The tale continues. Again with respect to the unknown author Chapter 2 of " The Rocket Car".
WHY THE ROCKET CAR DOESN'T WORK
One thing I want to make clear from the start is that I'm
not pissing on the Rocket Car legend purely as an academic
exercise. When my friends and I set out to build the vehicle we
test-fired in the spring of 1978, a real-life jet-powered,
road-traveling car was exactly what we had in mind. Craig
Breedlove was busy breaking land speed records in the Spirit of
America, Evel Knievel had graduated from "biker"to "payload"
while attempting to jump the Snake River Canyon a few years
earlier, and rocket-powered vehicles were a pretty popular
notion. Unfortunately, machines like this require a lot of time
and money and engineering skill to build and operate.
My friends and I had none of these things.
In 1978, I was 22 years old and still living with my
parents. My father owned a scrapyard, twenty-two acres of barren
desert scrub ideally suited to having junk thrown on it. The yard
was a salvage smorgasbord, covered with everything from dead
water heaters to junked airplane cockpits. And since we lived
near a major Army storage facility, a lot of the scrap my father
bought and sold came from government auctions. To be brutally
honest, the main yard looked like a cross between Sanford &
Sons and Apocalypse Now. My father would go to the auctions held
at the post from time to time, bid on pre-marked lots of God only
knew what, then send me out he next day with the big flatbed to
collect the latest pile of junk he'd bought. Plenty of people who
went to these auctions ended up with nothing more than tons of
unusable junk that was worth less than they paid for it, but my
Dad always seemed to find the lots that contained valuable stuff.
He also knew plenty of people who owned military surplus stores,
and usually had some idea of what was in demand and what wasn't.
But since the nearby Army base was a HUGE storage depot,
the auctions weren't the sort of affairs that the average
man-off-the-street would be interested in. The lots for sale were
usually measured by the ton, and if a lot seemed to have a few
items you were interested in, you had to buy the whole
mess. Because of this, my Dad ended up with an amazing amount
of unusable military surplus, things like gas-masks and vehicle
parts that were worthless in the civilian world.
But from time to time, we'd get weapons, too.
No, he never bought a pile of crap and ended up with a
crate full of M-16's or a Shrike missile, the military was
usually careful enough to keep THAT from happening. But from time
to time we DID end up with stuff we weren't supposed to have.
Once day I opened a crate marked "heater assembly" and found it
full of smoke grenades. My Dad found a steel ammo box full
of blank M-60 rounds once. And even though these instances were
a rarity, the Army had a very strict policy toward scrap dealers
who found such things: You had to give them back. No two ways
about it. Before even being allowed to place a bid, dealers at an
auction were required to sign several forms, one of which stated
that they'd return any "explosive, ordnance, fuse, detonator, or
other chemically viable part or assembly of a weapons system." I
remember that paragraph well, since it's the only part of
the Army red tape that ever directly pertained to me. The
penalties for non-compliance outlined at the end of the paragraph
sounded pretty scary (five-figure fines, possible imprisonment,
etc), and were enough to make my Dad return the crate of smoke
grenades, but not the blank ammo. These were judged to be too
trivial to warrant a drive to the base, and my Dad ended up
keeping them draped over a file cabinet in his office, as a
decoration.
Of course I'm telling you this because it's how I managed
to get hold of the JATO bottle we used for our rocket car.
Actually there were four of them, each in a long, hay-filled
crate with "BARREL ASSEMBLY" stenciled on the side. One day I
went out to the base to pick up a load of junk my Dad had bought
at the auction, and while we were going through the stuff back at
the yard, I spotted the crates and took a look. And even though I
didn't know what the hell it was at first glance, I knew
it wasn't a barrel for ANYTHING. The JATO bottle was a round
metal cylinder about four feet long, and less than a foot in
diameter. At first I thought it was a gas cylinder of some sort,
but written on the side in red paint were the words "M-23 JET
ASSIST UNIT". And rather than the sort of valve assembly you'd
see on a gas cylinder, the end of the bottle had an inverted
funnel shape to it, with a rubber plug at the lowest point. It
was obviously a rocket of some sort. And judging from the weight
(it took two people to even budge the things) they were still
full of something.
Once I figured out what they were, I decided I had to call
Jimmy.
Jimmy and I met in the third grade (or thereabouts), and
were best friends for most of our growing-up. His family lived
just down the street, and his father ran an auto body shop in
town. On more than one occasion Jimmy's Dad and my own traded
parts or services, and our families were pretty close. But while
I went to work for my father after graduating high school,
Jimmy went to college to study mechanical engineering. He had a
natural talent for figuring out things in the physical world, but
was never much good at putting them into practice. He could
design and visualize, but when it came to hands-on applications,
he just wasn't very talented.
Nevertheless, he was the first person I showed the JATO
bottles to.
Actually, I didn't show them to anyone right away. The
campus where Jimmy took classes was almost 150 miles away, so he
spent his weekdays in a rented room and only came home on the
weekends. I found the JATO's on a Wednesday, which meant I had
three days before I could tell Jimmy about them. More than enough
time for me to cook up the idea of the Rocket Car. As a matter
of fact, as soon as I realized what that dull metal
cylinder represented, I thought about attaching it to a car and
taking a jet-propelled ride. I spent the rest of Wednesday,
Thursday and Friday planning how it could be done. The principle
certainly seemed simple enough. Nail the rocket onto one of the
junkers in my Dad's field, point it down a straight stretch of
road, and light the mother up. Sure there'd be minor details to
be worked out, but the basic idea was fairly straightforward.
