From: CLIFF JUDKINS
Sent: Saturday, May 20, 2023 10:45 AM
To:
Subject: "Friday Pilots" - A Poem
This is from a Martin Baker friend…read all the way through the message.
I received this poem, in the style of
17th century poet John Donne, by a retired Navy Captain aviator friend which I
think is excellent.
THE FRIDAY
PILOTS
Amidst the din of yonder tavern's room,
Where youthful souls seek solace from the gloom,
A brotherhood of elders, brave and wise,
Together gather, retell stories, sighs.
Our battles fought in heavens far above,
United by a bond of deepest love,
We, Friday Pilots, now on Earth reside,
And in these humble meetings, joy we find.
As suns do rise and fall, and tides do change,
Our past, a tapestry of life's vast range,
Yet in each other's presence, time stands still,
As if our youth returns, against its will.
In Donne's fair words, we find a truth sincere,
No man an island, nor a hemisphere,
So do we, pilots, seek each other's shore,
To find connection, camaraderie, and more.
Our laughter rings, recalling days of yore,
As wings of fire tore through skies once more,
And in this sacred fellowship, we see,
A glimpse of heaven, where our souls run free.
For though our bodies age, and strength does wane,
The spirit of the Friday Pilots reigns,
In hearts and minds, we're tethered by a thread,
A golden bond, unbroken, till we're dead.
So let our stories echo through the years,
A testament to joy, to love, to tears,
As Donne once penned, and we now understand,
In this great circle, each a part, a strand.
My friend then came clean and said that he had
used the artificial intelligence ChatGPT to produced this wonderful poem
using the following instructions that he typed in: "You are retired
geezer fighter pilots who have lunch every Friday. Write a John Donne poem
about the Friday Pilots.” No wonder there is concern that AI will soon take
over but my friend has the last laugh - he has been granted the copyright!
All the best
.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Travis Foster thfoster6@aol.com
Pete Reed sent me this.
Travis Foster
Sent: 5/17/2023 6:25:06 PM
Eastern Standard Time
Subject: THIS IS A GREAT STORY !!
THIS IS A GREAT STORY !!
HISTORY OF
THE
CAR RADIO
Seems
like cars have always had radios,
but
they didn't.
Here's
the story:
One
evening, in 1929,
two
young men named
William
Lear and Elmer Wavering
drove
their girlfriends to a lookout point high above the
Mississippi
River town of Quincy, Illinois, to watch the sunset.
It
was a romantic night to be sure,
but
one of the women observed that
it
would be even nicer if they could listen to music in the car.
Lear
and Wavering liked the idea. Both men had tinkered with radios (Lear served as
a radio operator in the U.S. Navy during World War I)
and
it wasn't long before they were
taking
apart a home radio and trying to get it to work in a car.
But
it wasn't easy: automobiles have ignition switches, generators, spark plugs,
and other electrical equipment that generate noisy
static interference, making it nearly impossible to listen to the radio when
the engine was running.
One
by one, Lear and Wavering identified and eliminated each source of electrical
interference. When they finally got their radio to work, they took it to
a radio convention
in
Chicago.
There
they met Paul Galvin, owner of Galvin Manufacturing Corporation. He made a
product called a "battery eliminator", a device that allowed
battery-powered radios to
run
on household AC current. But as more homes were wired for
electricity, more radio manufacturers made AC-powered radios.
Galvin
needed a new product to manufacture. When he met Lear and Wavering at the radio
convention, he found it. He believed that mass-produced,
affordable car radios had the potential to become a huge
business.
Lear
and Wavering set up shop in Galvin's factory, and when they perfected their
first radio, they installed it in his Studebaker.
Then
Galvin went to a local banker to apply for
a loan. Thinking it might sweeten the deal,
he
had his men install a radio in the banker's
Packard.
Good
idea, but it didn't work Half an hour after the
installation, the banker's Packard caught on fire. (They didn't get the loan.)
Galvin
didn't give up. He drove his Studebaker nearly 800 miles to
Atlantic City to show
off
the radio at the 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association
convention.
Too
broke to afford a booth, he parked the car outside the convention hall and
cranked up the radio so that passing
conventioneers could hear it. That idea
worked -- He got enough orders to put the radio into production.
WHAT'S
IN A NAME
That
first production model was called the 5T71.
Galvin
decided he needed to come up with something a little catchier.
In
those days many companies in the phonograph and radio businesses used the
suffix "ola" for their names -
Radiola,
Columbiola, and Victrola
were
three of the biggest.
Galvin
decided to do the same thing, and since his radio was intended for use in a
motor vehicle, he decided to call it the Motorola.
But
even with the name change, the radio still had problems:
When
Motorola went on sale in 1930, it cost about $110 uninstalled, at a time when
you could buy a brand-new car for $650, and the country was sliding into the
Great Depression.
(By
that measure, a radio for a new car would cost about $3,000 today.)
In
1930, it took two men several days to put in a
car radio -- The dashboard had to be taken
apart
so that the receiver and a single speaker could be installed,
and the ceiling had to be cut open to install
the antenna.
These
early radios ran on their own batteries, not on the car battery, so holes had
to be cut into the floorboard to accommodate them.
The
installation manual had eight complete diagrams and 28 pages of instructions.
Selling complicated car radios that cost 20 percent of the price of a
brand-new car wouldn't have been easy in the best of times, let
alone during the Great Depression.
Galvin
lost money in 1930 and struggled for a couple of years after that. But things
picked up in 1933 when Ford began offering Motorola's pre-installed at the factory.
In
1934 they got another boost when Galvin struck a deal with B.F. Goodrich
tire company
to
sell and install them in its chain of tire
stores.
By
then the price of the radio, with installation included, had dropped to $55.
The Motorola car radio was off and running. (The name of
the company would be officially changed from
Galvin
Manufacturing to "Motorola" in 1947.)
In
the meantime, Galvin continued to develop new uses for car radios. In 1936, the
same year that it introduced push-button tuning, it also
introduced the Motorola Police Cruiser, a standard car radio that was factory
preset to a single frequency to pick up police broadcasts.
In
1940 he developed the first handheld
two-way radio -- The Handy-Talkie for the U. S.
Army.
A
lot of the communications technologies
that we take for granted today were born in Motorola labs in the years that
followed World War II.
In
1947 they came out with the first television for under $200.
In
1956 the company introduced the world's first pager; in 1969 came the radio and
television equipment that was used to televise Neil Armstrong's first steps on
the Moon.
In
1973 it invented the world's first handheld cellular phone.
Today
Motorola is one of the largest cell phone manufacturers in the world.
And
it all started with the car radio.
WHATEVER
HAPPENED TO
the
two men who installed the first radio in Paul Galvin's car?
Elmer
Wavering and William Lear, ended up taking very different paths in
life.
Wavering
stayed with Motorola. In the 1950's he helped change the
automobile experience again when he developed
the first automotive alternator, replacing inefficient
and unreliable generators. The invention lead to such luxuries as power
windows, power seats, and, eventually, air-conditioning.
Lear
also continued inventing. He holds more than 150 patents.
Remember eight-track tape players? Lear invented that.
But
what he's really famous for are his
contributions to the field of aviation. He invented radio direction finders for
planes, aided in the invention of the autopilot, designed the
first fully automatic aircraft landing system, and in 1963
introduced his most famous invention of all, the Lear Jet, the world's
first mass-produced, affordable business jet.
(Not
bad for a guy who dropped out of school after the eighth grade.)
Sometimes
it is fun to find out how some of the many things
that we take for granted actually came into being!
AND
It
all started with a woman's suggestion!!
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