Innovation & Flight

San Antonio, TX

On October 28, 1928, a San Antonio station billed as "Radio Sam" launched a two-hour nightly broadcast entirely in Spanish — the first program of its kind in Texas. Owner Sam Liberto and businessman Edward Buckley recruited Julián F. Lozano to produce and announce "The International Goodwill Program," which he hosted in a spirit of cross-cultural understanding until his death in 1951. The tradition he began seeded the many hours of Spanish-language radio that San Antonio stations still air today.

Scranton, PA

In the mid-19th century, northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite fields ran on ingenious gravity railroads — lines that let loaded coal cars coast downhill by their own weight, with stationary steam engines hauling the empties back up a chain of inclined planes. The Pennsylvania Coal Company's route carried anthracite between the mines around Pittston and the canal at Hawley for more than three decades. This surviving 'Pioneer' car, retired when the gravity line gave way to conventional steam locomotives, was handed over to the City of Scranton in 1909 as a relic of that vanished technology.

Emory, TX

Between 1910 and 1912, James Alexander Amis hand-poured and cured the cast-concrete blocks for this unusual family home in Emory. Amis was a one-man engine of local enterprise, running a sawmill, lumberyard, truck farm, livestock operations, a pickle factory, and an undertaking business. He even sponsored a 1914 hot-air balloon flight over town and later championed building Highway 19 through the city.

Athens, GA

Designed by Athens gunsmith John Gilleland, a member of a home-guard unit of men too old or infirm for regular Confederate service, this double-barrelled cannon was meant to fire two chain-linked balls at once to "mow down" advancing enemies. Cast in a local foundry, it failed in testing because the barrels could not be discharged at precisely the same instant, sending the balls on wild, erratic paths. The gun survives in Athens as a beloved curiosity—one of a kind and famously ineffective.

Latrobe, PA · est. 2013

By the turn of the twentieth century, steamships and railroads had made the once-exotic banana a cheap, everyday fruit in American cities and towns. In 1904, a young apprentice pharmacist named David Strickler put that abundance to delicious use at the Tassell Pharmacy soda fountain here in Latrobe, splitting a banana lengthwise and dressing it with ice cream. He is even credited with designing the boat-shaped dish that still holds the treat today.

Odessa, TX

The cable tool rig, which dropped a heavy bit on a steel cable to pound its way downward, replaced the older spring-pole method and let drillers reach the deep formations of the Southwest. Introduced in Texas in 1866, it brought in the first great wells of the Permian Basin, including reconstruction from rigs used at the legendary Santa Rita No. 1, which blew in near Big Lake in May 1923. Texas pioneered much of the surrounding industry, from the first oil lease to the first pipeline and storage tanks.

Bethesda, MD

This anchor, taken from a Coast Guard cutter, once stood before the Staten Island Marine Hospital—the very place where, in 1887, the Hygienic Laboratory was founded to study disease among arriving immigrants and sailors. From that single laboratory room grew the National Institutes of Health, today the largest biomedical research enterprise in the world.

Columbia, SC

On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart just 73 seconds after liftoff, killing all seven crew members as a national television audience watched. The disaster halted the American shuttle program for nearly three years and forced a hard reckoning over engineering, safety, and the true costs of spaceflight. This plaque was placed the following spring by cadets of an Air Force ROTC detachment and its Arnold Air Society, the young airmen honoring astronauts they saw as pioneers of their own calling.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2002

Established in 1855, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was the first hospital in the nation devoted entirely to the care of children. Over the decades it became a proving ground for pediatric medicine, developing lifesaving vaccines, pioneering newborn surgical techniques, and advancing treatment for childhood cancer. Its founding reflected a growing 19th-century conviction that children's health deserved dedicated, specialized care.

South Middleton Township, PA · est. 2014

From an 1886 house in the rolling country south of Carlisle came a remarkable American family whose lives orbited the natural world. Brothers Frank and Eugene Craighead earned national reputations as entomologists, and Frank's twin sons carried the work into wild landscapes—studying and helping save Yellowstone's grizzly bears, championing falconry, and lending their voices to the movement that became the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. The family's most famous member, Jean Craighead George, turned that same intimacy with nature into beloved books like 'Julie of the Wolves' and 'My Side of the Mountain.'

