Browsing: Science & Technology

A Brief History On October 14, 1938, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk made its first flight, leading to an eventual production run of 13,738 of the rugged fighters.  Although often referred to as “obsolete” at the beginning of World War II, and famously rejected by the British for combat in the Northern European theater, the plane flown by the Flying Tigers with its intimidating shark mouth paint job became one of the main Allied fighters of World War II.  (Previously, on November 6th we featured an article, The Hawker Hurricane: The Most Underrated Fighter Plane of World War II, and on…

A Brief History On September 29, 1940, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) experienced the most astounding incident of airplanes colliding in mid-air, becoming locked together, and then safely landing.  Incredibly, no crew member of either plane was killed! Digging Deeper At the RAAF No. 2 Service Flying Training School at Station Forest Hill, New South Wales, Australia (near Wagga Wagga if that helps), pilots and navigators learned to fly CAC Wirraway (single engine) and Avro Anson (twin engine) airplanes. The Anson was a derivation of the Avro 652 airliner, that served as a general purpose airplane before and during…

A Brief History On September 25, 1911, the French battleship, Liberté, joined the long, sad list of ships that managed to sink themselves without the benefit of an enemy to blame when she blew up while moored at Toulon harbor in the South of France. Digging Deeper Liberté was a pre-Dreadnaught type battleship, built in 1902 to 1908, already obsolete at her 1908 commissioning because of the revolutionary appearance of the British battleship HMS Dreadnaught in 1906.  Still, the Liberté  was an impressive ship with a displacement of nearly 15,000 tons and a length of 439 feet.  Capable of 19…

A Brief History On September 21, 1964, the XB-70 Valkyrie made its maiden flight at Palmdale, California.  The world’s first Mach 3 bomber, the Valkyrie was designed to outrace Soviet interceptors and drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union with impunity.  As it turned out, this concept became obsolete before the Valkyrie could be produced, and therefore it was not produced, saving US taxpayers a ton of money.  On previous September 7th’s we ran articles 10 Underperforming Weapons, 5 More Underperforming Weapons and Another 5 Underperforming Weapons.  On May 15th we featured an article on 10 Weapons and Weapon Systems…

A Brief History On September 20, 1893, Charles Duryea and his brother, J. Frank Duryea, tested their gasoline powered automobile, the first gasoline powered car in the United States.  Since that historic day, Americans have been building and buying cars and other motor vehicles like no other country on Earth.  Here today we list 10 Amazing Facts About American Cars, their history of manufacture, sales, performance and the like. Digging Deeper 1. First Ever Automobile, 1885-1886. Karl Benz of Germany came out with his Benz-Patent-Motorwagen a whopping 7 years before the Duryeas made the first American gasoline powered auto.  Benz used…