Heavier Than Air (1930) | Hacker News Reader

Heavier Than Air (1930)

newyorker.com

62 pointsbookofjoe16 comments

Really interesting piece and impreccably written!

A noteworthy statement from Orville: "He feels deeply upon the subject of accidents, saying that there are vastly too many of them and that this country has a bad record. He regards this as a matter of better pilot training; not, he thinks, until the spirit of daredeviltry dies out and pilots shun a hazard with the horror of a veteran locomotive engineer will we witness material improvement"

I also noted there were a few words that I have not seen before in modern English texts: "bumboatmen", "spoke-shave" "self-bailer", for example.

Bumboat[0] = a small boat used to ferry supplies to ships moored away from the shore

Spoke-shave [1] = a tool used to shape and smooth woods in woodworking jobs such as making wheel cart wheel spokes

self-bailer [2] - alternative to hand-bailing

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumboat

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spokeshave

[2] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=self-bailer

You're hanging out with the wrong crowd if you haven't heard spokeshave (it's not generally hyphenated anymore). It's still a commonly-used woodworking tool - just another in the family of planes, really - as is its "roughing" kin, the drawknife. When I were a lad, my father once remarked that a spokeshave seemed to be a bit of a modern contraption for Roy Underhill to be using on a particular project; I had to remind him that wooden spokes were just a little bit out of date and that the class of tools probably had a more meaningful name once upon a time.

I have also not seen "spoke-shave" in modern English texts. I'm not sure how that relates to the crowds I run with. I'm an amateur wood-worker but I prefer building to finishing so I don't do much planing. Likely my neighbor and a close friend knows what that tool is, but it never came up in conversation.

So that is to say that your comment is informative, but it could do without the "wrong crowd" comment. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you meant it in jest!

We will forgive you if you can turn a hook on a scraper :)

Wow, what a time capsule!

I have a newfound appreciation for the New Yorker after this. I’ve often found their articles tiringly long and full of unnecessary mundane details and side tangents.

But reading something from a hundred years ago, those very details and side tangents are the best part. People generally don’t care to record what ordinary life was like - everyone knows! - yet when we look back far enough in history that is the kind of stuff we have the most difficulty relating to and understanding. Perhaps better to think of the New Yorker’s style as not writing for today, but writing for future historians.

Reading the "digression" about the plans for the monument at Kitty Hawk, and Washington's meddling and bumbling, gives you a whole "the more things change, the more they stay the same" feel.

In the same vein, archaeologists find much of interest in trash from the past.

The interesting thing is that after the Wright Brothers successfully flew, their main contribution was a patent war which held back the US aviation industry significantly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war

Wher does the aëro spelling come from and where did it disappear?

The New Yorker has a famously idiosyncratic style guide that calls for diaresis to be explicitly marked (in words like e.g. coöperate). This is pretty interesting though because it seems to indicate that the pronunciation has shifted - nobody would pronounce "aero" with a diaresis today.

Obnoxious as well as idiosyncratic.

It hasn't disappeared in British (and related) English.

What is called an 'airplane' in US English is an 'aeroplane' in British English. Ditto 'aerofoil', etc.

'Aero' is a Greek prefix pertaining to 'flight'. (And also to 'air')

The two dots above a letter indicate that the two vowels are pronounced separately, rather than as one sound. As also seen in "The first Noël the ......", etc.

Though predating it by many decades, this is a bit of a tldr of the book The Wright Brothers by David McCullough which I thought was great. Presumably if you liked this article, you would feel similarly.

I second the recommendation. It’s a pretty easy read but gave me a much deeper appreciation for these two that I had sort of dismissively mischaracterized as “two bike shop mechanics”.

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