Shut up already.

Lucky us Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi gave a fairly short speech today. At a little over 95 minutes the "Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialists Peoples Libyan Arab Jamahiriya" (one of his actual titles, he has a few) was hours off the records for real long UN speeches. Too bad they didn't let him pitch his tent in the park across the street (really), or he might have been well rested and talked longer and maybe, just maybe, he might have made some sense. But hey, he is the force behind the Libyan National telescope project.

The UN's inclusivity has given equal time at the same podium to nut bars, dictators and down right losers. Sometimes you just gotta piss some people off to keep your street credibility.

Speeches that easily eclipsed this speech were: India's V. K. Krishna Menon, the holder of the trophy with his killer 7 hours, 48 minutes. It was January 23, 1957 when he tore into Pakistan for what is for most people a whole day's work time.

And it's nearly the anniversary of Fidel Castro's September 26, 1960 thumper. He gave it a good run clocking in at 4 hours 29 minutes.

Though not at the UN, Hugo Chavez went on for over 8 hours on some Venezuelan talk show. Jesus.

Some ketchup on my slurry please.

I am back again, and semi promising to keep to a regular schedule. No excuses, but my wife got me a new guitar and that has kept me from the keyboard once or twice.

So we got burgers and fries sorted out, now it's time to nail that other pillar of fast food, the hot dog.

First a little about the names these guys have. Frankfurters, or franks, are sausages from Frankfurt, Germany, and only bear a passing resemblance to hot dogs in that, yes, they are a sausage on a bun, but they are really much heartier and courser in texture. Wieners hail from Austria and are a blend of meats, usually pork and beef and resemble hot dogs a lot more.

No real point in time can be traced to the actual first hot dog, but we can be damn sure they came from Germany or Austria and that immigrants from these countries to America began selling them sometime around the mid 1800's. The sausage selling was easy for the German newcomers of the time. It was an easy food, widely known back home and seemed to strike a chord with American consumers whose pace of life and long work days often left little time for home cooking if you lived in any of the urban centers then. Trouble was, the hot dog vendors didn't put the stupid things in a bun yet. So diners had to burn their fingers. Some entrepreneurs handed out gloves (ya gotta wonder how they made a living) so customers would be safe. Other German immigrants like Charles Feltman tried selling them IN A BUN. Imagine.

Big picture was he did OK. Still it wasn't the 20th century yet and most folk didn't commonly call them hot dogs. It wasn't until the late 1990's that the term crept into usage. People were still a little leery of what meat actually went into these little wieners.

And on that note, yes hot dogs are made mainly from mechanically separated meat. (chicken, turkey, beef and pork. The industrial term for this process, as if it doesn't sound detached enough, is advanced meat recovery. Jesus.

chip?

So now that we have the burger tucked away quite neatly, we turn our rudder towards the mighty ship French Fry. Yummm.

It's not easy to get to the real facts as many sources piss around about where the damn name comes from. Let's face it, they're potatoes, and they're fried. French frying seems to refer to nothing more exotic than spuds cut Julienne style (the French part) and frying which means, well frying).

Oddly enough, the origins of this little tasty gem seem to point to Belgium. The story goes that back in the late 1600's inhabitants of a small Belgian village couldn't deep fry the fish from the local river because it was frozen over, so they went for the potato instead. Apparently, they were carved into a fish shape. I see the connection. Why the hell they were called French Fries might well be just a convenience thing. Belgian Fries sucks. The Belgians speak French anyway. In reality, the Belgians love their fries, elevating them to the stature of national snack. Some would argue it should be higher than that, more of a national meal or dish.

Allied troops who fought in Belgium during the First World War warmed to these delicious potato fingers and no doubt contributed to their popularity back home.

Next time we look at that classic English staple, fish and chips.

Cool potato names: Rocket, Arran Pilot, Red Duke of York, and my favourite, Pink Fir Apple. And yes that's a French Fry holder for your car up above.

over 1 decillion served

As promised a wee bit more recent fast food history before we head backwards in time. I started with talking about burgers so lets stay there for a bit more and flesh out the phenomenon that was White Castle.

Founded in 1921 when businessman Bill Ingram hooked up with restaurateur Walter Anderson, the Wichita , Kansas eatery became the first real fast food style chain ever. Anderson's hamburgers were tiny little affairs that sold for 5 cents. With a coupon you could get 5 for 10 cents.

The business angle of the success of White Castle was an American business first. Food was cooked in a production line, like Henry Ford's cars, and served as fast as people ordered it. To make the small burgers look bigger, they had a square shape so the edges stuck out. They moved to burgers with holes in the middle to reduce cooking times and eliminate flipping these little gems. Cooks at White Castle could really be any of the staff members and that suited them just fine. Staff turnover is typically high in the food service racket so little time and money needed to be spent training cooks. Once again keeping costs down, this no doubt contributed to the hamburger chain being the first to hit the million and then, billion hamburgers sold plateaus.

The innovations were not just in the kitchen. I mean square patties with holes in them are pretty cool, but as the chain expanded, they had to source everything. This is the early 40's after all, and you don't just call up and get 4000 pounds of burger delivered to your door.

Not surprisingly, the staff had to be kept clothed in a uniform and since custom paper hats just didn't exist, and the Internet was still 40 years away, Ingram made his own. Even developed a machine for making them and a company to do it at, Paperlynen.

good brownies

Ah ha, enough already. But I had to tell everyone in case you forgot, the stock Music and Art Fair ended on this day in 1969. And some believe, a whole lot more ended too. Good lord, it must have been one hell of a pain in the ass to set up and run. A glaring reminder of what happens when all the pieces fit, and they did, for just a few days, and in a really weird way.

And talk about weird stuff, the Wizard of Oz opened this day in 1939.

And here's a topic dear to my heart, bad flying. On this day in 1859, mail was delivered by balloon from Indianna to New York. And as expected, the thing never made more than about 30 miles before being forced to land.

Born on this day in 1929 was another unlucky traveller, Francis Gary Powers.

Baseball legend Boog Powell was born on this day in 1941. I joke, but he was entertaining.

And in 1944, jazz great Louis Jordan had a hit with "Is you is, or is you ain't my baby?"

Hey oil was discovered in the Yukon on this day in 1959. Sure took them long enough.

Henry Ford starts up Ford Canada in an old wagon builders barn in 1903.

See ya tomorrow.

Some rotten meat, a little barn dust, and voila.

I figure I'll start right in the middle of fast food history with the popularization of the hamburger in the United States in the 20's. The hamburger, as we know it, a ground meat patty between 2 buns apparently came from Germany about 50 years earlier. It was a quite an ugly affair, being raw ground meat served with seasonings on bread rolls. Of course, if you go way back to Medieval times, you'll find the happy go lucky Tartars placing beef under their saddles to get tenderized (Jesus) while they rode along. This too, was eaten raw.

