This driver is not for turning
QUESTION When were motorcar 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 US. A 500-mile race around a banked oval speedway, it is part of the triple crown of motorsport, along with the Le Mans 24-hour race and the Monaco Grand Prix.
Race cars in 1911 were twoseaters, 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 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. 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.’
He 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’, to hold 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 car. He dubbed it a Cop Spotter. He filed two applications, but did not receive patents. Car companies began routinely installing rear-view mirrors in the 1930s.
Richard Avery, Portishead, Somerset.
QUESTION How popular were pirate radio stations in Ireland?
PIRATE radio has a long history in Ireland, and during the 1970s and 1980s, with countless pirate stations on the air, they were attracting audiences as big as those for RTÉ Radio.
The country’s first ‘pirate’ broadcast was made from opposite the GPO during Easter Week, 1916. Later, at the start of the Second World War, an IRA man in Dublin was jailed for running a pirate radio station, and in 1944, Tony Boylan started a civilian pirate station, the Colleen Home service, in Rathmines, Dublin.
After his move to Ballymun, it became the Ballymun Home Service. Boylan was the only pirate broadcaster in Ireland at the time. During the 1950s and 1960s, few other pirate stations came on air, although the launch of the ship-borne Radio Caroline by Ronan O’Rahilly in 1964, broadcasting from international waters, had a huge impact both crosschannel and here in Ireland. The floating pirate station had been fitted out at Greenore, Co. Louth.
During the 1970s and 1980s, pirate radio took off throughout Ireland. Broadcasts started on the medium wave, before progressing to FM. The first major pirate in Dublin was Radio Dublin, run by the notorious paedophile Eamonn Cooke, now deceased.
In the early 1970s, the pirate radio scene in Dublin really blossomed, with the launch of such stations as ARD and the Big D.
One regional group, the Radio Carousel network, whose base included Drogheda, Dundalk and Navan, claimed to have been the first pirate to do proper market research into the size of its audience, in the early 1980s.
It said that close on 200,000 people were listening to it, a huge audience in the northeast.
Pirate stations became so numerous in Dublin that specific areas had their own stations, such as Radio Sandymount. Then came the two so-called super pirates, Sunshine Radio and Radio Nova, both of which started up in 1980. They were run on very professional lines, attracted huge listenerships and had a lot of advertising. Sunshine lasted until 1988, longer than Radio Nova, which closed down in 1986.
It has been sometimes claimed by people in the radio industry that Sunshine Radio got a bigger audience in Dublin than any other station has achieved, right up to the present day.
An official response to the deluge of pirates came in 1979, when RTÉ launched Radio 2, which is now 2fm, as a counter-attack on the pirate radio stations.
But by this stage, pirate stations had been spawned the length and breadth of the land.
Cities such as Cork, Galway, Limerick and Waterford all had their own pirate stations, all competing fiercely for listeners and advertisers. Cork had stations such as CBC and ABC, while Galway had stations such as Independent Radio Galway.
Limerick city had four main pirate stations at the time, while Waterford had three. All over the country, people were tuning in to local pirates, rather than RTÉ. The number of pirates set up was astonishing, close to 370 in total, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1988, legislation was brought in that put an end to the pirates and a new era in licensed local and national radio stations began. Some of the pirates, such as Q102 in Dublin and WLR-FM in Waterford, went on to become perfectly legitimate licensed radio stations and as such are still broadcasting today. The Sunshine name lives on in Sunshine 106.8, as does the name of Radio Nova, both perfectly legitimate stations.
Many presenters on the pirate stations also made the switch, becoming legitimate, working for both RTÉ and licensed local and national commercial stations. Many of today’s well-known older presenters, such as Ian Dempsey, Bryan Dobson, Dave Fanning and Marty Whelan, began their careers on pirate radio.
The heyday of the pirate radio scene may have been anarchic and chaotic, but listeners had a huge choice of stations.
Today, the occasional pirate can still be heard, but, by and large, sound broadcasting is mainly safe, middle-of-the-road and entirely within the law.
Eamon Whelan, Dublin.
QUESTION Why do we all 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 the missing of a chance for 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.