Pretty tricky.

I am guilty of yet another right hand turn in delivering tonight's post. What was to be a short piece on rope tricks, the history of and a few crazy ass examples, rapidly morphed into a couple of lines about atomic bombs. What can I say? I'm a sucker for well documented insanity.

So whats the connection anyway? Well seems that there is a phenomenon called the "rope trick effect" that occurs when certain bombs are set off.

John Malik, a physicist, noticed this startling visual effect when looking over high speed photography of the nuclear tests in the 50's. When photographed just after detonation, the camera captured a "fireball" that looks a lot like a huge transparent marble, but what is too bloody weird are the series of spikes or long tendrils, the "ropes" that extend from the bottom of the fireball.

The ropes are actually the mooring cables being heated, followed by rapid vaporization and then expansion of the cables. Malik, being curious and artistic, tried different colours, with black producing the most pronounced effect, while ropes wrapped in foil or other reflective material didn't show at all, they just went phsst in a nano second.

Not surprisingly, surface or air detonations, or any that weren't held down by ropes didn't produce the rope effect.

tube steak

Back at it after a week off on helping my employer out. Had to fly over to a new office and get the staff started on the right foot. Good to be back at my own desk and cosy bed.

Saw a nifty little video on the CBC web site about a London designer who has recycled old London subway carriages into office space. He's plucked then from the scrap heap and dropped on top of existing buildings. You may have noticed a soft spot for trains on this blog and particularly the goofier side of transport, (remember trains sucked through rubber tubes don't you?) so I'd thought I would dig up stuff on the the London Underground.

Anyway, the 1840's saw what was to be called the Railway Mania in England. Railways were where it's at then and everyone was tripping over themselves to by a stake in some new railroad. Speculative investing in new railways was crazy. Now it turned out that many never got off the ground, were gobbled up by bigger companies or were simply bogus, but the rage over railways was here to stay.

No wonder, compared to other investments there was a buck to be made. And more important, there was a middle class to invest their earnings. Propelled by the industrial revolution the railways were in demand and tracks needed to be laid and locomotives needed to be built. Not only was there an insatiable need to move goods, people had to be moved to. England was rapidly urbanizing and workers had to get to their jobs.

So back to the London Underground. There has been attempts to link suburban train stations in the 1840's by using shallow troughs but these never took off. The City was simply in the way. No one wanted hundreds of homes and roads destroyed to get even the beloved trains into downtown. Some lines were constructed, most notably to connect Paddington Station, but these were basically trenches that were covered over.

Lets jump ahead a few years and have a look at the first real tube train. The tube train could only exist once deep tunneling could be accomplished safely (sort of for the time- the construction of some of the shallow trenches, the so-called "cut and cover" was crazy. At one point they dug through the Fleet Ditch Sewer system near Farringdon). By 1970 tunnelling shields allowed deep excavation to proceed and a tunnel was bored under the Thames near Tower Hill. This was barely a railway in the true sense, just one car hauled back and forth on cables, but it was a start.

More improvements and access to electric locomotives made subways practical, and the first one showed up, The City & South London Railway in 1890. It was powered by an electric locomotive and had some 5+ kilometers of track in service. The ride was no hell and for some reason, probably due to the dark tunnels, the carriages had no windows. Could not imagine a weirder little ride. Patrons called them padded cells.

Dad.

Father of the Delta blues, Charlie Patton was a true homegrown talent. Born in 1891 (there is debate over this, with some musicologists suggesting he was born earlier, that is 1885 earlier) on the Mississippi delta. He moved with his family to the Dockery Plantation at the turn of the century. A couple of other real cool cats found out about the Patton magic, maybe you've heard of them: John Lee Hooker and Howlin Wolf.

Music has to come from somewhere, and Patton learned his craft from local Dockery musician Henry Sloan. Blues wasn't invented yet but this guy had it going on. Two of Patton's future sideman, Son House and Tommy Johnson learned at Sloan's feet. Unfortunately there are no known Sloan recordings.

Patton's first real composition was "pony Blues". Known as a song writer and developer of the the delta blues style, he was comfortable playing many genres and toured all over the Southern United States. Toured is being generous. He was a Black musician in turn of the century times so he played plantations and beer halls.