But hamburger like meals were being served by the turn of the century all over the States. Often as cheap food at fairs when meat of some kind (often low grade and highly seasoned to give it taste and kill the background flavours) was served on a roll. However, there are two claimants to the first burger title who, no doubt dispute the quality angle. One is Louis's Lunch. A diner owned by Louis Lassen of New Haven Connecticut, and the other claim is from the Menches brothers of Hamburg (gimme a break) New York. A ground beef patty served on a bun at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair is probably the first to have a national audience however.

Since I'm dwelling on burgers for now, the next logical step is to a burger only affair, and to that we must meet Billy Ingram and J. Walter Anderson, founders of White Castle.

We'll actually meet them next post. Get out your napkins. And yeah, those guys up above sat on meat.

ketchup time.

So give me crap already, I have been very remiss in keeping my end of the barn up. We've had visitors, the house keeps asking to be repaired, and it's been so damned hot you can't think without sweating. The first two are easy to deal with: at the worst you can just ignore them. The last though, the awful heat, just puts me into a no sleep cycle that just grinds at your head. So, enough crabbing.

As usual I will fill in the void with a few notes about what happened this day many years ago.

One of my favourites was that Nicholas Jacques Conte was born on this day in 1755. This versatile Frenchman was a painter, balloonist (there were a lot of them 350 years ago) and inventor of the pencil.

He was most widely know for his balloon exploits. As was the case then, just like a hundred years hence, when electricity was being toyed with, you had to make the damn things yourself. Considered to be a true aeronautical pioneer, he flew an early home made balloon through the town square.

Napoleon was attracted to the notoriety it produced and asked Conte to work with the French army in Egypt. He was one of the first to figure out that a balloon with an observation deck, flown high enough might be a good thing for an army to have. So did Napoleon.

At the first test flight in Egypt the balloon caught fire and Conte had to be fast to avoid disaster. Ironically, many of those present thought the idea was to SET it on fire then fly it over the enemy and let it down on them. In that context, it was partially effective.

A second flight was made, sans fire, but no one was really convinced it was more than a stunt.

Conte was a versatile inventor so he turned to the next best thing to ballooning and invented the pencil lead. More specifically, that cornerstone of the art world, the conte stick.

As is often the case, clever, and often times great inventions are the children of dire need. In this case, years of British naval blockade limited the French's access to graphite. Conte blended graphite, clay and wax to form a stick or lead that users could hold and draw with. Being an artist himself, he realized pretty quick that he could control the hardness of the lead, and the resulting depth and thickness of the line.

Starting tomorrow, it's the Barn's look at fast food.

You'll need a wagon too.

As I wrap up my unofficial history of electricity, I thought it would be nice to come up with a list of firsts, a greatest hits of the ground breaking devices that, when they came out they were weird, but now, we love 'em.

So, here they are starting with the first portable computer in 1981:

It was called the Osborne 1, weighed in at about 25 pounds and had a processor with the speed of an ant in molasses. It featured a cataract inducing 5 inch CRT monitor and two complete 5 1/4 floppy drives (not cut down or smaller versions just for the Osborne 1, but full size desktop drives just stuffed in the case. It came with an optional modem for surfing all 200 bulletin boards avaible in 1981.

The first mobile phone had a few starts with a couple of true mobile phones coming out in the 50's and 60's, though these could only communicate with a home base, and really, some of them weighed almost a 100 pounds. Not much mobility in that mobile. The first real cell phone is of course the classic Motorola "brick" phone, first used by Martin Cooper in 1973.

Lucky us because in 1956 the first protable television, the British Ekcovision came out. Not much on the device except it was made by that stalwart British lectronics company, EK Cole. It's actually a real spiffy looking little rig. See above.

Help I've fallen etc . .. .

Never one to let a fad pass unnoticed, I thought I'd take a peek at those nifty little devices that keep us feeling so warm and cozy. No not electrical fires, but the burglar alarm.

The first electrical alarm was invented by Augustus Pope, an American inventor.The year was 1853. Edwin Holmes bought the patent from him and in 1857 he opened the The Holmes Electric Protective Company. Stories have it that he made skirt hoops in his shop before he got into the protection industry.

With the help of Charles Williams, who knew a few things about telegraphs, and a machinist named Thomas Watson (of Watson, come here I need you fame) they set about keeping the bad guys out of Boston's parlours.

Both Williams and Watson worked on telephone equipment for Alexander Graham Bell and found the work of making alarm systems to be well tied into what they did anyway. In fact Holmes would take advantage of the telephone cabling and switching stations to wire his burglar alarm systems into central dispatch stations. A tripped wire would close a solenoid and ring a bell at a monitoring station where an operator would dispatch the navy to thump the burglar.

Eggs over easy.

I'm going to go off about Nikola Tesla for only a little bit more. And rather than dwell on the obvious stuff he did I'd rather look at the fringes of his accomplishments. Lucky for us, he had a wide fringe.

Lets see, there's his Columbus Egg, a gizmo that suspended a copper "egg" in a rotating magnetic field. This was 1893.

Then we have a little bit later in 1898 the Tesla Oscillator. This was a mechanical device that once placed against a significant component of a building, say a support column, and left run would produce high frequency vibrations. The frequency could be tuned and allegedly he was able to discover the resonant frequency of buildings or any other thing for that matter. Designed to run on steam or air pressure, the thing could supposedly bring down a city block. How could he know that?

Leap ahead to 1934 and we find him working on a particle beam weapon, oh so much more sophisticated than an oscillator. In his "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" he claims to have all the necessary things to make the damn thing. I like how he refers to doing this as an "art". In actual fact, given his abilities and access to the major components he claims he needs to build one, I'm glad we didn't ever really piss him off.

Where's those garden lights.

Since the beginning of time mankind has wanted lights in the garden. There's something enchanting about walking in a garden at night. And it helps when you take the compost out to the bin.

With the current craze about things that don't belch smoke, and to celebrate the fact that I no longer light my deck with torches, I thought I would take a quick minute to look at the invention of the solar panel.

Charles Fritts was an American inventor, who, in 1883 created the world's first working solar cell. Amazing considering this is in an era when there are only a few electrical generating stations in the USA and most people rode horses to work.

The idea was simple: coat a chunk of selenium with gold and expose to the sun. They were very inefficient and cost a pile of money to make. It was easier to farm electric eels.

Jump ahead about 4o odd years and meet Russell Shoemaker Ohl. Another very clever American engineer whose tinkering with the solar cell led to the modern day version. In short, he got it right. He was a pioneer in semiconductor research and was at the very leading edge of transistor development.

While Ohl had the theoretical and scientific side down it would take until the 50"s before Bell Labs and their experiments with semiconductors led to the discovery of various coatings that caused the semiconductors to go wild with electricity. Well "wild" is a relative term. They succeeded in boosting efficiency to a whopping 6%.

It didn't take them long to connect the dots and use solar cell to charge batteries which could run interesting things like satellites. In fact Vanguard 1, launched in 1958 had solar panels powering its meagre electronics. Look closely at the picture above and you can see the panels. To give some perspective, the body is about 6.5 inches in diameter, and it is still up there.

Welcome to Wardenclyffe Tower

I have kept a respectful distance from this man's history simply because there is so much to work with, that anything I try and add to the wealth of analysis already out there, well, maybe I'll just look a fool.

