Do Elephants Jump?

by David Feldman

  It really wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that any serious scholarship into the archaeology, contemporary artwork, contemporary accounts, and analysis of historical records (such as probate estate inventories) of the Pilgrims enlightened us as to what they truly were wearing.

  We also heard from Carolyn Freeman Travers, research manager and historian for the Plimoth Plantation, a “living-history museum” in Plymouth, Massachusetts (“Plimoth” was the preferred spelling of William Bradford, the first governor of the colony). The Plimoth Plantation boasts a replica of the Mayflower, a re-creation of a Pilgrim village, arts and crafts, and no buckles. She dates the buckle-obsession to the early twentieth century, and thinks artists were the key perpetrators:

  The popular image of the Pilgrim developed in America about 1900 to 1920 into the man with the bowl-shaped haircut; tall, dark hat with the prominent square buckle; and large square buckles on his belt and shoes as well. The square buckles on the belt and shoes actually appear very frequently, and seem to mean quaint and “old-timey” — popular depictions of eighteenth-century people have them. Mother Goose, Halloween witches, and leprechauns generally do. The last often have the tall-crowned, narrow-brimmed hat with the buckle as well — it’s the green color of the clothing that sets them apart.

  Why turn-of-the-century artists chose the buckle as a hat ornament to mean the Pilgrims/Puritans, I don’t know. Earlier historical paintings of the mid-nineteenth century often had hats with a strap and buckle for Puritan men of the English Civil War. The famous 1878 painting by William Yeames, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, has a hat of this style, known as a sugar-loaf from the shape, with a strap and a buckle for the Puritan interrogator. There is also a similar hat in The Burial of Charles I (1857) by Charles W. Cope. My guess is that American painters looked to these paintings for inspiration, and went on from there.

  Buckles did adorn hats in the late seventeenth century, though. We corresponded with the manager and curator of Plymouth’s Pilgrim Hall Museum, Peggy Baker. Her museum features a cool Pilgrim-era felt hat processed from beaver furs that can be seen at www.pilgrimhall.org/beav_hat.htm. Baker concurred with our experts that buckles weren’t around in the early seventeenth century, but came into vogue later:

  Buckles on hats were a genuine style, however — just not for Pilgrims. It was a short-lived style in the later seventeenth century, a fad, if you will. Why would anyone put a buckle on his hat? Who can really understand the vagaries of fashion? Imagine trying to explain logically and rationally to an audience 300 years from now the costumes worn, for instance, by Britney Spears and her imitators?

  Who could explain those costumes right now?

  Baker agrees that artists are probably to “blame” for the buckle misconceptions:

  What happened, however, was that Victorian-era artists, illustrating the Pilgrims, were less interested in historical accuracy than in conveying the impression of “ye olde-timey.” They used the buckled hat to convey that impression and the image became “stuck” in the popular imagination.

  Submitted by Michael Goodnight of Neenah, Wisconsin.

  Who Are All Those People on the Sidelines During American Football Games?

  The action may be on the football field, but the traffic congestion is usually on the sidelines. In NFL games, but especially in big-college football schools, the area around the benches is teeming with as many people as Grand Central Station at rush hour. Who are all these guys? As Bob Carroll, executive director of the Pro Football Researchers Association puts it, the sidelines are full of

  …players, coaches, assistant coaches, equipment managers, towel boys, mascots, cheerleaders, officials holding the sticks, TV folks, photographers, police, alumni, anyone donating big bucks to the school, and a partridge in a pear tree.

  Restrictions on issuing credentials for access to the sidelines are surprisingly loose, especially in the pros. Faleem Choudhry, a researcher at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, told Imponderables that there isn’t a hard and fast rule limiting the number of sidelines personnel, or even visitors: “Anybody the team deems necessary can be there.” One team might want the electrician who supervises the lighting of the stadium to stay near the bench; another team might banish him to the stands.

  The problem of overpopulated sidelines is greater in the college ranks, and the Big 10, known for its impassioned football competition, is among the most restrictive conferences in regulating credentials. The Big 10 allows a maximum of forty credentials for the bench area of each team, including all of the absolutely essential non-playing personnel, such as coaches, trainers, and physicians. According to Cassie Arner, associate sports information director of the University of Illinois, the bench area has a dotted line 50 yards long around it, usually starting at one 25-yard line and running to the other 25-yard line. The bench area zone does not extend all the way back to the stands, so cheerleaders and other credentialed personnel (in some cases, marching bands, press, and security) can stay behind the bench zone.

  Here’s how Arner estimates the University of Illinois allocates its credentials:

  Ten to fifteen coaches

  Approximately ten team managers (whose jobs range from handling balls to charting statistics for the team)

  Five full-time equipment managers, who are responsible for mending damaged paraphernalia

  Ten to fifteen trainers, of whom perhaps five are full-time doctors

  The rest are student assistants there to get water, help with taping of bandages, and other relatively unskilled tasks

  But other folks somehow manage to creep down to the bench area as well. In this category, Arner includes the team chaplain, security, and occasionally someone from the event management or operations department of the school. But the University of Illinois does not issue credentials for alumni. Occasionally, a big donor or a dignitary from another team might be brought down to the “forty zone” during timeouts or at the quarter breaks. An occasional “honorary coach” is given credentials — usually a professor from the university who has helped with recruiting.