Pittsburg, TX

Baptist minister and inventor Burrell Cannon (1848-1922) drew on a vision from the Biblical book of Ezekiel to design a flying machine, persuading Pittsburg investors to fund the Ezekiel Airship Company. Its engine drove four sets of paddles beneath large fabric-covered wings, and the craft reportedly lifted briefly off the ground late in 1902—a year before the Wright brothers' flight. The airship was wrecked by a storm en route to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and after a second model crashed in 1913, Cannon abandoned the effort.

Chicago, IL

This Jackson Park site marks the start and finish of America's first automobile race, run on Thanksgiving Day in 1895. Six vehicles—four gasoline-powered and two electric—covered the roughly fifty-four miles to Evanston and back over snowy roads, in a contest sponsored by the Chicago Times-Herald. The grueling run proved that the horseless carriage was more than a novelty and helped ignite American enthusiasm for the automobile.

Newtown, PA · est. 2001

In 1960, the Lavelle Aircraft Corporation built TIROS 1 here, the world's first experimental and operational weather satellite. Pioneering satellite television techniques, TIROS relayed the first TV image made from space, opening a new window on Earth's clouds and storms. Its success led to a line of improved satellites that transformed the science of meteorology.

Frankfort, KY

In the early 1800s, demand for a better baitcasting reel led Frankfort watchmakers and silversmiths Jonathan and Benjamin Meek to apply their precision craft to fishing tackle, perfecting the quadruple multiplying reel. Benjamin Milam joined as an apprentice in 1839, and by 1853 the partnership stamped its reels "Meek & Milam." From 1896 to 1903 the firm's celebrated "Frankfort Kentucky Reel," prized by anglers and dignitaries worldwide, was made at 222 West Main Street.

San Augustine, TX

Built in 1890 in the deep East Texas town of San Augustine, this Greek Revival home was raised for George E. Gatling, a first cousin of the inventor of the famous Gatling gun. Constructed of native longleaf pine with fireplaces of handmade brick, it stayed in the builder's family through five generations. It stands as a well-preserved example of the fine timber-country homes that prosperous families built in the Piney Woods at the close of the 19th century.

Washoe County, NV

On the mountain above stood the "Great Incline of the Sierra Nevada," a 4,000-foot steam-powered cable railway completed in 1880 by the Sierra Nevada Wood and Lumber Company. Using 8,000 feet of wire cable wound over massive bull wheels, it hauled cordwood and lumber 1,800 feet up the slope to a V-flume that carried it down to Washoe Valley. From there wagons delivered the timber to the insatiable mines of the Comstock, moving as much as 300 cords a day.

San Diego, CA · est. 2015

In 1958, Scripps scientist Charles David Keeling launched a program to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide from the newly built Mauna Loa Observatory and other sites worldwide. Within two years his data revealed both the Earth's natural seasonal CO2 rhythm and — more consequentially — a steady, relentless annual rise, which he linked to the burning of fossil fuels. His insistence on continuous, precise measurement turned the resulting Keeling Curve into one of the defining records of modern science.

Livingston, TX

Organized on August 3, 1903, the Livingston Telephone Company became Polk County's oldest public utility, a locally owned exchange running a 24-hour switchboard above a downtown building. It began with just 40 hand-cranked telephones, growing to 124 by the time creosoted poles went up in 1909. In 1959 the exchange finally converted to fully automatic dialing.

Beaumont, TX

On January 10, 1901, a well drilled under Captain Anthony F. Lucas atop a salt-dome hill called Spindletop blew in with unimaginable force, spewing an estimated 100,000 barrels of oil a day from just over 1,000 feet down. The Lucas Gusher was the first great well of the Gulf Coast, and it instantly transformed Beaumont into a boomtown and the Sabine district into a world center of oil refining and export. It touched off the age of cheap, abundant petroleum in America.

Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1967

Drilled in 1882, the McGugin well tapped what was then reported as the greatest flow of natural gas in the world, and its output was soon piped east to fuel Pittsburgh's homes and factories. The strike helped ignite the development of the oil and gas fields of southwestern Pennsylvania, a region that became central to America's early energy industry. It marked a moment when Pennsylvania's underground riches began powering an industrializing nation.

