Doodlebug

Doodlebug (pronounced dood-l-buhg)

(1) In entomology the larva of an antlion (a group of some 2,000 species of insect in the neuropteran family Myrmeleontidae, the appellation “doodlebug” an allusion to the “doodle-like” marks they leave in the sand as tracks of their movement.

(2) In entomology (UK), a cockchafer (genus Melolontha).

(3) In entomology (US regional), a woodlouse.

(4) Any of various small, squat vehicles.

(5) A divining rod or similar device supposedly useful in locating underground water, oil, minerals etc.

(6) In World War II (1939-1945) UK slang, the German cruise missile the V1, (Fs-103, also known in formally as the “flying bomb” or “buzz bomb”, the latter an allusion to the distinctive sound made by the craft’s pulse-jet power-plant.  The slang began among RAF (Royal Air Force) personnel and later spread to the general population.

(7) In US rural slang, as “doodlebug tractor”, a car or light truck converted into tractor used for small-scale agriculture for a small farm during World War II.

(8) In informal use, a term of endearment (now rare).

(9) In informal use, a slackard (an archaic form of slacker) or time-waster (now rare).

(10) In informal, an idiot (the word used casually rather than in its once defined sense in mental health).

(11) In informal use, someone who habitually draws (or doodles) objects).

(12) Individual self-propelled train cars (obsolete).

(13) A device claimed to be able to locate oil deposits.

1865-1870: A coining in US English, the construct being doodle + bug, the first known use as a US dialectal form (south of the Mason-Dixon line) to describe certain beetles or larva.  Doodle dates from the early seventeenth century and was used to mean “a fool or simpleton”.  It was originally a dialectal form, from dudeldopp (simpleton) and influenced by dawdle (To spend time idly and unfruitfully; to waste time, pointlessly to linger, to move or walk lackadaisically; to “dilly-dally”), thus the later use of doodle to mean “a slackard (slacker) or time-waster”.  The German variants of the etymon included Dudeltopf, Dudentopf, Dudenkopf, Dude and Dödel (and there’s presumably some link with the German dudeln (to play the bagpipe)).  There is speculation the Americanism “dude” may have some link with doodle and the now internationalized (and sometimes gender-neutral) “dude” has in recent decades become one of slang’s more productive and variable forms.  The song Yankee Doodle long pre-dates the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) but it was popularized in the era by being used as a marching song by British colonial troops and intended to poke fun at their rebellious opponents.  From this use was derived the verb of the early eighteenth century (to doodle), meaning “to swindle or to make a fool of”.  The predominant modern meaning (the drawings regarded usually as “small mindless sketches”) emerged in the 1930s either from this meaning or (s seems to have greater support), from the verb “to dawdle” which since the seventeenth century had been used to mean “wasting time; being lazy”.  In slang and idiomatic use, doodles uses are legion including “the penis” and any number of rhyming forms with meanings ranging from the very good to the very bad.

A doodled Volkswagen “bug” on Drawn Inside.

Bug dates from 1615–1625 and the original use was to describe insects, apparently as a variant of the earlier bugge (beetle), thought to be an alteration of the Middle English budde, from the Old English -budda (beetle) by etymologists are divided on whether the phrase “bug off” (please leave) is related to the undesired presence of insects or was of a distinct origin.  Bug, bugging & debug are nouns & verbs, bugged is a verb & adjective and buggy is a noun & adjective; the noun plural is bugs.  Although “unbug” makes structural sense (ie remove a bug, as opposed to the sense of “debug”), it doesn’t exist whereas forms such as the adjectives unbugged (not bugged) and unbuggable (not able to be bugged) are regarded as standard.  The array of compound forms meaning “someone obsessed with an idea, hobby etc) produced things like “shutterbug” (amateur photographer) & firebug (arsonist) seems first to have emerged in the mid nineteenth century.  The development of this into “a craze or obsession” is thought rapidly to have accelerated in the years just before World War I (1914-1918), again based on the notion of “bitten by the bug” or “caught the bug”, thus the idea of being infected with an unusual enthusiasm for something.  The use to mean a demon, evil spirit, spectre or hobgoblin was first recorded in the mid-fourteenth century and was a clipping of the Middle English bugge (scarecrow, demon, hobgoblin) or uncertain origin although it may have come from the Middle Welsh bwg (ghost; goblin (and linked to the Welsh bwgwl (threat (and earlier “fear”) and the Middle Irish bocanách (supernatural being).  There’s also speculation it may have come from the scary tales told to children which included the idea of a bugge (beetle) at a gigantic scale.  That would have been a fearsome sight and the idea remains fruitful to this day for artists and film-makers needing something frightening in the horror or SF (science fiction) genre.  The use in this sense is long obsolete although the related forms bugbear and bugaboo survive.  Dating from the 1570s, a bugbear was in folklore a kind of “large goblin”, used to inspire fear in children (both as a literary device & for purposes of parental control) and for adults it soon came to mean “a source of dread, resentment or irritation; in modern use it's an “ongoing problem”, a recurring obstacle or adversity or one’s pet peeve.  The obsolete form bugg dates from circa 1620 and was a reference to the troublesome bedbug, the construct a conflation of the middle English bugge (scarecrow, hobgoblin) and the Middle English budde (beetle).  The colloquial sense of “a microbe or germ” dates from 1919, the emergence linked to the misleadingly-named “Spanish flu” pandemic.  Doodlebug & doodlebugger are nouns and doodlebugging is a verb; the noun plural is doodlebugs.  The forms have sometimes been hyphenated.

A doodlebug (left) and his (or her) doodles in the sand (right).

That the word doodlebug has appeal is obvious because since the 1860s it has been re-purposed many time, often with the hint something “small but not cute”, that something understandable given the original creature so named (larva of an antlion) is not one of nature’s more charismatic creations.  Doodlebugs are squat little things which live mostly in loose sand where they create pit traps and genuinely are industrious creatures, their name earned not because they are idle time-wasters but because the tracks they leave in the sand are strikingly similar to the doodles people often wile away their time drawing.  The frankly unattractive ant leave their doodles behind because as they percolate over the sands, their big butts drag behind them, leaving the erratic trails.  So compelling is the name, it has been applied to a number of other, similar insects.  Another use is attributive from the link with the seventeenth century notion of a doodle being “a simpleton or time-waster”, extended later to “an idiot” (the word used casually rather than in its once defined sense in mental health); in the 1930s it came be used of those who incessantly sketch or draw stuff, the idea being they are squandering their time.  What they draw are called “doodles”, the source of the name for the artist.

