Glenn Curtiss was one of the great innovators of motorcycling and aircraft in the early days of the combustion engine. His V-8 and V-12 aircraft engines were legendary and record-setting on earth and in the sky. Technical Editor Kevin Cameron rates Curtiss as a hero, and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer agrees. We also have excellent technical information about land speed racing from a engineer/racer Wes Orloff who also rates Curtiss as a hero, and we examine Curtiss' speed record set on a beach in 1907.
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Photo Credit: By The Motorcycle Illustrated (magazine) - Scientific American, Volume 96, Number 06, February 1906. This photo originally published in the February 1907 issue of The Motorcycle Illustrated (magazine)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76605000
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Looking to buy? Get prequalified
https://octane.co/flex/1?a=171
Photo Credit: By The Motorcycle Illustrated (magazine) - Scientific American, Volume 96, Number 06, February 1906. This photo originally published in the February 1907 issue of The Motorcycle Illustrated (magazine)., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76605000
Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6CLI74xvMBFLDOC1tQaCOQ
Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/
Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld
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SportsTranscript
00:00:00Welcome to the Cycle World Podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer, Editor-in-Chief. I'm with
00:00:03Kevin Kaminer, Technical Editor. Thanks for joining us for another episode. This
00:00:10week's topic is Glenn Curtis, pioneer manufacturer of motorcycles, a man of
00:00:16great intensity, and suddenly quit motorcycles to do something else. After
00:00:25supposedly setting speed records, we'll talk about that, that may be one of those
00:00:28that V8 that he did was perhaps questionable. We have some supporting
00:00:34maths from a calibration engineer at a major manufacturer of motorcycles.
00:00:42We'll get to that, but Glenn Curtis is a hero for us, for all the things that he
00:00:50did and the application of his genius and technology and making things go. Got
00:00:57us up in the air. It's pretty cool. You should start this one, Kevin, as you
00:01:02normally do. Let's talk about the molecules of Glenn Curtis.
00:01:06If I were going to write a book about Glenn Curtis, I would
00:01:12entitle it Rush Job, because everything that man did was with an eye on the next
00:01:24project. I wondered at first, as I looked at his early engines, why they
00:01:31all had the same basic cylinder. It was because he wasn't in this for engines. He
00:01:37wanted the power. He found he could get more power by adding more cylinders,
00:01:44first one, then two, then three. He built a triple. Then in the middle there
00:01:52he built a V4, and then he built a V8, all to get more power. He wasn't
00:02:00interested in engines except as a means to an end, and so productive. In 1901,
00:02:11according to one story at any rate, he sent off to E.R. Thomas in Buffalo for a
00:02:17casting set to build a basic De Dion single-cylinder engine. Now, what's De Dion
00:02:26about it? It has an automatic inlet valve. The inlet valve is held closed by a
00:02:33light spring, and when the piston descends on its suction stroke, there's
00:02:37more pressure behind the valve than there is on the engine side, so the valve
00:02:43lifts off its seat. Air sneaks between the valve and its seat and into the
00:02:49cylinder. It doesn't fill it very well, but it works. De Dion and his mechanic,
00:02:57Georges Bouton, were able to operate theirs at up to 3,500 RPM, and soon so
00:03:06was Curtis. Of course, the story was that Curtis had been in the bicycle
00:03:12business. His dad was a harness maker, had a harness shop, so he'd got over that
00:03:21first hurdle. He knew that people made things, just as people who plant a garden
00:03:32find out that food doesn't come in a package. So he put this first engine into
00:03:41a bicycle frame, and it didn't start, and it didn't start because he was using an
00:03:48improvised evaporator carburetor, basically an old shirt in a can, soaked
00:03:56with gasoline with intake air going through it. What's the mixture control
00:04:02method? Good luck. So it fires, and the story is that it dragged him down the
00:04:09street toward Lake Keuka, and he managed to get it stopped. And instead of being
00:04:16frightened, he was delighted. And this is so often the case. He built bigger engines
00:04:23so he could go faster. He entered contests. He won races until he realized
00:04:32that continuing to make one cylinder bigger and bigger created problems.