Galveston, TX

In January 1917, as World War I ground on, Germany's foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann secretly offered Mexico financial support to invade the American Southwest if the United States entered the war. Because Britain had cut Germany's cables, the coded message traveled over American lines and passed through the Mexican Telegraph Company's Trans-Gulf Cable, which came ashore at Galveston and relayed it on from a small building on Avenue O. British intelligence intercepted and decoded it, and its release helped push the United States into the war.

Galveston, TX

Financier and philanthropist W. L. Moody, Jr. built this large Late Victorian residence about 1894 and lived here for many years, later establishing the Moody Foundation. The house is said to be the first Texas home built on a steel frame, and it boasts magnificent stained glass, ornate ceilings, and rare hand-carved woodwork. Famed for its hospitality, it stands as a monument to Galveston's Gilded Age wealth.

Galveston, TX

The 1900 Galveston hurricane and its storm surge killed roughly 6,000 people and leveled much of the island city. In response, a board of three engineers — including Henry M. Robert, author of "Robert's Rules of Order," Alfred Noble, and H.C. Ripley — designed a defense: raise the entire city's grade and shield the Gulf shore with a solid concrete wall. Begun in October 1902 and finished in July 1904, the original 3.3-mile seawall proved itself in 1915, when a fiercer storm did far less harm.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2022

When the Palestra opened at the University of Pennsylvania in 1927, it was a marvel of engineering—one of the first steel-and-concrete arenas, and the first in the country built without sight-blocking pillars. Named for the ancient Greek wrestling school, it became the beating heart of college basketball in Philadelphia, home to Penn's teams and the storied Big 5. Generations of fans have packed its stands, earning it the nickname 'The Cathedral of College Basketball.'

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2001

Dedicated in 1906, the Pennsylvania State Capitol was hailed by President Theodore Roosevelt as 'the handsomest building I ever saw.' Designed in an Italian Renaissance style and crowned by a dome inspired by St. Peter's in Rome, its interior is a showcase of murals, tile floors, and sculpture by leading American artists of the era. The Commonwealth Treasure designation honors it as both an artistic achievement and the working seat of Pennsylvania's government.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1954

Founded in 1752 by Benjamin Franklin and a group of his fellow citizens, the Philadelphia Contributionship was the oldest fire insurance company in America, pooling members' risk to protect their houses against loss by fire. Born of Franklin's practical genius for civic improvement, it turned mutual cooperation into a lasting institution in a city all too familiar with the threat of flames.

Houston, TX

Opened on Houston's Main Street in 1951, The Playhouse Theatre was among the first buildings in the country designed specifically for "theatre in the round," seating 300 spectators encircling a revolving central stage. Producers Joanna Albus and William Rozan mounted high-quality productions here, and in 1953 the playwright Tennessee Williams himself directed a premiere on its stage. Rising costs forced the original company to close in 1954, but later owners kept the space alive as a theater and cinema until it became the National African American Museum in 2004.

Upper Saucon, PA · est. 2024

In the industrial heyday of the Lehigh Valley, one of the largest single-cylinder steam engines of its age stood here, pumping torrents of water out of the Ueberroth zinc mine. Designed by the Lehigh Zinc Company's Cornish-born engineer John West and built in Philadelphia, the machine was nicknamed for President Ulysses S. Grant. From 1872 it ran for two decades, and its power and clever design drew engineers' attention from around the world.

Saxonburg, PA · est. 1947

In 1832 the German-born engineer John A. Roebling founded the village of Saxonburg and launched the business that would make him famous, manufacturing the twisted steel wire rope that revolutionized suspension engineering. His son Washington, born here in 1837, would carry their shared vision to completion by building the Brooklyn Bridge after his father's death. From this small Butler County settlement came ideas that reshaped how Americans spanned their rivers and harbors.

Leechburg, PA

Founded in 1872 by William Rogers and T.J. Burchfield, the Siberian Iron Works was among the first American mills to make black plate and tin plate, breaking into a market long dominated by imports from England and Wales—and drawing skilled British workers to Leechburg in the process. Its tin went into cookware, cans, and roofing across the country and abroad. In 1874 it became the first mill in the nation to run on natural gas rather than coal, and it operated here until 1931.

