A chase that ended badly
QUESTION Is it true that the mummified cat and rat in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral are known as Tom and Jerry and that this is where the cartoon characters got their names?
YES, it’s true that the mummified cat and rat in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral are known as Tom and Jerry. But they didn’t lend their names – the mummified creatures were named after the cartoon characters.
Christ Church Cathedral was built on a commanding position overlooking the River Liffey in 1172, shortly after the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169.
But the location for the cathedral had been chosen well before the Anglo-Normans arrived. Sitric Silkbeard was the first Danish king in Dublin to become a Christian and he had a wooden church built on the site about 1028.
Then, after Strongbow had conquered Dublin, the wooden church was replaced by a stone structure. The cathedral is the oldest working building in Dublin.
During medieval times, the cathedral was a major site for pilgrims. Over the years, the cathedral has gathered many unusual artefacts, including the heart of Laurence O’Toole, patron saint of Dublin, and of course, the mummified remains of the cat and rat.
It’s said that the cat chased the rat into an organ pipe, where they both got stuck.
They got a mention by James Joyce in his book, Finnegan’s Wake. But the cat and the rat were named after the cartoon characters, rather than their being the origins of the names.
The Tom and Jerry cartoons go back the best part of 80 years. The first Tom and Jerry film was Puss in Boots, released in February, 1940. Originally, Tom was called Jasper, while Jerry didn’t have a name and was referred to as Jinx by the animators.
Then when the MGM studios started looking at the possibilities of franchising the characters, they had to find names for them.
Studio workers were allowed to put one name each that they liked into a raffle.
Then two names were pulled out of the hat, Tom and Jerry, so this purely arbitrary choice was adopted. Curiously, the names were already in use as monikers for British and German troops in the Second World War. Peter Grimes, Howth.
QUESTION Is the term Adam’s apple based on a mistake?
THE term Adam’s apple (technically, laryngeal protuberance, formed by the largest cartilage of the larynx) has been used in English since at least 1625. The term is a folk etymology derived from a misunderstanding of the original word in the Bible.
Genesis describes the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil using a Hebrew word, which simply means a fruit. Rabbinic commentators variously characterised it as a fig, pomegranate, grape, apricot, citron, carob or even wheat.
The Vulgate, a 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible, said to have been translated by St Jerome, translated it as ‘malum’, which originally meant any tree fruit. A pear is a kind of malus, as is the fig and peach. It may have been a clever pun by St Jerome because malus means ‘evil’ in Latin.
When the term Pomum Adami entered English as Adam’s apple in the early 15th century, it was used to describe not an apple, but a range of citrus fruit, such as Citrus maxima, the pomelo or shaddock, and Citrus limetta, a type of sweet lime.
Even by the 16th century there was no consensus on what type of fruit Adam had eaten. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco features a serpent coiled around a fig tree. The apple began to dominate Fall artworks after the German artist Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1504 engraving depicting Adam and Eve with an apple tree. In 1526, Lucas Cranach the Elder famously depicted Eve presenting Adam with an apple.
By the early 17th century, Adam’s apple was used to describe the thyroid cartilage. It was said that when Adam swallowed the fruit, by then an apple, the hand of God stopped it in his throat. It thus became a symbol of Man’s Fall. Gerard McNeill, Leeds.
QUESTION Has a propellerdriven aircraft achieved the speed of sound?
NO propeller-driven aircraft has exceeded Mach 1.0, the speed of sound in air. This is despite the depiction in the 1952 film The Sound Barrier, in which the pilot achieved it by ‘reversing the controls’ – sheer piffle, as one of my schoolmasters described it.
However, two aircraft came close and in part did achieve supersonic speeds: the Tupolev TU-95 Russian Federation long-range heavy bomber and the experimental aircraft, the American Republic XF84H Thunderscreech aircraft.
The huge TU-95 is still in service. It is driven by four double contrarotating propellers, each 14ft in diameter. It was developed in the Fifties and there were several variants, including the passenger version, TU-114 Rossiya.
However, despite a maximum speed of 520mph – very fast for a propeller-driven aircraft – it falls well short of the speed of sound.
The XF-84H was developed by the US Air Force and the Republic Aviation Company to experiment with how far propeller-drive technology could be developed. The aircraft reached Mach 0.83 (623mph) at its maximum.
Like the TU-95, it suffered from two significant problems: excessive vibration and huge noise levels. The noise and vibration created by the rotational velocities at the tips of the propellers in fact exceeded the speed of sound, reaching Mach 1.18. Each propeller tip creates a sonic boom many times a second and huge shock waves are developed, creating the vibration.
As a result of the combined problems of noise and vibration, the XF84 experiment was not pursued. The US Air Force went on to create the all-jet Century series of combat aircraft that entered service in the Fifties. William Aitchison, Truro, Cornwall.
QUESTION In the late Nineties, I remember a story about a motorway in Ireland that was going to be diverted because it was running through a sacred ‘fairy bush’. What happened the fairy tree in the end?
FURTHER to the previous answer, I can answer that very precisely, I hope, since I’m the one who objected to the path of the motorway – the M18 – in the first place. The bush is still there, at Latoon. Quite a tourist attraction now, in spite of the attempts of vandals to deface it. Eddie Lenihan, via email.