He is so damned interesting I just have to have quick stab at the subject.

I am talking about Nikola Tesla: engineer, inventor, philosopher. And he must have been fun to go to a restaurant with.

Born in 1856 in Serbia, his early years were fraught with many ups and downs, including several stabs at university and ongoing health issues. He was also beginning a pattern of frequent wild changes in direction. He disappeared for a while so convincingly friends thought him dead. After surfacing it was off to another university, only to quit in the first year when his father died.

He was now suffering from episodes of mental "flashes" where he claims he became overcome with the minute details of an engineering problem. These episodes would permit him to actually see the device in his mind and he could manipulate and "work" on assembling and modifying it.

Regardless, his engineering prowess was tangible and before leaving for the USA, was the head engineer for the country's telephone system.

After a stint in France he arrived at the door of Thomas Edison on June 6, 1884. And now begins the fun stuff. See you tomorrow. Gotta interact with my family.

Rope em pardner.

I admit I've been reading the Regulators. They don't write hay burners like that anymore.

I have just time for a short post tonight (I'm heading home tomorrow yay!) so I think it's important we meet William Thompson. He's better known to the rest of us a Lord Kelvin. The British physicist and engineer. That wiley genius who invented the Kelvin scale of temperature.

A quick backgrounder on those of you who missed that class. Kelvin temperature measurement is based on an absolute scale, that is, zero K is as cold as it gets. The complete absense of heat. After that, it only goes up. By the way, temperatures in Kelvin are simply Kelvin, not degrees Kelvin.

And the name Kelvin comes from. Having been named to the peerage, a baron is the lowest, the name he was given comes from the River Kelvin, which runs past Glasgow University.

Since this is a short piece on the man, we'll jump ahead to his work on the telegraph. It was in the mid 1850's and Thompson had been distracted by his wife's lifelong frailness, being constantly sick. Inspired by work begun on a possible transatlantic telegraph cable, he went to work figuring out how to get the signal to go thousands of miles. Remember that this is in a time when the most reliable sources of electricity still came from the sky.

He tackled the hypothetical problems of this project in an exhaustive paper that covered not only the mechanics of transmitting data over long distances (bandwidth, yeah it's like 1855) but the economics of transmitting the information. In other words, how big and of what materials would best get the volts to its destination.

He also invented a device called a siphon recorder, an electromagnetic device attached to a telegraph wire that sprayed ink on paper according to the dots and dashes. A very early ink jet printer.

Oh, still trying to figure out the title of the post? He was second wrangler at Cambridge.

Nice day for Paris

The Barn has been resting for a bit as I have been travelling again and spending time with my brother. So to catch up I usually do a good old what happened on this day, and wow, this time we have quite a crop.

On this day in 951, Paris was founded. Just how do you know when a city starts anyway?

In 1777, Vermont becomes the first state to abolish slavery. That's gotta feel good.

In 1885 the Liberty bell cracks, for the second time. They should have bought the extended warranty.

I an event heard around the world, Odore R Timby invents the rotating gun turret. The year in 1862. Hmmm, took that long?

On this day in 1932 the Dow Jones hits 41.22. That's gotta hurt.

In 1960, Havana's Sugar Kings are kicked out of Cuba and find a home in New Jersey.

And, born on this day in 1838 is Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin. Again, lets see the warranty.

Fritz Perls was born this day in 1893. Everyone remembers him as the developer of Gestalt therapy. Be aware.

And finally, on this day in 1908, Louis Jordan was born.

Tomorrow, back to the zaps.

That guy from Newington Butts.

That guy was Michael Faraday. Born in 1791, he was both a chemist and physicist. He had range, a deep scope of interests and had the rare ability to see "into" things. For example, he discovered that a magnetic field could bend light. Just how the hell do you do that in the 1800's? Most homes barely had artificial sources of light, let alone anything so abstract as a way to bend it.

Early life was poor but happy. At 14 he went to apprentice as a bookbinder. Not surprisingly, this bookbinder sold and collected books and the young Faraday read everything. The apprenticeship was 7 years and during all that time he developed a keen interest in the sciences.

Among his many contributions to science we can list the basic but useful- Bunsen burner, the basic but useful with the other one-discovered benzine, the amazing given what year it was- by providing the first description, in scientific terms, of nanoparticles. He also invented, in 1821, no less, the electric motor.

Now all he needed was electricity.

Everything but the squeal.

A very long time ago on the this day, around 451 AD, Halleys Comet swooshed by. All 200 million people then living on the earth, went "whoa"

And so that the people were smart enough the next time it came by, Eton College was founded this day in 1441 by King Henry VI. The full name was "The King's College of Our Lady of Eton besides Wyndsor"

And probably on this day in 1497, Giovanni Caboto, John Cabot to you and I, landed in North America. Like another famous explorer a few years earlier, he thought he was somewhere else. The snow and the lack of spices didn't give it away I presume.

Henry VIII divorces his 4th wife, Anne of Cleves on this day in 1540. It was said she was good at cards.

Kingston Jamaica founded in 1692. First inhabitants stayed at a place called Hogs Crawle. Num.

And for all you funny handshake people out there, the 1st Free Masons' grand lodge founded in London this day in 1717.

Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, born this day in 1771. He's the guy that brought explosives into the modern world.

Next time you have a bacon sandwich, tip your hat to Gustavus Franklin Swift, born this day in 1839. Never comfortable wasting anything, he pioneered the use of animal byproducts.

They gotta be kidding.

In my never ending search for the stupid in history, and my absurd success at finding buckets of examples, I have wondered into a rather dark arena today. As readers to this blog have noted, much of my focus has been on the ill guided but enthusiastic side of inventions. The car that was too long to turn around a normal city corner or the ancient aviator with the equivalent of 400 pounds of dynamite strapped to his back. The giddy excitement of discovery tempered by flaming crashes.

For today I was going to peel out a short (as always) backgrounder on the electric chair. Once I got looking a bit deeper though, it got too gruesome to describe.

I was left with the nicknames the more popular (now that's really sick) chairs had. That alone is enough to give you an idea.

So, how about Old Smokey? That's the one that executed Bernard Hauptmann. It resides in New Jersey.

Not to be outdone is Old Sparky. This cheerful moniker was given to chairs used in over a half dozen states. A chair of this name first built in 1912 was actually used in 2008. They made them to last then. None of that made in China mass produced stuff.

Now this one has a real scary name: Yellow Mama. It's home is the Kilby State Prison, Montgomery, Alabama. It's unique name comes from the fact it was originally painted with yellow highway paint.

And in Louisiana, they simply call the electric chair Gruesome Gertie. No commentary or descriptive adjectives. You knew it was gonna hurt.

I will leave you with whatever imagery these nicknames conjure up. But Sparky and Smokey? By the way, that's one of the Old Sparkey's up top.

twang

Ah, too too bad. But guitar legend Bob Bogle died Sunday. Who has NOT learned a Ventures song in this room? Stand up. I didn't think so. Everyone has done it. And anyone who tried realized that it was not as easy as it sounded.

