Science Archives • Page 4 of 7 • C Stuart Hardwick

QWERTY is Good Enough

July 3, 2016 7 comments

The QWERTY keyboard layout, the defacto standard derived from the Sholes layout popularized by Remington in the early 20th century, has a bad rap. It’s generally seen as either a failure of market forces or a failure of regulatory oversight, depending on your political bent. After all, Sholes designed his keyboard to prevent the jamming of keys in an antique mechanical typewriter, while Dvorak set out to rationally engineer a keyboard optimized for high-speed typing. Such a keyboard is obviously superior, and it’s only the inertia of the market that has kept the world from reforming.

There’s only one problem with this. It just isn’t true.

Oh, Sholes did design his layout to prevent jamming, but he did this to speed up typing, not slow it down. He was, after all, in an economic death struggle with competing inventors, and while his approach was more intuitive and experimental than Dvorak’s, modern analysis shows that he actually developed a remarkably good layout by the three measure we now know to be important:

Balancing workload between the hands
Maximizing load on the home row
Frequency of hand alternation during actual typing (to permit one hand to prepare to type while the other is pressing a key.

According to Norman and Rumelhart, although the Dvorak layout is superior in the first two regards, QWERTY excels at the latter, and the effect is essentially a wash.

So how did the myth arise? Mostly from Dvorak himself, who like anyone acting on a sincere belief that his reasoning must be correct, stretched the truth more than a little. Then there was the Associated Press report of a US Navy study in which novices using the Dvorak keyboard “zipped along at 180 words a minute.” Only it didn’t happen, and the Navy Department, in an October 1, 1943 letter to the author said it had never conducted any such study. (Foulke, 1961). Apparently, the AP had transposed the “8” and the “0”.

The navy had in fact conducted a study; they just didn’t find the spectacular results that the press like to pick up and amplify, and that Dvorak himself was keen to see. In fact, the navy study was deeply flawed, and really only measured “the Hawthorn effect.” This term stems from ergonomic studies at a Michigan auto factor early in the century that found similarly surprising performance improvement when experimental changes were made on an assembly line—any changes. The researchers finally realized the obvious: workers speed up when they are being watched. They also speed up when they are taken away from their normal work environment and told their speed is being measured, as was the case in the navy study.

So forget the navy study. It’s rubbish. In 1956, though, Earle Strong conducted a careful scientific study of typing for the US General Service Administration. He found that expert typists took 23 days of Dvorak training to match their previous speed on the QWERTY layout. They then continued to train alongside an equal number of QWERTY typists, and were unable to keep up. That is, in direct, head-to head competition between highly skilled and motivated typists, the QWERTY team outpaced the Dvorak team, and Strong was forced to conclude that there would be no value to the government in retraining its workforce.

Typewriting sprints on both QWERTY and Dvorak layouts have exceeded 210 wpm and have been so close over the years that no conclusion can be drawn.The fastest sustained typing (over 50 minutes) ever recorded remains 150 wpm by Barbara Blackburn using the Dvorak layout, however, given that Dvorak typists usually take it up under the expectation that its myth is true–and therefore are clearly over-represented by people intending to train for speed, it’s dubious whether we can draw any conclusions from this. Did Barb make the record books because she typed on Dvorak or because she tried really hard? In 1959, Carole Bechen typed 176 words a minute for five minutes on QWERTY, but does this prove anything either?

The record books don’t represent real world typing, and anecdotal evidence isn’t evidence at all. Here is what researchers have found:

“No alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over the QWERTY for general purpose typing.” (Miller and Thomas, 1977 509)

“There were essentially no differences among alphabetic and random keyboards. Novices type slightly faster on the Sholes keyboard [QWERTY] probably reflecting prior experience… Experts…showed that alphabetic keyboards were between 2 and 9 percent slower than the Sholes and the Dvorak keyboard was only about 5 percent faster than the Sholes…” (Norman and Rumelhart , 1983, 45)

A large scientific study during the 1970s (for which I’ll add a link when I dig it up) found that most professional typists (remember, this was the heyday of typing pools and electric typewriting) average no more than 60wpm, less than half the maximum speed attainable by anyone on any keyboard who makes a good effort. Dispatchers and certain time-critical typing jobs pushed workers to 80wpm, still easily attainable with any keyboard.

So if QWERTY is the lead weight of history, dragging us down by our fingertips, why don’t those who’s jobs depend on typing come anywhere close to its limits? Simple. The real world is not a typing competition. In the real world, typists and thinking while typing, and they just don’t need (or can’t sustain the mental effort) to put words down any faster.

