Today, we wonder which story might be true. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
A friend led me to a neat
website: www.snopes.com. It's
all about sorting fact from fancy. We've always
been suckers for the written word, and the Internet
provides a lot of written words these days.
Naturally, a great deal of what we read is sheer
fancy.
The site keeps
track of cyber myths and flags them as true or
false. It's arranged in categories: Horrors,
Language, History, Science, and so forth. So let's
dip in and see what's here: Under the
History heading is one you may've seen.
It's a convoluted explanation of why railroad
tracks have the same spacing as the wheels of Roman
chariots. Actually, railroad track spacings
are not the same
everywhere, but they're close. The kinship with
Roman roads occurs because, when wheels are too far
apart in any vehicle, the turning radius is too
great. With wheels too close together, vehicles
become unstable. We've replaced the drama of a long
train of connections with two common constraints.
But surprises remain. For example it's true that,
in 1970, a Texas senator, angered by colleagues
voting on legislation they hadn't read, wrote a
resolution commending Albert de Salvo for unselfish
service to his country. After his cohorts passed
it, they learned that de Salvo was the name of the
Boston Strangler!
The offer of something for nothing goes on all the
time. We read that Bill Gates is offering a
thousand dollars to all who forward his e-mail
message -- or that the Miller Brewery gave away two
million cases of free beer to celebrate the year
2000. However, it really is true that if you click
on any of several advertising banners, the
organization will contribute a small sum to a
charity.
One claim had me fooled. We read that
sales of the Chevy Nova were doomed in
Spanish-speaking countries because no va
means "doesn't go." The problem is, any Spanish
speaker will read Nova and no va
as completely different linguistic entities. It's
like our English word notable for a famous
person. No one ever sees that as not able,
even though the spellings are identical.
Like so many cyber myths, the Nova story
is too good not to be true. Another story tells of
the student who finds that the instructor has left
an unsolvable math problem on the blackboard. He
thinks it's his homework and solves it.
That was not just a plot idea for the movie
Good Will Hunting. It actually has
happened.
Speaking of movies, remember Nicolas Cage in It
Could Happen To You? In place of a tip, a
policeman promises a waitress half his winnings if
a lottery ticket pays off. It really did, both in
the movie and in real life. There's also the story
about the man who stops to help a stranger in a
stranded limo. The stranded man turns out to be
Donald Trump, who thankfully pays off the man's
mortgage. Well, only in the story. That one never
happened.
So we continue to search the web for excitement. So
many stories! So many stories, and some of them
actually prove to be true.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
I am grateful to Stephanie Kazanegras at KUHF-FM for
suggesting the www.snopes.com site to
me. Details of all of the cases mentioned above may
be found at that site.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2002 by John H.
Lienhard.
