That’s not a bigger boat!
QUESTION What became of the boat used in the film Jaws?
CAPTAIN Quint’s boat, Orca, featured in many scenes in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws, in which a man-eating great white shark terrorises a tourist town.
Two boats were used in the production. The first, a lobster boat, Warlock, plied its trade out of Marblehead, Massachusetts, 160km up the coast from Martha’s Vineyard, where Jaws was filmed.
The boat was revamped with paint and the addition of a mast pulpit – nicknamed ‘granny bars’ because it looks like a Zimmer frame. This boat was used in most of the film’s fishing scenes.
A fibreglass replica, Orca 2, with a detachable stern, was used in the stunt scenes, such as when Jaws gets his teeth into Quint.
Orca 2 ended up in the hands of Lynne Murphy, a marine mechanic who, during production, towed the robotic shark and fixed the electronics on the underwater platforms used for action scenes.
He stored the boat on his private beach near Menemsha, Martha’s Vineyard, for 30 years. After Murphy discovered trophy hunters were dismantling it, he broke it up into foot-long sections and sold them at auction in 2005. Recently, one of these sections was re-sold on eBay for $1,700.
Orca 1 was shipped back to Universal Studios in Hollywood. After the success of Jaws, the first $100million-grossing movie, Spielberg claimed he was suffering from post-traumatic stress and would visit the boat to calm down.
He said: ‘The Orca used to be sitting here on the Universal lot for at least the first 20 years after the film was released in 1975. I used to periodically come and just get in to allow myself to have an anxiety attack.’
He was devastated when the boat was destroyed. He said: ‘One day, I came up here to have an appointment with my flashbacks and the Orca was gone. I walked over to the end of the dock and just saw pieces of wood floating on the water. ‘I called [Universal boss] Sid Sheinberg and said, “What happened?” Sid said, “I’ll find out.” Then we both found out that because of the amount of mildew, rot and infestation of termites, someone had taken it upon themselves to chop the Orca into a million pieces and drop it into a slag heap.’
All that remains of the Orca are the steering wheel, one of the propellers, and the anchor, which are in Spielberg’s private collection.
Tim Corston, Portsmouth.
QUESTION Have the Russians accidentally changed the world’s weather by doing experiments based on Nikola Tesla’s research?
THE Russians have been known to change the weather using cloud-seeding technologies, but this has nothing to do with Tesla and only affects local rainfall.
No personality in the history of science has been mythologised more than the Serbian-American electrical engineer Nikola Tesla (1856-1943).
One of his most famous plans was a global wireless power system. He envisaged using the extremely low frequency of the Earth’s electromagnetic field so a hand-held coil could receive electrical power for free anywhere in the world.
He claimed this system would also be the basis of a global communications network and have the ability to alter the weather, putting an end to droughts.
However, the farthest he got with his ideal was the partial construction of Tesla tower at Wardenclyffe, New York, an experimental wireless transmission station intended for communication across the Atlantic.
Debts mounted and the tower was dismantled. Physicists now consider Tesla’s concept to be unworkable.
But it’s not all science fiction; cloud-seeding uses chemicals such as silver iodide, fired towards or dropped into clouds to disperse them and force them to rain earlier or in a different place than would have occurred naturally.
In 2016, the Russian government spent more than €1million to make sure it didn’t rain during the May Day celebrations, according to official news agency Tass.
L B Smith, Swindon.
QUESTION Did the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche predict the two World Wars?
FRIEDRICH Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) exerted a huge influence over Western philosophy in the 20th century. However, he was ignored for most of his lifetime. It was only after 1889, when he became clinically insane due to suffering from advanced syphilis, that he gained recognition.
Nietzsche’s famous quote ‘God is dead’ appears in several of his works. It first appeared in Die Frohliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science) in 1882: ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?’
Beginning at the Renaissance in the late Middle Ages and continuing through the Enlightenment in the 18th century, religion was put to the test as science began to explain what had once been mysterious.
During Nietzsche’s lifetime, Darwin’s theories on evolution were becoming accepted. This led to scepticism about religion, giving way to atheism and nihilism – the rejection of religious and moral principles based on the belief that life is meaningless.
Nietzsche believed people would look to other ‘gods’, such as dictators, for guidance.
These leaders would gain power over people by promising ‘heaven on earth’, and the rise of new ideologies would result in a clash of arms.
In 1893’s The Will To Power, he wrote: ‘For some time now, our whole European culture has been moving toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing decade to decade.’
Nietzsche predicted the catastrophes of the two World Wars before anyone else. He saw them not just as military events, but as symbolic forces or sweeping cultural affairs that would alter everything.
After he was declared insane, Nietzsche’s estate fell into the hands of his sister Elisabeth, who distorted his works after his death by adding her own extreme nationalist and anti-Semitic views.
The Nazis then used these corrupted versions to justify their atrocities. Paul Wilson, London.
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