All I can say is thank God I consulted with Jimmy before
actually doing anything. If it wasn't for his intervention, I'd
have probably ended up a damp spot on a highway somewhere.
Jimmy came over to the house on Saturday morning, we drove
to the yard, and I showed him the rocket. He immediately knew
what it was, or at least what it seemed to be. A solid fuel
rocket, the kind they'd used in Vietnam to give cargo planes a
kick in the ass when they needed to take off from
short runways. Very simple, very straightforward. Also very
dangerous. I described the idea of the Rocket Car to him, and at
first he was pretty enthusiastic. But after thinking the whole
thing over for awhile, he not only lost his enthusiasm, but made
me promise I wouldn't actually DO anything with the JATO until he
had time to check a few things out. I agreed, mainly because I
knew I'd need Jimmy's help if I was ever going to make the
Rocket Car work.
We talked about design possibilities for the rest of the
weekend, and when Jimmy went back to campus, I stashed the JATO's
in the back of a wasted milk truck rusting in the field. When
Jimmy came back the following weekend, we sat down at his kitchen
table and he explained PRECISELY why the rocket car wouldn't
work.
It was a sobering (and depressing) lecture.
The main problem was control. Jimmy explained that the
JATO bottle would produce something like 2,500 pounds of thrust
(albeit for a very short time), which sounded like more than
enough to ensure a fun ride. Unfortunately, this huge amount of
thrust would not only be unstoppable once it was started, it
would probably have to be applied to a point on the car
that wasn't designed to handle such a such a force. Under
normal circumstances, a car gets it's forward thrust from the
back axle, by way of tires against the pavement. Which means that
a normal car will never exceed a certain amount of thrust due to
the fact that the tires HAVE to touch the pavement to move the
car forward. Jimmy described the whole thing using top-fuel
dragsters as an example. When the driver hits the gas, the back
end of the car tries to lift into the air due to the sudden
force applied to the rear axle. But as soon as the ass end starts
to lift, the tires lose traction, and the thrust decreases. The
back end drops, thrust is restored, and the process starts all
over again. So a car of a given weight using driven wheels can
only get so much forward thrust. The limiting factors are the
weight, the distribution of the weight, size of the tires, and
torque applied to the wheels. The fact that a car uses driven
wheels creates a self-damping system that ensures the wheels will
stay on the ground (at least most of the time). The only reason
dragsters and funny cars pop wheelies is that they use oversized
tires that screw up the relationship between torque and traction.
Unfortunately, a rocket car has no such restraints. A massive
amount of thrust is suddenly being applied to a point on the
car that wasn't designed to handle it, and there's no telling
what happens next. Maybe the front end lifts off the ground.
Maybe the rear. Maybe the ass end would slew around sideways. The
only thing that was certain was that the car would NOT go in a
straight line, and would continue to not go in a straight line at
a VERY high rate of speed.
Naturally I asked how Craig Breedlove managed to drive the
Spirit of America at 600+ miles an hour, but I knew the answer
before I even spit the question out. He hired a team of aerospace
engineers and rocket scientists to design a car that was BUILT to
have a jet engine sticking out it's ass.
After hearing this, Jimmy didn't even have to outline the
rest of the reasons why my idea wouldn't work, but he did anyway.
There was also the fact that store-bought tires couldn't handle
the sort of acceleration a rocket would provide, which was why
all land-speed record cars used custom-made, solid-rubber tires.
Simply SPINNING a regular tire at rocket-car speeds would
probably create enough centrifugal force to tear it right off the
rim. And if that wasn't enough, there was the problem of stopping
the thing once it got rolling. And structural stress. And so on
and so on.
By this time I'd pretty much decided that the whole idea
was stupid and suicidal, which was why I was amazed when Jimmy
proceeded to tell me exactly how the rocket car COULD work.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, April 14, 2007
The Rocket Car Chapter 1
Sorry for the delay. I've been busy with a sick pup. But like I said this is a story that Micheal found on the Internet and I enjoyed reading so with all due respect to the unknown author here is chapter 1 of "The Rocket Car"
FAST FORWARD
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The first thing you should know about the legend of the
Rocket Car (especially if you got the story via E-mail or the
Web) is that it's been around a LOT longer than most people
think. It started years ago, as a vague rumor passed from one guy
to the next by word of mouth, usually in bars or during
lunch-break bullshit sessions. The kind of story someone hears
from a friend who read it in a magazine, or a half-remembered
newspaper story that someone read a long time ago. It's a story
that comes out of nowhere, gets passed around for awhile, then
dies out, like one of those weird strains of flu that keep coming
back every few years. The period of dormancy varies, but whenever
the story springs back to life, it seems to spread like a grass
fire. I used to think it was funny how the legend of the Rocket
Car managed to spread so far (and FAST) purely by word-of-mouth,
but now that it's become a subject of Internet interest, it's
popularity has become downright spooky.
