Picture the scene: you’re driving through the bone-dry American desert. There’s been nothing around for miles. Abruptly, up ahead, you recognize a monstrous solid bolt.
No, you’re not daydreaming as you travel. These mysterious structures are spotted over the length and broadness of the United States – – they were worked in the late 1920s and mid 1930s to help control pilots exploring the nation’s juvenile air mail framework in a period well before satellites and GPS.
Once upon a time, the bolts were lit up by neighboring guides. Presently, the greater part of these light towers are a distant memory and the bolts lie relinquished –
“What starts my fascination in the bolts was this existed and I had no idea about it, and there was no data about it,” says Charlotte, a previous lineage analyst.
She’s appropriate, there’s truly very little data accessible on the web. As opposed to prevalent thinking, the bolts have no relationship with the US Post Office. The bolts were worked between 1926-1931, as demonstrated by the Journal of Air Traffic Control, made by the Air Traffic Control Association. Aides were 25 miles isolated from one another and the jolts were painted yellow – regardless of the way that the paint on by far most of whatever is left of the markers has now obscured.
The Journal of Air Traffic Control reports that the reference points were authoritatively decommissioned during the 1970s. Somewhere in the range of four decades later, their future stays questionable.
“I have an inclination that they’re all going to end up authentic landmarks in the following couple of years, the ones that are left,” says Charlotte.
“There’s been a significant couple that have been crushed throughout the years and we simply can look on Google Earth and see a bolt there that doesn’t exist any longer, it’s dispiriting – and I think the open is beginning to perceive the way that […] it should be safeguarded,” she includes. “