The simple melody, the repeating riff, it all sounded so cool and so accessible. But when you learned those riffs, suddenly you knew that you were only copying the notes. The feel, the sound, the audacity to play such a bare bones production. Only Booker T and the MG's came close.

Formed in 1958 with fellow guitar player Don Wilson, they started the act as a duo in Tacoma Washington, probably being the first of the real Northwest sound bands to make it outside the northwest. And somehow managed to survive the Beatles and the British invasion. They both knew each other and worked as stone masons before hitting the clubs to watch bands and hang with their guitars. They had a single in 1959 that featured vocals, but it was a flop.

They soon added musicians to fill out their sound and had their first huge hit with "Walk, Don't Run" in 1960. It almost never got off the ground. After they recorded the song, they went shopping for a label. No one was biting so they formed their own label and by chance a local DJ had a copy of their record which he used to intro the news.

This was the break they needed. With the hit behind them, one more piece of luck moved the band into legendary territory. Nokie Edwards and Bob Bogle switched instruments- Nokie to lead guitar, and Bob to bass. A perfect fit. Bob had defined the sound and feel of the Ventures and Nokie ran with it.

And who didn't want to buy a Fender Jaguar after that? Thats Bob at the top left.

Bagdad Ipod

Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta has been widely credited with inventing the electric cell, or storage battery. What a relief. Hanging out for lightning is a thing of the past. And grabbing electric eels, well, that grows stale fast.

He had been messing around with devices that produced electricity for a while, including a machine called an electrophorus. Volta coined the name for it, but it was actually the invention of Johan Carl Wilcke. He was a Swedish inventor who came up with the machine in 1762. A very big version of an electrophorus was built by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. He was a German scientist and bit of an oddball, but must have been quite fun to be around. He discovered the phenomenon known as a Lichtenberg figure from playing about with his giant electrophorus. The devise gave off static electrical sparks that he quite cleverly recorded in dust. He then lifted the pattern with moistened paper and had a real unique tree like image.

So, as usual, I am following a path away from my topic, the Bagdad Ipod. Volta developed the battery so guys like Lichtenberg didn't have to fuss with crazy macines to get a few sparks flying.

Now the thing is that there is some doubt if Volta really was the first to make a battery. Just before WWII, clay pots containing the components of a modern cell battery. The actual date of these is a matter of debate, but even the newest dates put them at around 200 AD or so.

Scholars have pondered the use of these things and most conclude they will work as batteries. Most likely real use was to electroplate metal objects, as many such relics have been found all over the area. Or, like many, priests used the electricity to jolt and dazzle the crowds.

Really though, no one has ever found any proof they were used for anything electrical.

search this.

K, things were hairy on this day.

For starters, in 1509, King Henry VIII marries his first wife, Catharina of Aragon. Lucky her.

Then in 1742 the Franklin stove is invented by Benjamin Franklin, nice.

Who could forget Barnabe Googe, English poet? He was born on this day in 1540. I know I can't.

Charles Fabry, born on this day in 1867, discovered the ozone layer in 1913.

Or how about the Professor, Dai Vernon, born in 1894. Famous Canadian magician.

Clarence "Pinetop" Smith born on June 11, 1904.

And finally, David Guy Barnabas Kindersley was born this day in 1915. He was the designer of the Octavian font.

Lots more people were born on this day. I am too busy right now looking up clever and little known details of the history of electricity.

Keep your nose out of the water.

As visions of thundering jets recede in the rear view mirror, we turn our gaze upon my semi official history of electricity.

Today, it seems easy to harness and control, and relatively easy to carry around with you. Unless you develop a habit of making toast in the shower or licking the battery electrodes in your car, chances are you passively enjoy the finer things electricity can do for you.

Now, many, many years ago, we're talking 2500 BC or more, electricity began to be noted by humans. Early interactions with it were notable, and very scary. It can be surmised that humans had had confrontations way before then, but they hadn't invented the words for "holy shit" yet.

Not surprisingly, the earliest recorded mentions were of people getting zapped by electric eels, rays and catfish. (Few were available or felt compelled to write about their lightning strikes).

Scientists of the day, like the early Roman physician, Scribonius Largus, knew of the shocks and that they were conducted through water. Even then, they were getting patients to touch electric fish in a misguided attempt to cure, of all things, gout. What is it with doctors anyway? I guess getting a zap from a ray DOES make you focus less on your sore toe. To put things in perspective, these animals can poop out over 200 volts.

Until static electricity was discovered, there was no real way to go out and get some to play with to see how it worked. Lightening had not yet been tied to it, and anyways it was horribly unreliable as a source.

Next post, science gets serious!

Now this sucks.

And . . . . he's back. I've been bouncing around Vancouver Island for work a lot and finally got to posting something. Not so sure yet if the jet engine has run it's course, but I need a break from flames and grievous bodily harm.

So, short term lets get to know Ives W. McGaffey. This enterprising fellow invented the vacuum cleaner. The year was 1868, the city, Chicago. The device was really the first "sweeper" to use vacuum to suck up the dirt. Trouble was, McGaffey did not have anything to power it with. This was a hand crank vacuum. And really, other than he had the idea down, this thing must have been awful. On top of pushing this about, you had to crank it. He named his invention the Whirlwind. Too bad he didn't share the "who gives a shit if it's dangerous" attitude of the early airplane pioneers who were quite happy to climb aboard steam engines and solid fuel rockets to prove an engineering theory.

In actual fact, these devices were really a two person endeavor- one cranked, spun a lever or pumped a bellows, while another pushed. Must have been the odd elbow to the chin cleaning aunt Mary's sitting room. The only reason, other than stupidity, that kept the sales of these things going was the limited penetration of electricity in rural North America until the late 30's. Labour saving there were not.

Hubert Cecil Booth, a British engineer was the first to power a vacuum cleaner in 1901. Nick named the "Puffing Billy" it was powered by a diesel engine (that's my boy) and later a large electric motor. Obviously, these were large machines carried on wagons or trucks, and designed to have the suction hose run into the home or office from outside, much like an industrial carpet cleaner does today. The cool thing about this company is that it continues to this day building pneumatic tube transport systems. Remember the rubber railroads?

Saab makes jets.

The Italians enjoyed a bit of notoriety with their early airborne bombing exploits but really, the rest of the show all the way through WWII was iffy.

Like many countries, Italy turned to it's major industrial manufacturers when it needed airplanes, because you didn't just build an airplane factory out of the blue. So, just as the Germans relied on a train factory for some of their aircraft, Italy turned to Fiat. Oddly enough, a current potential plyer in the bailout of North American automobile industry.

The Regia Aeronautica, or Royal Italian Air force was formed in 1928. By 1935 it was at war with Ethiopia. Equipped with over 1500 ill equipped, slow and virtually defenceless aircraft, they easily wupped the poor Ethiopians. The closest thing they had to airborne weapon was a spear.

When the Royal Air force got into a real fighting war in Spain in 1936, it was apparent that the weird little Fiats were hopeless. But somehow the skilled Italian pilots were among the top dozen aces of the war. Maybe being slow was an advantage.