00:04:39I'll have two cylinders. So in 1903, long before Harley-Davidson did this, he added a second
00:04:48cylinder. And instead of using a fork and blade connecting rod arrangement, as Harley did,
00:04:55he put a lug on the big end of the existing rod design, and he pivoted a link rod
00:05:07which connected to the piston in the second cylinder. And when the second cylinder ran rich,
00:05:19because the fuel was already moving through the jet when the second cylinder came on
00:05:24its intake stroke, he drilled a hole in that cylinder's intake pipe. Bleed air.
00:05:37Of course, at this time, see, Curtis had this wonderful advantage over someone
00:05:43of similar disposition, namely John Britton, because when John Britton came on the scene,
00:05:49there were millions of people who understood internal combustion engines.
00:05:55When Curtis came on the scene, internal combustion engines were a big novelty.
00:06:03And airplanes had not yet flown. The Wright brothers would fly a Kitty Hawk in 1903,
00:06:11but they weren't telling anybody about it because they had plans to control the new
00:06:18field of aviation through their patents. Sort of like the Selden patent in the automobile
00:06:25business. Henry Ford just said, I'm going to get so big, this guy is just going to be blown away.
00:06:31And that's what happened. So poor old Selden. So at this point, he's got a product that he
00:06:43could sell. So he starts manufacturing these things. His friend, Charlie Kirkham,
00:06:51from a place called Taggart's up the way, Charlie's dad had a rudimentary machine shop. So
00:07:00he and Charlie went to the machine shop to machine these raw castings to make engines.
00:07:08And as time passed, Charlie Kirkham took over more and more of the engine side
00:07:14because there was a lot going on. They built buildings. They had as many as 60 people working
00:07:24for them making Curtis motorcycles, which today are a great rarity. I talked to a man who had
00:07:32been to a swap meet and had seen a Curtis V-twin, just the engine, $7,000. And he walked away,
00:07:43shaking his head. And in his car going home, he realized, what a jackass. Get that 7,000 is
00:07:53nothing. But it was too late. He'd missed. So basically, what these engines were, was an
00:08:03aluminum crankcase with a roller bearing, roller main bearings. And the crank pin bearing was a
00:08:12bronze bushing in a split and bolted steel connecting rod. And oiling was by splash
00:08:21as it was in so many early engines. Frederick Lanchester, around 1900, came up with the idea of
00:08:33pumped recirculating oil systems, but it took a while for them to catch on. And it also took a
00:08:41while for them to be needed. Fresh, cool, clean oil, lovely stuff. It's hard to have anywhere
00:08:51when there's oil and it's good. So the two men ran this motorcycle business.
00:09:04Kirkham taking care of engine manufacturing. Curtis trying to keep it all together.
00:09:14And around 1904, along come these airship fellows. They wanted engines for their airships.
00:09:24So Curtis provided them with V-twins making five or six horsepower. And they could pot along.
00:09:36If the wind were blowing, maybe you can't go upwind, but you could tack like a sailboat.
00:09:43And always this need, this need for more power. So at a point, he takes two of his early twins,
00:09:55which have a 50 degree cylinder angle, and puts them face to face to make a V4.
00:10:08The thing is still air cooled. The cylinder is a hardened iron casting with a side exhaust valve.
00:10:22And it has circumferential fins like a normal finned engine cylinder for a motorbike.
00:10:29The cylinder head is radially finned and it has this threaded hole into which screws the intake
00:10:39valve cage, which has the intake valve, its seat, the intake port, the light spring,
00:10:47just about everything in that little screw-in guy.
00:10:50And as carburetors came on the market that you could just buy,
00:10:54no more tomato can or whatever it was, the historians argue this point, wasn't a coffee can.
00:11:04And a sort of crude air-cooled V4 was made that gave double the power of the V-twin.
00:11:16And this whole process is going forward. And by now, Curtis has one foot in the airship business
00:11:28and one foot in the motorcycle business. They're not going in the same direction. So he's
00:11:35doing a dance and along comes Alexander Graham Bell and the Aerial Experiment Association.
00:11:47And some of these people are persuaded that an airplane can be made in the form of a
00:11:54multicellular box kite. And they built enormous ones and they wrecked them.
