Trick is hard to swallow
QUESTION Do sword swallowers actually swallow swords?
They do and have done for a long time. Sword swallowing was first introduced in India in 2000 BC, where it was part of ascetic religious practice. The art spread to Greece and Rome in the 1st century AD and to China in the 8th century.
In Japan, it became a part of the Japanese acrobatic theatre, Sangaku. In europe, it became associated with medieval jongleurs. Today there is a Sword Swallowers Association International, that requires you to swallow a 15in blade to be admitted.
Besides trick swords or when performers prepare for the event by swallowing a metal tube, the feat can be performed for real. It requires intense physical and psychological training.
The gag reflex must be desensitised. This is usually begun by putting fingers down the throat, but other objects are used including spoons, paintbrushes, knitting needles and plastic tubes before the swallower commonly progresses to a bent wire coat hanger. The performer must then learn to align a sword with the upper oesophageal sphincter with the neck hyper- extended.
The precise placement of the sword is essential. The blade must bypass the epiglottis, pass behind the prominentia laryngea ( the voice box), past the pharynx, through the cricopharyngeus or upper oesophageal sphincter, down the oesophagus (the muscular tube that carries food and liquids from the mouth to the stomach), and through the lower oesophageal sphincter, through the stomach and even into the duodenum.
Most performers lubricate the sword with saliva, vegetable or olive oil to help the sliding process.
even experienced sword swallowers can suffer serious injury. In 2018, veteran circus performer Chris Steele, aka Captain Steele, was almost killed. At an event in Atlanta, he was performing his signature act, swallowing 13 16in swords simultaneously and then rotating them 180 degrees, an act he’d done more than 100 times. This time he pushed through the side wall of the oesophagus and into his chest cavity. he somehow managed to miss his vital organs and survived.
David Thomas, Monmouth.
QUESTION My grandson has recently started at Alcester Grammar School. While walking him to school we pass a number of lanes with the suffix ‘Tuery’. What does this mean?
AlCeSTeR in Warwickshire — Roman in origin and a thriving market town by the early Middle Ages — is, like all big towns, full of narrow lanes, alleyways and shortcuts familiar to locals. Various dialects around the country call such pathways snickets, ginnels or wynds. Alcester, however, has its own name.
An alleyway there is a tuery and is often important enough to be signposted, however narrow. The name derives from the French tuerie meaning ‘slaughter’, and it’s thought that the alleyways were first named sometime during the 300 years after the Conquest, when Norman French was the language of the elite.
A pathway leading from the marketplace to the local abattoir probably became known as a tuery and in later years the word came to mean a pathway in general. Bulls head yard and Market Place tueries are reminders of this time.
Alcester also has lion, Oak and Nelson tueries running alongside pubs with those names, and Abbey and Priory tueries taking their names from the Benedictine monastery founded in 1138. local authorities have recently made efforts to enhance the appearance of the tueries and make them more attractive to tourists.
Ian MacDonald, Billericay, Essex.
QUESTION An old TV Times from January 1965 features a competition to win a ‘TV tape recorder’. Was this an early video recorder?
ThIS was an early video tape recorder (VTR). These were replaced by video cassette recorders (VCRs) in the same way as audio cassettes replaced reel-toreel tape recorders.
The prototype VTR was developed by Bing Crosby enterprises in 1951. It had a tape duration of 15 minutes, running at a speed of 100 inches per second, which is very fast, but necessary to record the amount of data in a video transmission.
The quality of the Crosby system was poor and RCA demonstrated a better model in 1953, but with only a fourminute tape duration.
This was superseded by the VRX-1000 developed by the Ampex Corporation. It had a tape duration of 90 minutes and caused a storm when it was demonstrated at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters Convention in 1956. It was the first VTR to go on sale commercially in the U.S.
The VRX-1000, which cost $50,000, was bought by TV companies that wanted to replace cine film to record their shows, as recording and playback could be done on the same machine without chemical processing. This speeded up programmemaking, as recordings could be viewed within seconds instead of having to wait for film to be developed.
The drive to conquer the domestic market galvanised the development of the VCR as a lower- cost option, with strong competition between the U.S. and Japan.
From this rivalry emerged three different formats — Betamax, VhS and Phillips, developed in the Netherlands.
The VCR was introduced into europe in 1977, using both Betamax and VhS systems. By 1980 more than four million players had been sold for home use.
Bob Dillon, Edinburgh.
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