Crowds came from all over to see the show, and a show it was. Way before the antics of Pete Townsend or pyrotechnics of Hendrix, this guy played the guitar below his knees and behind his head wowing the crowns who had never seen anything like him before. There were no amps or PA systems then, but his voice was as legendary as his playing. He could blow out candles at the back of the hall.

Patton moved to Holly Ridge Mississippi with his partner, fellow musician Bertha Lee, where he lived until his death in 1934. He has also been known to go by the name Elder J.J. Hadley.

No smoking.

So we all know the Incas built some pretty good rope bridges. As engineers period they are up there. Now they didn't get far with no wheels, but rope bridges they did OK. The largest of these spanned 200+ feet over the Apurimac Canyon.

The cool thing with these rope bridges including others built in South and Central America was the commitment to regular maintenance. Locals would rebuild and tighten main sections of the bridge on a fixed schedule, prolonging the useful life and keeping harmful accidents at a low level.

Far, far away in Northern Ireland, we see the bridge builders craft displayed in the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge, near Ballintoy. This amazing little bridge actually spans the ocean between Ireland and tiny Carrick Island.

Area fisherman erected the bridge as an easier way to get their catch to land (thought they would have had boats though). This bridge shows up in local lore and seems to have been around off and on some 300 odd years. The current version is all safe and has safety measures installed so its pretty much for tourists. It's still a harrowing 20 metre walk on a shaky bridge.

Sparkling sugar.

In one of many attempts to find out a little bit more about the history of rope I stumbled upon a short science piece making the rounds at all the news services. Seems scientists have discovered if you peel Scotch tape off it's roll in a vacuum it emits x-rays.

The article doesn't have any background, that is to say, what got the scientists unfurling tape in a vacuum anyway. Maybe it was a slow day, who knows.

Researchers at UCLA found that peeling Scotch tape off a pane of glass "ejects enough radiation to take an x-ray image."

The phenomenon is called triboluminescence and was first written about by Sir Francis Bacon in 1620 when he noted "It is well known that all sugar whether candied or plain, if it be hard, will sparkle when broken or scraped in the dark." Sounds like they played around with Lifesavers back then a bit. But that's just the idea. Many substances emit mild radiation when rubbed scraped and scratched.

The researchers above are thinking of using the energy to power portable x-ray machines. I'm sure someone else will come up something real fun to do with it.

In case you want to follow up, here's one link to the story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081023/ap_on_sc/sci_scotch_tape_surprise

Gotta look up again, shit.

Just a shorty tonight, but in a rope-y theme. Seems the Peruvians had a thing for rope and what to do with it. Take the Rope Bridge of San Luis Rey. Built in 1350 across the Apurimac River, it was made of hand woven rope and spanned 148 feet.

The cables were twisted and then added as components of a larger cable until the core span was as thick as man's body. The bridge even had a device to self tighten the ropes as they stretched installed on one side.

So well made was this magnificent bridge it lasted 500 years. A lot longer, actually, than many cast iron bridges.

If you are intrigued check out Thorton Wilder's 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, or if you prefer, find one of the several film adaptations. The most recent features Robert DeNiro and Kathy Bates.

Sorry readers, I tried to find at least a drawing of the orinal bridge but all I could dig up was endless DVD box art.

Look up, way up, and I'll call Angie and Fiddle

Doing research into expedition artists (the folk who paint and sketch the things that explorers go looking for before cameras were useful) landed me on quite few web sites devoted to things that fell from the sky.

There is a long history of objects pummeling the earth. Pretty much from ancient times onward man has seen stones, cinders, toads, fish (quite a few actually) and especially since air travel is common, the odd plane part and frozen poop.

And then there is meat. Seems that meat has fallen lots of times. Lets see starting in 1851 near San Fransisco troops reported seeing pieces of meat, apparently beef (how did they check?) falling from a cloudless sky.

Sampson County, North Carolina reported that in the same year meat as well as liver, brains and blood fell from the sky. No mention as to what cut of meat it was. Again in 1884 meat fell from the sky in Chatham County.

In 1869 on a farm near Los Nietos, California, more meat came down. This time in strips.

We move now to Bath, Kentucky when in 1876 cubes of beef (what else?) landed on the Crouch family farm.

Every meat fall occurred on clear cloudless days. Think I'll use the grocery store.