The main aircraft was the Fiat CR 32, a biplane with just 2 machine guns and a maximum speed of just over 200 mph. At the beginning of WWII they upgraded this tiger of the skies with yet another biplane fighter, the CR 42. Finally in 1940 they scrapped the bi wing design for the C 50 monoplane. Unfortunately, it stunk and was hazardous to fly.

Mind you the Italian bombers were of an equally not quite there design too, having 3 engines. This made aiming a real challenge and impossible to see or shoot straight forward. And, once again, they were slow.

Ready the balloons.

As promised a bit of background on the Italian Air Force. They did have jet powered aircraft by the 50's, but for now lets have a look at the beginnings. The Italian Air Force was originally an offshoot of the Italian Army. In 1884, a special division, called the Aerostatic Regiment for balloon operations was created to, well, have balloons to fly. Mainly to fly over the battlefields and report back by semaphore or telegraph, the balloons, like any other suffered from one huge inescapable weakness: they went where the winds blew. But hey, they had a real cool name for the regiment.

The Italians have had quite a history with aviation, scoring it's first balloon flight in 1784. They have a page in the history of dumbass steam powered aircraft with a working steam powered model helicopter . It took to the air in 1877, but was never seriously developed further. Odd.

The Italian Air Force really came in to it's own though around 1911 when Italy and Turkey were at war. This was the first time airplanes were used in a war for bombing anything. Poor Turks.

Italy did not have an actual arm of the military called an air force until 1923 when the Italian Royal Air Force (Regia Aeronautica Italiana) was born.

Next post I look at those flying Fiats.

Crunch, crunch.

I was going to go on a tear about the early years of the Italian Air Force but decided to give you all a break, and crab about some really bad ideas for snacks.

How about Tako brand(with a k) octopus flavoured chips. I had some fish flavoured noodles not that long ago with a truly obscene name that tasted probably as bad as these sound. Actually, after a bit of snooping, the Asians seem to have this thing for mollusk flavoured chips. How about cuttlefish and squid chips? I'm serious here.

Since I am a solid defender of really good chips, I'll close out the tiny little post with a bit of chip history. The potato chip, the only real chip, mind you apple chips aren't bad, was invented in 1853 by (I'm sorry, but what are the odds?) George Crum.

That ad, to the right, ain't no joke.

There's 2 of them.

Boy of boy, was the end of WWII a real watershed for jet airplane design. Not only were the planes being developed during the insanely high stress final years of the war, but they were test flying then one week and tooling the factory the next to start production. After the war, when the first passenger jet airplanes started showing up at airports, they were usually parked far away from the terminal and metal pans placed beneath the engines in case the "self igniting" jet fuel should leak out or spill.

No doubt German engineers had it down when it came to the jet powered aircraft. C'mon, the were the first to use swept wings, molded high altitude canopies, even ejection seats. (You did have to get out of them occasionally). Sadly, many test pilots didn't. The damn things were just too fast, too powerful and had only a few things sorted out by the time they were tested. Often, the fact they had a pointy bit in the front, an engine out the back and 2 or more wings, that was enough to give them a whirl.

Case in point, the Horten Ho 229. Production models were called the Gotha Go 229 and were built by Gothaer Waggonfabrik, originally a manufacturer of train cars. Hmmm, good choice. Whilst building tram cars they also dabbled in aircraft manufacturing as the Nazi government ignored the Treaty of Versailles and armed the country to the teeth. One of their early products to actually see service was something called the Gotha Go 242, described as an "assault glider". The only assaulting thing it really did was drop off 2 dozen really angry German troops. They had, after all, to travel in the damn thing. It never actually assaulted anything.

Back to the Go or Ho 229. It was designed by Walter and Reimar Horten. The design was a flying wing type powered by twin jet engines. The Horten brothers were not university trained but had been avid glider builders for years (between the wars it was the only things with wings you could get away with building in Germany). The flying wing was something they played around with alot and knew the advantages when it came to powering the aircraft as a wing only design limits drag because there is no fuselage. Less drag means more range, larger payload and faster speeds. A wing and a couple of engines is really only half an airplane. This plane, could have however actually met the 1000, 1000, 1000 design objective dreamed about by Goring. He wanted an aircraft that could go a 1000km, carry 1000kg of bombs and go 1000km an hour.

The test version was a bizarre combination of wood (plywood actually, now that's safe) and welded steel core frame. Unpowered gliders were first tested in the spring of 1944 with unmanned powered tests that winter.

I can't hear you.

So after another couple of days of out of town stuff, I'm back again and hope to shed some light on a little known piece of jet plane history.

The British were the only other WWII participant (the first being the Germans) to have operational jet aircraft. They did not meet in combat, but the Gloster Meteor is credited with shooting down over a dozen German V-1 flying bombs.

Now things moved fast at the end of the war and many new types of jet aircraft came out of England then. An example is the deHavilland DH-100 Vampire which came out in 1946. One version of the airplane was a swept wing oddity called the Swallow. The real name was the de Havilland DH 108. It had no tail wing and resembled early German rocket powered death traps. The Swallow was no easier to fly.

The swept wing design and stubbiness of the fuselage made the plane quick in the turns but broke just about every other engineering rule it could. The first one out of the gate could barely hit 300 mph, but a second version, powered by a more powerful engine, broke apart during a high speed dive. It had anti spin parachutes attached to the wingtips, as it was near impossible, given its design and shape, to break the spin using normal techniques.

These aircraft were flirting with the sound barrier and on September 9, 1948, with John Derry at the controls, a Swallow broke the sound barrier. Although not the first ever, it was one of the first jet powered aircraft to do so.

No matter, every prototype crashed. Next, Horton hears a who.

People are passengers too.

Ok, readers, back on track. More of what we love. Explosions, flaming crashes and all done in the name of science.

No surprise at all that by the end of WWII, the military jet was moving ahead almost daily in capability, range and, dare I say it, ease of use. Fires, flame outs, explosions all dropped off as engineers and pilots got a grip on the new technology. Purpose built aircraft with real performance began to emerge and find their way into the next wars.

So too, as the years after 1945 dragged on, the technology began to leak out into the commercial sphere. The jetliner was close.

The first "jetliner" was a modified Lancastrian. So just what is a Lancastrian? They were modified Lancaster bombers used for transport and passenger service during the tail end of WWII and through the early 50's.

The airplane was used to test jet engines for use in commercial airliners. Typically the outer 2 piston engines were replaced with jet engines. They were still a little leery of equipping this rig with 4 jets. The very first flight occurred in the fall of 1945. Powered by 2 Nene turbojets and 2 Rolls Royce Merlin power plants this was the first jet powered aircraft to carry passengers.

All sorts of variants ensued but the most noteworthy was the 1947 version that used the de Havilland Ghost 50 turbojet engine, the engine slated to power the first real jetliner, the Comet 1.

At least one version had captured German rockets tied under the wings too. Now that's more like it.

get yer hammer

American folk guy ( I was going to say icon, but he wouldn't like it) Pete Seeger turned 90 yesterday. Born in New York City May 3, 1919, to a family of thinkers and doers. His dad a musical historian, his mother a violinist and teacher. Aunts, uncles and siblings were either musicians, poets or in one case, an astronomer.

