Thoughts du Jour

Rocky Smith

Jul 16

Tribute

Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot died recently at age 84. Lightfoot was plenty popular in the US, but a legend in Canada. He is best known for his stirring 1976 anthem The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, about a freighter that sank in Lake Superior in 1975. I featured that tune on this blog a while back.

At the end of the song is this refrain: In a musty old hall in Detroit, they prayed in the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral. The church bell chimed 'til it rang 29 times for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Actually, the chiming happened at the Mariners' Church of Detroit. And there, one day after Lightfoot's death, the church bell chimed 30 times. Nicely done.

Drainage

Isa Lake in Wyoming is a bifurcation lake, meaning it has two natural outflows. That's pretty weird for a lake, when you think about it. Even weirder, each outflow drains to a different ocean.

Isa covers about 12 square miles and sits atop the continental divide in Yellowstone National Park. The east end of the lake (located west of the divide) drains into the Lewis River, which loops west to the Snake and Columbia Rivers and then to the Pacific Ocean.

The west end of Isa (located east of the divide) drains into the Firehole River, which flows north to the Missouri River system and south to the Gulf of Mexico.

Gnarly.

Bertha Benz

Bertha Benz (1849-1944) was the wife and business partner of German automotive engineer Carl Benz (1844-1929). In 1886, their company (later to become Mercedes-Benz) patented the "Motorwagen," which is considered the first practical automobile. Bertha was enthusiastic about the possibilities, but Carl wasn't sure automobiles would be embraced by the public.

So Bertha took action. On August 5, 1888, after informing the press, but not Carl, Bertha drove a Motorwagen 65 miles from their home in Mannheim to her mother's residence in Pforzheim. Bertha was accompanied by her two teenage sons.

On the daylong trip, Bertha cleaned a blocked fuel line with a hatpin and made a leather brake pad when a wooden pad failed. On returning home a few days later, she instructed her team to add a third gear to the engine to help the vehicle climb hills.

Publicity about the trip brought worldwide attention to the Motorwagen, convinced Carl that autos might have potential after all, and got the company its first sales.