In the end, Dvorak is a fine tool, well engineered, and might well be ever so slightly superior, but it just doesn’t make any difference. A $10,000 racing bike is a superior tool to my Schwinn, but unless I decide to train for the Olympics, it’s a pretty meaningless distinction.

Having presented all this, I must confess that I’ve never given Dvorak a first hand try. I taught myself to touch-type using an Apple IIe program of my own design, based on a one-page magazine article. Since then, I’ve never found typing speed to be a constraint, though I really only type up to about 50wpm. I’ve always felt that learning Dvorak is one of those things that, like balancing your checkbook in hexidecimal, you could learn all right, but at a cost to your sanity and ability to functionin the real world.

But what do you think? What is your experience? So you have studies I haven’t mentioned? Anecdotal evidence you’d like to share? Leave a comment. Send this to your Dvorak typist friend. Let them leave a note. I’m interested to know what you think.

And if you like science fiction and fantasy, pop over to my newsletter signup page for a free, signed e-sampler of award-winning stories.

Foulke, A. (1961) Mr. Typewriter. A Biography of Christopher Latham Sholes, Boston, Christopher Publishing.

Strong, E.P. (1956) A Comparative Experiment in Simplified Keyboard Retraining and Standard Keyboard Supplementary Training, Washington D.C., US Government General Services Administration

Miller, L.A., and Thomas, J.C. (1977). “Behavioral Issues in the use of Interactive Systems”, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 9,509-536.

Norman, D.A. and Rumelhat, D.E. (1983) “Studies of Typing from the LNR Research Group,” in Cooper W.E. (ed.), Cognitive Aspects of Skilled Typewriting, New York: Springer-Verlag.

Proof of Neil’s Giant Leap

June 29, 2016March 8, 2022 0 comments

Someone recently asked, “How can I convince my dad that Apollo 11 went to the moon?…He thinks later missions may have gone, but that Apollo 11 was faked just to meet Kennedy’s goal and beat the Reds”.

Simple. The Russians were watching. And listening.

The only way to convincingly fake a transmissions from the moon is to send transmissions from the moon. In addition to the high-capacity S-band transmitter in the CSM, the Apollo Command Module, Service Module, Lunar Module, and S-IVB upper stage each had their own independent omni-directional VHF transmitters which they used to communicate with each other and with ground stations and to support radio range finding.

Could the Soviets track these signals? You betcha.

A Kentucky HAM radio operator named Larry Baysinger (W4EJA) did just that. On July 20, 1969, he listened in on 35 minutes of VHF chatter between Mike Collins (in orbit) and Neil and Buzz (on the surface), including the president’s “phone call,” all of which arrived in his headset about five seconds before it reached the TV inside the house. Baysinger used a home-brew chicken-wire 8×12 foot corner horn antenna he had built earlier for radio astronomy. This was sensitive enough that his buddy had to continually adjust his aim or the moon’s orbit would carry the transmissions out of focus. The Soviets and other national governments of course had far larger and more accurate antennas, and would have had no trouble telling the CSM in orbit from the landing site, or in decoding the S-band transmissions.

Apollo 11 communications were independently recorded by the Bochum Observatory in West Germany using a 20 meter dish. The page, A Tribute to Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station, has a link to the Bochum recording (heard in the right stereo channel only, with the Goldstone voice added in the left).

A compilation of independent astronomical observations of the mission appeared in Sky and Telescope magazine, November 1969, pp. 358–359. These could not have been faked except by placing multiple alternate spacecraft in the announced positions at the announced times—which would rather defeat the purpose.
Apollo 11 was tracked by the Madrid Apollo Station in Fresnedillas, Spain. Most of the personnel were not with NASA, but Spain’s Instituto Nacional de Técnica Aeroespacia. Were they all in on a conspiracy together? I think not.
The Lick Observatory in San Jose not only tracked Apollo 11 and let throngs of journalists and well wishers see the spacecraft through their telescopes, they were standing by to use the new laser retro-reflector as soon as it was deployed.
The Table Mountain Observatory in South Africa tracked Apollo 11 and published pictures in “Observations of Apollo 11”, Sky and Telescope, November 1969, pp. 358-359. Here is a 20 minute exposure from that article showing the spacecraft (as a streak) right where NASA said it should be:

The Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK tracked the mission in both optical and radio frequencies. Jodrell was tracking the Soviet Luna 15 probe at that time and knew when it had failed. They certainly would have known if Apollo 11 had not really landed.

