Orville Wright over Huffman Prairie, Ohio, Nov. 16, 1904.
Humans advanced from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years.
Technology
Airmail Before Airplanes
The world’s first airmail stamps were issued for the Great Barrier Pigeon-Gram Service, which carried messages from New Zealand’s Great Barrier Island to the mainland between 1898 and 1908.
It was pretty good: The fastest pigeon, aptly named Velocity, made the trip to Auckland in only 50 minutes, averaging an astounding 125 kph. That’s only 40 per cent slower than modern aircraft.
Hoist by Their Own Petards
Inventors killed by their own inventions:
- According to the Bible, Haman was hanged by the gallows he invented.
- William Bullock (1813-1837) was crushed to death while trying to fix a rotary printing press he’d invented.
- Otto Lilienthal died in 1896 after a crash in one of his hang gliders.
- Thomas Midgley Jr. strangled in the cord of a pulley-operated mechanical bed he’d designed in 1944.
- Alexander Bogdanov, a Russian physician, died when he accepted a “rejuvenating” transfusion of blood infected with malaria and tuberculosis.
And Jim Fixx, author of The Complete Book of Running, died of a heart attack while jogging.
Fordlândia
Henry Ford was a big deal in the United States, and for a time he was a big deal in Brazil, too. In the 1920s the auto tycoon bought 10,000 square kilometers of land near the mouth of the Amazon. Rubber came from the tropics, he figured, so he’d cut out the middleman and gather it himself.
That’s big thinking, but “Fordlândia” didn’t really work out. The land was rough and unfamiliar, bugs and blight ate the plants, and the natives eventually threw aside their hamburgers and drove the managers into the jungle.
Ford tried again, but by 1945 synthetic rubber had made the whole project look silly, and in the end he took a $20 million loss. That was okay with Ford, for whom active failure was better than passive dreaming. “You can’t build a reputation,” he’d say, “on what you are going to do.”
Wrong Number
Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple Computer, once obtained the phone number 888-888-8888.
He found it was unusable — he received more than 100 calls a day from children playing with phones.
Jantar Mantar
Timex had nothing on Jai Singh II. After building this 90-foot sundial, the Indian maharaja always knew the correct time to within half a second — and this was in the early 1700s.
Ben Franklin wrote, “Energy and persistence conquer all things.”
The Quick Brown Fox …
In 1984, British engineer Lee Sallows built a dedicated computer to compose a self-enumerating pangram — a sentence that inventories its own letters. It succeeded:
This pangram contains four a’s, one b, two c’s, one d, thirty e’s, six f’s, five g’s, seven h’s, eleven i’s, one j, one k, two l’s, two m’s, eighteen n’s, fifteen o’s, two p’s, one q, five r’s, twenty-seven s’s, eighteen t’s, two u’s, seven v’s, eight w’s, two x’s, three y’s, & one z.
Black Gold
Barrels per day of oil consumption, as of 2003:
- United States: 20,033,504
- Japan: 5,578,386
- China: 5,550,000
- Germany: 2,677,443
- Russia: 2,675,000
- India: 2,320,000
- Canada: 2,193,263
- South Korea: 2,168,128
- Brazil: 2,100,000
- France: 2,059,843
- Mexico: 2,015,232
- Italy: 1,874,380
- Saudi Arabia: 1,775,000
- United Kingdom: 1,722,419
- Spain: 1,544,260
- Iran: 1,425,000
- Indonesia: 1,155,000
Pencils Down
Bill Gates scored 1590 on his SATs.
Falling Fortunes
Franz Reichelt dreamed big. In 1911 the Austrian tailor designed a garment that he hoped would serve as a combination overcoat/parachute. Never one for half measures, he tested it by leaping from the Eiffel Tower.
The sad/romantic results were caught on film, including Reichelt’s long hesitation on the brink, his fatal fall and a measurement of the hole he left behind.
“If you’re not failing every now and again,” said Woody Allen, “it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.”