Strange Facts!

[specs4you]

Fun with words;

1- BOSS: How did the "boss" get his name?
From the fact that at one time he had complete authority over his workers and could thrash them at will. "Boss" comes from the Old High
German bozan which means "to beat".

2- DOUBLE HEADER: What is the origin of this baseball term?
Baseball took this from railroading. In railroading, a "double header", is a train with 2 engines on it. Hence, in baseball, a "double header" is two games on a single afternoon.

3- TAXI:
The reason a taxi is called this? The word referred to the "meter" carried by the cab. It was called a "taximeter" because it measured the fare or "tax", and cabs boasted of the fact by painting "taximeter" ontheir doors. Soon this was shortened to taxi.

I like words....

[rinselberg]

Chicken Kiev by candlelight? A bucket of Extra Crispy from KFC? Either way, the latest from the paleontologists is that you could be chowing down on a distant relative of that most iconic of dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex.

In a remarkable experiment that brings to mind the 1990 novel and 1993 movie Jurassic Park, scientists recovered seven protein sequences from the 65 million year old thighbone of a Tyrannosaurs rex and matched them with proteins from living species.

Three of the proteins matched up with proteins from chickens.

The findings are thought to reinforce the theory that modern birds are on an evolutionary line of descent that started with dinosaurs.

The refinements in analyzing mass spectrometer data that were achieved in the course of the experiment are expected to add to the progress of human health care - possibly by providing the means for earlier detection of cancers.


Source: MSNBC "T. rex analysis supports dino-bird link".


View MSNBC slideshow that explores the dino-bird theory.

[rinselberg]

It's estimated that about one in every million lobsters is blue. This one was photographed at the New England Aquarium in 2006. "Click" the photo for a higher resolution image.

Credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_lobster


Today's "crustacean moment" has been brought to you by Rogue Ales, brewers of ...



- today's Beer Of The Day.


Beer Of The Day is always brought to you by ...

[rinselberg]

Want to sink your teeth into a decades-old controversy?


Have a Baby Ruth candy bar.




According to the official Baby Ruth website:

Introduced in the early 1920s by Curtiss Candy Company, Baby Ruth was said to be named after President Grover Cleveland's daughter, Ruth. At the time, the child was endearingly referred to as "Baby Ruth". The trademark was patterned after the engraved lettering used on a medallion struck for the 1893 Chicago World's Colombian Exposition. The image pictured the President, his wife, and young daughter Baby Ruth.

That's not exactly how the story goes down in the online reference Wikipedia, however ...

Although the name of the candy bar sounds like the common moniker of legendary baseball player Babe Ruth (George Herman Ruth), the Curtiss Candy Company has always claimed that it was named after President Grover Cleveland's daughter, Ruth Cleveland.

Nonetheless, the bar first appeared in 1921, as Babe Ruth's fame was on the rise and long after Cleveland had left the White House and years after his daughter had died. Moreover, the company had failed to negotiate an endorsement arrangement with Babe Ruth, and many viewed the company's story about naming the candy bar as a ruse to avoid having to pay the baseball player royalties.

Ruth Cleveland, born in 1891, in between President Cleveland's two terms of office, was a national sensation. But she was an unhealthy child who only lived to the age of twelve, having died of diphtheria in 1904 - and 17 years before the candy bar that was supposedly named in her memory.



Ironically, in 1931, Curtiss successfully shut down a rival candy bar called the "Babe Ruth Home Run Bar" that was honestly named for and endorsed by the ball player, on the ground of trademark infringement.

More twists to the story are referenced in the trivia book series Imponderables, by David Feldman. In the edition called What Are Hyenas Laughing At, Anyway? Feldman (1995) reports the standard story about the bar being named for Grover Cleveland's daughter, repeating the explanation involving the medallion struck for the 1893 Chicago World's Colombian Exposition.