Doodles on a rendering of Lindsay Lohan by Stable Diffusion.

The mid-twentieth century art (some of its practitioners claiming it was a science) of doodlebugging was practiced by doodlebuggers who used a method said to be not greatly different from the equally dubious technique of the water diviner.  All the evidence suggests there was a general scepticism of the claims that a bent rod waived about above the earth could be used to locate hydro-carbons and the use of “doodlebuging” to refer to the process was originally a slur but it became an affectionate name for those intrepid enough to trek into deserts seeking the “black gold”.  In the 1940s when the “profession” was first described, any reliable means of detecting sub-surface oil deposits simply didn’t exist (other than drilling a hole in the ground to see if it was there) and the early doodlebuggers were scam merchants.  The science did however advance (greatly spurred on by the demands of wartime) and when geologists came to be able to apply the modern machinery of seismic mapping and actually had success, they too were called doodlebuggers and happily adopted the name.

Texaco Doodlebug fuel tanker, one of eight built in 1934-1935 during the industry's "streamliner" era.  It was a time when art deco's lovely lines appeared in many fields of design. 

In the early twentieth century, a doodlebug was a self-propelled rail car, used on rail lines which were short in length and subject only to light traffic.  These were autonomous vehicles, powered both by gasoline (it was the pre-diesel era in the US) and electricity and were an economical alternative for operators, being much cheaper to run than the combination of large locomotives & carriage cars, eminently suited to lower passenger numbers.  The concept may be compared with the smaller (often propeller or turbo-prop) aircraft used on regional & feeder routes where the demand wouldn’t make the use of a larger airliner viable.  Although the doodlebugs carried relative few passengers, their operating costs were correspondingly lower so the PCpM (passenger cost per mile) was at least comparable with the full-sized locomotives.  While it may be a myth, the story is that one rail employee described the small, stumpy rail car as looking like a “potato bug” and (as English informal terms tend to do) this morphed into the more appealing doodlebug.

Some assembly required: a doodlebug tractor with hydraulic pump-driven crane, the agglomeration dating from circa 1934.

Although the mechanical specification of each tended to vary as things broke and were replaced with whatever fell conveniently to hand or could be purchased cheaply, when discovered it included a 1925 Chevrolet gasoline engine, Ford Model T firewall and steering, Ford Model A three-speed manual transmission, Ford Model TT rear end and AM General HMMWV rear wheels and tires.  The "mix & match" approach was typical of the genre and it's doubtful many were for long exactly alike.

A doodlebug could also be a DIY (do it yourself) tractor.  During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the smaller-scale farmers in the US no longer had the capital (or access to capital) to purchase plant and equipment on the same scale as in more prosperous times but they needed still to make their land productive and one of the modern tools which had transformed agriculture was the tractor.  New tractors being thus unattainable for many, necessity compelled many to turn to what was available and that was the stock of old cars and pickup trucks, now suddenly cheaper because the Depression had lowered demand for them as well.  With saws and welding kits, imaginative and inventive farmers would crop & chop and slice & dice until they had a vehicle which would do much of what a tractor could and according to the legends of the time, some actually out-performed the real thing because their custom design was optimized for a specific, intended purpose.  What made the modifications possible in the engineering sense was that it was a time when cars and pick-ups were almost always built with a separate chassis; the bodies could be removed and it was possible still to drive the things and it was on these basic platforms the “doodlebug” tractors were fashioned.  They were known also as “scrambolas”, “Friday night specials” and “hacksaw tractors” but it was “doodlebug” which really caught on and so popular was the practice that kits were soon advertised in mail-order catalogues (the Amazon of the day and a long tradition in the rural US).  Not until the post-war years when economic conditions improved and production of machinery for civilian use resumed at full-scale did the doodlebug industry end.

1946 Brogan Doodlebug (right) with 1942 Pontiac Torpedo (left).

Although now what’s most remembered about the US cars of the post-war era are the huge and extravagantly macropterous creations, there were more than two dozen manufacturers in the 1940s & 1950s which offered “micro-cars”, aimed at (1) female drivers, (2) inner-city delivery services and (3) urban drivers who wanted something convenient to manoeuvre and park.  The market however proved unresponsive and as the population shift to the suburbs accelerated, women wanted station wagons (in many ways the emblematic symbol of suburban American of the 1950s) and the delivery companies needed larger capacity.  As the VW Beetle and a few other niche players would prove during that decade’s “import boom”, Americans would buy smaller cars, just not micro-cars which even in Europe, where they were for a time successful, the segment didn’t survive to see the end of the 1960s.  But there was the Brogan Doodlebug, made by the B&B Specialty Company of Rossmoyne, Ohio and produced between 1946-1950 although that fewer than three dozen were sold hints at the level of demand at a time when Detroit’s mass-production lines were churning out thousands of “standard sized” car a day.

1946 Brogan Doodlebug.

Somewhat optimistically (though etymologically defensible) described as a “roadster”, the advertising for the Doodlebug exclusively featured women drivers and it certainly was in some ways ideal for urban use (except perhaps when raining, snowing, in cold weather, under harsh sun etc).  It used a three wheeled chassis with the single wheel at the front, articulated so the vehicle could turn within its own length so parking would have been easy, the thing barely 96 inches (2440 mm) in length & 40 inches (1020 mm) wide; weighing only some 442 lbs (200 kg), it was light enough for two strong men to pick it up and move it.  Powered by either a single or twin-cylinder rear-mounted engine (both rated at a heady 10 horsepower (7.5 kW)) no gearbox was deemed necessary thus no tiresome gear levers or clutch pedals were there to confuse women drivers and B&B claimed a fuel consumption up to 70 mpg (US gallon; 3.4 L/100 km) with a cruising speed of 45-50 mph (70-80 km/h).  All this for US$400 and remarkably, it seems it wasn’t until 1950 (after some 30 doodlebugs had been built over four years) the cost-accountants looked at the project and concluded B&B were losing about US$100 on each one sold.  A price-rise was ruled out so production ended and although B&B released the Broganette (an improved three-wheeler with the single wheel at the rear which provides much better stability), it was no more successful and the company turned to golf carts and scooters which proved much more lucrative.  B&B later earned a footnote in the history of motorsport as one of the pioneer go-kart manufacturers.