00:12:02And Curtis is looking at all this and thinking, who are these guys? Why don't they build an
00:12:10airplane? So they get busy building an airplane. And the third airplane to be built by the Aerial
00:12:20Experiment Association is Junebug. And by that time, he has the power. He's made more powerful
00:12:30engines. He flies the Junebug in 1908. It takes off and flies. The big problem for the Wright
00:12:44brothers is their patent calls for roll control by wing warping. And what the Curtis airplane had was
00:12:58little subsidiary airfoils whose incidents could be varied.
00:13:04Today, we call them ailerons and they're part of the wing.
00:13:09And so it was going to come down to how are the lawyers going to treat this wording?
00:13:19In a nutshell, that's law. It's like arguing about words.
00:13:23How much will we have to pay for them to come up with a definitive answer?
00:13:28And so another ball is added to Curtis's juggling act. But he becomes a proficient aviator.
00:13:41He's able to fly. He's able to control the thing. He has the horsepower. It is not an improvised
00:13:49semi-cooled thing. Although at one point when he made his air-cooled V8,
00:13:56he said, it's the best little engine in the world for exactly three minutes.
00:14:04And that is the nub of the controversy because before using the V8 to fly, he tests it in a
00:14:13motorbike. He goes down to Ormond Beach for the Scientific American Carnival of Speed.
00:14:20He has his lads at the factory run him up a completely improvised chassis.
00:14:30And this reminds me of some things that were built in the 1980s by major corporations. Oh,
00:14:36we finished the engine and now we have five bucks left to do the chassis.
00:14:41So, they decided to drive the rear wheel with a shaft and a pair of exposed bevel gears
00:14:52running in bearings that are lubricated by drip. Only when someone's holding an oil can over them
00:15:01and pressing the bottom of the oil can in. Boink, boink. So, this is a cross-sectional
00:15:08So, this is a cross-your-fingers kind of operation. What are the arrangements for timing?
00:15:17He's given two miles in which to accelerate. The measured mile, when he enters the measured mile,
00:15:28stopwatches are started and people look at the crowd at the finish line through binoculars.
00:15:35When they see a flag waved, they stop the stopwatches.
00:15:42In this way, the celebrated 136-mile-an-hour one-way run, because the bevel gear arrangement
00:15:50in the universal joint made out of bent strap iron, flew to pieces and fortunately didn't
00:15:58tear off one of Mr. Curtis's legs. So, they couldn't make a return run. It was always unofficial.
00:16:08But then, here comes Wes Orloff and Harley Davidson who is in emissions and calibration
00:16:15and is a plain speaking person. Oh, Wes is great. Very optimistic.
00:16:23Yeah, Arma racer. I know him from Harley. I didn't race Arma with him, or I mean,
00:16:32I did race Arma with him, but not against him. He's got some Buell products and some other
00:16:37vintage bikes with a friend of his in different classes. But yeah, avid racer,
00:16:44land speed stuff with Buell products, naked. And this is what kind of fired up his curiosity was
00:16:50he had done some land speed racing with a naked Buell and they put a lot of work to get something
00:17:00like 144-miles-an-hour out of this naked Buell. And it got him thinking because Curtis is also
00:17:07a hero of Wes'. Before we go on, he is the crew chief for James Rispoli in bagger racing. So,
00:17:17he's passionate into performance and motorcycling and all that stuff.
00:17:22He's in there. And Harley Davidson, they're fortunate to have him because so many big
00:17:28companies, when they replace some key person, the replacement comes from HR and may have to take an
00:17:36MIC course about motorcycles. What are they? Yeah, it's cool. This was all triggered by Wes
00:17:46sending me an email and saying like, Hey, I've been looking into this cause it was so interesting.
00:17:51And it's just spreadsheets and calculations about frontal area and drag coefficient of friction on
00:17:57the ground. And there is much controversy. So, he brought all this to light. He did a lot of math
00:18:04and he's like, I'm trying to give this guy the benefit of the doubt and I'm not seeing 136 here.
