EXHIBITS
Aerial History in a Hangar
Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
Washington Dullest International Airport, Virginia
www.nasm.si.edu/nasm/ext
Courtesy Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum |
Shark-mouthed and shrink-wrapped, a Curtiss P-40E Kittyhawk appears ready to pounce on visitors at a satellite branch of the National Air and Space Museum, housed in a 10-story hangar at Dulles Airport, opening on December 15. This slightly modified Kittyhawk, a cousin of the P-40s flown by the famed U.S. “Flying Tiger” unit in World War II, was part of a Royal Canadian Air Force squadron that defended Alaska’s Aleutian Islands against attack by the Japanese. The bent-winged 1940s Chance-Vought F4U-1D Corsair hovering near the Kittyhawk was among the first fighter-bombers to take off regularly from aircraft carriers in the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Fleet. The more than 200 aircraft in the collection also include the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest and highest-flying jet-powered craft, and the Cessna 180
Spirit of Columbus, piloted in 1964 by Geraldine Mock, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. A second hangar for spacecraft is expected to open next summer.
—Maia Weinstock
TELEVISION
The Wright Brothers’ Flying Machine
NOVA, PBS, Tuesday, December 16, 2003
www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wright
In a film that combines the gravitas of a historical docudrama with the derring-do of a contemporary reality show, aviation buffs Ken Hyde and Rick Young set out to build and fly an exact replica of the Model B wood-and-cloth biplane that the Wright brothers pointed skyward in 1910. When the Model B hurtles into a bank of trees, leaving Hyde tangled in the branches with a broken arm, we are reminded that one uncertain tilt of the rudder during their first flight could have vanquished the Wrights’ quest for scientific immortality.
—Elizabeth Svoboda
BOOKS
Nothing New Under the Sun
The ancient world was awash in devious weaponry
By Joseph D'Agnese
Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World
By Adrienne Mayor, Overlook Duckworth, $27.95
Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World
In the run-up last spring to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a parade of pundits appeared nightly on the news, spouting ideas honed by a century’s worth of war atrocities. Good warriors fight fairly, they insisted. Chemical weapons are the coward’s way out. Our side does research biological weapons—but only for defensive purposes. Though these notions may seem novel, they are, in fact, ancient history. The firstcentury A.D. Roman historian Florus, for example, lambasted a general for poisoning wells, while his contemporary Tacitus praised the Goths, who spurned poison and chose pitch-dark nights for attack.
Thus, if there is any lesson to be learned from Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs, it’s that there’s nothing new about biological and chemical weapons—or in the universal hypocrisy surrounding their use. During the Vietnam War, American forces sprayed civilians with napalm, a jellied gasoline that burned at more than 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, consuming clothing, skin, and bone. It was widely assumed that Harvard scientists had invented the stuff in 1942. Few people realized that liquid incendiaries—naphtha, pitch, or quicklime—were used as far back as 875 B.C. Later, in the seventh century A.D., a Syrian engineer named Callinicus invented a terrible cannon that pumped a fiery naphtha mix through bronze tubes at ships in battle. Dubbed Greek fire, it doomed its target instantly.
Mayor, a classical folklorist, recounts in lively, sometimes darkly comic detail the diabolical stratagems devised by devious warriors for tactical ends: arrows dipped in toxins; jewel-encrusted urns booby-trapped with plague-laden garments; and a host of dirty tricks involving snakes, stinging beetles, and venomous frogs. Ironically, the more humans resorted to these insidious tools of destruction, the more the concept of war became idealized. During the brutal Peloponnesian War, the Athenian historian Thucydides condemned atrocities against noncombatants and praised “courage and sheer strength” over “scientific methods.” Yet the chicanery not only prevailed but bred arms races that continue to this day. Defeated once by war elephants in the second century B.C., the Macedonian prince Perseus ordered his men to build wooden pachyderms from which musicians blew trumpets. In this way, warhorses became inured to the sight and sounds of the tusked raiders. In other battles besiegers unleashed pigs and camels to frighten elephants and horses, whereupon the generals exposed their stables to these animals and their offensive odors. By A.D. 1398, the Turkic conqueror Tamerlane had hit upon a new trick in his onslaught on Delhi: releasing flaming camels across the battlefield.
Such insidious tactics could backfire, though. As Mayor points out, biochemical weapons are the ultimate double-edged sword. Hercules buried Hydra’s head because he knew it was immortal. Today we talk of stockpiling our nuclear and chemical weapons in desert repositories. We can hide them, but we can never rid them completely of their power to kill. This is the hard lesson of history that we moderns have yet to learn: If you unleash a flaming camel, sooner or later it’ll go berserk and run straight back into your camp.
GIZMOS
iBot Wheelchair
Independence Technology, $29,000 (by prescription only)
www.indetech.com
Photography courtesy of Van Vechten & Company |
One morning, inventor Dean Kamen stepped out of the shower and skidded across the bathroom floor. As he flailed about and recovered his balance, inspiration struck. He realized that the near-instant feedback and control provided by his brain, inner ear, and moving body could be a model for a new type of self-balancing wheelchair. The fruit of his epiphany has now taken shape in a stair-climbing robotic wheelchair called the iBot.
Approved in August by the Food and Drug Administration, the battery-powered iBot climbs up and down stairs by pivoting two sets of wheels up and over each other. It can also balance itself on two wheels alone, elevating a rider to eye level with standing companions. Like Kamen’s ballyhooed Segway scooter, the iBot feels sturdy and surprisingly stable during a ride in its two-wheeled standing mode. The secret to its stability lies in an array of tilt sensors and gyroscopes that mimic the inner ear, feeding information to computers that in turn tell motors to make minute adjustments to the wheels to maintain balance. The iBot in fact never stands quite still. In the same way that a soldier at attention must make subtle muscular adjustments to stay balanced, a standing iBot always dithers to and fro as a rider shifts his or her weight. Rock backward and forward and the wheels gently roll back and forth with the rider’s movement. Push it extremely hard and it will drop automatically to four wheels, just as Kamen might have fallen to all fours if his bathroom slip had really sent him sprawling.
By providing access to places that were previously inaccessible, the iBot has the power to transform the lives of the disabled. In four-wheel drive, it can motor up a grassy hillside or along a sandy beach. The stairs in a subway station? No problem. Kamen has ridden the iBot up to street level from the deep tunnels of the Paris metro. He followed that feat by using it to climb 700 steps of a spiral staircase to the Jules Verne restaurant, halfway to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
—Jon R. Luoma