Just in case you never heard the legend before (in which
case I can't imagine why you'd be reading this), here's the bare
bones of it: Once upon a time, in some out-of-the way part of the
country (take your pick of locations) a maniac took a rocket of
some sort, and mounted it on the back of a car (make and model
depend on automotive trends when the story is told). The maniac
then sped down a deserted stretch of highway, and when he reached
an appropriate spot, he lit the rocket. Unfortunately, the rocket
(which was either a JATO bottle, a surplus ICBM engine, or an
experimental Shuttle booster) proved to be far more powerful than
the maniac anticipated. The car reached an incredible speed in a
matter of seconds (somewhere between 150 miles per hour and Warp
9) at which point the car's brakes and steering became...
ineffective. This development would've been bad enough on a
straightaway, but through some error in planning or navigation,
the maniac found himself hurtling down a road that curved
sharply, not far from where he ignited the rocket. When the car
arrived at the curve, it went straight ahead instead of
negotiating the turn. Pilot and car then flew like an arrow (for
a distance only limited by the imagination of the person telling
the story), before crashing into an inconveniently-placed
mountainside.
Nifty.
I'm sure this sounds pretty ridiculous if it's the first
time you've heard the Legend of the Rocket Car, but that's
because I didn't go out of my way to make it sound good. Most
people DO try to make it sound convincing, embellishing
the story with all sorts of little facts and details to make it
easier to swallow. I've personally heard a dozen versions of this
story over the past 20 years, and I'm constantly amazed at how
the story grows, shrinks, and generally mutates with each
retelling. Maybe I notice these changes more than most people
because I've always paid close attention to this particular
rumor. Oh, I'm not a car expert or an aerospace engineer or
anything, and I really don't have much interest in urban legends.
Even if I did, from an intellectual point of view, this story
isn't as entertaining as some of the others that have come and
gone. The one about McDonalds shoveling worms into the grinders
that produce Big Macs, for instance, beats it by a mile. I only
pay attention to the Rocket Car legend because I'm 99% sure that
I started the whole thing in the spring of 1978.
Not intentionally, of course.
Now, before you draw any conclusions, I don't want you to
get the impression that I, myself, claim to be the maniac who
drove the Rocket Car into the wild blue yonder. I said I was
probably RESPONSIBLE for the rumor, not that I actually performed
the test flight. As far as I know, the flight in question never
happened. Like all legends, the root of the story might be true
(or partially true), but once the tale started circulating, the
root was lost in the embellishments. If the Legend of the Rocket
Car survives, my great-grandchildren will probably end up talking
about a guy from Lunartown who nailed an anti-matter pod onto an
old Apollo moon-rover and flew into the side of Tycho Crater.
That's how it goes with legends.
Like I said, I'm not a rocket scientist or motorhead. I
don't even KNOW any rocket scientists or motorheads. I'm a
high-school biology teacher. I know, this must sound like I'm the
most unqualified person in the world to give opinions about
things like jet-propelled cars, but I wasn't ALWAYS a biology
teacher. The fact that I'm a biology teacher today is only
relevant to the extent that it's responsible for my writing this
story down.
Last year, a week or two before Thanksgiving, I was taking
my class through some of the particulars of evolution ("how human
beings were raised from monkeys" as one of my students phrased
it). We were discussing Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species
when one of my students asked me how Darwin's research ship ever
got the name "H.M.S. Beagle".
Damned good question, when you stop and think about it.
Since I've been teaching this subject for 11 years, it's
rare when a student asks a question I can't answer. But this one
was a real pisser. Anyone who's ever taught in a classroom knows
that sometimes you get a student that likes to play "Stump the
Teacher". A kid who asks questions he doesn't really care about,
just to see if he can find a gap in the teachers knowledge.
Usually these questions are pretty easy to evade or ignore (or
even lie about) but sometimes one will catch my interest. This
was one of them. You have to admit, "The Beagle" IS a pretty dumb
name for a ship that cruised the Galapagos in search of exciting
bird-beak variations. So I told the student that I had no idea
where the ship's name came from, but I'd find out. After all,
I've been teaching the same class for 11 years, so I've amassed a
pretty good variety of books on the subject. Surely the answer
would be in one of them.
Hah. I couldn't find the answer ANYWHERE. My reference books
concerned themselves with headier subjects, the Scopes trial and
genetic mutations and whatnot, NOT the name of Darwin's boat. I
looked through every book I could find, but came up dry. After
exhausting all my research options, I was thinking about
conceding this particular round of Stump the Teacher when one of
my kids asked if I'd looked for the information on the World Wide
Web.
I said "Of course I looked there. It's the first thing I
checked. Go play in traffic."
Truth be told, I not only HADN'T checked the Web, I didn't know
HOW to check it. In addition to being a non-rocket scientist, I'm
not (or at least I wasn't) very interested in computers or the
Internet. I know this is a shameful thing for a teacher to say in
1998, but it's true. I kept MEANING to take a look at the
Internet-connected computers in the school library, just to see
what all the hoo-hah was about, but I simply hadn't gotten around
to it. Actually I was a little bit intimidated by the machines,
and kept putting off the inevitable confrontation due to
embarrassment. Sure, I could've walked into the library during my
free period, sat down at one of the machines and tried to figure
out what to do on my own, but what if I couldn't make it work? It
wouldn't be long before someone spotted my baffled expression and
realized I was completely lost. So the next day I went to the
library during my free period and asked the librarian for help,
feeling like Crocodile Dundee asking how to work the bidet. But
the librarian had obviously dealt with the situation before, and
gave me her ten-minute "Internet For Stupid Teachers" course
without making me feel any dumber than she had to. As soon as she
left me alone with Netscape running and a search engine online, I
typed "Darwin" into space provided, and let the machine do it's
thing. When the results of my search started filling the screen,
the first thing I noticed was that there were over two MILLION
sites listed as being Darwin-related.