Pete's first instrument was the ukulele, odd considering the number and quality of trained musicians around his home growing up. But a uke means you gotta have something else to hold the audience, and for Pete it was the grace, charm, wit and respect that flowed from the stage when he performed. He learned early on to captivate listeners with his voice and a simple instrument.

In college, his life changed musically when he heard a banjo for the first time. He was so crazy learning the banjo and messing with politics that grades began to slip. He dropped out in 1938 and looked about for something meaningful to focus his creative talents on. He was a puppeteer briefly, but it was a stint helping folk historian Alan Lomax that got him on the radio and the exposure to a wider audience.

So how good was he? Lessee, formed the Weavers, worked with the likes of Woodie Guthrie and Leadbelly. Monster good actually. At 90 he's still works for what matters with people who care.

Turn the lights out when you leave.

So now that jet engines made things go fast, it became increasingly obvious that shit would happen correspondingly faster too. Meaning that if trouble did strike, there was a lot less time to save your butt.

Enter the ejection seat. The first ones were arguably conceived by Germany in the years between the wars when they were spending a lot of energy not arming themselves to the teeth. I say this because there is debate the the Brits had a few ideas of there own too about the same time.

No doubt as aircraft performance increased, the possibility of simply climbing out of the stupid thing, walking to the edge of the wing and jumping off with your parachute, decreased.

The early plan was a lot like a Wyle E. Coyote episode. That is to say the ejection from the aircraft was accomplished by a really big spring. Nice. Of course, the pilot opened the canopy first. Otherwise he had a headache.

The Germans actually did work out the concepts before the UK. In fact they had a few workable ideas in the early 30's. They thought of the spring under the seat method and and external style spring powered device that was like a small crane above the pilot that yanked the pilot free from above and tossed him kind of like a trebuchet. I'm thinking I might want to walk off the end of the wing.

The British version of the spring thing did not eject the seat, only the pilot. Christ. In reality, they never got farther than the drawing board and didn't look at the idea till after the Second World War when they had a chance to look at captured German aircraft.

Cooler, and smarter heads prevailed and by the start of the war they had moved on to compressed air and explosive charge systems.

The butler did it.

News today that the asteroid impact 65 million years ago do not immediately snuff out the dinosaurs. The Daily Mail is reporting that researchers from Princeton University have come up with evidence that suggests the Chicxulub crater in Mexico is about 300, 00 years older than the time lines generally agreed to be gospel about when the dinosaurs winked out. This is the spot the asteroid actually hit.

The resulting explosive gases and dust shrouded the earth and the rest well, is real ancient history. But, not so according to research head Professor Gerta Keller. Seems those nasty Indian volcanoes went off about the same time. I'm talking about a coincidal series of huge eruptions at an area in India called the Deccan TrapInstead she found that bore holes showed clearly a very slow gradual layer of sediment, taking round about 300,000 years to develop, just above the time of the impact. In fact the layers are about as natural and ordinary as can be. So there.

I thought it was the booze all along that killed them off.

The old folks will still have their Buicks.

For those of you who have spent the day nailed to a board in the basement may not have heard that GM is killing the Pontiac and keeping the Buick. Those of you who haven't been in a cone of silence will note with some sadness the passing of a sometimes cool automaker. I mean cars like the GTO, Firebird and the Bonneville, all classy.

Started in 1926, Pontiac didn't set anything on fire until the addition of designer John Zachary DeLorean (yes, the Back to the Future car guy) in 1959. Delorean was responsible for a number of innovative ideas including the "ropeshaft" drive shaft introduced in the 1960 Pontiac Tempest. The base engine for this car, a spunky 4 cylinder, was literally half of the current Pontiac 389 cubic inch V8. Tests proved that half the V8 ran just fine so tooling costs were cut since half the parts were already in production.

I for one will miss the Pontiac, but am slightly pleased that Buicks are still easy to spot on the highway.

Where the hell have I been post.

Well, I have been thinking about history while I've been off the radar. The job took me away for 3 odd parts of weeks and then I got lazy. I did eat more breakfast cereal the last little while. Our new family favourite is Lucky Charms. Oddly enough they have just about the exact same nutritional values as a very highly advertised "heart friendly" brand, but taste like candy. The wonders of chemistry.

I am getting back to looking at what is good to read and watch, starting with the offerings to the left. The first one will make you want to build your own. The second one is a good fun. Learn a few for your next management meeting.

There will be a new one with every new post, so don't get caught snoozing.

logical

Quick little reminder to all of you who may have slept for the last 40 years and missed anything to do with the science fiction thing. Leonard Nimoy was born this day in 1931.

Son of a barber he first started to get into film and TV around the end of the 50's. Bit parts in series and cheapo movies and the odd Twilight Zone was where he cut his teeth. Of note (I guess): Zombies of the Stratosphere was an installment in a movie serial that featured Nimoy as a martian. The stuff isn't very good. I mean really. The main character is some guy named Commander Cody. From there it goes downhill.

Oddly enough he appeared with William Shatner in 1964. They were in an episode of The Man from Uncle.

That's gotta hurt.

Starting up a new department tonight. In poking around the news and archives I see so much amazingly messed up stuff that it's too good to pass up. I'm not talking about the typical shock Internet crap a la Jackass stuff. I'm talking "it really happened." And if it has some stupid historical connection, I'm there.

So, today's 1st gem is from Japan. Though these events occurred just a few months ago, it does connect with a short couple of posts I did about submarines colliding.

The Japan Times reported that on January 12th of this year a surfacing submarine collided with a Japanese fishing vessel. This tiny little story is telling in that the fishing vessel had aboard at this time a Maritime Self Defence Force officer charged with preventing submarine / fishing boat collisions. He was on the lookout for a sub when it happened.

And from the other side of the globe now, news of another sub/boat crack up. The Straight of Hormuz is the spot, the date, last Friday night. An American submarine, the USS Hartford and a surface vessel, the USS New Orleans, ran into each other around 1am.

Seems the collision was a vertical one, that is to say, the Hartford was under the New Orleans. No details if someone official was posted on the New Orleans to spot for submarines.

Oh weely?

So history has a way of having a laugh every now and again. Case in point: British engineer Frank Whittle was the first to patent a real turbo jet engine. The year was 1932. He managed to build a functioning prototype by 1937. Though strapped to a test bed, it ran just fine. British military were not that interested.

On the other side of the channel, Hans von Ohain, a German engineer, had been tinkering with his own turbo jet. And the laugh is they never knew of each others work. The difference was German industrialist Ernst Heinkel saw a demonstration of the lab model and was hooked.

Heinkel had acces to the tools, machinery and expertise to build lots of stuff. He teamed Ohain with master machinist Max Hahn. Together they created a fully functioning stand alone engine. Heinkel was ready with an airframe and on August 27, 1939 (less than 2 years from workshop bench to production) test pilot Erich Warsitz successfully flew the He 178. This was the world's first turbo jet airplane to take to the skies. Erich Warsitz (know as titanium gut, cast iron constitution guy) was also the first guy to fly a rocket powered plane, the He 176, only a few months before. Hope he had a pension. Military testing was undertaken in quiet remote areas to maintain "secrecy and reasonable safety". Nice to know they care.