All of which is to say, the moon landing could not have been faked. Not the first landing. Not the last. Not any of the in-between. Will hoax monkeys never learn? Yes Virginia, We Really Did Land On The Moon

Eavesdropping on Apollo 11

Otter Creek – South Harrison Observatory

Apollo 11 anniversary: Lick Observatory scientists recall landmark experiment 40 years ago

Bill Keel’s Space Bits

Happy Birthday Crawlers

May 31, 2016 0 comments

As it gears up for the next leg of the manned exploration of space, NASA is celebrating the 50th work anniversary of its two mightiest and most stalwart servants, Crawler Transporter 1 and Crawler Transporter 2, each of which has already traveled around 2,000 miles, all over the coarse gravel trackways of the Cape.

These two marvels were manufactured by the Marion Shovel Company in Marion, Ohio, and entered service in 1966 by moving the Apollo 4 test vehicle out to the pad.

Each crawler is 131 feet long and 114 feet wide, and weighs 6 million pounds. Diesel generators drive 16 electric motors, and a complex jacking and leveling system that permits the versatile beasts to sidle up beneath whatever needs to be moved and latch on with four pickup points spaced 90 feet apart on the upper deck.

Here is one of the crawlers carrying Apollo 12 from the VAB, where it was assembled on its mobile launcher, to the pad:

Here is the unmanned Apollo 4 test flight, sitting over the flame deflector. Note that the crawler has scuttled off to safety:

Here is a Crawler carrying the Shuttle Mobil Launcher and a couple of SRBs as part of a vibration test:

Image result for crawler carrying shuttle vibration test

And here is Crawler Transport hauling the Space Shuttle mobile launcher:

Designed to carry the Saturn V and its mobile launcher, the crawlers are now being upgraded to carry up to 18 million pounds.

To my mind, these 50 year-old workhorses are highly flexible and versatile, and excellent examples of government work done right.

Why is the Moon Receding?

February 15, 2016July 10, 2020 3 comments

When the Apollo astronauts set down on the moon, they didn’t just plant the flag and take a selfie–they had science to do.

One of the experiments left by Apollo was a laser range finding experiment. By means of high quality retro-reflectors left by Apollo and two Soviet Lunakod missions, we now know that the moon is receding by nearly 4 cm per year. We also know our day is slowing down. So what gives?

The moon’s gravity constantly creates a bulge in the Earth, mostly in our oceans. But our daily rotation constantly carries that bulge eastward. The moon must then constantly pull it back toward itself–and the bulge constantly pulls the moon forward in its orbit. This has the effect of slowing our rotation and accelerating the moon’s orbit.

When the moon formed, both it and Earth revolved much more quickly than today. The Earth probably had something like a six hour day, and the moon? We don’t know how long its day was, but it was much closer then, less than a tenth its current distance, and both the Earth and its moon were partly molten, which means the tides were vastly greater than today (today, 90% of the tidal bulge is in our oceans) –and therefore this process of recession and slowing operated much, much faster. The moon’s rotation slowed until its rotational and orbital period were in sync, and then its bulge faced Earth and it became locked.

Looking at the diagram, you might notice that there are actually two bulges, one on either side of the Earth. This is true, but since gravity weakens with distance, the bulge nearer the moon is substantially larger and interacts more strongly with the moon than the farther one. For purposes of understanding, we can treat the system is if there were only a single, smaller bulge on the moon’s side.

All moons that orbit in the same direction their planet spins undergo this same process. How long it takes them to become locked depends on the orbital distance and speed and the composition of the two bodies. Liquid bodies naturally have much large tidal bulges than solid ones, and so feel the change more strongly.

Don’t worry. Although the moon is now almost a foot farther away that it was when we first set foot on it, it’s not going anywhere. The recession is slow enough, the sun will die before the moon can get away.

Why Did Apollo Space Suits Have External Hoses?

January 24, 2016 0 comments

Someone recently asked: Weren’t the external hoses on the Apollo astronauts’ space suits a risk?

Excellent question. Yes, they were a risk, but an easily managed one with huge benefits.

