Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, June 17, 1993 TAG: 9308230256
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A: You can imagine all sorts of problems if jetpacks were widely used. Bad accidents involving overhead power lines, for example. Or the occasional catastrophic airburst, also known as ``the fireworks effect.'' (``Here's Daddy! And here's some more of Daddy!'').
Jetpacks have been invented. In fact, we spoke to the man who holds the patent on the ``jet vest.'' His name is Thomas Moore, he's 81, and he received the patent in 1966 while working as an engineer at the U.S. Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala. He figured it could be used in certain military situations, like going from ship to shore, or jumping over barriers. The problem: Cost and weight.
``You can only fly for so long with the amount of weight you can conveniently put on your back,'' Moore said. ``The weight of the fuel is quite a bit of the problem. You have to have an energetic fuel in order to do that.'' His own jet vest used hydrogen peroxide. It was tested with the aid of a tether - the better to guard against someone getting launched into the next state.
And it was tricky to fly. A jetpack looks like a snappy little gadget when it's Johnny Quest doing the flying, but in reality it's hard to maneuver, because you have to worry about three dimensions of movement, the pitch, roll and yaw.
Bell Aerospace built the Rocket Belt in the early 1960s, and later produced the Jet Flying Belt. But the military never really cottoned to these gadgets. The tactical benefit never made up for the cost and hassle, and of course there remained the question of what would be a fair speed limit when flying over a school zone.
Q: Why did geologists come up with names and dates for geologic time periods that no one could possibly ever remember?
A. Every so often we'll ask a scientist how old something is, and the scientist will say, ``Well, it goes back at least to the Miocene, possibly to the Oligocene.'' And then we'll say something like, ``Wasn't that the time of the Romans?''
Pleistocene, Pliocene, Paleocene, Permian, Paleozoic, Proterozoic, Phanerozoic and Precambrian - you can't even get the Ps straight! Why is there a Tertiary period but no Secondary period? Who concocted this mess?
No one. That's the answer. It wasn't invented in one motion, the way, say, the metric system was, or the dimensions of a baseball diamond. It was pieced together - a fossil bed here, a stratum of rock there. Devonian was named by a scientist working on some rocks in Devon, England. The Mississippian and the Pennsylvanian periods got their names in the same way. Tertiary is left over from another scientist's attempt in the 1700s to come up with a simple geologic time scale system - after the Primary and Secondary periods were given other names by the scientists.
All the words mean something to someone. Proterozoic, for example means before animals. We're going to guess that Carboniferous was when they did a lot of barbecuing.
Washington Post Writers Group f
by CNB