Clifton Heights, PA · est. 2019

A coiled steel spring that could "walk" down stairs became one of the twentieth century's most beloved toys — and it was made right here. Richard James stumbled onto the idea in 1943, his wife Betty gave it the name Slinky, and James Industries manufactured it in Clifton Heights for decades. When Richard walked away in 1960 and left a nearly bankrupt firm to Betty, she rebuilt it into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, later earning a place in the Toy Industry Hall of Fame.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2009

Built in 1784 on the banks of the Schuylkill by John Penn, Jr., a grandson of Pennsylvania's founder, The Solitude was an elegant retreat in the refined Adam style then fashionable in Britain. Its graceful proportions and delicate plaster ceilings made it a model for the country villas of the young republic's Federal era. Since 1874 it has stood within the grounds of the Philadelphia Zoo, its original interiors carefully preserved.

Nile Township, OH

In 1922, Ohio set aside 15,000 acres of worn-over land in the hills of Scioto County as its first wildlife area, funding the purchase entirely through hunting-license fees so that sportsmen themselves paid to rebuild what earlier decades of unregulated hunting and clearing had stripped away. The plan paired reforestation with the reintroduction of game, letting depleted woods and animal populations recover together. The preserve took its name from Theodore Roosevelt, the president who had made conservation a national cause, and who had died just three years before.

New York, NY · est. 1938

On an April night in 1896, a New York vaudeville house called Koster & Bial's Music Hall hosted something audiences had never seen: images that moved on a screen for a paying crowd. Using Thomas Edison's Vitascope projector, the program threw flickering scenes larger than life before a Broadway audience, marking the American debut of projected motion pictures. The tablet was later affixed by the motion-picture industry itself, honoring the spot where its business was, in effect, born.

Denison, TX

Thomas Volney Munson settled in Denison in 1876 and built extensive nurseries, becoming one of the world's foremost authorities on grapes. When a root disease devastated France's vineyards, Munson's work with hardy American rootstock helped save them—an achievement that brought a French agriculture minister to his door and made him only the second American named to the French Legion of Honor. He built this brick Victorian home in 1887.

Londonderry Township, PA

On March 28, 1979, a combination of equipment failures and human error at Three Mile Island's Unit 2 reactor triggered the worst commercial nuclear accident in U.S. history. Over several tense days radiation escaped, part of the reactor core melted down, and thousands of nearby residents fled their homes. The crisis gripped the nation and became a defining moment in the debate over atomic energy.

Nacogdoches, TX

Built by the founder of nearby Melrose and later home to the Hardeman family, this East Texas farmhouse passed in the 1860s to Lyne Taliaferro "Tol" Barret and his wife Angelina. In 1866 Barret drilled the first producing oil well in Texas, near Oil Springs, decades before the great Spindletop gusher. His descendants occupied the house until 1956, and it was moved to its present site in 1975.

Hereford, TX

In 1941 Hereford won national fame as the "Town Without a Toothache" when a state dental officer told the American Dental Association that tooth decay was nearly unknown there. The discovery, traced by local dentist Dr. George Heard, pointed to the area's mineral-rich water and soil, later understood to reflect naturally high fluoride levels. Demand grew to ship Hereford's "miracle water" across the country and abroad.

Carson City, NV

The first authenticated flight over the Sierra Nevada ended here when four U.S. Army planes—three Liberty-powered DeHavillands and a Curtiss trainer—touched down on an improvised field after taking off from Mather Field near Sacramento. Governor Emmet D. Boyle personally welcomed the fliers, led by Lt. Col. Henry L. Watson, before the squadron continued on to Reno. On the return leg Boyle flew as a passenger, becoming the first civilian to cross the Sierra by air.

Town of Scio, NY

This boulder marks the location of O.P. Taylor's Triangle No. 1, the discovery well that opened the Allegany Oil Field in 1879. When this well struck oil in June of that year, it set off a drilling boom that transformed the quiet farm country around Scio and nearby Bolivar and Wellsville into one of New York's busiest petroleum districts. The Allegany field would go on to produce for decades, part of the great Appalachian oil rush that followed the famous 1859 strike at Titusville, Pennsylvania.

Socorro County, NM · est. 1965

In the pre-dawn desert of southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945, scientists of the secret Manhattan Project detonated the first nuclear device, code-named the Gadget. The blast lit the Jornada del Muerto with a light brighter than the sun and left a crater of green glass, proving the physics that would soon be used over Japan. The remote site was chosen for its isolation, and its name, Trinity, was drawn from the poetry of John Donne.

