Radio, radio!
A tour of WBCQ in Maine from April of last year. WBCQ is a new shortwave station:
Bonus #1: We went on a virtual tour of the Early Television Museum. How about one of the Antique Wireless Museum?
Bonus #2: Another tour, this one of WLW in Mason, Ohio. WLW at one point was transmitting at 500,000 watts (between 1934 and 1939). They were forced to drop down to 50,000 watts, and still use that power level.
Over the weekend, FotB RoadRich sent an obit for Lt. Col. Thomas Robert ‘Bob‘ Vaucher (USAF – ret), certified American badass, who passed away on February 7th at the age of 102.
What did LTC Vaucher do? He flew B-29s. More specifically, he delivered the first B-29 from the factory to the military. He also led the flyover of the USS Missouri during the surrender ceremony. Additionally:
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Weak brakes, a lack of reversible props, and a nosewheel collapse cut one wartime B–29 mission short. During another, Vaucher’s heavily laden long-range bomber struggled to gain altitude when one of the four supercharged 2,200-horsepower Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclone engines feathered unexpectedly on takeoff. “I staggered out” as the 138,000-pound aircraft slowly gained altitude, he recalled to Zimmerman. “What happened was that when the co-pilot ganged the power down from our takeoff engine speed of 2,900 rpm to 2,600 rpm or so, one of the toggle switches stuck and an engine went into feather mode. I could barely keep the airspeed up above a stall. Fortunately, we took off at sea level and remained at sea level for the next 10 miles, so I was able to baby the thing up to get going.”
“I flew it so much it was second nature to me,” Vaucher said from the pilot seat of the B–29 during a video recounting his wartime flying experience. “I have 3,000 hours sitting in this chair—a year and a half of work.”
This is a 2016 talk LTC Vaucher gave to the Air Force Association NJ Chapter 195 about his experience flying the B-29.
Another shorter video from AOPALive:
I don’t want to seem like I’m whinging about the cold (even if it is 477.67 degrees Rankine out at the moment) so I thought I’d fall back to some more military history today.
From 1944, vintage OSS film: “Army Experiments In Train Derailment & Sabotage”. You know, it is a lot harder to derail a train than you’d think…
Bonus video #1: higher quality, and more recent: “An Eye In the Darkened Sky”, a promo video for the A6-E Intruder and the Target Recognition Attack Multi-Sensor system (TRAM).
Bonus video #2: “Royal Navy Learning Gutter Fighting”. Might be some useful tips here if you’re the kind of person who gets held at bayonet or gun point.
Bonus video #3, and I think this one is a real treat: “Cowboy 57” a 1959 short about the day to day activities of a B-52 crew. The treat is: this is narrated by Brigadier General James Maitland Stewart.
Science Sunday!
I’ve been thinking about volcanoes. Why? No reason, really.
This seems right up RoadRich’s alley, and possibly Lawrence’s as well. I’m trying to find this on blu-ray, but the only versions I’ve found so far are not US region discs.
(What I really want to do is a double-bill of this and “Krakatoa, East of Java”. The latter actually does seem to be available on a US region disc at a reasonable price.)
Anyway…
I like this video because it clearly solves two problems at once: heating up the ravioli and opening the can. And because the ravioli is in the can, you avoid the gas problems you get when you try to toast marshmallows over hot lava. Now if you could just figure out a way to contain the hot ravioli once the can explodes.
Anyway, that was just the appetizer. From Gresham College and visiting professor Sir Stephen Sparks CBE, “Enormous Volcanic Eruptions”.
Bonus #1: “Volcano!”, a NatGeo documentary.
Bonus #2: “Life on the Rim: Working as a Volcanologist”, also from NatGeo, but short.
Bonus #3: Professor Tamsin Mather on “Volcanoes: from fuming vents to extinction events”.
