A driver not for turning
QUESTION When were car rear-view mirrors first used?
Ray HaRROUN was the first racing driver to use a rear-view mirror and it was wrongly believed to have helped him win the inaugural Indianapolis 500 in 1911.
The Indy 500 is the most prestigious automobile competition in the U.S. a 500-mile race around a banked oval speedway, it is part of the triple crown of motorsport, along with the Le Mans 24hour race and the Monaco Grand Prix.
Race cars in 1911 were two-seaters, one for the driver and the other for a mechanic whose main jobs were to warn about approaching competitors and monitor the oil temperature.
Harroun helped design his own six-cylinder car while working for the Indianapolis auto maker, Marmon. It had a revolutionary design, being the first open-wheel, single-seater race car. Its yellow paint and tapered rear earned it the nickname of the Marmon Wasp.
However, the other drivers complained that without a spotter, it would be a danger and there were calls to ban it.
Harroun came up with a solution he had seen years before on a horse-drawn carriage: a mirror attached to the cowling — ‘seeing without turning’, as Popular Mechanics magazine called the concept.
The weight advantage helped Harroun win the race, but the mirror allowed him to avoid disqualification.
He later said: ‘actually, it [the mirror] shook so bad I couldn’t see a darn thing in it anyway, but no one knew that but me.’
Harroun didn’t invent the rear-view mirror. adverts for dash mirrors had appeared in 1908.
In 1909’s The Woman and The Car: a Chatty Little Handbook For all Women Who Motor Or Who Want To Motor, racing driver Dorothy Levitt advised: ‘Carry a little hand mirror in a convenient place when driving’ so you may ‘hold the mirror aloft from time to time in order to see behind while driving in traffic’.
In 1921, engineer Elmer Berger created a standard version that could be added to any model of car. He dubbed it the Cop-spotter. Berger filed two applications, but did not receive patents. Car companies began routinely installing rear-view mirrors in the 1930s.
Richard Avery, Portishead, Somerset.
QUESTION Why do we instinctively hold our heads when a goal is missed?
EvOLUTION has endowed humans with innate, hard-wired, automatically activated behaviours, which are termed the defence cascade.
Most of us are familiar with ‘flight or fight’. However, a third element is freeze — the last resort to inescapable threat.
When something shocking happens, such as missing an important goal, fight or flight are impossible, so the freeze instinct kicks in.
This results in a number of familiar postures: shoulders forward, back hunched, head lowered, crouching down and head in hands. In extremis, the foetal position is adopted.
Dr Ian Smith, Cambridge.
QUESTION Is plastic used in plastic surgery?
THE word plastic originally meant pliable and easily moulded, derived from the Latin plasticus meaning ‘of moulding’ and the Greek plastikos, meaning to form or to mould. as plastic surgery involves remodelling of the features, this is how the term came about.
Plastic also refers to synthetic materials created by the polymerisation of simple molecules. at some stage in their creation they are easily mouldable or plastic.
Medical-grade plastic derived from polyethylene, usually under the trade name Medpor, is used in plastic surgery, particularly nose jobs, ear surgery, eye rim reconstruction and skull operations.
Silicone gel — a thick, sticky fluid that closely mimics the feel of human fat — is used in breast and buttock implants.
Carrie Foulds, Stroud, Glos.
QUESTION Why were certain diesel locomotives known as Warships?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, the Warship class of locomotives, mainly called after ships of the Royal Navy, was part of the Great Western Railway tradition of naming engines.
Broad gauge engines carried names by which the class was known. For express engines, this continued into the 20th century. From 1923, names had obvious links to the whole class. Kings, Halls, Manors, Granges, Castles and Counties were easily identified.
With the advent of diesel traction in the later 1950s, the Western Region of British Railways chose the names of warships for its first diesels.
I remember D600 active leaving Paddington Station in a flurry of photographic flashes as I arrived behind a Castle from Bristol.
Despite one of the two 1,000hp engines failing on this Press run, D600 achieved its top speed of 90 mph on the journey to Bristol. In comparison, the 1923-designed Castles would regularly run at more than 100mph, taking 90 minutes for the 118mile London to Bristol route.
It is possible the engines carried warship names because of the strong naval link with Plymouth on the former GWR line. The depot at Plymouth Laira, 83D, was the base for the line to Penzance.
From D803 albion to D870 Zulu, the names followed the GWR alphabetical tradition. However, the first three D800s did not follow this rule.
D800, Sir Brian Robertson, was named in 1961 after the British Transport Commission chairman at the time.
Alan Bowden, Bristol.