of Utah may not have been the first school to sign on, but it was the first one outside of California. One of the very first uses for this network was to sent messages back and forth. It wasn't until the 1990's that Netscape got off the ground, and did for using the web what the GUI did for using the computer.
Utah's Novell, and Ray Noorda in particular had a lot to do with other kinds of computer networking. Novell made it possible to connect a lot of computers in a building, and send letters and memos to the guy on the fourteenth floor without leaving your desk.
Utah didn't have a whole lot to do with the invention of the telephone, the phonograph, or the tape recorder, which are all important communications technologies. However, there was a Utahn named Homer Fletcher, who ran the famous Bell Laboratories back in the 1930's. Dr. Fletcher is credited with the invention of the hearing aid, and with the creation of stereo audio. While teaching at the University of Utah, he helped create the Fletcher Munson Equal Loudness Curve, which is what your hearing is compared to when they test your hearing.
After retiring from Bell Labs, Dr. Fletcher taught at BYU. While he was there, a professor at the University of Utah named Thomas Stockham was creating a whole new field in audio technology. Together with a student named Ingebretsen, and a professor named Erculino Ferretti, Dr. Stockham created a method for digitizing sound onto a computer hard disk. Stockham and Ingebretsen founded a company called Soundstream, and helped invent many digital formats, including the Compact Disc.
My Dad and I think it's interesting that there is no direct connection between Farnsworth and Sutherland, or Fletcher and Stockham, other than the fact that they all lived and taught in Utah. Sutherland could not have done much with the computer monitor if it hadn't been for Philo T. Farnsworth's original ideas. Likewise, Stockham got a lot of help from Fletcher.
My Dad's professor in college was a research assistant to Dr. Stockham when they were first figuring out some of the details of digital audio. At the same time, he also worked as an assistant to Vlademir Ussachevsky across campus. Dr. Ussachevsky is known as the father of electronic music. Dr. Peterson, my Dad's professor, once got a call from a frustrated student at BYU. "Can you come down here and see if you can make Dr. Fletcher believe that digital audio can work? He's making us all crazy!"
Nobody knows if Stockham and Fletcher ever got together, or even if Stockham and Ussachvsky ever crossed paths on the University of Utah campus. But it's clear that Dr. Petersen knew the latter two, and that he invented cross synthesis, which is a way of making the computer sound like it is talking.
Here is another coincidence. Homer Dudley invented the first talking synthesizer at Bell Labs, during the time that Dr. Fletcher was in charge. He called his speech synthesizer the Voder. Wendy Carlos, a student of Ussachevsky at Columbia, helped improve the Dudley speech synthesizer, calling her version the Vocoder. Dr. Petersen improved that vocoder, calling his digital version the Phase Vocoder.
My Dad met a Utahn who works for Microsoft, and also creates voice recognition software. She said there is a whole bunch of people in Redmond who work with her, and many of them are Mormons. Now, a Utah company called Phonix makes computer chips for listening to people and typing their words on the screen. This type of software is called "voice recognition". The founder of Phonix is named Roger Dudley, and he's a descendant of Homer Dudley.
Meanwhile, another Utahn named Dexter Francis, worked for Apple Computer a few years ago. While he was at Apple, he directed the creation of the first consumer flatbed scanner. Like with digital audio, it is possible to send scanned documents via internet to anyplace in the globe in an instant.
Likewise, with the use of communications satelites, you can beam any recorded sound or any electronic picture to anywhere in the world at the speed of light. You won't be surprised to know that there are several Utah companies that make communications satelites, such as Lyman Brothers of West Jordan. You may already know this, but Utah State University has one of the best schools in the country for "areospace engineering".
Besides broadcasting images and sound by video and satelite, many companies are interested in using the internet as a means of broadcasting content. At the forefront of this is a Utah company owned by inventor James LeVoy Sorensen. His company invented many of the best video codecs in the world. These "codecs" allow you to compress video and audio, so it doesn't take as long for "content" to "stream" onto your computer over the net.
So I have to ask you my question again. Why do people call Utah the crossroads of the West? It's what they always say on the Mormon Tabernacle Choir broadcast, which is America's oldest, and longest running radio programm. "From the shadows of the everlasting hills, and from the crossroads of the west, again we leave you…"
Robert Rivlin's book, The Algorithmic Image: Graphic Visions of the Computer Age, contains the following quote: "Almost every influential person in the modern computer-graphics community either passed through the University of Utah or came into contact with it in some way."
Everything was not invented here in Utah. Everything did not start here in Utah. Even the Mormon church was started in the eastern United States, not here in Utah. I think we can do Rivlin's quote one better. Almost every major development in the technology of moving people and information either passed through Utah, or came into contact with it in some way. Utahns have woven themselves into the fabric of American society in a way that few people recognize.
Bibliography
Orphans preferred by Christopher Corbett
The Transcontinental Railroad by Gillian Houghton
Salt Lake City airport brochure
The American Nation by Dr. James West Davidson Dr. Michale B. Stoff and Dr. Herman J. Vilola
The Transcontinental Railroad by Thomas Streissguth
The Transcontinental Railroad by Linda Thompson
Westward to promontory Building the Union Pacific across the plains And mountains by Barry B. Combs
The Pony Express by Peter Anderson
Pony Express! By Steven Kroll and Dan Anderasen
Orphans Preferred by Christopher Corbett
Douglas Propliners DC-1-DC-7 by Arthur Pearcy
The Transcontinental Railroad by Gillian Houghton
ZCMI America's first Department Store by Martha Sonntag Bradley
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