The next edition in 1996 - How Do Astronauts Scratch an Itch? - offers what seems like a more credible explanation. Feldman was tipped off by a letter writer, referring to another trivia collection, More Misinformation, by Tom Burnam: "Burnam concluded that the candy bar was named after the granddaughter of Mr. and Mrs. George Williamson, candy makers who developed the original Baby Ruth formula and sold it to Curtiss."

The Williamsons had also sold the "Oh Henry!" formula to Curtiss around that time.

Burnam observes that describing the product as having been named for a mere businessman's granddaughter would not have had the same marketing appeal; hence the motivation for the story about Ruth Cleveland.



As if to lampoon their very own account of how the candy bar was named, the Chicago-based Curtiss Company installed a lighted sign advertising Baby Ruth, after Babe Ruth's "Called Shot" home run at Chicago's Wrigley Field in the 1932 World Series. The sign was installed on the roof of one of the flats across Sheffield Avenue, near where Ruth's fabled home run ball had landed. The Baby Ruth sign stood there for forty years.


The Urban Legends Reference Pages serves up another historical tidbit ...

Part of the official explanation offered by the Curtiss Company has been that Ruth Cleveland visited the Curtiss confectionary factory when the company was just getting started.

Ruth Cleveland died in 1904.

The Curtiss Candy Company was founded in 1916.

It must have been a remarkably macabre kind of visit ... more like a visitation than a visit.



Antique advertisements:
http://www.wmob.com/artpages/babyruth1.html
http://www.zanesville.ohiou.edu/emed...thumbnails.htm




Visit the oldest unsolved puzzle in optics ...

[chip anderson]

Ruth's Chris ususally has some blue Lobsters.

[rinselberg]

[move]

Just when you thought it was safe to answer the phone ...

[/move]



In 2004, California's Monterey Bay Aquarium exhibited a young female specimen Great White Shark ... i.e. "Jaws".

After 198 days of captivity in the aquarium's million-gallon Outer Bay exhibit, the shark had grown from five feet long and 60 pounds to just over six feet and 160 pounds. It had to be returned to the ocean because it had developed an unnerving habit of chasing after some of its tankmates - perhaps with an unauthorized in-between-meals snack in mind or some other kind of mayhem. Almost a million visitors had come to see it.

The shark was fitted with an electronic tracking tag and returned to Monterey Bay. After a programmed interval of 30 days, the tracking tag popped to the surface for collection at a point almost two hundred miles to the south, offshore from Santa Barbara. The data recovered from the microcomputer that was encapsulated in the tracking tag revealed that the shark had traveled as far as 100 miles from shore and descended as far as 800 feet beneath the surface during its 30 day journey.



"... before a shark is returned to the wild, we fit it with an externally attached pop-up satellite tag with a tiny computer that collects and stores data. The computer records sensor data at five-second intervals to track the shark - how far below the surface it goes, the water temperature and the ambient light level where the shark is swimming. It's a detailed log of the sharks journey. On a pre-programmed date, the tag pops off the shark and floats to the surface. When the shark tag is recovered, the data is transmitted via satellite to a marine laboratory where it can be analyzed for its scientific value ..."



"In the thirty days after we released our first white shark in March 2005, it traveled more than 100 miles offshore and dove more than 800 feet deep ..."


They did it again in 2006. The second white shark was a young male specimen. After 137 days in captivity, it had grown to six and a half feet long and 170 pounds. It drew almost 600,000 visitors. When it was returned to the ocean, it was fitted with a tracking tag that was programmed to self-release and float to the surface after 90 days. The tag revealed that the shark's 90-day journey, starting from the release point in Montery Bay, had taken it more than 1100 miles to the south, off the coast of Baja, California.

The aquarium has donated $700,000 of its revenues to TOPP (Tagging Of Pacific Predators), which has enabled scientists to tag almost 100 Great White Sharks, including large adult specimens. Whenever a shark "phones home" (i.e. when its electronic tracking tag is recovered) the scientific database of shark behavior patterns is enlarged with a new set of measurements.

