A giant leap for mankind
QUESTION Who was the first person to use (successfully) a parachute?
THE first parachute design is usually credited to Leonardo Da Vinci, but an earlier, anonymous manscript from Italy, dated to the 1470s, shows a free-hanging man clutching a cross bar frame attached to a conical canopy supported by four beams.
Da Vinci depicted a more sophisticated parachute in his Codex Atlanticus of around 1485, a pyramidal solid ‘ tent roof ’ design which remained untested in his lifetime.
Celebrated polymath, inventor, engineer, historian and author, the Croatian-born Venetian Cardinal Faust Vrancic (15511617) set out to improve on da Vinci’s design.
Instead of a pyramid-shaped chute, he envisioned a billowing form to create more drag, similar to the parafoil shape which parachutes took 350 years later.
A famous drawing called the Homo Volans (Flying Man) appeared in his book on mechanics, Machinae Novae (1615), alongside a number of other devices and technical concepts. Local legend has it that he tested the design by leaping from St Mark’s Campanile in Venice, but there’s no real evidence that this feat ever took place.
It wasn’t until 1783 that Frenchman Louis-sebastien Lenormand made the first substantiated successful parachute jump. Clinging to a 14ft cloth parachute with a rigid wooden frame, Lenormand stepped off the top of the Montpellier observatory and, a few seconds later, landed on the ground unharmed.
The famous balloonist Joseph Montgolfier was present at the time. It was Lenormand who called his invention le parachute, from the Greek para (meaning against), and French chute (fall).
Jean-pierre Blanchard was the first to parachute from an aircraft when his balloon ruptured during a 1793 flight. Beatrice Smith, Ludlow, Shropshire.
QUESTION Is the word ‘gotten’ correct English usage or an Americanism?
GOTTEN is both correct English and an Americanism. Usually used in the past tense as in: ‘I’d gotten to where I was going,’ it was in common use in British English well into the 17th century, both on its own and within phrases such as ‘ only begotten’ and ‘ ill- gotten’ (from the King James Bible).
The word was taken to what is now the U.S. and Canada, the ‘New World’, by 16th and 17th- century British colonists and settlers and remained in common use there.
But in the 18th century, when the Enlightenment/ Age of Reason developed in Britain, some leading members of the intelligentsia considered English a coarse, inferior language and tried to ‘improve’ it by applying to it the grammatical rules of classical Latin and Greek.
As generations of British schoolchildren testify, the reason why English grammar makes so little sense is because it’s the grammar of another language,
Latin is a Romance language (like French, Italian and Spanish), while English is descended ( like German) from a Teutonic language, in this case Old Frisian.
From the 18th century and into the Victorian era, as Sunday Schools and social reformers pioneered universal education for the poor, the linguistic snobbery of Enlightenment scholars condemned many perfectly useful English words to disuse, because they were seen as unfashionable, common and inferior.
Examples include words such as ruth and couth, now known only by their antonyms ruthless and uncouth, while others — including gotten and even got — became dormant for a time while people replaced them in writing with ‘ better’ words such as arrived, reached, etc.
English schoolteacher Henry Watson Fowler’s (1858-1933) books on English use, especially his 1926 Modern English Usage, are considered definitive. He remains an advocate of the Enlightenment-inspired snobbery of ‘ correct’ English usage, for example the 1965 edition terms gotten as ‘archaic and affected’.
But gotten had never fallen out of use in parts of Britain and remained in common usage in Canada and the U.S.
As U.S. authors and TV shows gained popularity from the Eighties onwards, so the word gotten came back into fashion and is in common us in Britain, especially as in many popular U.S. TV shows, the word is commonly used by educated characters, including the wealthy, handsome and educated New York thriller author Richard Castle ( Nathan Fillon) in the crime comedy-drama Castle. C. D. Stewart, Sheffield. QUESTION Each day my diary ends with a printed fact. On Tuesday, October 4, it stated: ‘It is illegal to die in the Houses Of Parliament.’ Is this true? If so, why was this law passed? IN NOVEMBER 2007, UKTV Gold published the results of a survey in which it asked 3,931 people to select the most ludicrous law ‘from a shortlist of bizarre rules’.
These ‘laws’ were recirculated by in the BBC and several newspapers without providing any sources or evidence that the options presented were actual laws of this country.
The notion that it is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament supposedly relates to the idea that those who do so are entitled to a state funeral and the law was made to prevent this having to happen. Neither the government’s legal database legislation.gov.uk, the Law Society Library nor the House of Commons library has any proof that this law ever existed.
Other ‘laws’ in the list were also highly questionable. One, that it’s illegal to be topless in Liverpool except as a clerk in a tropical fish store, was denied by Liverpool City Council.
Another that it is illegal to eat mince pies on Christmas Day might once have been true. But all Cromwell’s laws were repealed following the Interregnum.
A couple of bizarre laws can be confirmed, for instance: whales are the property of the monarch. King Edward II’S Prerogativa Regis (1322) states: ‘Also the King shall have . . . throughout the Realm, Whales and [great Sturgeons] taken in the Sea or elsewhere within the Realm, except in certain Places privileged by the King.’
It also remains illegal to wear armour in Parliament, from: A Statute forbidding Bearing of Armour (1313).
Colin May, Bretton, Flintshire.
QUESTION Can anyone explain the principles behind the Cyclonic Firebox, which, if developed, could have prolonged the life of steam traction?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, in the late Seventies, South African Railways (SAR) tested a Gas Producer Combustion System on one of its Class 19D locomotives and, encouraged by the results, gave the go ahead for further tests to be conducted on a larger Class 25NC.
The locomotive selected was No 3450, originally built in 1953. It was rebuilt at the Salt River workshops in 1981 under the supervision of David Wardale. It was such a radical departure from the original design, it was reclassified as Class 26 and named L. D. Porta, aka the Red Devil, owing to the red livery it was given on completion.
The rebuild incorporated the design improvements pioneered by L. D. Porta, but didn’t incorporate a circular cyclonic firebox.
Nonetheless, under test it emitted very little smoke when operating and, compared with the standard Class 25NC, burned 35 per cent less coal, used 27 per cent less water and delivered a 50 per cent increase in maximum drawbar horsepower, reading of 4,490 hp (3,370Kw), equal to some of the most modern diesel locomotives currently being delivered to the UK.
But SAR dropped the project in favour of diesel and electric locomotives, in order to look modern, rather than invest in the further development of steam. David Rawnsley, Uckfield, E.sussex.