Wing Warping
It’s Sunday morning and one of the best times to catch up on interesting stories of various kinds on TV. The habit most of us have these days is a cable news habit, which is prone to drilling down on the hot issues of the moment, trying sometimes too hard to make something out of very little or nothing. Hopefully, you are watching a cable channel that does not use that drill down as an opportunity to distort fact (as clearly I feel Fox News tends to do), but rather to gain perspective and meaning to events. Nevertheless, even the most faithful cable news reporting tends to get wearisome as the pundits analyze the event, which may have no more distinguishing reality than that it just happened, to the point of overkill. That’s what makes Sunday morning and the types of shows that have proliferated, so much more interesting. Some would call the Sunday morning shows “fluff” since they are less about hard news and more about human interest, but I would contend that it is human interest which moves the world further forward than any single news factoid.
This morning there was a piece on the CBS Sunday Morning show about a young policewoman who lost her life in the line of duty. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, there were 649 officers who died in what is defined as the line of duty in 2021. To be fair, 72% of those or 467 were from COVID, which can be argued as either line of duty related or incidental, but that does not change the fact that many deaths occurred violently from gunfire, stabbing, vehicular assault, or other forms of job-related violence. Being a police officer is a dangerous occupation to be sure and it is hard at any moment to say that the rewards of the profession are commensurate with the risks. In today’s world the accusations of police brutality are so quick to arise, rightly or wrongly, that it must create at least some degree of hesitation in reaction time which adds to the death toll. It can be argued that native reaction, if properly grounded should not lead to impairment, but that belies the vagueness of the morality of what is right and wrong in complex situational ethics settings.
Seara Burton was a police officer in Richmond, Indiana. She was shot in the line of duty on August 10th and died 39 days later of those wounds. Seara Burton was much beloved in her community. It seems she was less a police officer and more an officer of the peace. Her care and concern for the homeless of Richmond has become the subject of national awareness because of one simple act. One day after her death, a member of the homeless community walked into the police station where she served and left an envelope with a donation of eight crumpled one dollar bills and a note. The note simply said “From the people of the street.” These people, who have so little in our society were not beyond acknowledging with a huge portion of their meager wealth, how much the touch of human kindness can mean in a world where the harsh realities of survival are present each and every day. That single act of respect of a caring person is reverberating in donations for the homeless in ways that all the fundraising Seara could have done if she were alive could not have done. It is reminiscent of the story a few years ago of the homeless man who gets a $100 windfall and uses the money to help out his fellow homeless souls rather than feather his own simple nest. These are the stories that should change our lives on a Sunday morning.
After the Sunday shows end and before I sort out whatever else I am want to do on a Sunday in the fall, I turn on a show about the great inventions of the last century. I admit to being a bit of a science nerd when it comes to inventions and how things work and I love engaging on what aspects of creativity have led to the most profound changes in the collective life of mankind. One of the most interesting aspects of that exercise is in thinking about how the good and the bad of invention have been balanced by mankind. The obvious example is always with the invention of gunpowder or simply guns. The arguments in favor of the invention have to do with exploration and conquering the wilds of the world in favor of the expansion of human habitation. The negatives perhaps overwhelm the positives with the turning of those weapons from the general natural world onto the human world whether in “organized” conflicts like wars or random conflicts like drive-by shootings. A broader assessment might even challenge the goodness of the original intent of taming the wilds given the extent to which humankind has undone the balance of nature through his obliteration of species or just the denuding of the planet’s resources to the point of global sustainability crisis. Even those of us who are decidedly anti-gun probably allow that guns have a place in the world and we too might well be argued against in that broader contextualization.
The problem is that the same can be said for almost every great invention of mankind. If every cloud has a silver lining, then every ray of sunshine has a melanoma which it equally generates. It is said that few inventions have added more to man’s progress than the internal combustion engine and we all certainly know the pro and con arguments to that beast. One invention that is sometimes credited with greater impact than the ICE is the Haber-Bosch process for synthesizing ammonia. The reasoning is that the only way we could have fed a burgeoning world population that has grown four-fold in the last century was through dramatic increases in agricultural output, which was only possible with the fertilizer that the ammonia from Haber-Bosch made possible. The Haber-Bosch process uses something called methane-steam-reforming, which basically uses hydrocarbons from which it extracts hydrogen to make ammonia and guess what it releases into the atmosphere? Yep, both methane and carbon dioxide, aka Greenhouse Gases….in vast quantities.
So, on this morning’s show they were talking about the Wright brother’s invention of the first viable airplane in 1903. The Wright brothers were struggling with the concepts that underlie aviation, trying to find the balancing points between lift, drag, thrust and yaw. The biggest problem the brothers struggled with was how to make the plane bank turn. By observation of flying hawks, they noted the flexibility of the wing configuration during the banking and came up with the idea of what they called wing warping or twisting. But when that happened, the plane would tend to yaw to one side or the other. In order to prevent yawing of the plane when there was an uneven force on the “warped” wings, they had to find a solution. What they found and what made stable flight possible was to create a countervailing and equilibrating force with a flexible rudder (rudders had been theretofore fixed). This solved the problem and the Wright brothers were able to take off from Kitty Hawk. The interim solution of wing warping was overcome by the ultimate solution of rudder manipulation.
And that’s how it goes with everything in life. It’s all a game of Newtonian physics (specifically Newton’s Third Law of Physics) with each action giving rise to an equal and opposite reaction. The Wright brothers were governed by the same physical laws and needed to deal with wing warping. Seara Burton had a job to do and she not only did it, she did it while showing concern for her fellow man, not regardless of but because of their impaired circumstances. Both found a way to soar to the heavens on mended wings and both kinds of actions with their equal and opposite reactions have changed the world for the better.