Garbage in books
Sometimes things people write in books just take your breath away. Makes you doubt the essential facts of life, or even your own history.
I have had two cases in the last two years. I am still gasping from the most recent.
Last year I was browsing our local bookshop and there was an Encyclopedia of Trains. Flicking through the pages I found myself looking at the Flying Scotsman (Loco, not train.) The book claimed that the Flying Scotsman was the official first loco to travel at 100 mph. I happened to know it is not so. In the UK at least the first loco accepted to have done 100 mph (although only checked on stopwatch, the usual standard of the day) was City of Truro. I know for sure it was not the Flying Scotsman as Alan Pegler told me so. He owned her for several years and he was my stepfather at the time. You would think a supposed authority could get it right in an encyclopedia, wouldn’t you?
OK, so you think that is bad?
Yesterday I was browsing again and found a book about “How structures fail”or something like that by a chap called Eberhard who claims to be a professor of chemistry and something else ( sorry, lousy memory.) In one chapter he was discussing fighters. According to him wooden planes were very good structures although they were more prone to catching fire than metal planes which almost never caught fire unless they were hit directly in the fuel tank. An example, he said, that not many people knew, was the famous plane that won the battle of Britain and was composed entirely of wood, the Spitfire, as was the Japanese Zero.
Well blow me down with a feather, I never knew that.