  Tom Schott, sports information director at Purdue University, concurs with his Illinois counterpart, although it sounds like Purdue is a little looser in issuing credentials. As he says, “It’s really up to the school’s discretion, except for the forty in the bench area.” On occasion, Purdue will issue a sideline pass to a former player or corporate bigwig, expecting them not to crowd the bench area. Schott observes:

  If the school has corporate deals with companies, they may ask for sideline passes. We’re pretty frugal with those but they do exist. Officials have the final say and if they think the visitors are getting too close to the sidelines, they’ll push them back.

  As long as participants in the game are not being harassed or distracted, the NCAA and NFL don’t want to get involved in regulating the population flow on the sidelines. And even if the colleges don’t like having to turn down entreaties for sideline passes, sometimes the alternative is worse. Case in point: Purdue. Schott remarks:

  For years we weren’t very good in football so there wasn’t much demand for sideline credentials. Now that we’ve gotten good, there are more requests.

  Submitted by Rachel Rehmann of Palo Alto, California.

  Why Do Crickets Chirp at Night? What Are They Up to During the Day? And Why Does It Seem That Crickets Chirp More in the Summer?

  The answer seems obvious: Crickets chirp at night because that’s when we’re trying to sleep. But perhaps our application of Murphy’s Law (the Imponderables Corollary: “All acts of nature can be explained by their ability to annoy us to the maximum extent”) isn’t what is uppermost in crickets’ minds. Come to think of it, very little is likely to be uppermost (or bottommost) in crickets’ minds.

  Crickets chirp at night because that’s when they are most active. Most cricket species — and there are about 100 just in North America — are nocturnal. They come out at night to find their two most pressing needs: food and c
rickets of the opposite sex.

  During the day, crickets are relatively dormant, hiding from predators beneath rocks, in the grass or trees, or in soil crevices. By lying low when the sun shines, they are hoping to avoid confrontations with small owls, snakes, mice, frogs, raccoons, opossums, and other creatures that might try to hunt them for food.

  Most entomologists believe that only male crickets chirp. They chirp by rubbing the two covers over their long wings together by using what is usually called the “scraper and file” technique. The cricket lifts one wing cover to a forty-five-degree angle (the scraper) and rubs the front end of it against the other wing cover (the file). Specialized veins in the wing covers make this possible: the file surface is rough while the scraper is relatively sharp. Crickets are “ambidextrous chirpers” — each wing can serve as both the scraper and file, and commonly crickets will switch off, presumably to prevent fatigue and excess wear on the file. The chirping sound will be the same regardless of which wing cover is used, but different species of crickets can be identified by slight differences in their “songs.” The cricket is so famed for chirping that its name is of “echoic” origin (cricket is derived from the Old French criquet, an attempt to echo the chirping sound of the insect).

  The primary purpose of chirping seems to be to attract female crickets. As Blake Newton, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky put it:

  Only males chirp, and they do so to attract females. This helps the females find the males. It is a big world out there for dating crickets!

  Since each species creates a slightly different song, a female cricket of one species will not be attracted to a cricket from the wrong side of the tracks. Females are more active at night. Like their male counterparts, they are hiding from male predators during the day, and according to David Gray, biologist at California State University, Northridge, they are also busy laying most of their eggs in the daytime.

  But sex isn’t the only thing on a chirping cricket’s mind. David Pickering, owner and webmaster of Chamowners Web (http://chamownersweb.tripod.com/), a site devoted to chameleons and crickets, wrote to Imponderables: “There are special songs for courtship, fighting, and sounding an alarm.”

  Chirping in the nighttime confers several other advantages to crickets regardless of what they are seeking when they sing, as Blake Newton elaborates:

  I can speculate that the special calmness of the night would allow the sounds of a chirping male cricket to emanate equally without distortion from the source. The chirps of the males not only attract females of the same species, but repel other males, thus resulting in distributing males in a way that would increase the mating success of females in the population.

  Sound travels best when the air is calm, so nighttime is the right time for crickets. As anyone trying to sleep when crickets are chirping can attest, they can be quite loud. Cricket chirps have been known to travel over a mile in ideal conditions, but some crickets aren’t content to leave their range to the vagaries of weather. In some cricket species, the wing itself acts as an amplifier; others burrow into long holes in the ground and chirp while inside, creating the kind of tunnel effect that echoes and augments the volume.

  Entomologists used to believe that chirping was crickets’ only way of communicating with one another, but we know now that they are capable of vocalizing. The sound generated is so high-pitched that humans are incapable of hearing it. The vocalizations seem to be some form of male bonding (female crickets don’t seem to “talk”), perhaps a way of one male to tell another male of an impending predator.

  Blake Newton mentions that the time of day or night that crickets chirp seems to be species-specific: Some species of crickets do chirp primarily when the sun shines. Captive crickets, such as those studied by entomologists in laboratories, are apt to chirp at any time, but with a definite bias toward the nighttime.