If you would like to browse some webpages that offer photos, video clips, podcasts and scientific observations of the world's largest predatory fish, you couldn't do better than to start with these:

White Shark Phones Home
White Shark Research
National Geographic - Great White Shark



Select ("click") the photo if you would like to hear some of the background audio presented to visitors at the Outer Bay exhibit. For a super high resolution image, click here.


Audio credits: WickedBlue Friends and Christopher KueB.



at Beer Of The Day

[Sean]

The guppy, a popular tropical fish kept by hobbyists, is named for its discoverer, R.J. Lechmere Guppy.

[Sean]

The first woman in the U.S. cabinet was Frances Perkins. She was named U.S. Secretary of Labor by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

[chip anderson]

Sean:
You have spoiled one of my illusions. I read in a book on tropical fish back in the 1950's the name guppy ment: Millions of fish.

Chip

[rinselberg]

Serbia hasn't exactly been tops on my list of places to chill out during an international vacation.

The last time I took any notice, it was as a live bombing range for NATO's combat air arm - and nothing more.

So why is the Serbian news media suddenly so mirthful as to be joking that the "S" in Superman secretly stands for "Serbia"?

It's because of a new mineral that was just discovered there.

Scientists have classified it as a form of "sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide". Which is exactly what was written on one of the props in the movie Superman Returns. In the movie, it appears as the writing on a case of rocks stolen by Lex Luther from a museum. Not just any old rocks ...

Kryptonite.

Unlike the large green crystals of kryptonite in the Superman comics, the real "kryptonite" is a white, powdery substance which doesn't contain fluorine and isn't radioactive.

Officially, the new mineral will be known as Jadarite.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18289647/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18306151/

[Sean]

The Monopoly board game mascot, Mr. Monopoly, was originally named Rich Uncle Pennybags.

[rinselberg]

According to Dusty Sklar, author of Hitler and the Occult, there was a deposition from a German professor of anthropology during the Nuremberg trials, who said that he had heard a story that "fine young specimens of SS men" had been beheaded, in an attempt to use their decapitated heads to communicate with certain"Eastern masters"; i.e. the spirits of long-dead Germanic heroes, like King Heinrich the First and Frederick the Great.

Talk about an unwelcome promotion!

I've not found anything online to corroborate the story, but if there are further details of record, I would look in Dusty Sklar's aforementioned book ... if I still read books anymore.

True or false, such grisly proceedings would certainly have fit in with the spectrum of occult activities undertaken by the SS under its bizarrely malevolent leader Heinrich Himmler. Citing from Wikipedia:

The Ahnenerbe Society, the ancestral heritage branch of the SS ... was dedicated primarily to the research of proving the superiority of the "Aryan race" but was also involved in occult practices. Founded in 1935... the Society became involved in searching for [the lost civilization of] Atlantis and the Holy Grail.

Wikipedia also reports:

A German expedition to Tibet was organized in order to search for the origins of the Aryan race ... Another [such] expedition was sent to the Andes. Similar expeditions were organized in the pursuit of semi-mythical objects believed to bring power or granting special powers to their owner, such as the Holy Grail and the Holy Lance or Spear of Destiny ...

Getting back to the decapitations legend, it's not too hard to imagine such macabre proceedings being undertaken in the dimly lit recesses of Castle Wewelsburg, one of the centers of the mystical and malevolent SS cult that was carefully fostered by the half-mad Himmler.

For other rinselberg posts on this topic, see Wewelsburg: Castle of Evil and The bells of Oxford.


Eye on history ...


Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and Wasatch Brewery's Evolution Amber Ale - it's a winning combination at today's Beer Of The Day!

[rinselberg]

One for the money ...



Select ("click") the icon for a brief video presentation.



Two for the show ...

Tsar Bomba was a formal designation for the largest and most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated.

Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb had a yield of about 50 megatons and was codenamed Ivan by its developers. The bomb was tested on October 30, 1961, on Novaya Zemlya, an island in the Arctic Sea. The device was scaled down from a 100-megaton blueprint to reduce the amount of radioactive byproducts, and true to its design, the explosion was remarkably "clean", producing nothing more in the way of radioactive fallout than many smaller atmospheric tests.

Political fallout was another matter.

In the fall of 1961 the Cold War was in full swing. The Tsar Bomba test came shortly after France exploded its first nuclear weapon. Construction had just started on the Berlin Wall. The next year would see the Cuban Missile Crisis.

At the U.N., U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson opened disdainfully with "Mr. Khrushchev tested his giant bomb, just as he said he would." Stevenson, calling it a "monstrous and unnecessary weapon", described the test as a "deplorable event for the world, a step backward from international security, toward chaos and anarchy." He berated the Russians for breaking an informal ban on atmospheric tests and polluting the air with new radioactive byproducts.

When Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev addressed the U.N., he dusted off an old Russian idiom, "to show somebody Kuzka's mother", meaning to punish someone. This is how the Tsar Bomba acquired its slangier appellation, "Kuzka's mother".



Three for the critics ...

After the release by the carrier aircraft, the huge 27-ton bomb was slowed during its drop by a "ginormous" parachute constructed from 5400 square feet of nylon - and a story began making the rounds that for some time thereafter, it was all but impossible to find nylon hosiery for sale in Russia.

The bomb released the same total energy as 50 million tons of chemical explosive - ten times the sum of all of the explosives used by all of the warring nations during World War Two. It was 2,500 times as powerful as the larger of the two atomic bombs used against Japan. Upon detonation, the bomb fuel burned for 39 nanoseconds (0.000000039 seconds). During this virtual instant in time, "Kuzka's mother" released an astonishing one percent of the total energy radiated by the Sun. In a single second, the superheated gases from the explosion expanded into an incandescent fireball over four miles in diameter.

Despite cloudy skies over the Arctic, observers at a distance of 1,600 miles saw the flash. There was a sensation of abnormal heat out to a radius of 500 miles. Had the skies been clear, anyone within 60 miles of ground zero, outside and without protection, would have been "toast". The seismic shock wave was recorded at earthquake monitoring stations even after circling three times around the globe. The mushroom cloud rose to an altitude of 40 miles. Most of the bomb's energy was radiated harmlessly into outer space: one of the reasons why such enormous bombs were considered to have no practical military use.

Because of an unpredictable and unavoidable effect called "atmospheric focusing", shock waves raced through the air at the speed of sound before reflecting downwards, touching down like tornados and creating scattered and isolated areas of destruction almost 1,000 miles away. These long distance shock waves were reported to have shattered window glass and damaged buildings as far from the test site as Finland and Norway. That's more than the distance from Boston to Detroit.

Belying all of the Soviet sizzle and showmanship, "Kuzka's mother" was not a useful military weapon. It was too big to go on top of a missile. It could be dropped from a specially modified long range aircraft (as it was during the test), but attempting to penetrate the strong U.S. air defense with aircraft was a dubious proposition at best, and the extraordinary weight of the bomb, coupled with the aerodynamic drag of the oversized bomb compartment, would have made the carrier airplane(s) even more vulnerable. The U.S. and Russia alike developed arsenals of thousands of smaller nuclear weapons that offered a more credible strategic deterrent than any number of the "king size" bombs could have provided.



Image gallery ... "click" any image to enlarge.





The banal awfulness of the Reliable Sources ...

Mushroom Clouds Image Gallery
Soviet Weapons Programs
Russia's Nuclear Weapons Program
AllExperts Encyclopedia
Wikipedia

[Sean]

In M&M candies, the letters stand for Mars and Murrie, the developers of the candy in 1941.