Annotated schematic of the V-1 (left) and a British Military Intelligence drawing (dated 16 June 1944, 3 days after the first V-1 attacks on London (right). 

First deployed in 1944 the German Vergeltungswaffen eins (“retaliatory weapon 1” or "reprisal weapon 1” and eventually known as the V-1) was the world’s first cruise missile.  One of the rare machines to use a pulse-jet, it emitted such a distinctive sound that those at whom it was aimed nicknamed it the “buzz-bomb” although it attracted other names including “flying bomb” and “doodlebug”.  In Germany, before Dr Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945; Reich Minister of Propaganda 1933-1945) decided it was the V-1, the official military code name was Fi 103 (The Fi stood for Fieseler, the original builder of the airframe and most famous for their classic Storch (Stork), short take-off & landing (STOL) aircraft) but there were also the code-names Maikäfer (maybug) & Kirschkern (cherry stone).  While the Allied defenses against the V-1 did improve over time, it was only the destruction of the launch sites and the occupation of territory within launch range that ceased the attacks.  Until then, the V-1 remained a highly effective terror weapon but, like the V-2 and so much of the German armaments effort, bureaucratic empire-building and political intrigue compromised the efficiency of the project.

Belladonna

Belladonna (pronounced bel-uh-don-uh)

(1) In botany, a poisonous Eurasian perennial herb, Atropa belladonna, of the nightshade family, having purplish-red flowers and poisonous black berries (sometimes also called deadly nightshade).

(2) In clinical pharmacology, a drug from the leaves and root of this plant, containing atropine or hyoscyamine and related alkaloids; used in medicine to check secretions and spasms, to relieve pain or dizziness, and as a cardiac and respiratory stimulant; the alkaloids affect the nervous system by blocking the effects of acetylcholine.

(3) A female given name (now rare).

1590-1600: A compound word, from the Italian belladonna, from the Medieval Latin blādōna (nightshade) which may have been of Gaulish origin.  The construct was bella (a stantivization of the singular feminine form of the adjective bello (beautiful)), from the Latin bellus (beautiful, pretty, handsome, pleasant, agreeable, charming) + donna, from the Late Latin domna, a shortened variant of the Latin domina (lady, mistress of an estate or household), from dominus (master), from domus (home) and a doublet of dama (dame).  Belladonna is a noun and is capitalized if used as given name or as the taxonomic genus within the family Solanaceae–Atropa (this largely archaic except as a historic reference).

Vesicaire rempant: A print of Henbane-Belladonna, woodcut on laid paper by an unknown illustrator in Commentaires de M. Pierre Andre Matthiole medecin senois sur les six livres de Pedacion Dioscoride Anazarbeen de la matière médicinale (1572) by Dr Pietre Andrea Mattioli, published by Guillaume Roville of Lyon.

The belladonna plant seems first to have been so described by Italian physician Andrea Mattioli (1501–circa 1577) who used the form herba bella donna.  Dr Mattioli was a pioneer in botanical classification and a diligent scientist who admitted (and corrected) his errors although some of his research methods would today shock, the data he published documenting the effects of poisonous plants gained by testing them on prisoners languishing in various royal dungeons.  Apart from the value to botanists and students of medical history, his texts and the high quality artwork they included have provided much source material for social historians interested in matters as diverse as the dyes used in clothing and the produce regionally available to chefs; his texts contain the first documented evidence of tomatoes being grown in Europe.

Belladonna: Lindsay Lohan in "deadly nightshade" print fabric.

The term belladonna introduced to English by the London-based botanist John Gerarde (circa 1545-1612) who almost certainly acquired from one of Mattioli’s textbooks and quickly it seems largely to have displaced the native English forms used for the plant including dwale, (from the Old English dwola (connected with the Modern English “dull”)) & morelle (from the Old French morele, from the Latin morella (black nightshade)).  Gerarde’s epic-length (1484 page) Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), was one of the standard texts in English until well into the seventeenth century although it was later found substantially to be a plagiarised translation of Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597) by the Flemish physician Rembert Dodoens (1517–1585), a work translated into several languages in continental Europe.

Amaryllis Belladonna.

In eighteenth century Italian use, belladonna (literally "fair lady"), was understood to convey the meaning "beautiful woman" and, supposedly, the use in botany came from the cosmetic eye-drops women made from the juice (atropic acid) of the plant known in English as "deadly nightshade", the desired quality the property of dilating the pupils to create the alluring look young ladies desired.  The mid-nineteenth century explanation that it gained the nomenclature because it was used to poison beautiful women appears to have no basis in any European legal records and was likely a folk etymology alteration.  The Italian belladonna was certainly altered by folk etymology to bella donna (beautiful lady)) the original Medieval Latin being blādōna ("nightshade" and written variously as besulidus, belbulidus, belulidus or belhulidus), the meaning shift again motivated by the cosmetic use of nightshade for dilating the eyes and the authoritative German-Austrian Romanist and linguist Ernst Gamillscheg (1887-1971) suggested it was ultimately of Gaulish origin, the Italian botanist Luigi Anguillara (actually Luigi Squalermo, circa 1512-1570) using the spelling biasola.

Pulchra domina sed tribulation: (the Latin for "a beautiful woman but trouble").

In modern use, Italian men note the legend that the more beautiful the flower of a belladonna, the more deadly its poison although this has no documented basis in botanical study it's never been disproved (were such research possible) so, according to the scientific method, it's not impossible there may be a link.  Attracted by the logic of this, the folk tradition in Italy was more beautiful a woman, the more problems she’s likely to cause, nulla altro che guai (nothing but trouble) the common vernacular form although one probably often uttered in hindsight.  Belladonna is known to have been used for medicinal purposes since Antiquity although it was the use to enlarge the pupils by women in Renaissance Italy for which lent it the romance.  The more sinister name (deadly nightshade) hints at its other chemical role and the dark berries the plant yields were known variously as “murderer’s berries”, “devil’s berries” & sorcerer’s berries, many suggesting it was the poison in William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) Romeo and Juliet (1596) which made Juliet appear dead.  Things of course ended badly for the star-cross'd lovers but despite that belladonna remains in use as an ingredient in a number of medications, sold as a supplement and best known still for being in the drops used to dilate the eyes.