The second thing I noticed was that NONE of them seemed to
pertain to Charles Darwin, the most famous naturalist in history.
Instead, they all seemed to focus on "The Darwin Award", an
"...honor (posthumously) bestowed on people who did the most good
for humanity by removing themselves from the communal gene-pool".
Which really isn't a bad idea, when you think about it.
Of course I expected this "award" to be a piece of tongue-
in-cheek humor, the sort of thing that used to make the rounds
via smudgy Xeroxes in the days before E-mail and the World Wide
Web. And that's exactly what it turned out to be. What I WASN'T
prepared for was my very first encounter with the story of the
Rocket Car in print. Not only in print, but in a format that can
reach around the world. When I read the story, I didn't know
whether to laugh or cry or get nauseous, but I think if I were
alone, I'd have done all three. Based on the number of different
Websites cross-referenced to the word "Darwin", I'll bet that if
you read the Rocket Car story from a computer monitor, the
version you saw looked something like the one that follows. The
text, anyway. The high-tech, precision-drafted engineering
diagrams are my own addition. Don't bust my balls about them,
either. I already told you that I'm not a motorhead or a rocket
scientist, and I'm no Leonardo da Vinci, either.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering
metal embedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road at
the apex of a curve. The wreckage resembled the site of an
airplane crash, but it was a car. The type of car was
unidentifiable at the scene. The lab finally figured out what it
was and what had happened.
It seems that a guy had somehow obtained a JATO unit (Jet
Assisted Take Off-actually a solid fuel rocket) that is used to
give heavy military transport planes an extra "push" for taking
off from short airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out into
the desert and found a long, straight stretch of road. Then he
attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed
and fired off the JATO!
The facts as best could be determined are that the operator
of the 1967 Impala hit JATO ignition at a distance of
approximately 3.0 miles from the crash site. This was established
by the prominent scorched and melted asphalt at that location.
The JATO, if operating properly, would have reached maximum
thrust within 5 seconds, causing the Chevy to reach speeds well
in excess of 350 mph and continuing at full power for an
additional 20-25 seconds. The driver, soon to be pilot, most
likely would have experienced G-forces usually reserved for
dog-fighting F-14 jocks under full afterburners, basically
causing him to become insignificant for the remainder of the
event. However, the automobile remained on the straight highway
for about 2.5 miles (15-20)seconds before the driver applied and
completely melted the brakes, blowing the tires and leaving thick
rubber marks on the road surface, then becoming airborne for an
additional 1.4 miles and impacting the cliff face at a height of
125 feet leaving a blackened crater 3 feet deep in the rock.
Most of the driver's remains were not recoverable; however,
small fragments of bone, teeth and hair were extracted from the
crater and fingernail and bone shards were removed from a piece
of debris believed to be a portion of the steering wheel.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
As I said earlier, for the past 20 years I've kept an eye
out for stories like this, and I've heard plenty of them. But the
stories I'd heard up until then had always been vague and
somewhat skimpy on technical details, making them marginally
easier to swallow. Or at least to repeat. But the Darwin Award
version was different. It was chock full of numbers and
specifics, which is always bad news for a legend. Oh, INITIALLY
it might make the story more believable, but throwing in a lot of
facts and figures also gives the non-believers plenty of details
they can use to refute the story. In the case of the Darwin
Awards version, I'm surprised that anyone, anywhere, believed the
story well enough to repeat it the first time. For instance,
there's the fact that this event was supposedly investigated by
the Arizona Highway Patrol. Well, that's not too hard to check,
is it? One call to the state police in Arizona would be all it
took to get a confirmation or denial. If you don't believe me,
give it a try. You'll get an irritated denial before you've even
finished asking the question. Actually, the AHP is so sick of
answering questions about this whole thing that they may
well hang up in your ear.
Don't feel like making a long-distance call just to have
someone hang up on you? Then ask yourself this: If the Darwin
Award story is true, then why was it never reported in the
national media? Why has nobody ever produced pictures of the
crash site? And how about the unfortunate "pilot"? Nobody was
ever able to attach a name to this person? Specify the location?
If you want to explain these questions away by blaming human
error or police indifference or whatever, that's okay. There's
too much apathy and incompetence in the world to pretend THAT
couldn't be the case. But if you look at the PHYSICS of the
story, you'll see that the whole pile of bullshit is impossible,
regardless of the human angle. It's simple stuff, too. You don't
have to be an aerospace engineer to see what I'm talking about.
For instance, when the Chevy left the road with it's rocket still
going full-blast, why did it go in a straight line? Take a look
at a missile sometime. You'll notice that it's... missile-shaped.
Nice pointy nose, tail fins, stuff like that. It's built that way
so it'll go in a straight line. The 1967 Chevrolet was a nice
looking car, sure. But it doesn't look much like a missile. Mount
a big rocket on a `67 Chevy and it MAY go straight as long as
it's on the ground. But once it got airborne, the weight of the
engine would immediately pull the nose down. And if the JATO was
still blazing away, the car would drill itself into the ground
like a tent-spike before it got fifty feet from the cliff.