00:18:12And there was a lot at the time as well. There was weather. They were talking about
00:18:16the beach being too rough and the weather came in and finally on the second day,
00:18:23the waves came and smoothed the beach out so that the big potholes weren't there. And they were
00:18:27the bikes, these rigid bikes, weren't getting tossed to the sky and that finally they could
00:18:32make the runs. And so, there's just all kinds of... And this is on two and a half inch tires.
00:18:38Two and a half inch section.
00:18:39Yeah, totally, yeah.
00:18:40Wonderful. Anyway, so I get out my copy of Horner. It has an item on motorcycles,
00:18:52motorcycle frontal area and so on. And I also have another book that shows a method. It's
00:19:03Victor Paget actually from years and years ago. And it shows a sitting up rider on squared paper,
00:19:11the outline, and a tucked in rider. And you count all the little squares and you have your
00:19:19frontal area. This is done on a dark night with a point light source at a great distance and a
00:19:30screen behind the object whose frontal area is to be measured. Anyway, what it comes down to
00:19:39is an effective frontal area, which means the actual frontal area multiplied times
00:19:48the coefficient of drag. That is, how much better is the shape you've made than a flat plate
00:19:56sawn from plywood?
00:19:59Well, that's the whole... Yeah, the Caltech experiment with the XR-TT and the so-called
00:20:06midget, the compact version of the XR. They said that the aerodynamics of a motorcycle
00:20:16were worse than a vertically placed piece of plywood.
00:20:20Yes.
00:20:21So, great.
00:20:23Yep. So, just taking this at its superficial level and combining it with Wes's stuff,
00:20:36what you come up with is that to go 136 miles an hour neglecting rolling friction
00:20:45is going to take 56 horsepower.
00:20:48So, if the engine is rated, as the history books tell us, somewhere between 36 and 40 horsepower,
00:20:56that's not 56 horsepower. So, whose ferocity shall we impugn?
00:21:07There were said to have been many people with stopwatches.
00:21:12Many people with stopwatches.
00:21:17When was the flag thrown? All these things we have no idea about.
00:21:21Who measured the mile and with what?
00:21:26Scientific American at that time was a popular mechanics type, popular
00:21:34do-it-yourself, what's happening in the world of manufacturing magazine.
00:21:40And they sponsored this carnival of speed from time to time. So,
00:21:47you would think they would use a responsible method for measuring these speeds, but
00:21:58we're left with 36 horsepower is different from 56 horsepower, and 56 horsepower is probably an
00:22:05underestimate. But what happened, happened. We just can't put a number on it.
00:22:15Because at this point, Curtis realized that the airship and airplane
00:22:26duty cycle was too tough for air cooling. It wasn't going to work. So,
00:22:34he looked around for someone who could help and he found Sandor Pfitzner, an immigrant to the US
00:22:43from Hungary, who was working for Buick. Pfitzner was evidently interested in aviation and that was
00:22:53probably part of why he could be hired away. He came to Hammondsport, New York, where Curtis's
00:23:02plant was, and he set about waterjacketing the cylinders for future aero engines and generally
00:23:16shaping them up because he was familiar with what was going on in the wider world,
00:23:23such things as pumped recirculating oil systems. And this is how Curtis, mind you, Pfitzner is
00:23:37hired early in, well, we don't know, but he had less than a year to prepare a water-cooled V8
00:23:50for the great French air expo at what looks like Reims, France. And Curtis packs up this airplane.
00:24:06It's a bundle of sticks and some rolls of yard goods and some wire. But you have to know how it
00:24:16goes together. I mean, when you get down to it, we've been flying lawn chairs for 125 years.
00:24:22Yes, indeed. So he gets over there, he rigs his airplane,
00:24:30he flies, and he wins the grand prize. It is
00:24:37unbelievable, because to take the thing all apart, put it on a ship, arrive, keep calm.
00:24:49People, the French people writing about him said that his calm was admirable.
00:24:56And we see these photographs of him in which he looks so intense
00:25:02that you could imagine him imploding like a black hole. He's just, he's on it. He's thinking,
00:25:12trying to think, of everything. And he keeps it together. There are the photographs of him
00:25:20in France with the big radiator directly behind him and the engine behind that. So we know
00:25:29that it was a water-cooled V8 making basically 90 horsepower, some say 100.
