Have a giggle with a Google
QUESTION The Google Book of children’s verse was written in 1913. What was a google at that time?
Long before Sir Tim Berners-Lee conceived the internet, economist Vincent Cartwright Vickers wrote and illustrated The google Book.
His google was a nonsense word referring to a mythical beast, one of several fantastical illustrations he created to accompany his poems.
The son of Albert Vickers, chairman of engineering giant Vickers Armstrong, he was educated at Eton and Magdalen College oxford.
He was Deputy Lieutenant of the City of London and director of London Assurance. At the age of 31, he became a director of the Bank of England.
He was a keen ornithologist and a Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society. According to his grandson Edward A. Dawson, he was most relaxed in the company of children, who he would delight with his poems and drawings.
A colourful collection of birds populate google Land including The great Skullheaded Stone Trot, The Shivver Doodle, The Flabbytoes, The Poggle, The Softnosed Wollop and The Lemonsqueezer (‘Have you seen the Lemonsqueezer/ Feeding Herbert and Louisa?’).
This world is presided over by The google, a frightening creature who sleeps in his beautiful garden by day and silently prowls for food at night.
The book was published in 1913 by J. & E. Bumpus in a limited edition of 100 copies. Two further editions appeared in 1931 and 1979.
Vickers had no formal training in art, yet some of his google bird pictures were exhibited at the Royal Academy.
The verb google was originally used in the game of cricket for a googly, a delivery that appears to be a normal leg-spinner, but turns towards the batsman, like an off-break.
The earliest published reference is in a 1907 issue of The Badminton Magazine: ‘The googlies that do not google are about the poorest tosh which ever reduced cricket to an absurdity.’
The mathematical term googol has a different origin. It first appeared in 1940’s Mathematics And The Imagination by Edward Kasner and James newman. Kasner’s nine-year-old nephew invented the word when he was asked to describe a huge number, 1 followed by 100 zeros.
The internet search engine google based its name on this term.
J. E. Newman, Chipping Norton, Oxon.
QUESTION Did the U.S. refuse to help Britain build atomic weapons?
In 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Quebec Agreement, pooling their resources in the race to beat the germans to the atomic bomb.
But after the war, the U.S. government banned the sharing of atomic secrets for fear of Soviet spies.
Britain had been the senior partner in terms of atomic research. Manchesterbased scientist Ernest Rutherford discovered the atom in 1911 and the Cockcroft-Walton generator developed at Cambridge in the 1930s first split the atom.
Rudolf Peierls and otto Frisch, Jewish scientists who had fled to Britain to escape the nazis, produced the theoretical groundwork for creating a nuclear explosion using uranium.
Leading British scientists including Sir geoffrey Taylor and James Tuck went to the U.S. to work on the Manhattan Project, which produced the first nuclear weapons. The team who worked at Los Alamos, new Mexico, was led by British physicist James Chadwick.
nevertheless, project leader general Leslie groves, who disapproved of collaboration, restricted British access to information and the UK quickly became the junior partner in the project.
It was a bitter disappointment for new Prime Minister Clement Attlee when the U.S. government banned sharing of atomic secrets under the McMahon Act in 1946. The U.S. Congress feared atomic secrets were being stolen by Soviet spies.
This was not without foundation. Klaus Fuchs, a german physicist on the Manhattan Project, and Alan nunn May, a British physicist who had worked on tube alloys at the Montreal laboratory, were outed as Communist spies. Attlee’s government began its own atomic weapons programme in January 1947. This led to the first test in october 1952 at the Montebello islands, northwest of Australia.
In 1954, Churchill ordered Britain to start developing thermonuclear weapons. The first hydrogen bomb was tested on november 8, 1957.
By then, the Soviet Union also had a hydrogen bomb. Without a clear military advantage, in 1958 the U.S. agreed to share nuclear information with Britain.
Jack Moseley, Saltford, Somerset.
QUESTION What is the story of the Champ, used in National Service in the 1950s?
FURTHER to the history of the Champ, I have fond memories of this vehicle as I passed my driving test in one.
I did my national Service in Minden, West germany, in 1958/9. My driving test consisted of a three-mile drive from camp to Minden town centre, coffee and biscuits at the Red Shield Club, and the drive back to camp, stopping on the way to do a hill start.
The Champ had a 24-volt electrical system, ten gears — five forward and five reverse — and a Rolls-Royce engine. All of the maintenance could be done with a ½ in spanner. John ‘Ted’ Evans, Liverpool.
I HAVE been fascinated with Austin Champs since the early 1950s when I saw them being used by an Army bomb disposal team clearing mines from a beach at Mundesley, norfolk.
The nearest I came to owning one was when I maintained a friend’s Champ in 1970 and used it occasionally.
Roy Padgett, Woking, Surrey.
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