This story is obviously bullshit to anyone willing to give
it a little thought, but it persists, mainly because people WANT
it to be true. And most of those people are men. As a story that
got it's start when it was still being shouted across pool tables
in noisy bars, women were left out of the loop until it hit the
Internet. Sort of like the story about the deadly gas that lies
inside the core of a golf ball. Little boys learn this one too,
but not little girls. And when the little boys grow up (to
whatever extent they actually DO grow up), the Golf Ball Toxin
story is replaced with the Rocket Car story.
One "urban legend" debunker attributes the huge popularity
of this story to the fact that it's "...a real-life version of
the Road Runner cartoon. Wile E. Coyote nails an Acme Jato Rocket
onto the back of a Chevy Impala and flies into a canyon wall."
Works for me.
The question is, how did such a story ever get started in
the first place? Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say
that nobody would ever be dumb enough to ATTEMPT a stunt like
this. Anyone who followed the O.J. Simpson trial will probably
agree that there simply aren't any limits to the depths of human
stupidity anymore. It's just mighty unlikely that someone
stupid enough to pilot the Rocket Car would be smart enough to
build it in the first place. The story probably started with an
event that bears some similarity to the final version, a
much SMALLER event that gradually evolved into the final legend.
All I know for sure is that myself and three other guys were
getting up to some awfully weird shit out in the desert back in
the spring of 1978, shit that was MORE than weird enough to start
the Legend of the Rocket Car. And only ONE of us was stupid
enough to be the pilot in the Darwin Awards story.
At least that's what I keep telling myself.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
FAST FORWARD
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The first thing you should know about the legend of the
Rocket Car (especially if you got the story via E-mail or the
Web) is that it's been around a LOT longer than most people
think. It started years ago, as a vague rumor passed from one guy
to the next by word of mouth, usually in bars or during
lunch-break bullshit sessions. The kind of story someone hears
from a friend who read it in a magazine, or a half-remembered
newspaper story that someone read a long time ago. It's a story
that comes out of nowhere, gets passed around for awhile, then
dies out, like one of those weird strains of flu that keep coming
back every few years. The period of dormancy varies, but whenever
the story springs back to life, it seems to spread like a grass
fire. I used to think it was funny how the legend of the Rocket
Car managed to spread so far (and FAST) purely by word-of-mouth,
but now that it's become a subject of Internet interest, it's
popularity has become downright spooky.
Just in case you never heard the legend before (in which
case I can't imagine why you'd be reading this), here's the bare
bones of it: Once upon a time, in some out-of-the way part of the
country (take your pick of locations) a maniac took a rocket of
some sort, and mounted it on the back of a car (make and model
depend on automotive trends when the story is told). The maniac
then sped down a deserted stretch of highway, and when he reached
an appropriate spot, he lit the rocket. Unfortunately, the rocket
(which was either a JATO bottle, a surplus ICBM engine, or an
experimental Shuttle booster) proved to be far more powerful than
the maniac anticipated. The car reached an incredible speed in a
matter of seconds (somewhere between 150 miles per hour and Warp
9) at which point the car's brakes and steering became...
ineffective. This development would've been bad enough on a
straightaway, but through some error in planning or navigation,
the maniac found himself hurtling down a road that curved
sharply, not far from where he ignited the rocket. When the car
arrived at the curve, it went straight ahead instead of
negotiating the turn. Pilot and car then flew like an arrow (for
a distance only limited by the imagination of the person telling
the story), before crashing into an inconveniently-placed
mountainside.
Nifty.
I'm sure this sounds pretty ridiculous if it's the first
time you've heard the Legend of the Rocket Car, but that's
because I didn't go out of my way to make it sound good. Most
people DO try to make it sound convincing, embellishing
the story with all sorts of little facts and details to make it
easier to swallow. I've personally heard a dozen versions of this
story over the past 20 years, and I'm constantly amazed at how
the story grows, shrinks, and generally mutates with each
retelling. Maybe I notice these changes more than most people
because I've always paid close attention to this particular
rumor. Oh, I'm not a car expert or an aerospace engineer or
anything, and I really don't have much interest in urban legends.
Even if I did, from an intellectual point of view, this story
isn't as entertaining as some of the others that have come and
gone. The one about McDonalds shoveling worms into the grinders
that produce Big Macs, for instance, beats it by a mile. I only
pay attention to the Rocket Car legend because I'm 99% sure that
I started the whole thing in the spring of 1978.
Not intentionally, of course.
Now, before you draw any conclusions, I don't want you to
get the impression that I, myself, claim to be the maniac who
drove the Rocket Car into the wild blue yonder. I said I was
probably RESPONSIBLE for the rumor, not that I actually performed
the test flight. As far as I know, the flight in question never
happened. Like all legends, the root of the story might be true
(or partially true), but once the tale started circulating, the
root was lost in the embellishments. If the Legend of the Rocket
Car survives, my great-grandchildren will probably end up talking
about a guy from Lunartown who nailed an anti-matter pod onto an
old Apollo moon-rover and flew into the side of Tycho Crater.
That's how it goes with legends.
Like I said, I'm not a rocket scientist or motorhead. I
don't even KNOW any rocket scientists or motorheads. I'm a
high-school biology teacher. I know, this must sound like I'm the
most unqualified person in the world to give opinions about
things like jet-propelled cars, but I wasn't ALWAYS a biology
teacher. The fact that I'm a biology teacher today is only
relevant to the extent that it's responsible for my writing this
story down.