  And yes, crickets do have a preference for hot weather. They do chirp more in the summer. When the weather gets cold, crickets not only stop chirping, they stop moving! Like other insects, crickets are cold-blooded. When the temperature rises, their metabolism increases, and the scraping of their wing covers is faster — so they chirp faster on hotter nights than cooler ones.

  The relationship between chirping rate and temperature is so established that it is common folk wisdom to count chirps in lieu of consulting a thermometer. Just count the number of chirps from a cricket in fifteen seconds, and then add forty to that number. The sum is supposedly the current temperature in degrees Fahrenheit!

  Submitted by Alexei Baboulevitch of Mountain View, California.

  How Do They Put the Hole in the Needle of a Syringe?

  Needles are used to poke patients. But are needles poked to create the holes through which the vaccine is pumped into our veins? The answer is a resounding no. As Jim Dickinson, president of K-Tube Corporation, wrote us:

  I have been involved with making the stainless-steel tubing used for hypodermic needles for the past thirty-four years, and the question about how the hole is put in this tube has been asked many times. The secret about the hole is that we don’t put it in after, but before!

  How? The answer comes from Michael A. DiBiasi, a senior mechanical engineer at medical supply giant Becton-Dickinson, who proudly asserts, “I am the guy who, among other things, puts the hole in the needle.”

  The stainless steel “needle” part of the syringe is more commonly referred to as the “cannula,” and the “hole” that has aroused your curiosity is called the “lumen.” Cannulae are produced from large rolls of stainless steel strip stock. Depending upon the size requirements of the finished product, which is dictated by its intended use, the strip stock could be about as wide and as thick as a piece of Wrigley’s chewing gum, and may range down to about the width and thickness of one of the cutting blades in a disposable, twin-bladed razor.

  The steel strip is drawn through a series of dies that gradually form the strip into a continuous tube. As the tube closes, the seam is welded shut and the finished tubing is rolled up onto a take-up reel. In this manner, the entire roll of flat steel is converted into a continuous roll of tubing. At this point, the tubing may be anywhere from about the diameter of a common wooden writing pencil, to about the diameter of an ink pen refill tube.

  Next, the tubing is drawn through a series of tiny doughnut-shaped dies that further reduce its diameter while stretching the material, which thins the cross section of the tubing wall. Depending upon the desired target thinness of the cannula, and the physical properties required of the finished product, this process may or may not be accomplished using heat. In general, cannula tubing that is to be used for injecting liquids into the body may be produced with an outside diameter of about thirteen-thousandths of an inch, with a wall thickness of about three-thousandths or finer. Thus, the lumen may be as small as six- or seven-thousandths of an inch.

  When all of the reduction processes are complete, the tubing is fed onto another take-up reel for transportation to one of several machines which cut the cannula stock into specific lengths for the next operation — point grinding [the point of the needle is chiseled or filed until the point is at its proper degree of sharpness].

  As the stainless steel tube is pulled and lengthened by the dies, the dies create a bright, mirrorlike finish on the outside of the needle. The seam where the cylinder was welded together when the sheet metal was rolled into a tube all but disappears during this stretching and polishing process.

  Even with changes in the production of needles, the holes prevail, as Jim Dickinson explains:

  The most recent technology uses a laser to weld a very thin stainless steel jacket around the hole, where in older processes electric welding required a thicker jacket. Once the hole has been jacketed, we then make it smaller and smaller by squeezing the jacket down around it.

  When we squeeze the hole it elongates, but try as we can, we have never been able to squeeze it completely out of the jacket. In other words, we have never bee
n able to close the hole.

  Submitted by Matt Lawson of Tempe, Arizona. Thanks also to Ray Kelleher of Spokane, Washington; and Gregory Medley of Tacoma, Washington.

  Why Do FM Frequencies End in Odd Tenths?

  All numbers are not created equal. Even numbers have cachet, while odd numbers are the black sheep of the integer family. And if there is a numerical caste system, fractions are at the lowest rung, always subject to being rounded off to the next whole number. Maybe this explains why more than ten Imponderables readers wrote to ask why U.S. FM frequencies end in odd fractions.

  When the Federal Communications Commission moved FM radio to its current location in 1945, it placed the FM band between the television channel 6 (82 MHz through 88 MHz) and the Federal Aviation Administration frequencies (108 MHz through 136 MHz). Each station was allocated two-tenths of a megahertz (100 kHz on each side of its frequency) to avoid interference with adjoining station. The FM band was divided into 100 channels, starting at channel 200 (88.1) and ending at channel 300 (107.9).

  Robert Greenberg, the late assistant chief of the FM branch, audio services division, of the Federal Communications Commission, wrote to Imponderables:

  Since each channel is 200 kHz wide, the center frequency could not start right on 88 MHz, because it would overlap into television channel six’s spectrum and cause interference to channel six. Similarly, the same reason holds true at the high end of the FM band. To protect FAA frequencies starting above 108 MHz, the carrier frequency for the channel 300 would have to be below 108 MHz.