Romeo (Leonard Whiting (b 1950)) finds Juliet (Olivia Hussey (b 1951)) lying in a death-like coma after taking a potion, Franco Zeffirelli’s (1923–2019) production of Romeo and Juliet (1968).

Although so toxic that ingesting even a small quantity of its leaves or berries can be fatal (just a touch of the plant can irritate the skin), the medicinal benefits are real if the active chemicals (atropine & scopolamine) are correctly prepared and while there’s some overlap in their use, atropine as a muscle relaxant is more effective and useful also in regulating the heart rate.  In industrial applications it’s used as an antidote for insecticide poisoning and in chemical warfare agents.  Scopolamine has many sources apart from belladonna and is helpful in reducing body secretions, such as stomach acid and is an ancient sea-sickness treatment, thus the application to help with motion sickness, available in convenient skin patches.  Lethal though it can be, belladonna products are widely available as over-the-counter nutritional supplements in pump-sprays, ointments, tablets, and tincture (liquid).

Stationary & Stationery

Stationery (pronounced stey-shuh-ner-ee)

(1) Writing paper.

(2) Writing materials, as pens, pencils, paper, and envelopes.

(3) Any office related hardware (staplers, pencil sharpeners et al) or consumables (staples etc), a use technically incorrect by historic standards but widely used and understood in commerce. 

1727: From the Medieval Latin statiōnārius (station), used to describe a bookseller who had a fixed station (especially at universities) as distinct from the then more prevalent form of commerce which was peripatetic.  The construct of stationery was not station + ery but stationer (one who sell paper, pens, books etc from a fixed location) + -y.  Stationery is a noun & adjective & stationer is a noun; the noun plural is stationeries but stationers is more commonly used.

Reader's Digest Kids Letter Writer Book & Stationary Set, one of Lindsay Lohan’s early (in 1994, then aged seven) modelling jobs.    The original form (circa 1675) was "stationery wares", describing the books, pens, ink and such sold by a "stationer" who was someone with "a station" (as opposed to the them common itinerant vendor)) and, over time, popular usage saw stationery gain and retain its modern association.  So there's a reason why two words with slightly different spellings share the same pronunciation yet have meanings which at first glance appear to be unrelated.  Such linguistic quirks are not unique to English but the language does seem to have many which, even when explained, must seen strange to those learning the tongue.

The suffixes –ary, -ery and –y

The suffix –ary was a back-formation from unary and similar, from the Latin adjective suffixes -aris and –arius.  It created the adjectival sense “of or pertaining to” when applied to various words, often nouns, and was used most frequently with words of Latin origin but it’s long been more broadly applied.  In mathematics, it’s used to refer to results having the specified -arity (the maximum number of child nodes that any node in a given tree (data structure) may have).-ate

The suffix -ery was from the Middle English -erie, from the Anglo-Norman and Old French -erie, which is inherited from the Latin -arius and Latin –ator (a suffix forming abstract nouns).  The suffix first appeared  in loan words from the Old French into Middle English, but became productive within English by the sixteenth century, in some instances properly a combination of -er with -y as in stationery, bakery & brewery, but also as a single suffix in words like slavery & machinery.  Added to nouns, it could form other nouns meaning "art, craft, or practice of"; added to verbs it could form nouns meaning "place of an art, craft, or practice”; added to nouns it could form other nouns meaning "a class, group, or collection of"; added to nouns it could form other nouns meaning "behaviour characteristic of."

The suffix -y was from the Middle English –y & -i, from the Old English -iġ (the –y & -ic suffixes), from the Proto-Germanic -īgaz (-y, -ic), from the primitive Indo-European -kos, -ikos, & -iḱos (-y, -ic).  It was cognate with the Scots -ie (-y), the West Frisian -ich (-y), the Dutch -ig (-y), the Low German -ig (-y), the German -ig (-y), the Swedish -ig (-y), the Latin -icus (-y, -ic) and the Ancient Greek -ικός (-ikós); doublet of -ic.  It was added to nouns and adjectives to form adjectives meaning “having the quality of” and to verbs to form adjectives meaning "inclined to”; “tending towards".  The suffix remains productive in English and can be added to just about any word.  If the result is something perceived not to be a real word, a hyphen should be used to indicate it’s a deliberate attempt to convey a meaning rather than a spelling mistake.  A few long-established words ending with this suffix have distinctive spellings, such as wintry and fiery, which are often misspelled as wintery and firey although these mistakes are now so frequent that they’re likely to gain acceptance and there are special cases: "firey" is now widely used in slang as a noun to describe fire fighters.

Stationary (pronounced stey-shuh-ner-ee)

(1) Standing still; not moving.

(2) Having a fixed position; not movable.

(3) Established in one place; not itinerant or migratory.

(4) Remaining in the same condition or state; not changing.

1400–1450: From the late Middle English from the Latin word statiōnārius (surface analysis station) from statiō (a standing, post, job, position) ultimately from stō (to stand). Stō was a word-forming element used in making names of devices for stabilizing or regulating (eg thermostat), from the Ancient Greek statos (standing, stationary) from the primitive Indo-European ste-to-, a suffixed form of root sta- (to stand, make or be firm)  It was first used in heliostat (an instrument for causing the sun to appear stationary (1742)).  The late fourteenth century sense of "having no apparent motion" was in reference to planets and was derived from the Middle French stationnaire (motionless) also from the Latin statiōnārius; the meaning "unmovable" is from 1620s.  Not unusually, the meanings in later English and European languages evolved beyond the original; in Classical Latin, statiōnārius is recorded only in the sense "of a military station, the word for "stationary, steady" being statarius.  Stationary is a noun & adjective, stationariness is a noun and stationarily is an adverb; the noun plural is stationaries.  The most common appearance of stationary as a noun is probably as a misspelling stationary but it can be use (1) as a clipping of the description of a static version of something (stationary engine et al) or (2) of any person or object which is not moving (usually in the context of a contrast with surrounding people or objects which are moving) and (3) in historic astronomy, a planet or other heavenly body which apparently has neither progressive nor retrograde motion (now obsolete).  In the aerospace community, it may be that "geostationary" (of satellites) are sometimes casually referred to as "stationaries") but it seems not documented.