00:25:37He had power, which these other characters didn't. Louis Blériot, the first man to fly the
00:25:46English Channel, Henry Farman, all the greats of European aviation were there. And the French
00:25:56took aviation just, they loved it. They embraced it so hard. It was delightful to them.
00:26:07And at one point, Curtis said that as he was flying the course, he could look down and see
00:26:14the litter of the crashed airplanes of many of the competitors on the course.
00:26:22Onlookers said that his turns around the pylons at the end defining the course were sharp.
00:26:32He'd learned to fly and he was doing it. So this was August. In September, he was at Brescia in
00:26:42Italy, where he wowed him again. He could take his airplane wherever people wanted it and he
00:26:51could make it fly. That's amazing. He was like a 30-year-old when he's doing this.
00:26:56Yes, he was born in 1878. So in 1908, he was 30 years old, yeah, when he flew.
00:27:12And this is the liquid cooled, this is the OX-5, they called it, right?
00:27:17Well, it didn't become OX-5 for a while, but it was a good beginning.
00:27:23Like a prototype, is it?
00:27:26And so we're talking about a guy flying a plane, designing a plane, coming up with
00:27:31some version of ailerons. And it's not just figuring out like, oh, if we do ailerons,
00:27:37we can make the plane turn. It's what are my means of controls? What are the ratios of the bell
00:27:43cranks? How do I have enough force, human force to move the controls?
00:27:50What's enough, what's too much?
00:27:52What's enough, what's too much? And then where are the ailerons? How much surface does the
00:27:56aileron have? What do you need for authority? We would call it rudder authority or elevator
00:28:02authority. Enough authority, but not too much authority. I mean, there's no manual, right?
00:28:10Because it's uninvented and there's no learning to fly book either. It's just like, well,
00:28:15okay, let's try this.
00:28:19It was very much cut and try because you can imagine him landing and saying, yeah,
00:28:26I can control it, but it's not easy. Let's make these things bigger. Well, we find out that at
00:28:33Lockheed's Skunk Works, this story was told to me by a man who was in the thermo team designing
00:28:42that airplane, SR-71. He said, they looked at the data from the strain gauges in the aircraft
00:28:54structure and they could see that some of the wing spars were close to yield.
00:29:03And so he said, the team got together and they said, how much do you think we should
00:29:09kick the front, the leading edge downward? And somebody said, well, let's start at six degrees.
00:29:17Yeah, sounds good. Okay. And so it's basically the same process. They didn't go to a computer.
00:29:26They didn't create a math model. They didn't wind tunnel endlessly. They needed the answer now.
00:29:35And this is what aviation and motor racing teach us, that there are times when time
00:29:44is so much more valuable than money, if you have the money.
00:29:51Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. What's that saying about if I had some bread,
00:29:59I'd make a sandwich if I had some meat. What's remarkable to me is we're talking about Glenn
00:30:06Curtis, 1908, flying his V-8 and knocking it down and having guy wires and all that,
00:30:13and just kind of building up his thing and figuring out how to get his ratios. And the SR-71,
00:30:19which you just brought up, his first flight was like 64. So it's like in 50 years,
00:30:29we're flying across the country in 45 minutes.
00:30:34Like we're barely getting off the ground and just 50, 55 years later or whatever.
00:30:40I think in France, he went 42 miles an hour.
00:30:46And there were like 50,000 people there.
00:30:49Which must have been wonderful. I mean, imagine that. I mean, flying feels so good,
00:30:53like just going up in anything, light plane, Cessna 172, 152, the Chevette of the skies.
00:31:02And this is slow. I mean, 152s, you buy them to get time. They're nice little knocking around
00:31:09airplanes, but you don't have a rate of climb so much as you circle around. You kind of reduce the
00:31:15gear ratio of the sky. So just hate to get up in the air. Not high performance, and yet it feels
00:31:20so good. It's like riding an XS-650 like that behind me. That's kind of a tired old XS-650.