Last year, a week or two before Thanksgiving, I was taking
my class through some of the particulars of evolution ("how human
beings were raised from monkeys" as one of my students phrased
it). We were discussing Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species
when one of my students asked me how Darwin's research ship ever
got the name "H.M.S. Beagle".
Damned good question, when you stop and think about it.
Since I've been teaching this subject for 11 years, it's
rare when a student asks a question I can't answer. But this one
was a real pisser. Anyone who's ever taught in a classroom knows
that sometimes you get a student that likes to play "Stump the
Teacher". A kid who asks questions he doesn't really care about,
just to see if he can find a gap in the teachers knowledge.
Usually these questions are pretty easy to evade or ignore (or
even lie about) but sometimes one will catch my interest. This
was one of them. You have to admit, "The Beagle" IS a pretty dumb
name for a ship that cruised the Galapagos in search of exciting
bird-beak variations. So I told the student that I had no idea
where the ship's name came from, but I'd find out. After all,
I've been teaching the same class for 11 years, so I've amassed a
pretty good variety of books on the subject. Surely the answer
would be in one of them.
Hah. I couldn't find the answer ANYWHERE. My reference books
concerned themselves with headier subjects, the Scopes trial and
genetic mutations and whatnot, NOT the name of Darwin's boat. I
looked through every book I could find, but came up dry. After
exhausting all my research options, I was thinking about
conceding this particular round of Stump the Teacher when one of
my kids asked if I'd looked for the information on the World Wide
Web.
I said "Of course I looked there. It's the first thing I
checked. Go play in traffic."
Truth be told, I not only HADN'T checked the Web, I didn't know
HOW to check it. In addition to being a non-rocket scientist, I'm
not (or at least I wasn't) very interested in computers or the
Internet. I know this is a shameful thing for a teacher to say in
1998, but it's true. I kept MEANING to take a look at the
Internet-connected computers in the school library, just to see
what all the hoo-hah was about, but I simply hadn't gotten around
to it. Actually I was a little bit intimidated by the machines,
and kept putting off the inevitable confrontation due to
embarrassment. Sure, I could've walked into the library during my
free period, sat down at one of the machines and tried to figure
out what to do on my own, but what if I couldn't make it work? It
wouldn't be long before someone spotted my baffled expression and
realized I was completely lost. So the next day I went to the
library during my free period and asked the librarian for help,
feeling like Crocodile Dundee asking how to work the bidet. But
the librarian had obviously dealt with the situation before, and
gave me her ten-minute "Internet For Stupid Teachers" course
without making me feel any dumber than she had to. As soon as she
left me alone with Netscape running and a search engine online, I
typed "Darwin" into space provided, and let the machine do it's
thing. When the results of my search started filling the screen,
the first thing I noticed was that there were over two MILLION
sites listed as being Darwin-related.
The second thing I noticed was that NONE of them seemed to
pertain to Charles Darwin, the most famous naturalist in history.
Instead, they all seemed to focus on "The Darwin Award", an
"...honor (posthumously) bestowed on people who did the most good
for humanity by removing themselves from the communal gene-pool".
Which really isn't a bad idea, when you think about it.
Of course I expected this "award" to be a piece of tongue-
in-cheek humor, the sort of thing that used to make the rounds
via smudgy Xeroxes in the days before E-mail and the World Wide
Web. And that's exactly what it turned out to be. What I WASN'T
prepared for was my very first encounter with the story of the
Rocket Car in print. Not only in print, but in a format that can
reach around the world. When I read the story, I didn't know
whether to laugh or cry or get nauseous, but I think if I were
alone, I'd have done all three. Based on the number of different
Websites cross-referenced to the word "Darwin", I'll bet that if
you read the Rocket Car story from a computer monitor, the
version you saw looked something like the one that follows. The
text, anyway. The high-tech, precision-drafted engineering
diagrams are my own addition. Don't bust my balls about them,
either. I already told you that I'm not a motorhead or a rocket
scientist, and I'm no Leonardo da Vinci, either.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering
metal embedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road at
the apex of a curve. The wreckage resembled the site of an
airplane crash, but it was a car. The type of car was
unidentifiable at the scene. The lab finally figured out what it
was and what had happened.
It seems that a guy had somehow obtained a JATO unit (Jet
Assisted Take Off-actually a solid fuel rocket) that is used to
give heavy military transport planes an extra "push" for taking
off from short airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out into
the desert and found a long, straight stretch of road. Then he
attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed
and fired off the JATO!
The facts as best could be determined are that the operator
of the 1967 Impala hit JATO ignition at a distance of
approximately 3.0 miles from the crash site. This was established
by the prominent scorched and melted asphalt at that location.
The JATO, if operating properly, would have reached maximum
thrust within 5 seconds, causing the Chevy to reach speeds well
in excess of 350 mph and continuing at full power for an
additional 20-25 seconds. The driver, soon to be pilot, most
likely would have experienced G-forces usually reserved for
dog-fighting F-14 jocks under full afterburners, basically
causing him to become insignificant for the remainder of the
event. However, the automobile remained on the straight highway
for about 2.5 miles (15-20)seconds before the driver applied and
completely melted the brakes, blowing the tires and leaving thick
rubber marks on the road surface, then becoming airborne for an
additional 1.4 miles and impacting the cliff face at a height of
125 feet leaving a blackened crater 3 feet deep in the rock.