Stationary Engines

Engineers insist a “stationary engine” is one bolted or cemented in place, to remain there until (1) it blows up, (2) it’s scrapped or (3) it’s uprooted and moved to a new location where it can again function.  Stationary engines provided much of the horsepower (a calculation devised to define engine power) for the first industrial revolution in the eighteenth century, used to drive anything from generators & pumps to cranks moving parts of machines.  The classic example were the big reciprocating devices (steam or internal combustion) whereas the large scale electric plants or turbines tended (once reaching a certain size) to be classified as “plant”.  The development of the infrastructure to distribute electricity from regional hubs meant the used of stationary engines declined but they remain widely used and are a common sight in rural areas where they both pump water from a variety of sources and distribute it to irrigation systems.  There are also engines which technically are portable (some small enough to be carried by hand while others are mounted on trailers, trucks or even boats) but which often function as stationary devices and engineers regards such things always as “portable”, even if stationary for years.

A Chrysler Air Raid Siren being delivered (1953, left) and permanently installed (1960, right), atop the Rob Storms Rochester Fire Department maintenance building, Rochester, Monroe County, New York.  This was a stationary engine even while on the truck which it remained after being taken up to the roof and bolted down.  Had it remained on the truck (even if bolted to the chassis) and been driven from place to be run, it would have been classified a “portable engine”.

According to Guinness World Records, the loudest sirens ever were the 350-odd built by Chrysler for the US government in the early 1950s and installed around the country to warn of an impending nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.  The maximum volume the devices generated was recorded (at a distance of 100 feet (30.5 m)) as 138 decibels (dB), a level which meant a human would be deafened if within 200 feet (61 m) during their operation.  Guinness noted the compressor discharge throughput at peak volume was 74 m³ (2,610 cubic feet at 7 lb per square inch) of air per second and the physics of fluid dynamics (air a fluid in this context) was such that this would have caused a sheet of paper in the path spontaneously to ignite.  By comparison the now retired supersonic airline Concorde at take-off produced noise levels between 112-114 dB at a distance of 100 feet and even the after-burner equipped military jets (F-16, F-35 et al) haven’t been recorded as generating levels as high as 138 dB.  Although there were ebbs in the tensions, the “High Cold War” is regarded as the time between the early 1950s and mid 1960s, the public perception of which was dominated by the fear of nuclear war. The US government made many preparations for such an event, notably building vast underground facilities where essential personnel (members of the administration, the Congress and their families and servants) could live until it was safe to emerge into the post- apocalypse world).  The tax-payers who paid for these facilities were of course rather less protected but the government in 1952 did install warning sirens in cities; people might still be vaporized by comrade Stalin’s (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) H-Bombs but they would know it was coming so there was that.

The early version was co-developed by Chrysler and Bell Labs and named the Chrysler Bell Victory Siren which sounds optimistic but although the acoustic properties met the specification, the drawback was the devices were manually controlled and required someone physically to be there to start the thing and, being directional, rotate it so the sound would be broadcast 360^o.  The obvious flaw was that were there to be a nuclear attack in the area, the job-description was self-sacrificial, something comrade Stalin would doubtless have thought just the part of the cost of war with the unfortunate soul posthumously to be awarded the coveted Герой Советского Союза (Hero of the Soviet Union) decoration.  However, neither the White House or the Pentagon liked the optics of that and revised specifications were issued.  Chrysler responded with a more elaborate device which was automated and remotely administrated, the Chrysler Air Raid Siren introduced in 1952.  It was powered by the corporation’s new 331 cubic inch (5.4 litre) Hemi-head V8, rated at what was then a stellar 180 HP (134 kW), a three-stage compressor added to increase output.  Instead of demanding a potentially doomed operator, there was a control panel connected (with nothing more than the two-pair copper cables which became familiar as Cat3) to dedicated phone lines so it could be activated either by local civil defense authorities or the military.  The big V8 provided sufficient power to both increase the dB and the geographical coverage, the siren able to be heard over an area of some 15.8 square miles (41 km³), an impressive number given the electric sirens used today for tornado and tsunami warnings have an effective footprint of only some 3.9 square miles (10 km³).

Chrysler FirePower 392 cubic inch V8 in 1957 Chrysler 300C Convertible.

In 1952, there was no engine better suited to the task than Chrysler’s new “FirePower” V8.  Applying their wartime experience building a number of high-output, multi-cylinder engines (the most remarkable a V16 aero-engine rendered obsolete by jet technology before it could be used), the FirePower featured hemispherical combustion chambers and was the corporation’s first use of overhead-valves.  Both designs had been around for decades but in time, Chrysler would make a (trade-marked) fetish of “Hemi”, continuing cheerfully to use the name for a range of V8s introduced in 2003 even though they were no longer a true hemi-head, the design unable to be adapted to meet modern exhaust emission laws.  The so-called “third generation” Hemi remains available still although how long it will last will be a matter of the interplay of politics and demand.  Doubtless, it was Greta Thunberg’s (b 2003) hit-list and that she and the engine debuted in the same year would have impressed her not at all.  

Cavitation

Cavitation (pronounced kav-i-tey-shuhn)

(1) The formation of pits on a surface.

(2) In fluid dynamics, the rapid formation and collapse of vapor pockets in a flowing liquid in regions of very low pressure (associated especially with devices such as rotating marine propellers or the impellers used in pumps.

(3) Such a pocket formed in a flowing liquid; the formation of cavities in a structure.

(4) In biology, the formation of cavities in an organ (used originally to describe those appearing in lung tissue as a result of consumption (tuberculosis)).

