October 17 has been a bad day to be in London. In 1091, of all things, a tornado touched down. The city was a great deal less impressive in 1091 than it is now, but it did have a London Bridge — which the tornado demolished. It also destroyed the St. Mary-le-Bow church and about 600 houses. Everything in the city was built out of wood in those days, but possibly because of the tornado incident, when the structures were rebuilt, there was a great deal more stonework.
The Bow Church, though, hadn’t seen the last of it. The one that’s still standing is the second rebuild. That was built after the post-tornado version was destroyed again in the Great Fire of 1666. That fire didn’t occur on October 17, but on this day in 1814 there was a notable flood in London. It was notable mostly because it was a flood of beer. The Horse Shoe Brewery used wooden vats 22 feet high to ferment their beer, and one of them burst. It caused a chain reaction rupturing other vats and barrels, and somewhere around 300,000 gallons of beer flooded the whole area.
Just like the architects of London after the tornado, the brewery — which got going again and stayed in business until 1966 — abandoned wood for construction after that. Just three years later, on October 17, 1817, another lesson in durable building materials appeared when in Egypt, the tomb of Pharoah Seti I was discovered. The place was thousands of years old, and there wasn’t a stick of wood in it.
Marconi’s first transatlantic wireless communications service began on October 17 in 1907. Luckily for both Marconi and his customers, the practice of trying to make antennas out of wood had ended years before.
You can’t make much use of wood when you’re working on atomic power, either. Albert Einstein was already well aware of that on October 17, 1933, the day he left Germany for the US. And luckily, those lessons were still remembered on the same date in 1956 when the first commercial nuclear power plant was opened. I say “luckily” with a particular eye to London; the plant was opened in England, and wasn’t all that far from the city.
In the 1990s, England started to privatize the railways around the country. A company called Railtrack was formed to take over all the tracks, signaling systems, bridges, and the like. Although a lot of the infrastructure included wood for things like station houses and railroad ties, the tracks themselves were, obviously, metal. But even metal needs maintenance — which the privatized system ignored because of the expense, leading to the Hatfield Crash on October 17, 2000. A section of track far overdue for replacement failed because of metal fatigue, derailing a passenger train.
You’ve got to be concerned with metal fatigue — not to mention other maintenance rules — if you’re going to use machines to perform ridiculously dangerous stunts. Things like jumping over cars, buses, or, for that matter, canyons in the desert. You’re probably already thinking of Evel Knievel, and you’re right — today is his birthday.
He was pretty famous in the 1970s and 80s, but when his attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon failed, he faded from the headlines. It seemed like his career had jumped the shark — which is ironic, because in 1977 he attempted a jump over a tank full of sharks. That jump failed too, but it was the inspiration for an episode of “Happy Days” the same year. The character Fonzie, on waterskis, jumped over sharks. That’s where the phrase “jump the shark” came from. At least Fonzie wasn’t trying to water-ski on a flood of beer.
