Topic: Science & Technology
This is an interview with Alaskan Way Viaduct Program Manager Ron Paananen. Paananen oversaw the viaduct replacement project for six years, from 2005 through 2011. The interview was conducted in Janua...
Alki Point, today part of West Seattle, stretches into Puget Sound to form the southern boundary of Elliott Bay. It is part of a much larger area originally inhabited by the Duwamish Indians. In Septe...
Despite having made billions of dollars as a result of his computer programming skills, Paul Gardner Allen insisted that he was not a geek. "I wasn’t a nerd," Allen writes in his 2012 auto...
Seattle visual artist, writer, and researcher Don Fels was loaned a trove of historical photographs depicting airplane building at The Boeing Company in the 1920s and early 1930s. The photographs ...
Primarily known for his historical novels of early Oregon country -- Trask, Moontrap, and To Build a Ship -- Don Berry lived and worked from 1974 until his death in 2001 as a writer, painter, musician...
Boeing's little known 307 Stratoliner, affectionately dubbed "the flying whale" for its portly lines, ushered in a new aviation era when it entered into airline service in mid-1940. It was the first i...
Boeing, the oldest major aircraft manufacturer, entered the jet airliner business third, after the British and Russians. Success long eluded Boeing in the art and science of building and selling airli...
Seattle residents saw their first flying machine on June 27, 1908, a balloon flown by L. Guy Mecklem (1882-1973) from West Seattle's Luna Park, and saw another flying machine, a dirigible, in 1909 dur...
The Boeing Airplane Company nearly collapsed following the end of World War I military orders. Pioneer pilot Eddie Hubbard (1889-1928) helped William E. Boeing (1881-1956) deliver the first bag of int...
Famed for its World War II exploits, Boeing's Superfortress was conceived before the war. The B-29 was born near the war's midpoint, flying on September 21, 1942, built and employed in large numbers d...
Sleek. Rakish. Seemingly poised to thunder into the wild blue yonder sits an Air Force Boeing B-47 Stratojet bomber, guarding the south entrance to the Seattle Museum of Flight. Contemporary in appear...
During the 1930s, transoceanic travel was beyond the capability of all but a handful of aircraft. The solution was offered by giant dirigibles such as the Graf Zeppelin and Hindenburg and by ever larg...
Paul Brainerd founded the Aldus software company, which produced the first desktop publishing program, Pagemaker. The product transformed printing and publishing almost as dramatically as had moveable...
J Harlen Bretz was a geologist who launched one of the great controversies of modern science by arguing, in the 1920s, that the deep canyons and pockmarked buttes of the arid “scabl...
Dave Bunker has been deemed an "extremist in guitar invention" and his radical instrument designs once earned him a spot on a list of the Top Ten Weirdest Guitars ever made. Bunker will likely be reme...
The Burke Museum, founded in 1885 by a group of teenage boys, is Washington's oldest museum. Since its inception, the museum has been part of the University of Washington, and has had various homes on...
The Seattle World's Fair of 1962 celebrated Century 21, offering a vision of the future to 10 million visitors and defining Seattle as a city of innovation. Structural engineers contributed to this vi...
Weaving with spun yarns was a defining characteristic of pre-Contact Coast Salish civilization in the Salish Sea (the marine waterways of what are now Washington and British Columbia), together with t...
This essay by Christopher Wiley on the development of the combine harvester won the 2010 Washington State History Day award presented by HistoryLink.org for Outstanding Essay on Washington State Histo...
Walter A. Crowley, in recent years a resident of Oak Harbor, Washington, was an inventor and engineer who developed the first practical air-cushion vehicle in the summer of 1957 in Detroit, Michigan. ...
Bonnie Dunbar, the first woman from Washington state to become an astronaut, rocketed into space five times. Only a handful of other American astronauts have heard the countdown to liftoff from the in...
Land formations in Washington and the Pacific Northwest were a result of millions of years of changes in weather conditions and the environment. Glaciers and other geological forces created islands, m...
The skull and bones of a man who lived more than 9,000 years ago were discovered in 1996 near Kennewick. Archaeologists realized that these remains were very rare. Some wanted to have the opportunity ...
The Marmes Rockshelter was a very important archaeological find in Washington. Tools, human bones, and a cremation hearth more than 8,000 years old were discovered there. But scientists had a big prob...