1868: The construct was cavit(y) + -ation.  Cavity was a mid-sixteenth century borrowing from Middle French cavité or the Late Latin cavitās, from the Classical Latin cavus (hollow, excavated, concave), the construct being cav +‎-ity (the nominal suffix).  The suffix -ation was from the Middle English -acioun & -acion, from the Old French acion & -ation, from the Latin -ātiō, an alternative form of -tiō (thus the eventual English form -tion).  It was appended to words to indicate (1) an action or process, (2) the result of an action or process or (3) a state or quality.  Cavitation is a noun, cavitate, cavitated & cavitating are verbs and cavitatory & cavitatory are adjectives; the noun plural is cavitations.

The original use of cavitation dates from 1868 and appeared in the literature of human pathology, describing “the formation of cavities in the body”, especially those appearing in lung tissue as a result of consumption (tuberculosis).  The use in fluid dynamics (particularly pumps and marine engineering) emerged in circa 1895 although oral use may have predated this: the verb cavitate (to form cavities or bubbles (in a fluid)) documented since 1892 so it was either a back-formation from cavitation or the construct was cavit(y) + -ate.  The related verbs were cavitated & cavitating.  The suffix -ate was a word-forming element used in forming nouns from Latin words ending in -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as estate, primate & senate).  Those that came to English via French often began with -at, but an -e was added in the fifteenth century or later to indicate the long vowel.  It can also mark adjectives formed from Latin perfect passive participle suffixes of first conjugation verbs -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as desolate, moderate & separate).  Again, often they were adopted in Middle English with an –at suffix, the -e appended after circa 1400; a doublet of –ee.  The noun supercavitation was a creation of plasma physics and described an extreme form of cavitation in which a single bubble of gas forms around an object moving through a liquid, significantly reducing drag.  As observational technology & techniques improved, the form ultracavitation also appeared to describe instances where instances of the phenomenon meant drag tended as close to zero as was possible.

Cavitation is an interesting aspect of fluid dynamics but it’s studied because it’s something which can cause component failure in devices like the pumps used for liquid, fluid & gas which can have catastrophic consequences for both connected equipment and people in the vicinity and beyond.  Such components typically feature robust construction but cavitation is a function of sustained operation (often 24/7) at high speeds and some vulnerable parts may be heavy and the fragmentation at high velocity of a heavy, reciprocating mass is obviously a serious problem.  Technically, it’s the formation of vapour- or gas-filled cavities in a flowing liquid when tensile stress is superimposed on the ambient pressure and one novelty in the science of cavitation was in 2021 noted by researchers in an oncology laboratory.  Using a gassy, explosive bacteria to destroy cancer cells by bombardment, the strikes were observed to produce a brief sonoluminescence (in physics, the emission of short bursts of light from imploding bubbles in a liquid when excited by sound), the cavitation bubbles producing a brief flash of light as they collapsed.

In the specific case of “pump cavitation”, the problem typically occurs when a hydraulic pumps which pumps liquids suffers a partial pressure drop.  What the change in pressure can induce is the formation of air bubbles, leading to cavity creation.  Inside the pump, the pressure shift transforms the liquid into a vapor which is then converted back to liquid by the spinning impellers.  The air bubbles thus are constantly moving inside the housing and as they implode during pressure changes, the surfaces of the impeller are eroded and it’s the creation of these tiny cavities which can accumulate sufficiently to weaken the structure to the point of failure.  The issue particularly affects centrifugal pumps but can occur in submersible devices.

Lindsay Lohan enjoying the effects of fluid dynamics.

Although something identified by engineers in the nineteenth century, the exact nature of cavitation wasn’t fully understood until the application in the 1950s of high-speed photography and the mathematical models developed then were later confirmed as close to exactly correct by computer simulations later in the century.  What was found was two causes of cavitation : (1) Inertial Cavitation in which a shock wave is produced by the collapse of bubble or void present in a liquid and (2) Non-inertial Cavitation which is initiated when a bubble in a fluid undergoes shape alterations due to an acoustic field or some other form of energy input.  Also observed were two behaviors of cavitation: (1) Suction Cavitation induced by high vacuum or low-pressure conditions which reduce the flow of fluid, bubbles forming near the eye of an impeller eye; as these bubbles move towards the pump’s discharge end, they are compressed into liquid, and they will implode against the impeller’s edge and (2) Discharge Cavitation which occurs when the pump’s discharge pressure becomes abnormally high, altering the flow of fluid, leading to internal recirculation, the liquid becoming “stuck” in a pattern between the housing (and the impeller) thereby creating a vacuum which in turn creates the air bubbles which will collapse and cavitate the impeller.

Representation of fluid dynamics under specific resonant conditions.

In fluid dynamics, a flow becoming “stuck” is often something to avoid but an aspect of the behavior can be exploited and it was a specific instance of certain “resonant conditions” Chrysler’s engineers exploited in 1959 when designing their Sonoramic induction system.  The idea wasn’t new, the math explained as early as 1863 and in racing cars it had been used for years but what Chrysler did was make it a focal point.  Sonoramic was an implementation of Sir Isaac Newton's (1642–1727) first law of motion, more commonly known as the law of inertia: “An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion” and it’s the second part which was exploited.  During the intake cycle of an engine, the fuel-air mix flows through the intake manifold, past the intake valve, and into the cylinder, then the intake valve shuts.  At that point, the law of inertia comes into play: Because the air was in motion, it wants to stay in motion but can’t because the valve is shut so it piles up against the valve with something of a concertina effect.  With one piece of air piling up on the next, the air becomes compressed and this compressed air has to go somewhere so it turns around and flows back through the intake manifold in the form of a pressure wave.  This pressure wave bounces back and forth in the runner and if it arrives back at the intake valve when the valve opens, it’s drawn into the engine.  This bouncing pressure wave of air and the proper arrival time at the intake valve creates a low-pressure form of supercharging but for this to be achieved all variables have to be aligned so the pressure wave arrives at the intake valve at the right time.  This combination of synchronized events is known as the “resonant conditions”.

Representation of cavitation in mechanical gears.