[rinselberg]

This artist's impression of a supermassive black hole highlights the swirling accretion disk and the fantastic power radiated outwards into space in the form of two tightly focused energy beams or jets. One jet is aligned with a magnetic north and the other with a magnetic south. The jet energy is distributed across the radio spectrum, and sometimes upwards into the visible light and X-ray bands.



As "fuel" in the form of interstellar gas and dust is captured by gravity and enters the accretion disk, it's accelerated to incredible speeds and temperatures. Friction and interaction with the powerful magnetic field releases the electromagnetic force that powers the energy jets. It's thought to be the most perfectly efficient energy conversion process in the observable universe.

How efficient? If the internal combustion engine in a car could be reengineered to run like a black hole, it would deliver about 1,000,000,000 MPG; i.e. one billion road miles per gallon of gasoline. That's about five "road trips" to the Sun and back - and there'd still be a long way to go before the next fill-up.


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12465712/
http://htxs.gsfc.nasa.gov/resources/...e_gravity.html


Updated:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19461296/

[rinselberg]

There's an excellent review of the Roswell Flying Saucer legend on the National Geographic Channel under the title The Real Roswell, and it's airing again on Saturday.

The most credible explanation to date of the 1947 Roswell incident and the frenzy of UFO sightings that preceded it emerged (finally) in 1995, but not having followed any of it (myself), this National Geographic segment was (mostly) news to me.

This one hour TV segment is brand new - it's dated 2007.

For more of what you most need to know, see the Laramy-K World News Forum - the optical world's most respected source for news.

[rinselberg]

U.N. team still looking for Iraq’s WMD
Though work is seen as irrelevant, Security Council can’t agree to end it

U.S. official: "Been there, done that ..."

Updated: 5:25 a.m. PT June 2, 2007
UNITED NATIONS - More than four years after the fall of Baghdad, the United Nations is spending millions of dollars in Iraqi oil money to continue the hunt for Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

Every weekday, at a secure commercial office building on Manhattan's East Side, a team of 20 U.N. experts on chemical and biological weapons pores over satellite images of former Iraqi weapons sites. They scour the international news media for stories on Hussein's deadly arsenal. They consult foreign intelligence agencies on the status of Iraqi weapons. And they maintain a cadre of about 300 weapons experts from 50 countries and prepare them for inspections in Iraq -- inspections they will almost certainly never conduct, in search of weapons that few believe exist.

The inspectors acknowledge that their chief task -- disarming Iraq -- was largely fulfilled long ago. But, they say, their masters at the U.N. Security Council have been unable to agree to either shut down their effort or revise their mandate to make their work more relevant. Russia insists that Iraq's disarmament must be formally confirmed by the inspectors, while the United States vehemently opposes a U.N. role in Iraq, saying coalition inspectors have already done the job ...

For the complete MSNBC report:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18970426/


Updated:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12342626/

[rinselberg]

Pimp my toad!



Is purple the new "black" in Suriname? That's the South American country where a recent expedition of naturalists, sponsored by two mining companies, discovered what are considered to be as many as 24 new species, including this Atelopus toad. Junior's Custom Auto Painting and Body Shop denies any involvement. The Associated Press described the markings as "fluorescent" purple, but I think that was just a figure of speech. I haven't turned up any evidence that the markings on this toad would react to ultraviolet light by changing or intensifying their color.

Select ("click") the photo to view a higher resolution image.





Visit the oldest unsolved puzzle in optics ...

[Sean]

The full name of breakfast cereal mascot Cap'n Crunch is Horatio Magellan Crunch.

[Sean]

The crimped bottle cap was invented by Baltimorean William Painter in 1891.

[rinselberg]

Darkness falls on the evening of March 24, 1944. Before the next sunrise, 76 POWs - mostly airmen from the U.K. and other Commonwealth nations - are on the lam in Germany after breaking out of a prison camp from a concealed underground tunnel. Disguised in fake civilian garb or counterfeit German uniforms tailored to match carefully scripted cover stories, they're ready to back up their fictitious identities by answering in German and presenting forged German documents when challenged. They carry food rations and copies of stolen German maps and railroad timetables. It's the culmination of a truly incredible escape plan involving almost a year of secret preparations by over 600 Allied prisoners.

