For years, people accepted the fact that various injuries (and I’m sure even death) were simply a hazard of handcranked car engines. When the president of Cadillac had a friend die because of an infection caused by a broken jaw while trying to start a Cadillac, he put the company on a crash program to develop a safer way to start cars. No doubt someone would have eventually come up with the electric starter sooner or later, but that’s not what happened. I’m wondering how many other inventions came about in a similar manner. You know, everyone accepts the hazard of something just fine, until a friend or relative of someone rich and powerful gets killed or seriously injured, and then suddenly a solution to the problem “must” be found.
There’s also the very common related phenomenon of friends and relatives of victims of a disease becoming active in raising funds to fight that disease.
I wonder if it’s such a bad thing.
On the surface, it is a bad thing, as it seems very selfish and hypocritical. I remember an Australian comedy sketch show of the 90s (D Gen for the locals) did a spoof of a TV news broadcast. In the little screen over the newsreader’s shoulder was THE DEATH-O-METER:
Death-o-meter: 0
“Good evening. Three people were killed today in a head-on collision north-west of Melbourne…”
- “KA-CHING!” Death-o-meter: 3*
“A house fire has claimed the lives of a family of four on the outskirts of Sydney…”
“KA-CHING!” Death-o-meter: 7
“To overseas news now, and a flood has killed approximately 75 000 people in Bangladesh…”
“KA-CHING!” Death-o-meter: 16
“…of course, those are the racially-adjusted figures. To sport now…”
Seriously though, human beings are designed to live in tiny universes (village level). We’re not mentally equipped to process all the bad news we can now receive courtesy of global information transfer. So we block it out. If there is a mechanism that makes us more sympathetic and more willing to do something, then that mechanism can only be a good thing. It sure might not seem to be on the surface, though.
If it were something like say, seatbelts, I could understand it taking so long for someone to come up with a better solution, since it’s fairly rare that people have car accidents, so the idea might not occur to them, but cranking a car over by hand is something that you’d have to do every time you wanted to start the car, and it wasn’t always an easy task, so you’d think that some automotive engineer, after suffering through a particularly troublesome effort to get a car started would say, “There has got to be a better way!” and come up with something.
“The death of one person is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.”
I don’t know who said that first.
I had no idea they were dangerous. I dated a girl for a few years whose father was the president of an antique cars club, and I’m pretty sure all of his antiques were crank-started. What is the danger?
By the way, TheLoadedDog, that sketch is very funny but sadly true. Nobody I know gave a damn when the tsunami hit in December of 2004, and I bet that 4 or out 5 of my co-workers would not remember it if you asked them about it today.
Isn’t pretty much all modern medical care for premature infants due to the death of a Kennedy baby? I mean, sure there’s been a whole lot of R&D since, but they were the first to look at the problem after losing their own child and go, “Dammit! There has to be something we can do instead of just accepting that a premature baby will die, period!” But I don’t know which specific machines, medicines or techniques were invented as a direct result of their money, just that basically everyone in my NICU says that without the Kennedy baby, they’d just be on death watch like in the bad old days.
Personally, I’m pretty grateful that someone with the clout and financial wherewithall came to that realization, although of course I wish it could have happened without their baby dying.
A couple of things can happen, one is that the engine can catch suddenly, and in just the right manner, that the crank handle will continue around at a high rate of speed, and any body parts in the way will be at risk of being mangled. Another is that engine will misfire and reverse which can catch the cranker in a bad position, giving them at the very least a nasty knock. I doubt if your ex’s father is in much danger, though. A well maintained hand cranker is less likely to do this than one that would be driven on a daily basis, I’ve also seen tricks in reprints of old articles on how to modify the crank so there’s less of a danger of you getting hurt, and no doubt someone who collects those cars would have knowledge of the tricks.
If you’ve seen films of someone starting a plane by spinning the prop, then you’ll have some idea of what the risks of cranking a car by hand are.
Isn’t this the genesis of the old saw, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”?
Old cars used a manual spark advance. There is a lever on the steering column that advances and retards the spark. When the engine is running normallly the spark is advanced so that it fires just before top dead center of the piston motion. If you don’t retard the spark before cranking the engine will kick back in the reverse direction, usually breaking an arm or a thumb.
Stalin?
One of those mass-murdering fuckheads anyway.
That is also why you would never crank an engine by just grabbing the crank. You would always tuck your thumb inside, otherwise you went from maybe getting hurt to definitely getting hurt.
I had forgotten that.
On the other hand, it provides a good mechanism for focussing effort where it’s needed the most. If there’s some rare disease that afflicts 1 in 10 million people, there aren’t going to be very many people personally affected by it, so there won’t be much effort expended on it. But if you have something that strikes 1 in 100, or 1 in 10, then a lot of people will be affected by it, and be moved to put their resources to work against it. Clearly, it’s a greater good for those common hazards to be addressed, than the rarer ones, and the human tendancy to react personally to tragedies helps ensure that this greater good will be served.
I only know that because of some very old machinery on the farm back in Kansas where I spent many a summer growing up. But it was one of the first lesson my father taught me about machinery: it bites. 
A variation on this theme that irks me to death is when the friend or relation of some political bigshot – or the bigshot him/herself – suffers from abuse at the hands of some government system. Only then does the problem become real and need to be fixed. Like all those little people who complained about the broken traffic light, or the do-nothing agency, or the abusive cop had nothing better to do with their time than file grievances.
I remember seeing a cartoon that depicted a bunch of germs in combat gear, preparing to descend upon an unsuspecting town. The “commander” of the germs is issuing last minute instructions: “And remember, whatever you do, don’t infect any celebrities!”
But isn’t the point that people tend to react to small numbers of personal tragedies far more than massive disasters a long way away?
Also if a rich + powerful person is affected, more will usually be done than if lots of poor people are suffering?
I was reading a while back about the founder of a company that sells tough denim trousers. Maybe it was L.L. Bean himself. He had received the occasional complaining letter from cowboys about the crotch rivet, but he didn’t do anything about it. Then one night, on a camping trip, the old boy squatted down next to the campfire to tinker with the logs. Suddenly, he understood exactly what the cowboys were complaining about. :eek: When he got back to work, he ordered the crotch rivet discontinued.
I was reading a while back about the founder of a company that sells tough denim trousers. Maybe it was L.L. Bean himself. He had received the occasional complaining letter from cowboys about the crotch rivet, but he didn’t do anything about it. Then one night, on a camping trip, the old boy squatted down next to the campfire to tinker with the logs. Suddenly, he understood exactly what the cowboys were complaining about. :eek: When he got back to work, he ordered the crotch rivet discontinued immediately.