[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

I hope you either take up parachute jumping or stay out of single motored
airplanes at night.

Charles A. Lindbergh, to Wiley Post, 1931

 

Never fly the 'A' model of anything.

Ed Thompson

 

Never fly anything that doesn't have the paint worn off the rudder Pedals.

Harry Bill

 

Keep thy airspeed up, less the earth come from below and smit thee.

William Kershner

 

When a prang seems inevitable, endeavor to strike the softest, cheapest
object in the vicinity, as slowly and gently as possible.

advice given to RAF pilots during W.W.II.

 

If an airplane is still in one piece, don't cheat on it. Ride the bastard
down.

Ernest K. Gann, advice from the 'old pelican'

 

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The West Highland Line Train is the real Hogwarts Express Train that was
used in the movies. It runs every day.

 

The development of the steam locomotive in the early 19th century
transformed the world, carrying people and goods at unprecedented speeds
around the globe. America's first steam-powered railroad-the Baltimore &
Ohio-opened in 1830, and within decades hundreds of thousands of railway
miles crisscrossed the nation. Today the descendants of those first
railroads-including CSX Transportation-continue to play a key role in our
lives, moving millions of carloads of freight each year. From the earliest
steam locomotives to today's high-speed "bullet trains," here are eight
things you may not know about the "iron horse."

 

1 - The term "horsepower" originated as a marketing tool.

 

James Watt didn't invent the steam engine, but he did create the world's
first modern one, and developed the means of measuring its power. In the
1760s, the Scottish inventor began tinkering with an earlier version of the
engine designed by Thomas Newcomen. Newcomen's design required constant
cooling down and re-heating, wasting vast amounts of energy. Watt's
innovation was to add a separate condenser, greatly improving the engine's
efficiency. A savvy salesman, Watt knew that he needed a way to market his
new product. He calculated how much power a single horse working in a mill
could produce over a period of time (though many scientists now believe his
estimates were far too high), a figure that he dubbed "horsepower." Using
this unit of measurement, he then came up with a figure that indicated how
many horses just one of his engines could replace. The sales ploy
worked-we're still using the term "horsepower" today-and his engines soon
became the industry standard, leading directly to invention of the first
steam locomotive in 1804.

 

2 - America's first steam locomotive lost a race to a horse.

 

In 1827, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad became the first U.S. company
granted a charter for transporting both passengers and freight. However, the
company struggled to produce a steam engine capable of traveling over rough
and uneven terrain, instead relying on horse-drawn trains. Enter
industrialist Peter Cooper: Cooper, who not coincidentally owned extensive
land holdings over the proposed route of the railroad (the value of which
would grow dramatically if the railroad succeeded), offered to design and
build just such an engine. On August 28, 1830, Cooper's engine, which he
called the "Tom Thumb," was undergoing testing on B&O tracks near Baltimore
when a horse-drawn train pulled up alongside it and challenged Cooper (and
"Tom Thumb") to a race. Cooper accepted, and the race was on. The steam
engine quickly roared into the lead, but when a belt broke loose it was
forced to retire, and the horse crossed the finish line first. However, B&O
executives, impressed with the massive power and speed Cooper's engine had
proven capable of, made the decision to convert their fledgling railroad to
steam. The B&O became one of the most successful railways in the United
States, and Cooper (with his newly minted fortune) went on to a career as an
investor and philanthropist, donating the money for New York's Cooper Union
for the Advancement of Science and Art.

 

3 - Trains helped the North win the American Civil War.

 

Throughout the war, railroads enabled the quick transport of large numbers
of soldiers and heavy artillery over long distances. One of the most
significant uses of trains came after the Battle of Chickamauga in September
1863, when Abraham Lincoln was able to send 20,000 badly needed replacement
troops more than 1,200 miles from Washington, D.C. to Georgia (in just 11
days) to fortify Union forces-the longest and fastest troop movement of the
19th century. Control of the railroad in a region was crucial to military
success, and railroads were often targets for military attacks aimed at
cutting off the enemy from its supplies. Union General William Tecumseh
Sherman provided particularly adept at the art of railroad sabotage. During
his infamous "March" through Georgia and the Carolinas, his men destroyed
thousands of miles of Confederate rails, leaving heaps of heated, twisted
iron that southerners wearily referred to as "Sherman's neckties."

 

4 -Abraham Lincoln's assassination helped publicize train travel.