Most of the driver's remains were not recoverable; however,
small fragments of bone, teeth and hair were extracted from the
crater and fingernail and bone shards were removed from a piece
of debris believed to be a portion of the steering wheel.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
As I said earlier, for the past 20 years I've kept an eye
out for stories like this, and I've heard plenty of them. But the
stories I'd heard up until then had always been vague and
somewhat skimpy on technical details, making them marginally
easier to swallow. Or at least to repeat. But the Darwin Award
version was different. It was chock full of numbers and
specifics, which is always bad news for a legend. Oh, INITIALLY
it might make the story more believable, but throwing in a lot of
facts and figures also gives the non-believers plenty of details
they can use to refute the story. In the case of the Darwin
Awards version, I'm surprised that anyone, anywhere, believed the
story well enough to repeat it the first time. For instance,
there's the fact that this event was supposedly investigated by
the Arizona Highway Patrol. Well, that's not too hard to check,
is it? One call to the state police in Arizona would be all it
took to get a confirmation or denial. If you don't believe me,
give it a try. You'll get an irritated denial before you've even
finished asking the question. Actually, the AHP is so sick of
answering questions about this whole thing that they may
well hang up in your ear.
Don't feel like making a long-distance call just to have
someone hang up on you? Then ask yourself this: If the Darwin
Award story is true, then why was it never reported in the
national media? Why has nobody ever produced pictures of the
crash site? And how about the unfortunate "pilot"? Nobody was
ever able to attach a name to this person? Specify the location?
If you want to explain these questions away by blaming human
error or police indifference or whatever, that's okay. There's
too much apathy and incompetence in the world to pretend THAT
couldn't be the case. But if you look at the PHYSICS of the
story, you'll see that the whole pile of bullshit is impossible,
regardless of the human angle. It's simple stuff, too. You don't
have to be an aerospace engineer to see what I'm talking about.
For instance, when the Chevy left the road with it's rocket still
going full-blast, why did it go in a straight line? Take a look
at a missile sometime. You'll notice that it's... missile-shaped.
Nice pointy nose, tail fins, stuff like that. It's built that way
so it'll go in a straight line. The 1967 Chevrolet was a nice
looking car, sure. But it doesn't look much like a missile. Mount
a big rocket on a `67 Chevy and it MAY go straight as long as
it's on the ground. But once it got airborne, the weight of the
engine would immediately pull the nose down. And if the JATO was
still blazing away, the car would drill itself into the ground
like a tent-spike before it got fifty feet from the cliff.
This story is obviously bullshit to anyone willing to give
it a little thought, but it persists, mainly because people WANT
it to be true. And most of those people are men. As a story that
got it's start when it was still being shouted across pool tables
in noisy bars, women were left out of the loop until it hit the
Internet. Sort of like the story about the deadly gas that lies
inside the core of a golf ball. Little boys learn this one too,
but not little girls. And when the little boys grow up (to
whatever extent they actually DO grow up), the Golf Ball Toxin
story is replaced with the Rocket Car story.
One "urban legend" debunker attributes the huge popularity
of this story to the fact that it's "...a real-life version of
the Road Runner cartoon. Wile E. Coyote nails an Acme Jato Rocket
onto the back of a Chevy Impala and flies into a canyon wall."
Works for me.
The question is, how did such a story ever get started in
the first place? Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say
that nobody would ever be dumb enough to ATTEMPT a stunt like
this. Anyone who followed the O.J. Simpson trial will probably
agree that there simply aren't any limits to the depths of human
stupidity anymore. It's just mighty unlikely that someone
stupid enough to pilot the Rocket Car would be smart enough to
build it in the first place. The story probably started with an
event that bears some similarity to the final version, a
much SMALLER event that gradually evolved into the final legend.
All I know for sure is that myself and three other guys were
getting up to some awfully weird shit out in the desert back in
the spring of 1978, shit that was MORE than weird enough to start
the Legend of the Rocket Car. And only ONE of us was stupid
enough to be the pilot in the Darwin Awards story.
At least that's what I keep telling myself.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Thursday, April 12, 2007
The Real Story
Well it turns out that my friend did not write the story about the rocket powered car. It was something he found on the Internet. So since it was on the Internet once I guess that it will be again. Starting tomorrow I will post a chapter at a time. For your reading pleasure. I would start today but I don't have access to my electronic copy from here. So watch this space for the "real" story of the Rocket Powered Car from the Darwin Awards. I will not take credit for the tale though I wish I had the talent.
Randy
Randy
Friday, April 6, 2007
Micheal's Story
Micheal is a fellow I work with, whom I would like to consider a friend. He is also an amateur author. He writes short science fiction stories. The kind of thing that would have been published in Asimov Magazine. Although I had heard about his stories I had not yet read one. Until today that is. He emailed me a story about a fellow who takes responsibility for the urban myth of a rocket powered car. You all have heard or read the story but Micheal's version is very good. Not exactly Buck Rogers and Captain Kirk science fiction but a good entertaining tale.
