VIGNETTES
It was April
18th, 1942 and the USS Hornet was turning into the wind, to give the
aircraft on the deck the most lift that they could get. The men in the B-25 Mitchell bombers had
trained for this day…a day that would prove to be more symbolic than
destructive. Sixteen aircraft took off,
bound for the Japanese homeland, in a surprise attack to show the Empire of The
Rising Sun that America
was not defeated…not by a long shot. The
raid was successful, but the aftermath was not.
Our ally, Russia,
interned one of the crews for a year.
The Japanese captured eight of the fliers and executed three of
them. It was a bold move by brave men
who, if they thought about it at all, probably knew that it might very well be
a suicide mission.
In The War Between The States, on
December 5th, 1861 a Confederate soldier observed a Union soldier
moving, and the distance between them was calculated to be around 1400
yards. The sniper fired, and a moment or
two later the Union soldier lay dead, and the troops around him were completely
baffled as to where the shot had come.
Patrols were sent out but because of the distance involved, it was never
considered that a sniper could make a shot like that. Even today, it’s ranked as the 14th
longest shot in history. Considering
the technology that was around in the 1860’s, it probably was something of a
miracle that the shot could be made, but the Whitworth rifle was the best of
what was available.
Our twenty-sixth President, Theodore
Roosevelt, was a man among men. Once,
while giving a speech an assassin shot him in the chest…Teddy continued on with
the speech. He single-handedly changed
himself from a sickly boy to a robust man, becoming an expert marksman, running
his own cattle ranch and being the leader of
the “Rough Riders” in the Spanish American war. When his own political party rejected him, he
formed the Bull Moose party. As President
he showed the flag by sending the US Navy around the world, and all the ships
were painted white, thus earning the name The Great White Fleet, and presenting
the United States
as a world power. In 1906 he was awarded
the Nobel Peace prize, for actually doing something to bring peace to the
world. He is carved into the Mount Rushmore façade along with Washington, Jefferson
and Lincoln. Good company, I’d say.
More people have probably heard of Edison than Tesla…unless they associate the name Tesla with
an electric car. Nicola Tesla was an
American of Serbian birth and one of the great geniuses of his, or any other
time. When Edison
was bring light to the world, via direct current, Tesla was working on
alternating current…which is the system that the world uses today. He died in 1943, and a unit of magnetic flux
density is called a tesla. He put on
demonstrations of high-voltage by sitting in a chair and having spark-like
bolts of thousands of volts crashing around him, with no harm to him. In the 1893 World’s Fair, Tesla put on an
exhibition and an observer noted: Within
the room was suspended two hard-rubber plates covered with tin foil. These were
about fifteen feet apart, and served as terminals of the wires leading from the
transformers. When the current was turned on, the lamps or tubes, which had no
wires connected to them, but lay on a table between the suspended plates, or
which might be held in the hand in almost any part of the room, were made
luminous. These were the same experiments and the same apparatus shown by Tesla
in London about
two years previous, "where they produced so much wonder and
astonishment"
We have people like this in the United States
today, believe it or not…but between political correctness, silly regulations
and downright stupidity on the part of the Federal government many of these
people are ignored and their creations never see the light of day. I remember, way back in the late 1940’s there
was a story about something called the Pogue carburetor. It was a device that would greatly increase
the miles-per-gallon of the automobiles on the road. The story goes that the-then Big Three,
General Motors, Ford and Chrysler, along with Big Oil bought the patent and
buried the idea.
Then there
was the Winchester,
the Sharps, and the Henry rifles which, along with the Colt six-shooter, tamed
the wild, wild west. Firearm technology
has always been a painful process primarily due to the failures sometimes being
fatal for the shooter. Samuel Colt, the
maker of the six-shooter, had a line attributed to him, that pretty much summed
it all up. It was said that God created
Man, but it was Colt that made them all equal.
At a time when single-shot rifles and revolvers were still high on the
list of technological wonders, a lever-action repeating rifle and a six-shot
repeating revolver were eagerly sought, and gun salesman traversed the west
selling everything they could get from the factories.
We were a nation of doers, makers of
wonders and our kids were in what I believe was the finest education system in
the world. Now, most of that is gone and
I cry for my beloved country.
No comments:
Post a Comment