 

George Pullman, who had made a name for himself during the 1850s as a
self-trained engineer and building mover in Chicago, began tinkering with
the idea of a comfortable railroad "sleeping car" after a particularly
uncomfortable train ride in upstate New York. By 1863, he had produced his
first two models, the Pioneer and the Springfield, named for the Illinois
hometown of then-President Abraham Lincoln. Pullman's cars were indeed
comfortable, but they were also prohibitively expensive and few railroad
companies were interested in leasing them-until President Lincoln's
assassination in April 1865. After Lincoln's death,, a Pullman car was used
as part of the cortege that travelled through several Northern cities before
returning his body to Illinois. The funeral train was front-page news, and
when Pullman also temporarily loaned one of his beautiful sleeper cars to a
grief-stricken Mary Todd Lincoln, the publicity poured in. Two years later,
he established the Pullman Palace Car Company, which would revolutionize
train travel around the world. Curiously enough, when Pullman died in 1897,
his replacement as head of the company was none other than Robert Todd
Lincoln, the slain president's eldest son.

 

5 - The world's first travel agency got its start thanks to a train trip.

 

In 1841, Englishman Thomas Cook, a Baptist minister, organized a train
excursion for 540 parishioners to attend a temperance meeting in London.
Cook negotiated a set fare for passengers, including tickets and a meal. The
trip was so successful that he expanded his operations, first within the
United Kingdom and then to the United States and Europe, providing
passengers with comprehensive packages including transportation,
accommodations and meals. In 1873, the agency, now known as Thomas Cook and
Son, launched an international railway timetable, still published today, and
by 1890 they were selling more than 3 million rail tickets annually.

 

6 - The railroads also gave us standardized time zones.

 

Britain adopted a standardized time system in 1847, but it took nearly 40
more years before the United States joined the club. America still ran on
local time, which could vary from town to town (and within cities
themselves), making scheduling arrival, departure, and connection times
nearly impossible. After years of lobbying for standardized time,
representatives from all major U.S. railways met on October 11, 1883, for
what became known as the General Time Convention, where they adopted a
proposal that would establish five time zones spanning the country: Eastern,
Central, Mountain and Pacific. The plan originally called for a fifth time
zone, the Intercontinental, which was instituted several years later and
became known as Atlantic Time. At noon on November 18, the U.S. Naval
Observatory sent out a telegraph signal marking 12:00 pm ET, and railway
office in cities and towns across the country calibrated their clocks
accordingly. However, it wasn't until 1918 that standard time became the
official law of the land, when Congress passed legislation recognizing the
time zone system (and instituting a new "daylight savings time" designed to
conserve resources for the World War I war effort).

 

7 - The miles of railroad track in the United States reached its peak in
1916.

 

It didn't take long for railroads to catch on in the United States. The same
year that the "Tom Thumb" lost its race, there were just 23 miles of
railroad tracks in the United States. But within 20 years there were more
than 9,000, as the U.S. government passed its first Railroad Land Grant Act,
designed to attract settlers to the undeveloped parts of the country. By the
beginning of the Civil War in 1861, there were 30,000 miles (more than
21,000 of them in the North), and lobbyists were clamoring for a
transcontinental system across the nation. The number of railroad miles
continued to climb until hitting its peak in 1916. That year there were more
than 250,000 miles of track-enough to reach the moon from Earth.

 

8 - Today's bullet trains can top 300 mph.

 

When Englishman Richard Trevithick launched the first practical steam
locomotive in 1804, it averaged less than 10 mph. Today, several high-speed
rail lines are regularly travelling 30 times as fast. When Japan's first
Shinkansen or "bullet trains," opened to coincide with the 1964 Tokyo
Olympics, they were capable of running at speeds in excess of 130 mph. In
the 40 years since, the top speed of these trains has been steadily
climbing, with a current world speed record of 361 mph. Japan is no longer
alone in the high-speed rail department however: France, China and Germany
all operate trains capable of similar extreme speeds, and there are plans in
the United States to construct a high-speed rail line connecting the
California cities of San Francisco and Anaheim.

 

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Investigators missed incriminating Google searches done on Casey Anthony's
computer - including "fool-proof suffication [sic]" - because they checked
her Internet Explorer history, but ignored Firefox.

 

In 1978, Apple Corps (owned by The Beatles) sued Apple Computer for
trademark infringement. The case settled for $80,000 along with the
condition that Apple Computer should not enter the music business, and Apple
Corps agreed not to enter the computer business.

 

The Motion Picture Academy refused to nominate Tron (1982) for a
special-effects award because, according to director Steven Lisberger, "The
Academy thought we cheated by using computers".

 

Mary Kenneth Keller who helped develop computer programming languages was
the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science in the United States.
She also earned a Master's degree in Mathematics and Physics and was a
Catholic nun.

 

John Lasseter (CEO of Pixar) was fired from Disney for promoting computer
animation.

 

In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first 'SUPER' computer
with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored 5 MB of
data.

 

The first entirely computer generated movie sequence in cinema history was
the Genesis Device demonstration video in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
The studio that made the scene would later become Pixar.