First, the risk of damage was managed by:
1. Enclosing the tubes inside braided stainless steel as is done today in better plumbing supply hoses. That, in addition to a multi-layer insulation and abrasion wrap made them pretty snug.
2. Providing the astronauts with spare hoses.
Second, using the hoses made it easy to:
1. Decouple the suit and the PLSS–even during an EVA–in case of emergency, or in case of entrapment.
2. Recharge, clean, and service the suits and life support (PLSS) packs.
3. Connect the same (multi-million dollar) suits to the space craft interior life support console for use during dangerous maneuvers (like liftoff and reentry).
4. Buddy breathe off another astronaut’s suit in case of damage or failure of a PLSS.
5. Use the same (multi-million dollar) spacesuit for tethered EVAs using a long umbilical connected the the life support console inside the spacecraft.

apollo_17_astronaut_ronald_e-_evans_performs_an_eva_to_retrieve_film_cassettes_during_the_trans-earth_coast

Apollo 17 Command Module Pilot, Ron Evans, performing an EVA to retrieve films shot from an experiment rack. Note that he is wearing the backup emergency life support pack, but no larger primary pack. Instead, both the emergency pack and a long umbilical connect to the suit connectors.

What do you think? Did the gains outweigh the costs? Please rate and leave a comment and let me know. And if you liked this post, you’ll love my upcoming story in Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Pop over to www.cSuartHardwick.com for a free signed e-sampler of award-winning scifi.

What is an orbit, anyway?

January 22, 2016November 17, 2020 2 comments

What is an orbit, anyway? And what do we mean by freefall, microgravity, and weightlessness?

To answer these questions, first understand the difference between mass and weight. Mass is a property of all (ordinary) matter, and can loosely be thought of as the amount of stuff in that matter. A bucket full of iron nails has a lot more mass than the same bucket full of wooden pegs because there are a lot more electrons, protons and neutrons in every atom of iron than there are in the carbon and other atoms in wood.

All (ordinary) matter has its own gravity, which is just its attraction to all other matter. A bucket of nails weighs more than a bucket of pegs because the earth pulls harder on it–because it has more mass crammed into the same space, and mass is what gravity pulls on.

Crate up the bucket and launch it into space and it still has the same mass, so why does it float around and get nails into everything? It’s still being attracted to the earth, isn’t it? So where did all its weight go?

To understand this, you need to understand inertia. Ever play air hockey ? Or ice hockey? Or knurling? Set the puck flying and it keeps going until it hits something. Give it a tap, and it creeps along until you reach out and hit it again, or till it strikes something, or till the slight friction against the table (or ice or lane) brings it to a stop. And once it stops, it’ll sit there till the cows tip over unless you go get it. Why? Because matter is lazy, that’s why.

No, I don’t mean matter is living in it’s mother’s basement playing video games all night. I mean it likes to keep doing what it’s already doing until something makes it change. If it’s still, it will remain still until pushed. If it’s moving, it will remain moving in a straight line until acted upon. This property of lazyness is called inertia, and it totally makes sense if you think about it. After all, if a bit of rock is hurling through space smoking weed at 82,000 kilometers per second, it’s not just going to stop, put on a tie, and go out for interviews at Starbucks. Why should it?

Any change in an object’s motion — whether speeding up, slowing down, or changing in direction — is called “acceleration.” We sometimes say “deceleration” to mean a reduction in speed, but in terms of physics, it’s just a type of acceleration–a change in the speed or direction of motion.

Inertia makes perfect sense–after all, why would an object speed up or change direction on its own? Except in everyday life, we don’t live in a hockey rink or in space. If we roll a ball through the garden, it rubs against the carrots and slows down pretty fast, so we think that’s normal. And it is, in the garden. But toss a cat out an airlock from the International Space Station, and it will go hurtling off in a straight line in whatever direction you tossed it (you sorry, cat-hating heathen). Except it won’t…because Earth is pulling on it…which brings us to orbits.

Sir Isaac Newton probably never got hit in the head with an Apple, but he was a pretty smart fellow. Three hundred years ago, he understood gravity and inertia and proposed this thought experiment: Say you climb up to the top of Mount Everest with a shiny new cannon. After negotiating the tip with your sherpa, you fire the cannon flat and level toward the horizon. What will happen?

Nothing, right? You fire the ball, it falls and hits some mountaineer on the head, lawyers are called, the usual. But if you pack more powder into the cannon, you can fire the ball further. Fire it far enough, and you can hit base camp. The faster the ball leaves the cannon, the further it will go, until eventually, the curvature of the earth starts to carry the ground away beneath the falling cannon ball.

