North Carolina Transportation: A Chronology of Invention and Technology
1902: The North Carolina Good Roads Association is organized to promote a network of all-weather roads that will connect every county seat and all state institutions not in a county seat with each other. Harriet Morehead Berry of Hillsborough is instrumental in publicizing the plan and securing legislative support.
1902: The first automobile is registered in Charlotte.
December 17, 1903: Wilbur and Orville Wright accomplish one of humankind’s
greatest feats by flying the first mechanically powered, controllable,
heavier-than-air craft. On the first successful flight, Orville reaches
a height of about 10 feet for 12 seconds and travels 120 feet in the winds
of Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk.
1905: John B. Rumbaugh of Asheville is the first person to drive a car from Asheville to New York City. The trip takes him 14 days! In 1911 he will become the first to drive across the Appalachian Mountains into Tennessee.
1907: Paul Cornu maintains the first flight of a true helicopter at five feet above ground for 20 seconds.
1908: The Clinchfield Rail Road between Marion, North Carolina, and Erwin, Tennessee, is completed. With some of the steepest and curviest sections of track in the eastern United States, it is considered one of the greatest engineering feats since the Saluda Grade in 1878.
1912: Coy Richardson, a farmer and mechanic in Alleghany
County, produces a vehicle capable of navigating his muddy fields near
Sparta.
July 4, 1912: Fourth of July festivities in Gastonia feature an “aeorplane” [sic]. Three thousand people crowd onto a new electric railway line between Charlotte and Gastonia to see it, while 110 automobiles carry other observers to the celebration.
1914: The new Mount Mitchell Railroad opens North Carolina’s secluded Black Mountains to logging and tourism.
1919: Dillon Supply Company builds a self-propelled mechanical cotton picker for Loomis MacGoodwin of Raleigh. It is one of the first field machines to pose a serious threat to human labor.
1921: Intensive lobbying by Harriet Morehead Berry leads to passage of a law creating North Carolina’s modern state highway system.
1923: Military officials sail to a site off Cape Hatteras for a demonstration of the potential of aerial bombing. General Billy Mitchell supports his argument for increasing the use of airplanes in warfare by destroying two retired navy ships in less than thirty minutes.
1925: Mrs. W. J. Matherly of Chapel Hill invents what is possibly the first automobile seat belt and child-restraint device. She places broad bands of cloth under her 11-month-old daughter’s arms and across her chest. Then she adjusts the bands so they are tight enough to hold the child captive yet loose enough for her to move her head and limbs.