00:31:27And it was a good motorcycle for 1972. Had some robust bottom end and good running,
00:31:33little bit of vibration, but you know it's alive. But you're not getting anywhere. You're
00:31:37not getting anywhere really fast. And yet you click it into fifth gear and you're going
00:31:4357 miles per hour. And if you go over 60, it vibrates a little more. So do I want to go that
00:31:49fast or not? But it still feels good. It still feels good. And going 42 in an airplane in 1908
00:31:58would be... imagine the analogous experience. I mean, to be in the sky. I don't know. It just
00:32:09flying feels good the way that motorcycling does in a way that automobiles tend not to because of
00:32:15the dimensions of movement. When he was finished up at Brescia in Italy, these people came over
00:32:25to him and they said, our poet Gabriele D'Annunzio would like to go for a ride in your airplane.
00:32:40He wants very much to do so and we want him to.
00:32:45Okay.
00:32:47Don't double the load, by the way.
00:32:49So he takes him up and flies him around. And of course, he has wonderful things to say when he
00:32:57returns to earth as so many did after their first flights. Because the terrible thing is that the
00:33:08American space program shot those people up into orbit. Then they landed them on the moon. And after
00:33:18that, nobody cared because they had Star Trek to hold their attention. Whereas space flight today,
00:33:29who watches that?
00:33:31My son.
00:33:33It became routine.
00:33:35It is routine.
00:33:37It is routine. Amazingly routine, isn't it?
00:33:42Now we find that the 777X is supposed to get this 134-inch fan engine. That's a big wheel.
00:33:57The landing gear must be something else. Anyway,
00:34:00Curtis, of course, just completely lost interest in the motorcycle business. He did get as far as
00:34:12making a triple with 50 degrees between each of the pairs.
00:34:18A W3, right?
00:34:20A W3.
00:34:22W3.
00:34:24Supposedly, it made 10 horsepower and still the same basic cylinders,
00:34:31circumferentially finned cylinder casting and a radially finned head.
00:34:36Well, Jim fueling in the early-mid 2000s had the fueling W3 where he took a Harley and
00:34:45threw a third cylinder on it. I believe it was a master rod with nubs on it for slave rods.
00:34:54I rode that quite a bit. I got to test that bike.
00:34:58Yeah, you just add 50% more power. There's another one tacked on there.
00:35:04Jim fueling could really make an engine work. He was a great guy to talk to. We talked about
00:35:11combustion chambers on two strokes. He showed me a cylinder head that he was running on a CR500
00:35:18that had essentially the entire diameter of the piston was squished. Then there was a small
00:35:25diameter that was shaped like a rocket nozzle with probably a quarter-inch radius or something.
00:35:33When I say a small diameter, I mean like centimeter, maybe 15 millimeters and a little
00:35:41kernel where the spark plug was. The place the combustion was happening was smaller than a
00:35:48walnut. The whole cylinder was squishing everything into that little kernel and they were lighting
00:35:56the fuse with the spark in this very high pressure nozzle blast on the piston. They were having some
00:36:03success with that. Good rate of pressure rise. In any case, the W3 was awesome. It would burn the
00:36:10back tire. They just sent me out in Ventura where his shop was. It was just an industrial
00:36:14unit. I had to walk around the 4360 engine in a can, pickled. Kevin's a fellow 4360.
00:36:24What do you say? You're in recovery from 4360? Yes, I am.
00:36:29I made his donations. I think he gave one to the Air Force out in Ohio or the students,
00:36:35the high school. Yes, I think the students had it. Now, some Navy unit down in
00:36:42Rhode Island, I think they're running a C119. Two of the engines I had were C119.
00:36:52Now, they have a lot of parts. Nice.
00:36:56Anyway, the fueling bike was a lot of fun. As it is with, I want to say, almost everybody who makes
00:37:02a big displacement long stroke, something less than four cylinders, I've seen it with three
00:37:09and a lot with twins, breather issues. It always seems to happen. Maybe breathers have finally
00:37:15been figured out, but engine breathing has been an ongoing pain in the ass. Sure enough,
00:37:22I was out there just hammering that bike. I had to get out my Nokia flip phone because the thing
00:37:28was puking oil. I thought, oh, no, I've ruined this motorcycle. I called the shop. I got,
00:37:35not Jim, but I got the mechanic and tech dude who was helping me. He's like, oh, no, good,
00:37:42man. It means you're riding it hard. That's my job, ride it hard, see what happens. Anyway, W3,
00:37:51yet another tangent, Kevin. In 1911, a fellow named Eli landed and took off from a platform
00:38:02built on the stern of the USS Pennsylvania. Amazing. A Navy ship. We're building a deck,
00:38:09folks, just like. Yeah. These two arrange our lawn chairs. This was at San Diego.