The mass breakout triggers an international dragnet that diverts thousands of German soldiers and police from other tasks. Hitler is furious. Of the 76 fugitives, 73 are quickly recaptured. Fifty are gunned down in cold blood by Gestapo agents who in a lame attempt to conceal yet another Nazi war crime, fictitiously record that the prisoners were shot while trying to escape from transport vehicles. Another 23 are returned to German captivity alive. Only three actually live the dream of escaping from Nazi-occupied territories. It goes down in history as "The Great Escape".

But you already knew all this, because you're one of the millions who've seen the iconic 1963 movie "The Great Escape" at least once - and probably more than once.

The movie was remarkably close to the real-life story, aside from what are probably the two most obviously fictional embellishments: Steve McQueen's character stealing a German motorcycle and James Garner's character swiping a German airplane. Those things didn't happen.

Here's some things you probably didn't know ...

Not a single American serviceman was among the 76 escapees who broke out.

When tunneling was detected by German guards or "ferrets", they usually pretended to be unaware, allowing the prisoners to continue their underground digging without hindrance. Then, when the ferrets judged that the tunnel was almost complete, they would pounce, driving heavy trucks around the POW compound to collapse the escape tunnels and galleries.

Concealing the escape preparations was a task assigned to the very capable hands of a particular American serving with the RCAF. He worked out a scheme in which a rota of prisoners logged in every German guard or ferret entering the POW compound using what was called the "Duty Pilot" system. The Germans were tailed everywhere inside the compound until they left, when they were logged out. An elaborate system of innocent-looking signals was devised to alert POWs engaged in escape activities, and give them enough time to either disguise their nefarious handiwork as one of several permissible camp recreations, or to completely conceal whatever it was that they were doing. Unable to effectively combat the Duty Pilot system, the Germans allowed it to continue, and on one occasion actually took their own advantage of the Duty Pilot log, inspecting it and then bringing charges against two German guards who were logged out several hours before the scheduled end of their watch - slackers, caught red-handed but inadvertently by the prisoners they were supposed to be guarding!

The accomplished German actor Hannes Messemer (figure on the right; below) was cast in the role of the suspiciously named Colonel von Luger. "Luger" ... like the famous German sidearm?


"Give up your hopeless attempts to escape, and with intelligent cooperation, we may all sit out the war as comfortably as possible ..." Credit: IMDb movie database.

The script for the von Luger character was drawn to match the real-life Kommandant of Stalag Luft III, a Luftwaffe staff officer who was held, ironically, in considerable regard by many of his captives. Colonel Freidrich-Wilhelm von Lindeiner-Wildau was a courteous and totally professional soldier without the slightest use for Nazi fanaticism or brutality - 180 degrees apart from the thuggish Gestapo agents who were sometimes assigned the task of tracking down escaped POWs.

Camp security was headed by Hauptmann (Captain) Broili and Oberfeldwebel (Warrant Officer) Hermann Glemnitz. The latter, who was 44 (in 1943) and endowed with a sharp sense of humour, was usually referred to as "that b*****d Glemnitz", and was both feared and respected by the prisoners as a dedicated disrupter of escape plots.

After the war, Glemnitz was discovered living in West Berlin and was flown to the 1965 POW reunion in Dayton and the 1970 reunion in Toronto. Upon arrival in Canada, Glemnitz, still very much in character, declared "I am here to make sure that you people aren't trying to tunnel out of Toronto."