I kind of enjoy motor sports. I’m not an obsessive NASCAR fan, but I do kind of follow it from a distance. I’ve kind of lost track of IndyCar (though when I was younger, the Indy 500 was a big deal for me), and I never really got into F1 (but I do have a general passing familiarity with it).
As my regular readers know, I’m also a student of failure. So today’s videos…
“The Worst NASCAR Race Ever: The 1969 Talladega 500”.
“The Worst Formula 1 Race: The 2005 United States Grand Prix”.
There are a couple of others that I considered plugging into today’s slot, but either they were long and boring, or they involved people being killed in racing accidents. Nobody needs that (stuff).
I planned to post this last night, but we had multiple power outages through the day yesterday (as other people have noted, it is cold here: right now, my phone is calling for a low of 10 on Sunday and a low of 3 (yes, THREE) on Monday), the last one lasting until well into the evening.
So I’m playing catch-up today.
The NYT got around to publishing a respectful obit for James Gunn yesterday.
Chick Corea, jazz guy.
In case you were wondering, I believe this is the complete list.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Leslie Robertson, structural engineer for the World Trade Center.
Mr. Robertson designed the structural systems of several notable skyscrapers, including the Shanghai World Financial Center, a 101-story tower with a vast trapezoidal opening at its peak, and I.M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, a cascade of interlocking pyramids. His projects included bridges, theaters and museums, and he helped install sculptures by Richard Serra, some weighing as much as 20 tons.
But the project that came to define his career was the World Trade Center. He was in his early 30s and something of an upstart when he and his partner, John Skilling, were chosen to design the structural system for what were to be the time, at 110 stories, the world’s tallest buildings. He was in his 70s when the towers were destroyed.
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“The responsibility for the design ultimately rested with me,” Mr. Robertson told The New York Times Magazine after the towers were destroyed. He added: “I have to ask myself, Should I have made the project more stalwart? And in retrospect, the only answer you can come up with is, Yes, you should have.”
He conceded that he had not considered the possibility of fire raging through the buildings after a plane crash. But he also said that that was not part of the structural engineer’s job, which involves making sure that buildings resist forces like gravity and wind. “The fire safety systems in a building fall under the purview of the architect,” he said.
In an interview in 2009 in his Lower Manhattan office, Mr. Robertson wiped away tears as he recalled the victims of 9/11. He talked about the family members who had come to see him, hoping he could say something to help them with their grief. But he also said he was proud of the design of the twin towers.
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According to Mr. Robertson, the buildings had been designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707, but the planes flown into the towers were heavier 767s. And his calculations had been based on the initial impact of the plane; they did not take into account the possibility of what he called a “second event,” like a fire.
When the planes struck the towers, they sliced through the steel frames, but the buildings remained standing. Many engineers concluded that conventionally framed buildings would have collapsed soon after impact. The twin towers stood long enough to allow thousands of people to escape.
But the fire from the burning jet fuel raged on. The floor trusses lost strength as they heated up, and they began to sag. The floors eventually began pulling away from the exterior columns before the buildings fell. A total of 2,753 people were killed, including 343 firefighters.
Mr. Robertson said he received hate mail after 9/11. But on a flight to Toronto one day, an airline employee gave him an unexpected upgrade to first class. When he asked for an explanation, he recalled in the 2009 interview, the employee said, “I was in Tower 2, and I walked out.”
The infamous Larry Flynt. As my mother said, “I thought he was dead already.”
S. Clay Wilson, underground cartoonist. I went back and forth on whether I wanted to include Mr. Flynt and Mr. Wilson, but I decided that Mr. Flynt’s celebrity was too great to ignore. As for Mr. Wilson, you have to like a guy who says:
“I’m just a big kid,” Mr. Wilson told him. “I like toys, firearms and hats.”
Finally, also by way of Lawrence, British actor Harry Fielder, who was in pretty much every darn thing in Britain, passed away February 6th. Seriously, his IMDB entry has 279 credits as “actor” (though it looks like many of those were small roles).