It is an entertaining read. It reminded me of Stephen King's story "The Body" which was made into the movie "Stand By Me". It is a reminiscence about an adventure in the narrator's youth. Not exactly a "coming of age story" but very good (in my opinion) none the less. It's also little like Max Braithwait's "The Night we Stole the Mountie's Car" or Kinsella's "Fence Post Chronicles". When I was reading it I could just picture Micheal sitting back ands telling this tale. He is a very good story teller. And this tale is quite funny. It was just the thing to read on a quiet Good Friday morning. Maybe knowing the author added to the appreciation but I hope that it stands on its own as well as I think it does. (As the old saying goes I may not know literature but I know what I like.)
I think it would make a very good set of posts on my blog. It is broken out into chapters so I could post a chapter a day if I can get his permission. I will ask him when I am back at work on Tuesday. I hope that he will let me post it. It would make a good change from my usual drivel and I could leave you all hanging at the end of the chapter waiting for the next post. (A sadistic little pleasure that I could enjoy.) It would be like the old serials. I have read that Charles Dickens published many of his novels as serial pieces in the paper and that there were near riots in the streets of London when a new chapter came out. I don't imagine that would be the out come with this but it is still a good yarn.
My sister in law is working on the great Canadian novel too. But I have not seen any of her work though I have heard of it for the past 25 years. I guess she is waiting for the great unveiling. I like Micheal's approach better. Turning out short stories and tales. I hope I can get his permission to post this one and the opportunity to read more. Then maybe we can all say we knew him when...
Keep your fingers crossed...
Randy
It is an entertaining read. It reminded me of Stephen King's story "The Body" which was made into the movie "Stand By Me". It is a reminiscence about an adventure in the narrator's youth. Not exactly a "coming of age story" but very good (in my opinion) none the less. It's also little like Max Braithwait's "The Night we Stole the Mountie's Car" or Kinsella's "Fence Post Chronicles". When I was reading it I could just picture Micheal sitting back ands telling this tale. He is a very good story teller. And this tale is quite funny. It was just the thing to read on a quiet Good Friday morning. Maybe knowing the author added to the appreciation but I hope that it stands on its own as well as I think it does. (As the old saying goes I may not know literature but I know what I like.)
I think it would make a very good set of posts on my blog. It is broken out into chapters so I could post a chapter a day if I can get his permission. I will ask him when I am back at work on Tuesday. I hope that he will let me post it. It would make a good change from my usual drivel and I could leave you all hanging at the end of the chapter waiting for the next post. (A sadistic little pleasure that I could enjoy.) It would be like the old serials. I have read that Charles Dickens published many of his novels as serial pieces in the paper and that there were near riots in the streets of London when a new chapter came out. I don't imagine that would be the out come with this but it is still a good yarn.
My sister in law is working on the great Canadian novel too. But I have not seen any of her work though I have heard of it for the past 25 years. I guess she is waiting for the great unveiling. I like Micheal's approach better. Turning out short stories and tales. I hope I can get his permission to post this one and the opportunity to read more. Then maybe we can all say we knew him when...
Keep your fingers crossed...
Randy
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Back at the Project
Well it's getting closer, the desk that is. The door and drawer fronts have been kerffed to make them look like a bank of drawers. Something that I would have had the devil of a time doing on the table saw but was very straight forward not to mention upright with the Radial Arm Saw. The saw is mounted above the work on a radial arm so you can see what you are cutting. Unlike a table saw that cuts from the bottom. When you are just cutting a groove you are flying blind with a table saw.
I also constructed the wire box, a chase for the computer wiring that connects the pedestals. It has a hinged front and holes in either end to let you pass wires easily through. It also helps keep them up off the floor and out of sight also a great idea.
Right now I would be working on attaching the door and drawer fronts but the battery on the cordless drill conked out and the spare must have been put away dead too. Note to self "DON'T DO THAT!" So here I am waiting for the batteries to recharge. I have a drill with a cord but it is a big 1/2 inch and it doesn't fit in where I need to drill. Well it fits but you can't hold on to it when its in there. Also the charger is plugged in where I need to plug the drill in. I would unplug the freezer for a minute or two but then if I forgot to plug it back in I would have a lovely mess in a few days. And you know that "sometimers" (like Alzheimer's only less permanent and intermittent) would kick in right about then. You see the basement has never been finished and there is a distinct shortage of circuits. Since we never used to use the basement it was not a problem but it looks like it is something that I will have to rectify and soon if I want to keep using the basement as a workshop.
Guess I could take the dog for a walk while I wait.
Belle want to go for a walk? As if I couldn't guess...
Randy
I also constructed the wire box, a chase for the computer wiring that connects the pedestals. It has a hinged front and holes in either end to let you pass wires easily through. It also helps keep them up off the floor and out of sight also a great idea.
Right now I would be working on attaching the door and drawer fronts but the battery on the cordless drill conked out and the spare must have been put away dead too. Note to self "DON'T DO THAT!" So here I am waiting for the batteries to recharge. I have a drill with a cord but it is a big 1/2 inch and it doesn't fit in where I need to drill. Well it fits but you can't hold on to it when its in there. Also the charger is plugged in where I need to plug the drill in. I would unplug the freezer for a minute or two but then if I forgot to plug it back in I would have a lovely mess in a few days. And you know that "sometimers" (like Alzheimer's only less permanent and intermittent) would kick in right about then. You see the basement has never been finished and there is a distinct shortage of circuits. Since we never used to use the basement it was not a problem but it looks like it is something that I will have to rectify and soon if I want to keep using the basement as a workshop.
Guess I could take the dog for a walk while I wait.
Belle want to go for a walk? As if I couldn't guess...
Randy
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