Flowers in Bloom Influenced Date for Memorial Day

It’s a federal holiday that honors U.S. military personnel who have died while serving in the country’s armed forces. Memorial Day is designated by law to fall late in May on the last Monday of the month. This year that is May 29, 2017.  

May 30th was the original date for the holiday when it began 149 years ago. Decorating veterans’ graves with flowers became an important part of the holiday, and founders of the tradition decided that flowers would be in bloom by that time of the year. Later, Memorial Day became one of the Monday, three-day weekend holidays when the Uniform Monday Holiday Act went into law on the first day of 1971.

Memorial Day originally was named Decoration Day by members of The General Army of the Republic. Members of that group were mostly widows and families of military members who fought on the Northern side of the American Civil War. They encouraged citizens to decorate the graves of Union war dead with flowers and American flags. Members of the organization started the decorating practice on May 30, 1868, in Decatur, IL, shortly after the end of the Civil War.

Confederate States started their own tradition of placing flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers also in May. The custom of using flowers as decoration was important in both the northern and southern states. In the early 1900s, both northern and southern states used May 30th as the official day.

Military units suffered more than 600,000 casualties during the Civil War. That staggering number of military dead required states on both sides of the war to build many additional cemeteries. New graveyards provided the needed space to bury war causalities, and grieving families used flowers to honor the military.

After World War II most state governments began calling the holiday Memorial Day because that name emphasized honoring the memory of fallen soldiers. The U.S. Congress officially changed the name in 1967.

Because its’s held during warm, spring weather, Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of the vacation season. Labor Day marks the unofficial end of summer.

Formal flag ceremonies honor the more than one million men and women who gave their lives in service to the United States during all American war conflicts. One formal ceremony includes the flagpole in front of the U.S. Capitol Building. The flag that flies above the Capitol is raised to full staff Memorial Day morning and immediately lowered slowly to half-staff.  At noon the flag is raised again to full staff and remains there all day.

   

Hyperloop Project Can Move People and Goods Near Speed of Sound

Hyperloop is an experimental, ground transportation system that’s designed to reach speeds faster than 700 mph. Experimental prototypes would hold passengers and freight in a twenty foot capsule that floats inside a partially vacuumed tube. Passengers and freight will travel both above ground and underground.

Magnets work to levitate capsules that get pushed through the tube by high-pressured air. The capsules have accelerated to several hundred miles per hour within seconds during experiments conducted over short distances.

Two major corporations, both located in California, are working to get a functioning Hyperloop system working sometime by 2021. Hyperloop One is a Los Angeles, CA, company that sprung from an idea publicized by Elon Musk, a top official for Spacex, Tesla Inc. and Paypal.  Musk was a concept coordinator for the Hyperloop project when he presented the idea to a national conference in August 2013. He decided not to participate personally in the project.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) is a second company that’s developing the transportation system designed to approach the speed of sound. HTT started in November 2013 and runs its operation in Culver City, CA.

The idea of using air pressure to move objects through a tube is nothing new. Major department stores used a similar method of sending paperwork through elaborate vacuum tubes connected to all floors of the buildings.

Drive-in windows at banks show the concept of Hyperloop transportation. Customers put their bank requests into a capsule that travels through a vacuum tube to an employee several feet away. A vacuum system sends the completed bank transaction inside the capsule back to the bank customer who doesn’t have to leave the car.

Building a Hyperloop system involves putting thousands of miles of tubes above and below ground. These tubes would be approximately nine feet in diameter and would house capsules that would hold about 12 people or a few tons of freight. Both HTT and Hyperloop One plan to build inner-city and suburban systems.

India’s government has an agreement with HTT to build one of the super speed systems between New Delhi and Mumbai. The Hyperloop engineers claim the travel time between the two major cities in India would be reduced to 70 minutes instead of the current train trip of 18 hours.

Other countries have expressed interest in getting Hyperloop systems inside their borders. The Czech Republic, and the United Arab Emerits invited HTT to build prototype systems for them. Speed estimates include cruising speeds of 650 mph to top speeds faster than the speed of sound at an incredible 800 mph.

Hyperloop engineers claim that the capsules would run completely silent inside the outer tubes. An electrical motor would provide the acceleration and stopping methods of the pods that are designed to float inside the outer shells.

Beach Pneumatic Transit

A prototype for an underground transit system ran underneath New York City from 1870 to 1873. The Beach Pneumatic Transit carrier put passengers into a railroad-type vehicle that moved by an air propulsion method similar to the Hyperloop. Up to 22 people were moved underneath Broadway for about one city block when the vehicle stopped and reversed direction to carry passengers back to the start of the tunnel. 

Passengers paid 25 cents to ride the transit car one city block and back. More than $7,000 was collected annually during the first two years of the prototype’s operation. It was more a curiosity than a practical way of transporting passengers, but the experiment proved the validity of using air pressure to move people from one spot to another worked.

Alfred Ely Beach was the developer and chief inventor of the transit system. He spent $350,000 of his own money to finance the experiment. That equals $8.75 million in today’s dollars. Beach wanted to increase the tunnel distance to five miles in the second phase of the transit operation. However, public interest in the tunnel diminished during the third year, and city government officials refused to raise tax money to fund the project.

Developers of Hyperloop One and HTT keep speculating that they will get a working system operational sometime before 2021. Their optimism is farfetched since the basic ground work is in the infancy stage.

Officials have estimated costs would be somewhere from 200 million to 400 million per mile to construct the first Hyperloop. That’s not more than a wild guess. The backers for Hyperloop One and HTT will have to be wealthy nations to make the superfast transportation systems a reality. 

Transportation of freight, goods and products is the future of the Hyperloop. Passenger costs will be so expensive that only wealthy citizens will travel at the supersonic speeds. That was found to be true during the short-lived SST super airplanes that traveled at the speed of sound decades ago.