The behavior in pumps is now well understood and both design parameters and maintenance schedules are usually cognizant of cavitation and its potential consequences.  However, instances remain not infrequent, especially when pumps are fitted into systems by non-specialists, the most common causes being (1) low fluid pressure, (2) insufficient internal diameter of suction pipes, (3) excessive distances between a fluid source and a pump’s impeller(s), (4) pumps being run at too high a speed (which may be within a manufacturer’s recommendations but inappropriate for the system in which it’s installed), (5) too many fittings added to a suction pipe and (6) debris intrusion (often a consequence of inadequate filter cleaning & maintenance).  Cavitation is a function of speed and in devices such as slow-speed propellers (such as those in many marine applications), cavitation is not an issue, thus the frequent use of light, efficient, thin blades.

Waterfall

Waterfall (pronounced waw-ter-fawl or wot-er-fawl)

(1) A steep fall or flow of water in a watercourse from a height, as over a precipice; a cascade of falling water where there is a vertical or almost vertical step in a river.

(2) A hair-style using long, loose “waves”.

(3) As “waterfall development”, “waterfall management” and “the waterfall model”, descriptions of product research & development (R&D) (especially in tech) including sequential stages, from conception and design through testing and implementation, hopefully to result in a final delivered product.

(4) Figuratively, any waterfall-like outpouring of liquid, smoke etc.

(5) In slang (originally US but now widespread), the action of drinking from a vessel without touching it with the lips (a sanitary precaution with shared vessels).

(5) In the smoking of weed, a particular design of bong.

Pre 1000: From the Middle English waterfal & waterfalle, from the Old English wæterġefeall (waterfall) and cognate with the Old Norse vatnfall, the West Frisian wetterfal (waterfall), the Dutch waterval (waterfall), the German Wasserfall (waterfall) and the Swedish vattenfall (waterfall).  The colloquial use to describe (1) a necktie, (2) a cravat, (3) a chignon (in hair-styling, a low bun or knot positioned at or close to the nape of the neck) or (4) a beard are now effectively extinct.  Waterfall’s synonyms in general use (though hydrologists are more precise) include cascade, cataract, sault (old Canadian slang more often used of river rapids) and the clipping falls.  Waterfall is a noun verb & adjective and waterfalling & waterfalled are verbs; the noun plural is waterfalls.

The construct was water + fall and the Modern English spelling appears to have been a re-formation from around the turn of the sixteenth century.  The noun “water” was from the Old English wæter (water), from the Proto-West Germanic watar, from the Proto-Germanic watōr (water), from the primitive Indo-European wódr̥ (water).  The verb “water” was from the Middle English wateren, from the Old English wæterian, from the Proto-Germanic watrōną & watrijaną, from the Proto-Germanic watōr (water), from the primitive Indo-European wódr̥ (water).  The noun “fall” was from the Middle English fal, fall & falle, from the Old English feall & ġefeall (a falling, fall) and the Old English fealle (trap, snare), from the Proto-Germanic fallą & fallaz (a fall, trap).  It was cognate with the Dutch val, the German Fall (fall) & Falle (trap, snare), the Danish fald, the Swedish fall and the Icelandic fall.  The verb “fall” was from the Middle English fallen, from the Old English feallan (to fall, fail, decay, die, attack), from the Proto-West Germanic fallan (to fall), from the Proto-Germanic fallaną (to fall).  It was cognate with the West Frisian falle (to fall), the Low German fallen (to fall), the Dutch vallen (to fall), the German fallen (to fall), the Danish falde (to fall), the Norwegian Bokmål falle (to fall), the Norwegian Nynorsk falla (to fall), the Icelandic falla (to fall), the Albanian fal (forgive, pray, salute, greet) and the Lithuanian pùlti (to attack, rush).

Two views of Niagara Falls:  Between June-November 1969 (left), a temporary dam was built to stem the usual flow so geological studies could be conducted to ascertain the condition of the rocks and assess the extent of erosion.  After rectification work was carried out, the temporary structure was dynamited, an event promoted as a tourist attraction.  In 1885 (right), the falls underwent one of its occasional freezes.  Usually, these are what hydrologists call "partial freezes" (of late there have been a few: 2014, 2017 & 2019), the only (almost) "total freeze" recorded in 1848 although that was induced by the accumulation of ice on Lake Erie which caused a "natural dam" to form, stopping the flow of water to the Niagara River.  It was this rather than a "total freeze" of the falls which caused the phenomenon.

Lindsay Lohan with waterfall, Guanacaste Gold Coast, Costa Rica, January 2016.

For most of us, we know a waterfall when we see one: it’s a point in a waterway (usually a river) where the water falls over a steep drop that is close to literally vertical.  However, among hydrologists, there’s no agreed definition about the margins such as when something ceases to rapids and becomes a waterfall, some insisting that what lay-people casually call “waterfalls” are really “cataracts” or “cascades”.  To most of us there to admire the view, it’s a tiresome technical squabble among specialists but among themselves they seem happy for the debate to continue and some have even suggested precise metrics which can be mapped onto any formation.

Wasserfall (Waterfall), the embryonic SAM

Wasserfall (project Waterfall) was an early SAM (surface to air missile) developed by the Nazi armaments industry.  Although never used, it was highly influential in the post-war years.  In his memoirs (Inside the Third Reich (1969)), Albert Speer (1905–1981; Nazi court architect 1934-1942; Nazi minister of armaments and war production 1942-1945) discussed both the weapons systems with which he as minister was usually in some way connected and the political in-fighting and inter-service rivalries which hampered their development.  Although his writings are not wholly reliable (there was much he choose not to say on his contribution to anti-Jewish measures and his knowledge of the holocaust), on industrial and technical matters historians regard his account as substantially accurate (if incomplete).  Interestingly, after reading in Spandau prison a smuggled copy of the memoir (Ten Years and Twenty Days (1958)) of Karl Dönitz (1891–1980; as Grand Admiral head of the German Navy 1943-1945, German head of state 1945) who had been a fellow prisoner for the first decade of Speer’s twenty-year sentence, without any sense of irony, he remarked in his (extensively edited) prison journal (Spandau: The Secret Diaries (1975)):

“Where he discusses military operations and the questions of armaments, the book is interesting and probably also reliable.  His political attitude, on the other hand, his relationship to Hitler, his childish faith in National Socialism – all that he either wraps in silence or spins a veil of sailor’s yarns.  This is the book of a man without insight.”