Nicholson Township, PA · est. 1995

When it opened in 1915 on the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, the Tunkhannock Viaduct was the largest reinforced-concrete structure ever built. Stretching 2,375 feet and rising 240 feet above Tunkhannock Creek, it was the centerpiece of a nearly forty-mile line relocation meant to straighten and speed the railroad. The novelist Theodore Dreiser marveled at it as "one of the true wonders of the world."

Texas City, TX

As revolution and border unrest spread from Mexico after 1910, local boosters persuaded federal officials to plant a major army camp at Texas City as a staging point for possible operations across the Rio Grande. In March 1913 some 14,000 troops—infantry, cavalry, artillery, engineers, and the nation's first military aviation squadron—pitched camp in an open field north of town. The camp's pilots set distance and speed records and thrilled crowds with flying exhibitions until a 1915 hurricane destroyed the encampment and scattered its soldiers to the border.

Miami, FL

Built in 1932 at Dinner Key, this seaplane hangar anchored the first permanent Coast Guard Air Station in the country. From here, seaplanes lumbered off Biscayne Bay to carry out rescues and evacuations across Florida's coasts and the Straits beyond. It stands from the pioneering days when aviation was still being folded into the nation's maritime lifesaving service.

Portsmouth, VA

Before automated buoys and GPS, lightships served as floating lighthouses, anchored at dangerous shoals and harbor entrances to guide mariners safely past hidden hazards. U.S. Lightship 101, known in her service as "Lightship Portsmouth," is one of the surviving vessels of this vanished maritime tradition. Now berthed in Portsmouth, Virginia, she was recognized in 1989 as a National Historic Landmark, preserving a tangible link to the crews who weathered storms at sea to keep coastal shipping lanes safe.

Kingsville, TX

With war looming, the Naval Expansion Act of 1940 fueled a two-ocean navy, and Kingsville leaders won a station by touting their open skies, flat terrain, and year-round flying weather. Commissioned on July 4, 1942, the Naval Auxiliary Air Station trained cadets in carrier landings, practicing touch-and-go on strips built to mimic flight-deck length and running bombing runs over Padre Island, while a unit of Navy WAVES served in support roles. The base helped prepare aviators for both the Pacific and Atlantic before it was decommissioned in 1951 and later reborn as a full Naval Air Station in 1968.

Fort Davis, TX

Founded in 1873 in an adobe building at Fort Davis, the Union Mercantile grew under army baker turned merchant W. Keesey into a frontier emporium selling everything from groceries and guns to cradles, coffins, and wagonwheels, while also doing private banking. The county's first telephone ran out of the store over a barbed-wire line to surrounding ranches. In 1906 Keesey replaced the adobe with the stone building that still stands.

New York, NY

This 140-foot stainless-steel globe rose over Flushing Meadows as the theme symbol of the 1964–65 New York World's Fair, an exposition themed "Peace Through Understanding" that drew millions to Queens at the height of the Space Age. Donated and engineered by U.S. Steel, its open latticework of continents and orbiting rings captured a moment when Americans looked hopefully toward space exploration and a shrinking, more connected world. After the fair closed it remained in the park, and today it endures as one of the most recognizable landmarks of the New York City skyline's borough of Queens.

Arlington, VA

High on a promontory overlooking the Pentagon and the Potomac, the United States Air Force Memorial marks the service that carried American power into the sky. Its three soaring stainless-steel spires evoke the contrails of jets peeling away in flight, honoring the airmen and women of a branch that became independent in 1947 and reshaped how the nation defends itself. The memorial was formally dedicated in the autumn of 2006, decades after the Air Force had proven decisive from the skies over Europe and the Pacific to the Cold War and beyond.

Schuylkill Township, PA · est. 2012

Opened in 1943 as America mobilized for total war, Valley Forge General Hospital grew into one of the nation's largest military hospitals, sprawling across more than 100 buildings and treating over 3,000 patients at a time. Its surgeons became pioneers in the era's most harrowing wounds — reconstructing shattered eyes, rebuilding burned faces, and advancing the young field of rehabilitation. Its wards received the broken bodies of three wars — World War II, Korea, and Vietnam — before the hospital closed in 1974.