Travel Thursday!
Here’s something really vintage for you: “Coast to Coast in 48 Hours”, featuring travel by train and Ford TriMotor from New York to LA at a blistering pace.
Bonus video #1: One of my bucket list items is to visit the highest point in each state. Or at least as many as I can: I have my doubts I will be climbing Denali at my age.
Anyway, “What is the Highest Point in Each State of the USA?” a visual tour.
Bonus video #2: I’m not quite sure I agree with the title of this video, but it has 747s and music by Windham Hill, so why not? “The World’s Best Pan Am 747 Video”.
I thought I’d start out today with a vintage promo video from General Tire, “Car Tires, The Loaded Gun”.
You can skip over the last four or so minutes of this (it is only eight minutes long) but I wanted to highlight it here because…that first minute and 30 seconds. Wow. That was…unexpected.
For something completely different from “The 8-Bit Guy”, going out to the young folks in my audience: “How Telephone Phreaking Worked”. I’ve set the embed to start at about the 4:15 mark to skip over all the introductory material (videos of vintage computers, videos of the presenter signing things, etc.)
And for something else, also completely different: “How To Make Potato Vodka”. This is more for informational purposes than “how-to” purposes, though if you do happen to have a still just lying around in your garage…or, I guess, the skills to improvise one out of parts without poisoning yourself with lead…
Bonus #3: “How to Taste Whisky with Richard Paterson” part 1:
And part 2:
Since I ran really long yesterday, I thought I’d go mostly shorter today. I also thought I’d post some things totally unrelated to military aviation: while I have a bunch of new related stuff in the queue, I’m going to try to avoid going back to that well more than once a week.
(And, of course, Thursday and Sunday are already booked up with unrelated topics.)
From 1953, according to the YouTube notes: “The 225,000 Mile Proving Ground”, a short documentary about railroad research and development. Featuring Hugh Beaumont being a little hard on the Beaver.
Bonus #1: Did you know there was an Early Television Museum? There is. According to their website, it’s even open right now. Hillard is closer to Columbus than my usual stomping grounds of Cleveland, but not out of the realm of possibility for a day trip.
In the meantime, here’s a tour of the Early Television Museum. And I guess this does sort of tie back to yesterday’s Walleye video.
Bonus #2: I said “mostly shorter” because I did want to make one exception, on the grounds of timeliness: from the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, October 31, 2013: “An Evening With Hal Holbrook”. About 77 minutes long.
“In a rare treat, the audience enjoyed several extended recitations of Twain throughout the evening.” If that helps you make up your mind…
I have a doctor’s appointment today. I would say I’m being a little lazy, since these videos are long, but I think there’s some stuff in them that might interest military history buffs. All of these come from the same source (BalticaBeer) and seem to be official productions of the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. I feel like there’s kind of unifying theme here: what a small motivated group of individuals can do if given liberty to work outside of the box.
In rough order of length: “To the Sea, a Sidewinder…50 Years of Snakes on the Wing”, a documentary history of the AIM-9 Sidewinder.
Next up: “The Origins of ARM: Defence Suppression and the Shrike Antiradar Missile”.
Finally: “The Pursuit of Precision: Walleye The TV-Guided Glide Bomb”
I know this last one is the length of a feature film. I’ve actually watched all of it, and personally found it weirdly fascinating. Also, there is a lot of footage of things blowing up or being blown up, so it isn’t just talking heads. Walleye itself is kind of a fascinating story. Today, it’s not uncommon to talk about putting a bomb through one window of a building: but what I don’t think most people realize is that we were actually doing that 55 years ago.
(Ålso, if you’re a television technology geek, there’s a lot of talk about TV tech and how Walleye helped advance the technology.)
Leon Spinks, former heavyweight champion of the world.
Leon had fought professionally only seven times, with six victories and a draw, before facing Ali at the Las Vegas Hilton on Feb. 15, 1978, in a bout arranged by Bob Arum, one of boxing’s leading promoters.