Speer re-invented himself by wrapping in veils of silence anything too unpleasant to admit and spun plenty of veils so appealing that for decades there were many who, for various reasons, draped them over his past.  He wasn’t a man without insight but compared with Dönitz, he had much more guilt to conceal and thus more need of selective silence & spin.

Speer regarded the regime’s failure to devote the necessary resources to the Wasserfall project as one of Adolf Hitler's (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945)  many strategic blunders which, by 1943, had made defeat inevitable.  Having delayed development of the revolutionary Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter (deployed at scale mass it would have been a devastating weapon against the Allied bomber fleets then laying waste to German cities and industry), Hitler took the decision to afford the highest priority to the A4 (better known as the V2) rocket to retaliate against English cities; psychologically, Hitler always wanted to be on the offensive and would later appal the experts by demanding the Me 262 be re-designed as a fast, light bomber.  As a delivery system the V2 was a decade ahead of its time and there was then no defense against the thing but it was a hugely expensive and resource-intensive way to deliver an explosive load under a tonne.  As Speer noted, even if it became possible to produce and fire the projected 900 a month, that would mean a daily bomb-load of some 24 tonnes falling on England and that at a time when the Allied bomber groups were on average dropping some 3000 tonnes a day on German targets.  Hitler wasn’t wrong in predicting the use of the V2 against civilian targets would have an effect well beyond the measure of the tonnage delivered and the historians who claimed the disruption to the allied war effort caused by the V1 (an early cruise missile) & V2 was “negligible” were simply wrong but to have been an effective strategic weapon, at least hundreds of V2s a day would need to have found their targets.

Captured blueprints and photographs from the Wasserfall project's development. 

Speer admitted he “…not only went along with this decision on Hitler's part but also supported it. That was probably one of my most serious mistakes.  We would have done much better to focus our efforts on manufacturing a ground-to-air defensive rocket.  It had already been developed in 1942, under the code name Wasserfall (Waterfall), to such a point that mass production would soon have been possible, had we utilized the talents of those technicians and scientists busy with [the V2] under Wernher von Braun (1912–1977).”

He added that von Braun’s team was employed to develop weapons “…for the army, whereas air defense was a matter for the air force.  Given the conflict of interests and the fierce ambitions of the army and the air force, the army would never have allowed its rival to take over the installations it had built up…”  The difference in resource allocation was stark, more than ten times the number of technical staff working on the V2 compared to Waterfall and other anti-aircraft rocket projects (such as the small Taifun (Typhoon)).  The attraction of the anti-aircraft rockets was obvious as Speer noted: “Waterfall was capable of carrying approximately six hundred and sixty pounds of explosives along a directional beam up to an altitude of fifty thousand feet and hit enemy bombers with great accuracy.  It was not affected by day or night, by clouds, cold, or fog. Since we were later able to turn out nine hundred of the offensive big rockets monthly, we could surely have produced several thousand of these smaller and less expensive rockets per month. To this day I think that this rocket, in conjunction with the jet fighters, would have beaten back the Western Allies' air offensive against our industry from the spring of 1944 on.  Instead, gigantic effort and expense went into developing and manufacturing long-range rockets which proved to be, when they were at last ready for use in the autumn of 1944, an almost total failure [a comment which, combined with Allied propaganda and disinformation, influenced for decades many post-war historians].  Our most expensive project was also our most foolish one. Those rockets, which were our pride and for a time my favorite armaments project, proved to be nothing but a mistaken investment. On top of that, they were one of the reasons we lost the defensive war in the air.”

Whether a mass-produced Waterfall would have been an effective weapon against the mass-bomber formations has divided analysts.  While the technology to produce a reliable directional mechanism had been mastered, what Germany never possessed was a proximity fuse which would have enabled the explosive charge to be triggered when a bomber was within range; instead the devices relied on impact or pre-set detonators.  Presumably, had other projects been suspended and the resources re-directed to Waterfall, mass production may have been possible and even if only partially successful, to disrupt a bombing offensive it was necessary only to inflict an ongoing 5-10% loss rate to make the campaign unsustainable.  Given the inevitable counter-measures, even that would likely have proved challenging but economic reality meant Waterfall probably did offer a more attractive path than the spectacular V2 and given the success in related fields, it was not impossible that had priority been granted, proximity fuses and other technical improvements may rapidly have appeared.  As it was, Waterfall (like Typhoon, Me 262, V2 and an extraordinary range of other intriguing projects) was the subject of a post-war race between the Russians, the Americans and the British, all anxious to gather up the plans, prototypes, and personnel of what were clearly the next generation of weapons.  As a proof of concept exercise Waterfall was convincing and within years SAMs were a vital component of defensive systems in most militaries.

The waterfall motif: Grill on the 1975 Imperial LeBaron Crown Coupe (left) and the Liebian International Building in China (right).

In design, "waterfall" can be a motif such as used for the grill on the 1975 Imperial LeBaron Crown Coupe.  It can also be literal and architects have many times integrated water-flows as an external design element but at 108 metres (354 feet) high, the one on the façade of the Liebian International Building in south-west China is easily the world’s tallest.  An eye-catching sight, the waterfall isn't run all that often (which must disappoint influencers who turn up with cameras ready) because it’s said to cost some 900 yuan (US$125) per hour just to pump the water to the top and, with the downturn in the property market, the building's revenues have fallen short of expectation.  When completed and displayed in 2016, the waterfall attracted some criticism on environmental grounds, water shortages far from unknown in China although the builders (Ludi Industry Group) pointed out the signature feature uses storm-water runoff, rainwater and groundwater, all stored in vast underground tanks.  It may for a while be the last example of exuberance to show up among China's skyscrapers, Xi Jinping (b 1953; general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and paramount leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 2013) in 2014 calling for an end to what he called "weird architecture".  Mr Xi thinks buildings should be "suitable, economic, green and pleasing to the eye" rather than "oversized, xenocentric & weird".  Those skilled at reading between the CCP's lines decided the president had called the architects "formalists".  They would have taken note.

On TikTok, a small but active community of those who find waterfalls mesmerizing post video clips.