What if you traded your magic beans for elfin gunpowder that lets you fire the cannon as hard as you like and send your projectile flying without any resistance from the air? Eventually, it would fly so far that the ground was carried perpetually away and the ball would circle the globe–forever.This is what we call an orbit, and we can actually do it in space where the air is so thin it takes months, years, or centuries to slow down our cannon balls, er satellites.

Objects in orbit still have the same mass they do on earth. The earth’s gravity still pulls on them (though not quite as hard, because gravity diminishes with distance). In fact, if you stepped on a bathroom scale while standing atop a tower as high as the International Space Station, you would weigh almost 90% of your normal weight on the ground. And so would all the steel and concrete in the tower, which is why it would collapse, so don’t do that.

But if you jumped off the tower, you would instantly be in free fall (which sounds a lot nicer than “screaming, oh crap! I stepped off the tower”). You would have no weight because the scale that measures weight would be falling along with you and would have nothing to push against but the chewing gum sticking it to your feet. You would not burn up (like a reentering spacecraft). You would fall through the near vacuum, speeding up due to gravity all the time and would eventually exceed the speed of sound before slowing down again in the thickening air. You brought a pressure suit and a parachute, right?

But why would you jump off the tower? It’s not like the ISS is about to crash into your bathroom. Crap! The ISS is about to crash into your bathroom! At 17,500 miles per hour. That’s gonna leave a mark!

Why so fast? Because the ISS is in freefall too. At 88.9% of normal surface gravity, it’s in what NASA likes to call, “microgravity.” It’s falling towards the earth all the time, and to keep from smacking into Disneyland, it’s been set moving in a straight line at 17,500 miles per hour. If the earth weren’t here, it would fly off in a straight line at that speed forever (ignoring a few dozen details that aren’t relevant here). But the earth IS here, and at 17,500 mile per hour, the ISS is flying away in a straight line at precisely the same rate it’s falling toward the earth. Freefalling. Weightless, but still with a lot of mass (the official mass of the ISS is 3.217 crap-tons).

The moon orbits the earth in the same way. The earth orbits the sun, the sun orbits the center of mass of the galaxy, and the galaxy orbits the disembodied mass of Donald Trump’s ego. It’s all the same.

So there you go. Did I leave anything out? Let me know and I’ll try to clear it up. Or jump over to my homepage and request some free scifi and I’ll send you, you know, some free scifi.

The Chicken Or The Egg

January 17, 2016 3 comments

This is a repost of a piece I wrote for Informed By Nature a while back:

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? This seeming paradox actually has a clear, specific answer, and that answer reveals as much about how we know what we know as it does about where our breakfast comes from.

To ancient philosophers, the question evoked the deepest mysteries of existence and creation. In popular culture, it’s used to imply the futility of hard reasoning. Both views are wrong—utterly wrong—and it’s easy to see why, even if the actual solution takes a little more effort. The chicken or egg question is an infinite regress, and like division by zero or answers containing infinities, this is usually a sign not of some profound truth but of a poorly framed question.

One famous example is Zeno’s argument that motion is impossible because to move any distance one must first move half way, and before that, half again, and so on. The fact that Zeno—living in ancient Greece—lacked the nineteenth-century mathematics necessary to sum infinite series and calculate geometric limits did not prevent his moving outside to address his neighbors. Another example is Anselm’s attempt to prove the existence of God. He first defined God as the greatest being imaginable, then argued such a being would be greater still if it were real and thus concluded that the greatest imaginable being must therefore necessarily be real. Among the more egregious problems with this argument are that it fails to explain why the whole of reality should be bound by the thoughts of one medieval monk and that it argues with equal force for the abominable snowman.

Clearly, asking the right question is very important.

The correct question here is, how did egg-laying chickens come to exist? To ask “Which came first” implies a false dichotomy—a one or the other choice that isn’t real. It implies that all chickens are the same, that all eggs are the same, and that at some point in the past, one or the other must have popped into existence exactly in its present form. This isn’t true.

The category of birds we call “chickens” is a population of animals that, while very similar to one another, is every one unique. Each chicken is a blend of features from the previous generation, each egg of features from its parent hen. Over time, certain traits may be selected for across the population so that it tends as a whole to drift, from Belgian bantams, say, to Bearded Antwerps. Go back 8,000 years, and you would find red and gray jungle fowl drifting into something recognizable as modern domesticated chickens.

Chickens, like all living things, change along a messy continuum. Any particular chicken came from slightly different parents which in turn arose from even more different ancestors, and so on and so on until at some point in the past, we humans arbitrarily declare the ancestor not to be a chicken at all.

