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The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company

[[image No. 155 - black & white photograph of a Goodyear blimp]]

Goodyear has grown up with American aviation in ways that are unique. In 1909, the Tire & Rubber Company achieved a major equipment breakthrough by designing a tire that replaced the bicycle hardware used by early designers. It could withstand the impact of hard landings without exploding, and would stay on the rim. The Goodyear Wing Aeroplane Tire became a favorite with Baldwin, Curtiss, Wright, and Martin pilots, and feedback from its use suggested other needs, such as better fabric for wings. Early coverings of silk, bedsheets, and canvas, coated with varnish and paraffin, were second-best until Goodyear perfected Stay-Tight, a fabric with multiple layers of very thin rubber. This led to the company's lighter-than-air fabric technology and many pioneering efforts during and after World War I. Between 1920 and 1935, came the first practical self-sealing fuel tanks, the famous Airwheel, and disk brakes. Goodyear now builds a wide family of wheels, brakes, tires, and landing gear equipment for all types of aircraft, both military and civilian--and even blimps to order.

[[image - drawing of a propeller]]

[[image No. 156 - black & white photograph of the IBM System/360 computer]]

International Business Machines Corporation

The remarkable System/360 computer reservation complex, pioneered and developed by IBM, has brought immediate and obvious benefit--and pleasure to tens of millions of people. While computer technology has aided a vast number of international business operations for military and civil transport, and their ancillary service organizations, the ticketing reservation revolution has been phenomenal. IBM, in fact, anticipated a wide band of ticketing problems, together with the growth of the airline industry, years before the carriers themselves. Teamed with American Airlines, IBM pioneered SABRE, the code name for 360's predecessor system that went on-line during the early 1960s. In June, 1968, Continental Airlines introduced the SONIC 360; Eastern, Mohawk (the first regional carrier), and National Installations are being completed.  Another pioneering IBM service to aviation: the marriage of computer technology and the movement of freight. Indeed the air cargo factor of aviation would appear to be an embryonic industry of its own.

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