How Scotland saw the light
QUESTION Is it true over half the population of Scotland witnessed Billy Graham in his 1955 ‘Crusade’? Between 1947 and 2005, Billy Graham conducted 417 evangelical crusades across six continents. His 1955 All-Scotland Crusade was notable for the fervour in which people embraced his mission.
Over six weeks, the Crusade reached hundreds of thousands of people at mass meetings and relay services.
It took Dr Graham all over Scotland, and he was just as happy among Clydeside shipyard workers and squaddies at Redford Barracks as addressing clergymen in St Andrew’s Halls, Glasgow.
It is often claimed 2.5 million people attended these crusades; this is not the case, though the numbers exposed to the Gospel through Graham’s preaching at rallies in the Kelvin Hall, Glasgow, and in football stadia, and by the skilled utilisation of radio relays, were astounding.
From 1953-55, tom Allan was the field director of the tell Scotland Movement, which had invited Billy Graham to conduct the Crusade.
According to Allan: ‘Between March 21 and the April 30, 1955, the six weeks of the Crusade, a total of 1,185,360 people in Scotland attended meetings directly connected with the Crusade.
‘Of these, 830,670 were at the nightly meetings in Kelvin Hall and at the closing rallies in Ibrox Stadium and Hampden Park; 217,700 were at services of the Relay Mission in various parts of the country; and 136,990 were at other meetings addressed by Dr Graham and team members during the Crusade.
‘At that time the population of Scotland was about five million, so at least one-fifth personally witnessed the Crusade. Following the last rally at Kelvin Hall, closing meetings were held at Ibrox Stadium with an attendance of around 50,000, and at Hampden Park where the congregation numbered close to 100,000 — the largest ever to assemble in Scotland’s history.’
Graham reached many more through popular media; on Good Friday, the rally was broadcast live on television and radio throughout Britain by the BBC, to an estimated audience of 30 million.
the conclusion of each rally was the ‘altar call’, the invitation by Graham for individuals to come forward to be saved in Christ, as the massed choir sang Just As I Am. teams of ‘counsellors’ were employed to take each ‘inquirer’ to Counselling Rooms. the total number of inquirers in Scotland during these weeks was 26,457. these people were invited to sign a ‘decision card’ agreeing to join the ministry.
not all admired his methods. Glasgow journalist Jack House wrote in the evening news that ‘Billy Graham did not impress me in the least... after an evening as boring as any I have had in any hall, the final scene (when the converts came) nauseated me.’
Jim Kyle, Aberdeen. QUESTION It used to be Heinz 57 (varieties), but now the 57 has been dropped, how many varieties do Heinz make now? HeInz never had 57 varieties. Company founder Henry J. Heinz was on a train in new York in 1896 when he saw a sign advertising ‘21 types of shoe’ for a shoe shop and copied the idea. even though by then he had 60 varieties, he liked the shape of a sloping 57. the firm now sells more than 5,700 varieties worldwide.
A lot of successful commercial brands were created in similarly odd ways. For example, George eastman thought the letter K attractive, so put one at each end of Kodak — a made-up word.
Seventies’ British consumers thought Japanese and German products superior, so one popular electronics brands was Matsui. Despite its rising sun logo, it was the own brand for Dixons and about as Japanese as Yorkshire pudding. Moben kitchens were as German as Cornish pasties, but sounded German.
Dixons founders Charles Kalms and Michael Mindel wanted to put their names above their first shop in Southend in 1937. there was space for only six letters, so they grabbed a phone book and chose the first six-letter name they found.
By rights you should ‘Spangler’ the carpet after a party, not ‘Hoover’ it. the inventor of the electric vacuum cleaner was an American boffin, Murray Spangler; william H. Hoover was merely the canny businessman who recognised a great sucker when he saw one, and really cleaned up. early vacuum cleaners had been horse-drawn appliances that visited your house and had a great long tube snaking in the front door to suck out dust.
Benedict le Vay, author of the secret History Of everyday stuff, London sW19. QUESTION On aircraft propellers, why do some have two blades and others have as many as eight? FuRtHeR to earlier answers, like a wing, the propeller blade is an aerofoil and works in the same way, causing a drop in pressure to the front and an increase to the rear.
the amount of ‘lift’ generated by an aerofoil is a combination of speed and angle of attack. there is a limit to the angle of attack beyond which the airflow separates from the blade or ‘stalls’, causing the lift to collapse.
Since the outer end of a propeller is travelling much faster, the angle of attack must be varied along its length — hence the ‘twist’ that one observes along the length of a propeller blade. One result is that most of the force generated by a propeller comes from the outer one-third of its length.
to handle a higher power, a longer blade can be used, until this, too, encounters the limiting condition of a tip that has gone supersonic, with the great increase in drag that results. A propeller being rotated in one direction will cause an aircraft to roll in the opposite direction and ‘yaw’ unless the pilot adds roll control.
with powerful engines this can be substantial. By using a pair of contra-rotating propellers, the effect can be cancelled out and the aircraft rendered safer.