A whittle bit of this and that.

There was no shortage of good ideas when it came to getting the jet engine off the ground. The real stopper was there was no materials or equipment that could handle the temperatures or pressure levels that were going to be needed to run a jet engine with enough snot to propel an airplane faster that an propeller driven engine.

For example, in 1915, the Hungarian Albert Fono devised adding a ramjet to a cannon fired projectile. The idea was the size of the cannon could be smaller and lighter as the jet engine equipped bomb would fly father on it's own. Although it was never built (denying the world ballistic missiles for, oh, a good 25 more years or so) he did patent a jet propelled airplane in 1928. It too, was merely a blueprint that awaited smarter minds and cleverer processes.

Maxime Guillaume, a French engineer, actually was the first to patent the jet airplane. He eclipsed the Hungarian by 7 years.

A Norwegian, a Hungarian, a Frenchman and finally a German and a Brit. The jet was about to be born.

Those wiley Norwegians, again.

It's Monday and I'm back. I spent the weekend looking through material for today's post and coming up with many possibilities. Remember, I am easily distracted. I have found that about the best music to do the nasty work of keeping the fires burning at the Barn is by far the wonderful streaming audio from CBC, in particular the Signal with Laurie Brown. Heard every evening from 10pm onwards, but because of the time zones you can pick it up as early as 6pm. Want to hear what I'm listening to? Click on this - http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/mediaPlayer.html?ATLANTIC_HI

Anyway, this post's title hides a rather interesting story. Ægidius Elling was a Norwegian inventor who is credited with if not inventing, at least figuring out, the gas turbine engine.

For those of you non techies out there, that's a real jet engine. His original patent for this engine came out in 1884. Trouble is, as he progressed through the theoretical to the practical he realized that there was few materials out there that could hold up to the high temperatures that modern jet engines produced. He was, in essence, making a modern jet engine in 1903.

Issues with safety and reliability prevented the jet engine from moving beyond Ellings prototypes. It would be over 2o years later when British engineer Frank Whittle patented a workable engine in 1932.

Coandă you fly?

I'll just jump ahead thousand years or so (because I want to ) and leap into the modern age a bit. What I really mean is about 1910.

In this year a Romanian engineer by the name of Henri Coandă built the very first jet powered airplane, the unimaginatively named Coandă 1910. You figure he could have named it after a bird at least.

No matter. He originally joined the military at the behest of his father. He was always interested in flight and paid special attention to artillery. However his inventive spirit and the army life was not a good fit and in 1908 he left to pursue a career in science. He found his way to Paris and enrolled in the École Nationale Superieure d'Ingenieurs en Construction Aéronautique. Two years later he was an aeronautical engineer. The year is only 1910.

He moved quickly. He was curious about how wind moved over the surfaces of airplanes and experimented with many shapes first using a fast train to mount his test subjects on, and then developing a wind tunnel, complete with smoke trails. Again, this guy was doing this stuff in 1910.

He then sat down and built the world's first jet airplane. Just like that. It was powered by a genuine jet engine, not an exploding keg of gunpowder strapped under the wing. Although not that powerful, and destined to be the poor cousin of jet propulsion, the thermojet engine he built was an amazing device indeed. A standard 4 cylinder piston engine powered an air compressor that forced air at amazing high speed into a combustion chamber where fuel was delivered and set alight. The roaring flames out the back pushed the plane through the air. In an age when inventors flew their creations, you got to figure he had as much raw courage as technical skill.

The damn thing flew, but crashed on later flight and burnt up. He walked away. By then though interest and money were lacking, so jet planes were put on the back burner. He continued to design and build airplanes over the years, but he maintained a quirky side throughout his life. He developed a jet powered sleigh and an early version of the hovercraft.

Eastern winds.

As is often the case, the more I look into something, the more it grows tentacles. As I snooped about to find worthy historical tidbits to weave together a reasonably accurate account of the history of jet engines I ran into all sorts of side roads to explore.

One of the basic ones is there is considerable history around rockets, and it begs the question, where do you split the jet engine off from rockets? I'm going to perform the surgery at the moment when jet turbines (what we call jet engines) were invented.

But there are some cool old rocket stories. The ancient Chinese had the gunpowder going on and it is assumed that occasionally something more substantial than a firework was fired heavenward. Chinese history records a fei tschu, or flying vehicle around 1750 BC, apparently capable of flying thousands of miles. No pictorial record has surfaced so we can only surmise at what powered it.

However, the crafty Turks with a long scientific heritage, look like they came up with rockets for at least firing at their enemies, if not for travel. With the Crusades and all, there was a sense of urgency to get going with weapons technology. Witnesses have recorded the Turkish forces using rocket powered "torpedoes", and books on military technique stating the same still exist today.

And in the 1600's Lagari Hasan Celebi is reported to have strapped no less that 140 pounds of gunpowder powered rockets to his back while slung under a seven winged monstrosity. He reportedly shouted he was going to "talk to Christ" and took off. The rockets fizzled and he came to earth over the ocean, landing safely.

Scrambled eggs.

I'm finally at the next obsession. It has all the elements of a good one: Excitement, danger, strong odours and rending human limbs. It has for me also, that extra twist of scientists bedecked in top hats toiling over Erlenmeyer flasks and steaming coils of copper tubing. And of course, they then attempted to ride these things.

The basic idea of hot gas escaping through an opening is as old as boiling water. The aeolipile is the first purpose made device to use hot gasses to propel something. Invented by Hero of Alexandria, (sometimes called Heron) a Greek scholar living in the first century AD. The motor was no more than a delightful toy for his and his colleague's amusement. An amazingly simple little gizmo it consists of a suspended metal ball with 2 tubes on either side to the axis. When filled with water and heated from below the escaping steam jets whizz the thing around and around.

Hero was a cool inventor. Among his other ideas were a wind wheel that powered an organ and the first coin op vending machine. It dispensed holy water. Damn. You have to admit, he had a sense of humour.

Don't let him live in Alabama.

Please indulge me one more off topic post. This one is just too good to be true.

OK, so here's the scoop: There's this chimpanzee in Sweden (at a zoo, NOT in the Swedish jungle)who has had a habit of throwing things at visitors. Can you blame the poor bugger? I was at a zoo in Quebec once and the monkey's there were throwing poop at the gawkers, (or freaking them out by masturbating).

Granted, monkeys aren't apes, but they are practical since they came up with effective ways of making their grievances heard.

Sorry, back to the rock throwing chimp. Called Santino, he was born on 1978 and was known to pitch rocks across the safety moat at visitors, and at other chimps to display his dominance of the joint.

After a few years the other male chimp died and Santino's rock wielding died down. But a few years later the barrage began, with volleys of ten stones or more. Zoo staff conducted a stake out and discovered he was stashing ammo all over the compound in little piles. Some neatly laid out, others tucked away in secrecy.

