History
One of the oldest military airfields in the United States, Marshall Army Airfield at Fort Riley, made its first appearance in history in November 1912 as the site of the first attempts in the United States to direct artillery fire from an airplane. Among the participants was a young lieutenant, Henry H. Arnold, who later became Commanding General of the United States Army Air Forces. Long afterward Arnold recalled the various methods tried for transmitting observations and instructions: a primitive radio, smoke signals, and even colored cards, weighted with iron nuts and dropped through a stovepipe.
The airdrome from which Arnold made his flights was probably the polo field at Fort Riley. How and when the polo field turned into an air base is unknown
Read more about this topic: Marshall Army Airfield
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of persecution is a history of endeavors to cheat nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)