Eye on history


Sources:
NOVA on PBS: The Great Escape
History In Film: The Great Escape
The Great Escape From Stalag Luft III by Rob Davis
First hand account of Stalag Luft III by Wing Commander Ken Rees
Wikipedia: The Great Escape
AXPOW: American Ex-Prisoners Of War Organization home page
AXPOW: Prisoner of War Stories and Articles

[chip anderson]

A little post script on Riseberg"s post. I have been told my many veterans of the D Day invasion: "No German Prisoners were taken after the 73 escapees were gunned down."
Think of how this contrasts with our "treatment of prisoners" today.

Chip

P.S. As you probably know in the retaking of the islands of the Pacific, no Japanese prisoners were taken except those too wounded to fight back, thier choice, not ours.

[Sean]

One of the largest freshwater fishes is the Paiche of the Amazon, which can grow to ten feet long and over 500 pounds.

[rinselberg]

Please return later ...

[rinselberg]

Yesterday (July 18) marked 69 years to the day since an ambitious U.S. aviator known to history as Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan landed at Baldonnel Airfield in Dublin, Ireland.

The year was 1938.

The flight made Corrigan just the eighth pilot to fly solo across the Atlantic.

You may not have noticed, but Tuesday (July 17) was Wrong Way Corrigan Day - so designated because the flight began 28 hours and 13 minutes earlier, on July 17, when Corrigan took off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York.

Corrigan acquired his "pre-owned" Curtiss Robin OX-5 for the grand sum of $325 in 1933 and fitted it with his own jury-rigged engine and extra fuel tanks. The Bureau of Air Commerce, unenthused with the condition of the airplane, declined his application to certify it for transatlantic flight. Before taking off, Corrigan told airport officials that he was going to fly west, all the way across the U.S., and land in Long Beach, California. Because of weather conditions (fog), they told Corrigan to take off heading east, make the Atlantic coastline and then turn back heading west in accordance with his flight plan.

Corrigan explained his unexpected materialization in Ireland as a navigation error. He said that either his 20-year old flight compass had malfunctioned, or in unfavorable lighting conditions inside the cockpit, and distracted by coldness in his feet and a menacing fuel leak, he had misread his compass, transposing east and west. He said that he didn't realize that he was over the Atlantic and closing on Ireland until 26 hours into the flight. He had no radio and because of the front-mounted auxilliary fuel tanks, his straight-ahead vision was obscured. He could only see out through the side windows of his plane.



Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan and his Curtiss Robin high-wing monoplane "Sunshine". Photo: Museum of Flight.


The offbeat news story caught the public's imagination at a time when the dreariness of the Depression years was still wearing on a somewhat dispirited and anxiety-ridden nation. The straight-laced officials at the Bureau of Air Commerce sent a 600-word transatlantic telegram, listing all of the regulations that were violated by the unauthorized transatlantic flight. They also suspended his pilot's certificate for the next two weeks. But they were out of step with the temper of the public. Corrigan and his patchwork Curtiss Robin returned to New York aboard the steamship Manhattan on August 4th, the last day of his temporary decertification. He was given a ticker-tape parade down Broadway that drew a larger crowd than the one that turned out for Lindbergh in 1927.

The confetti had scarcely been swept from Broadway when the pilot turned author started the manuscript for his autobiography. The book was ready for the year's end gift market under the title "That's My Story". Wrong Way endorsed "Wrong Way" novelty items including a watch that ran backwards. In 1939 he was cast in an autobiographical role in RKO Radio Picture's "The Flying Irishman". The $75,000 that he netted almost immediately from his celebrity surpassed the income that he would have realized from 30 more years at his previous airfield mechanic and pilot's wages.

Decades later, the retired aviator turned orange grower recounted that one of the high points of his life was meeting President Roosevelt, who told Corrigan that he never doubted the veracity of the "compass story" for even a moment.

Perhaps Roosevelt was just being congenial.

There's an air of "publicity stunt" about the celebrated flight that has never been dispelled.


For more:
Curtiss Robin C-1 page at Museum of Flight
http://www.santaanahistory.com/articles/corrigan.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Corrigan