Bubba -y

I admit I'm still distracted by science stuff so before I tear off in another direction I want to briefly talk about those statues they dug up near Luxor, Egypt. Anyone see the news stories that ran mid afternoon about the two Pharaoh Amenhotep III statues that showed up while crews were excavating the pharaoh's mortuary.

According to AP, one statue is black marble and depicts him in a seated pose, while the other, carved from quartzite, shows him as a sphinx, (a la- his own head on the body of a lion).

Amenhotep was the ninth pharaoh of the 18th dynasty and ruled for 40 odd years around 1400BC. Apparently, he left more images of himself than any other pharaoh. Hmmm.

I've tried to find out just how big the damn things are but just about every story so far is based on the AP news wire. Bet they're bigger than a Volkswagen.

Science-y

I am so easily distracted. They shouldn't let people like me near things like old record shops and the Internet. I started to look up stuff about jet engines (going fast, lots of fire, skidding out of control) and got hung up on two cool science headlines. Both have their roots in history. Which is good because my wealthy patrons will shut up.

The first is well, we all knew this was true, but here we are again with some more tantalizingly almost for sure proof of water on mars.

According to Samuel Schon, a Ph.D. student in the geological science department at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Mars had flowing water as recent as 1.25 million years ago. His studies of crater rims, and specifically water gullies, shows what he believes to be proof of running water.

Since you and I can't remember back that far, to put this news into perspective, this was a time when early humans were walking about and making very basic things, probably beer.

Now the other piece of science history is only a few days old, the actual item involved was much older. Did anyone happen to notice on Monday a kind of whoosh?Around 8:30am? It seems a rock, described by scientists as a "giant space rock" (glad they got that cleared up) passed by the earth about 72,000 kilometers away.

Oddly enough, the scientists can tell you to practically a car length how far away the thing is but estimate the rock to be anywhere from 21 to 47 meters across. A margin of error of over 2 to 1. And to make us feel better about it, they figure the Tunguska kaboom was caused by a rock about the same size.

All this science has me in a mood.

Some people name their kids after this. Sheesh.

Barbara Millicent Roberts is 50 years old today. That's Barbie to you and me. The first Barbie's came out in March 1959. There is much written about this iconic toy so I'll leave you to read the stuff that's out there.

I choose to look at a few of the duds and what were they thinking for Christ's sake anyway? Like the Barbie that came out in 1997 that featured an African American doll in the unfortunately named Oreo Fun Barbie collection.

Even more supportive and wholesome was the 1965 Slumber Party Barbie whose package contained a diet tips book that suggested kids don't eat to loose weight. Whoa.

How about the Rosie O'Donnell Barbie? I'm serious. And Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett. C'mon.

Gotta run. It's time for me to move away from the crabbing about so many consumer products and return to technological disasters. As fun as cereal was, it's time to turn my sights to more pressing historical chestnuts like the perfectly safe and family friendly development of the jet engine.

Oh, in case you have any questions, I direct you to the Breakfast Cereal Information Service (I am not kidding). Hey, they're online at http://www.breakfastcereal.org/ . Knowledge IS power.

See ya next time.

Oh you brute.

Sorry for the delay, I believe I was hung up playing video games. Now it seems that Lucky Charms (this family's personal favourite) had a short run in the 70's when the leprechaun fellow, LC, was replaced by a wizard named Waldo. It did not take off, thank god for that. But the real thrust of today's post is more of the mis-aligned marketing that's rampant, even today when products are aimed at children. Cereal is more an more marketed as a good food anymore, so it doesn't matter as much.

But a few decades ago the marketing people often did not have it figured out when it came to mascots. Case in point: Fruit Brute by General Mills. (You know they could have spelled it Fruit Bruit, or worse, Frute Brute).

It sold for an amazingly long time for a gimmicky cereal, almost ten years, and was last seen on grocers shelves in 1983. This stuff was part of the "monster series" of cereals that included Boo Berry, Count Chocula, Franken berry and of course that healthy stablemate, Yummy Mummy. The latter was discontinued too, wonder why.

The actual brute was a werewolf and the cereal was obviously fruit flavoured, but I cannot find a reliable description of just what flavour that was. I've found a few sources that describe it as something like raspberry, hmmm so so, and lime. Wow now that would be harsh.

Look for Lance eating a bowl of it in Pulp Fiction.

Canada goose.

A couple of good flying stories coming out in the Canadian press the last few days worthy of snarling at. First, it's the 100th anniversary of the first airplane flight in Canada. Now I ran a few posts a while back that had more than a few planes flying before the Wright Brothers, so no doubt, if you give me a bit I'll find something that pre-dates the Silver Dart's first flight, not just for Canada, but the whole damn empire.

How Canadian can you get? Christ, they flew the thing from a frozen lake, Lac Bras d'Or (the name of a very fine beer too). The machine was designed and built by the Aerial Experiment Association, a committee (how Canadian is that?). The thing was actually built in the states and flown a couple of times in early 1909 before being dragged to the frozen lake for a few circuits around the pond. The projects patriarch, Alexander Graham Bell had his summer home at this lake, which no doubt was much more pleasant in the summer.

At the other end of the spectrum, and no less Canadian, and for some dumb ass reason shares roughly the same anniversary, is the death of the Avro Arrow. Built by the A.V. Roe aircraft company of Malton, Ontario. The company was originally the Victory Aircraft company, and was bought out by Hawker Siddeley of Britain in 1950.

Their first jet was the Avro Jetliner, and it was their last. There were no problems with it, in fact it hauled goods for years. But they wanted to build real sexy stuff like fighter jets cause all those damn commies were just over the horizon. The silly jet liner set all sorts of records for the time and was not prone to falling apart like other early ones.

Turning instead to military stuff, Avro began to design the Arrow, the CF-105. The first flight was March 25, 1958. It could beat pretty much anything going at the time. So, it was scrapped February 20, 1959.

Politicians at the time could not bear the price tag of over a billion dollars and scrapped the project. When I say scrapped, I mean it. The whole inventory of 7 machines cut up and mulched. C'mon. The argument that they were worried that the bad guys would steal the technology doesn't hold water. The damn thing was almost 80 feet long. Couldn't they just take the spark plugs out?

Who in the heck is Antoinette?

So I've dwelt on the General Mills cereals for a bit, and really, they had some questionable products and some dodgy marketing. That means it's time to pick on Tony the Tiger!!! A Kellogg's product first introduced in 1951.

So there is really nothing wrong at all with the damn cereal. It is up there as a breakfast meal and TV snack. There is no dispute about that. But Tony the Tiger was just one of a number of animals to promote the product.

Animals that helped out in the beginning included a kangaroo named Katy, an elephant called Elmo and a gnu named Newt (what were they thinking?) Katy made in on the box briefly for the first year and then it was all Tony's show.

He had quite a brood and his boy, Tony Junior, even has his own cereal, Frosted Rice. Then there's Mrs. Tony (his wife), and mother Tony (his mom). And, since you're curious, Antoinette is his daughter.