Taking the high road
QUESTION Where is Britain’s steepest street?
The steepest residential street in the country is Vale Street in the aptly named Totterdown area of Bristol. It has a gradient of 22 per cent — over one in five.
The view from the top is terrifying for motorists and cyclists. An easter eggrolling contest is staged there every year.
Perhaps the most famous steep street is Gold hill in Shaftesbury, Dorset, known as hovis hill thanks to director Ridley Scott’s 1973 advert.
In the TV classic, to the strains of Dvorak’s New World Symphony, a delivery boy pushes his bike, loaded with loaves, up the cobbled street. It has a 16 per cent gradient, as does Steep hill, Lincoln.
The world’s steepest residential road is Baldwin Street in Dunedin, New Zealand. It rises from 30m to 100m above sea level in just 350m.
The top section has a gradient of 35 per cent — just over one in three.
Andrew Sweeting, Chepstow, Monmouthshire.
QUESTION Listening to The Who’s Roger Daltrey belt out Love Reign O’er Me made me wonder if rock singers with untrained voices suffer damaged vocal cords?
VocAL injuries are common for untrained singers. The distinctive sound of popular entertainers can be due to their lack of voice training.
Roger Daltrey, who once described his style as ‘ very loud screaming’, was diagnosed in 2010 with pre- cancerous dysplasia (abnormal cells) on his vocal cords. These were removed by Dr Steven Zeitels, director of the Massachusetts General Voice center and a professor at harvard Medical School in the U.S.
Adele was forced to cancel more than a dozen shows in 2011 because of a vocal cord haemorrhage that required laser microsurgery to restore her voice. This was also performed by Dr Zeitels.
Most vocal problems are caused by oversinging: performing too long and too loudly without enough rest; excessive use of ‘vocal fry’, a deliberately croaky sound; and ‘belting’, a controlled form of yelling to convey emotion. Alcohol, smoking and drugs do not help. The most common problem is vocal nodes, non-cancerous lumps that cause hoarseness and restricted range. Frank Sinatra, Rod Stewart, Bjork, Freddie Mercury, Justin Timberlake and elton John have all suffered from these.
Professionally trained singers aren’t exempt. In the Fifties, Luciano Pavarotti had a vocal nodule that left him ‘sounding like a baritone being strangled’. he almost gave up singing, but the nodule ‘miraculously disappeared’.
Angie Levin, Bamford, Lancs.
QUESTION Premium Bonds went on sale on November 1, 1956. What is the earliest Premium Bond still entered in the monthly draw?
The previous answer referred to Tommy Flowers, inventor of ernie — electronic Random Numbers Indicator equipment — the machine that picks the Premium Bond winners.
he was at Bletchley Park during World War II, but he was not a code breaker; his genius was in taking the ideas of mathematician Alan Turing and speeding up the process by building a machine that could check possible solutions more quickly than could be done manually.
he had been working at the GPo’s engineering research and development centre at Dollis hill, North-West London, before being seconded to Bletchley Park.
The GPo’s telephone engineering at the time was based on electro-mechanical processes.
This technology had been known since the earliest days of the industry and had been used in manufacturing industries for the automation of processes that followed a set pattern of operations.
The predecessor to this had been the punched card mechanised operations used in the weaving industry.
Flowers’s code-breaking contribution was in building the Bombe machine. crucially, this could be used for a number of different tasks, in other words it was what we would call programmable. It was the first example of computer technology.
This should not really be such a big surprise. The GPo used similar machines they called routiners to make automated phone calls to test for faulty equipment. These electro-mechanical devices were the size of a large tea trolley and were heavy to manoeuvre.
I worked with them during my GPo apprenticeship and I could see in the late Sixties how they could be used for other purposes.
They were probably the first truly digital machines, but they used base ten to count, as against modern binary digital machines, which use a base of two — zero or one (either on or off).
The introduction of semiconductors enabled the principles that Flowers was wrestling with at Bletchley Park to be miniaturised and speeded up into the modern devices we rely on today.
C. E. Sayers-Leavy, Broadstairs, Kent.
QUESTION Which mine is the Somerset town of Minehead named after?
MINEHEAD’S name is not derived from a mine. It originates from the Welsh word
Mynydd, meaning hill or mountain, and this passed into old english as Myned. Two ancient farms on North hill are known as east and West Myne.
Minehead once had copper and iron workings, but is not known as a mining town. In the 19th century, Minehead harbour was used to export ore from the nearby Brandon hill iron mines.
The trade stopped in the 1870s when the West Somerset Mineral Railway was built to carry iron ore from Gupworthy Station to Watchet harbour.
Kate Collins, Stroud, Glos.
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