Ali held the World Boxing Association and World Boxing Council titles. But at 36, though an overwhelming betting favorite, he was past his prime. He weighed in at 224 pounds to Spinks’s 197.
Spinks was a hard-charging brawler, but when he pressured Ali in the ring, the champion resorted to his rope-a-dope strategy, which was aimed at letting an opponent exhaust himself with punches that seldom did damage while Ali rested on the ropes.
The Spinks corner had a strategy of its own, aimed at weakening Ali.
“Jab, jab, jab, that was the plan,” Spinks’s trainer, George Benton, said in the dressing room afterward. “Hit him on the left shoulder all night with that jab.”Ali rallied in the 15th round, but Spinks warded him off and won a split decision.
He lost the WBA title to Ali in September of 1978: the WBC stripped him of the title because he wouldn’t fight Ken Norton.
Spinks’s last fight came in December 1995, when he lost a unanimous decision to Fred Houpe in an eight-round bout. Spinks was 42; Houpe was 45 and had not fought since November 1978.
Spinks retired with 26 victories (14 by knockouts), 17 losses and three draws.
George P. Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state and Nixon cabinet official.
Today’s dose of chicken soup for the you-know-what (because I’m pretty sure the actual term is trademarked, and I’ll hear about it from those people just like if I don’t refer to today’s game as the Superb Owl): Frank Shankwitz, former Arizona Highway Patrol motorcycle officer.
In 1980, he was introduced to a 7-year-old boy named Chris Greicius. Chris had terminal leukemia, and he desperately wanted to be a motorcycle officer when he grew up. He idolized Ponch and Jon from “CHiPs”.
The department had decided to make Chris’s wish come true, if just for a few days. A police helicopter ferried him to police headquarters from the hospital where he was being treated. Mr. Shankwitz was to greet him out front, next to his motorcycle.
“Figuring he’d be brought out in a wheelchair, I was surprised when the door opened and a pair of sneakers emerged,” Mr. Shankwitz wrote in his memoir, “Wish Man” (2018). “Out stepped Chris, an excited 7-year-old boy who seemed so full of life it was hard to believe he was sick.”
Mr. Shankwitz showed Chris his motorcycle, and after he and the other officers gave him a badge, the head of the department made him an honorary officer. Chris was feeling well enough to go home that night, and the next day the officers brought him a custom-made uniform.
To become a motorcycle officer, though, Chris had to pass a driving test — which he did, in his front yard, on his small battery-powered motorcycle. Mr. Shankwitz promised to bring him a special badge worn by motorcycle cops; he also called NBC, the network that aired “CHiPs,” and asked for the show’s stars, Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox, to autograph a photo.
The next day Chris was back in the hospital, and by the time Mr. Shankwitz arrived with the badge and the picture, he had fallen into a light coma. Chris had hung his uniform by the bed, and as Mr. Shankwitz pinned the badge on his shirt, the boy woke up.
“Am I an official motorcycle cop now?” Chris asked.
“You sure are,” Mr. Shankwitz replied.
Chris died later that day. Mr. Shankwitz and a colleague attended his funeral, in Southern Illinois, borrowing a pair of Illinois Highway Patrol motorcycles to accompany the hearse.
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Science Sunday!
It seems like it has been a while since I’ve done any space science, and I don’t think I’ve ever done any planetary astronomy, so let’s fix that today.
“Mercury: The Exploration of a Planet”, about Mariner 10.
Bonus #1: “Mars: Five Views on What Is Known”.
Bonus #2: “And Then There Was Voyager”.
Bonus #3: This breaks from the theme, but I wanted to put it here because: a short film about NASA’s Icing Research Tunnel at the Glenn Research Center.
As I have noted several times in the past, my father used to work at Glenn, back when it was still the Lewis Research Center. So I kind of have a sentimental attachment to the facility…