The thing is, there is no such thing—in nature—as species. This is a concept we invented to help categorize and study life. We divide modern chickens into distinct species and breeds, though no genetic barrier prevents their interbreeding. On the other hand, chickens can’t breed with dozens of other kinds of birds in nine modern orders, though countless genetic markers tell us they all descend from a common ancestral population.

The “tree of life” we all learned in elementary school is a useful metaphor, but it’s only a rudimentary approximation of how life actually changes over time. Put aside the nice, flat diagram from the biology book and picture instead a tree that branches in three dimensions and is very, very, blurry—as if viewed through an out of focus camera.

Blurred tree of life

Zoom in, and distinctions break down between branches. At each fork, blurriness causes overlap between the offshoots. The blurriness represents the variation among individuals. The overlap is the ability of neighboring populations to interbreed. If two branches continue to diverge, the gap between them grows too wide—they lose the ability to interbreed.

This—more or less—is how species arise. There’s no set line between one species and its neighbor. Polar Bears can breed with Brown bears if we provide the accommodations. Hybrids even occur between more distant branches, such as between jackals and wolves. How is this possible? Because every population is varied—every branch is blurry.

There was never a day when the first chicken appeared. There was only a population that gradually acquired more and more “chicken like” characteristics. The “species” of modern chickens and jungle fowl all overlap. Trace them up the tree and they join up with nine larger branches that once overlapped, but no longer do because they’ve continued to diverge. Far enough, and the branch holding the Rhode Island Red eventually blurs into what once led to certain dinosaurs.

It’s a messy, elegant progression. It never leads from one distinct type to another. It leads instead through diverging groups until time and survival raise a new species from the shadows of its origins. So now when someone asks which came first, the chicken or the egg, you know the correct answer: “Neither. Both come from an evolving population.”

It’s a Miracle

January 8, 2016 0 comments

“It’s a miracle!”

We hear it all the time, often from newscasters who want to maximize the emotional impact of some story of survival—the cat in the well, the baby in the twister, the passengers who walk away from an air crash. These are all miraculous—except they aren’t really, and using this hyperbolic term may actually put people at risk.

Consider the humble air crash. Big plane hits the ground, thousands of gallons of Jet-A. Go through a crash and you’re screwed right? You definitely need a miracle.

You might be surprised.

Plane crashes are spectacle—fire, wreckage, flashy lights—it’s easy to expect the worst. But according to an NTSB study of 568 crashes between 1983 and 2000, only five percent of passengers were killed. The remaining 95 percent escaped unharmed or without life-threatening injuries. In another study of more serious crashes, the odds were better than 50/50 that passengers got out alive. And crashes that occur on the ground often have very high survival rates.

This is not a string of miracles. It’s the result of science, engineering, and training. Attributing these survivals to divine intervention ignores nearly a century of NTSB investigation, hard fought regulation, and the bravery, skill, and experience of flight and ground crews across the country.

Maybe there are miracles, but fortune favors the prepared.

Fire in the Deep?

December 29, 2015 0 comments

In researching a new story, I learned that Deepsea Challenger, the deep sea submersible James Cameron used to visit the Challenger Deep, was recently damaged by a vehicle fire while being moved by truck.

This is quite a shame. The context of my research was possible exploration of Venus, where surface pressures are around 90 Earth atmospheres.

That’s pretty extreme, but you know how much pressure this baby could take? 1,099 atmospheres! With people inside! And with a window!

The Transcontinental Airway System

November 10, 2015 4 comments

Ever see one of these?

Directional marker of the US Transcontinental Airway System

In the 1920s, the US government built a coast-to-coast system of navigational aides to help airplanes deliver airmail day and night, in good weather and bad, across a vast, sparsely inhabited interior without benefit of radio or radar.

The system would have been immediately understood by any engineer in ancient Rome: Some 1,500 concrete arrows pointing the way, generator shacks and fifty-foot towers by which rotating beacon lights helped pilots find the markers, and flashing lights identified each marker by number using Morse code.

It’s the kind of system that calls into doubt the sort of prognostication we often attempt in scifi. It seems absurd today, given than radio navigation beacons were less than a decade away–but they didn’t know what at the time. Nor were they willing to wait. So they did what they could with what they had, and by all reports, it was deemed highly successful by the standards of the day.

But imagine if you will, flying alone in a twine engine biplane, searching for one of these across the barren plains of Nevada, or among the treacherous passes through the Rockies. Oh the stories these forgotten slabs have seen transpire.

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