New Philadelphia, PA · est. 1948

In 1836 the Valley Furnace became the first ironworks to smelt using anthracite alone, drawing on the hard coal that lay all around Schuylkill County. The method had been patented three years earlier by Dr. F.W. Geissenhainer, and it soon proved itself in continuous use at the nearby Pottsville, or Pioneer, Furnace. It was a breakthrough that married Pennsylvania's coal to its iron.

Jacksonville, FL

This modest house on Jacksonville's Westside was the childhood home of brothers Ronnie, Johnnie, and Donnie Van Zant, who grew up in a working-class Florida neighborhood in the 1950s and '60s. From these roots the brothers helped found Lynyrd Skynyrd and 38 Special, bands that defined Southern rock and carried a distinctly Southern, blue-collar voice onto the national stage. Ronnie Van Zant, Lynyrd Skynyrd's frontman, became one of the genre's signature songwriters before his death in a 1977 plane crash.

Franklin, PA · est. 1981

Formed in 1800 and named with an Indian term for French Creek, Venango County would give the world an industry. In 1859 at nearby Drake Well, the first commercially drilled oil well struck petroleum, igniting an energy revolution that transformed daily life across the globe. Franklin and Oil City grew into cities on the fortunes that flowed from the ground.

Mahanoy City, PA · est. 2006

A violin prodigy who once shared the stage with John Philip Sousa, Victor Schertzinger grew up in the anthracite town of Mahanoy City before finding his calling in early Hollywood. He was a pioneer of the film score, among the first to compose original music written expressly for motion pictures, and his 'One Night of Love' took Academy Awards for its score and sound in 1934. He also directed and wrote the pop standard 'Tangerine,' earning a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997

Philadelphia-born Vincent Persichetti became one of his city's most respected twentieth-century composers, producing nine symphonies alongside a vast body of instrumental and choral music. A 1939 graduate of the Curtis Institute, he shaped generations of musicians as a teacher at the Philadelphia Conservatory and, for four decades, at the Juilliard School. His work bridged accessible melody and modern technique.

Pitt County, NC

At the height of the Cold War, this quiet stretch of eastern North Carolina became a powerful voice reaching across the world. From 1963 to 1989, a transmitting station near Greenville relayed Voice of America broadcasts to Europe, Africa, and Latin America, beaming American news and culture past the Iron Curtain. Fields of towering antennas turned rural Pitt County into a node in the global information war.

Snyder, TX

Beginning in 1923, Clemens Von Roeder used naturally occurring mutations to breed a long-staple, big-boll cotton on this West Texas land, later adding strains resistant to hail, windstorm, and rust. Joined over the decades by his brother Nolan, agricultural executive Bentley Baize, and Nolan's son Max, the family developed marketed seed varieties — Texas Mammoth and Western Prolific for hand-picking, and Western Storm Proof for the new mechanical harvesters.

San Bernardino County, CA

This marker commemorates the iron column planted in 1873 at the southern end of the California–Nevada boundary survey run by U.S. astronomer and surveyor Alexey W. Von Schmidt. The line built on earlier fieldwork by Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives, who had fixed the Colorado River end of the proposed oblique border. Von Schmidt ran the first complete survey of the boundary—though his solar observations erred slightly, leaving the true line about three-quarters of a mile to the north.

Doylestown, PA · est. 2000

At just eighteen, W. Atlee Burpee founded the seed company that still bears his name, and at his nearby Fordhook Farm he turned plant breeding into a national enterprise. There he developed enduring garden staples—Golden Bantam corn, bush lima beans, and Iceberg lettuce among them—that landed in kitchen gardens across the country through his mail-order catalogs. He gave this park to Doylestown in honor of his wife, Blanche.

Sweetwater, TX

At Avenger Field near Sweetwater, the Women's Airforce Service Pilots trained during World War II — the only coeducational military flying field in U.S. history. From 25,000 applicants, 1,830 were accepted and 1,074 earned their wings, flying 60 million miles for the Army Air Forces under director Jacqueline Cochran. Living under military discipline yet holding only civil-service status, WASPs ferried planes, towed gunnery targets, tested aircraft, and flew countless support missions; thirty-seven died in service.