00:38:17So that was the kernel that led to the aircraft carrier.
00:38:24Because the terrible problem for the fleet was, what if they attack us with airplanes?
00:38:31We need airplanes of our own to stop them. Yeah. That's like, what is that? You mentioned the
00:38:37immune system. Oh, that was off camera. That was autoimmune. But this is like, what do you call
00:38:43that? That's an active immune system that goes outside the body of the ship to attack the
00:38:50attackers before they attack. That's the thing. Soon, naval aviation was launched. I think poor
00:39:03Thomas Selfridge was the first person to be killed in, he was an Army man,
00:39:12flying an Army aircraft. He had been one of the early experimenters. He was one of those people
00:39:21that said, yeah, I'll do it. Yeah, count me in. That's always the problem when they count you in,
00:39:29is that you might be on the unlucky flight, and he was.
00:39:33But meanwhile, Charlie Kirkham is developing engines. I think he came back and worked for
00:39:43Curtis from 1915. And Curtis wasn't concerned about engine details anymore, but the Curtis,
00:39:54well, really, K-12, K for Kirkham, you might say, was a V-12 engine. They had made V-12s earlier,
00:40:04but this was quite a modern engine. And then they made the D-12, ABCD.
00:40:12And with that, they were able to win the Schneider Cup seaplane race in Europe,
00:40:23taking the first two places. And that V-12 so impressed the British Air Ministry,
00:40:31mind you, designed by Charlie Kirkham based on experience that he gained
00:40:40working with Curtis. And also, he got his introduction to engineering by mail. He took
00:40:50a correspondence course in engineering while he was down with diphtheria. And so, here's Charlie
00:40:59Kirkham from Taggart's, New York. His D-12 is ordered in small quantity by the British Air
00:41:10Ministry, and they shipped these things to British aircraft engine manufacturers and said,
00:41:18I think you could come up with something like this.
00:41:21And the one they sent to Rolls resulted in the Kestrel, and then the great Merlin,
00:41:30the V-12 that was in the hurricanes and spitfires that defended Britain in the Battle of Britain.
00:41:38So, it's grand, I think, to be able to trace these important elements in aviation,
00:41:48the aircraft carrier, the Merlin, the idea of a V-12, having the facilities and the
00:41:59drive to produce, to dare to try to make a V-12, all goes back to Curtis.
00:42:08And when World War I was raging, the British Navy, the Royal Navy sent officers to his premises
00:42:22because he wanted to bid on their requirement for a coastal patrol aircraft that could land on water.
00:42:30And they came and what did they see? A huge shed-like structure with people building airplanes
00:42:38on the floor in a crowded chaos. And at one end of the building was a huge set of drawings,
00:42:49which were being amended hour by hour. Well, that's impossible to make.
00:42:56Lots of drawings have things on them that are impossible to make,
00:43:00and the people in the machine shop fix it, or the people in the foundry fix it.
00:43:06Oh, long history of the foundry folks fixing things just on the fly.
00:43:11Yeah.
00:43:12Because they know what's going on with the materials. I mean, it happens now,
00:43:15pattern makers. They're like, oh no, no, this is, no, what are they, you know, what are they thinking?
00:43:21You know, what are they thinking? I talked, years ago, I talked to Pierre Terblanche when he was
00:43:26working at Ducati. So he was, he was in the heart of the Motor Valley in Bologna and they were
00:43:31working with the casting people and all that. And I said, oh, I've got this Thames van, English Ford
00:43:35van, might become a drinking thing here, but, because they bring it up. But the Thames van,
00:43:41I could get a cylinder head. I said, yeah, the cylinder head is tragic on this thing,
00:43:45Pierre. It's got two intake ports. We were talking about vintage refrigerators and
00:43:49I showed him a picture of the Thames and he was fascinated by this English Ford van that
00:43:53all the racers used in the late fifties. But it had an overhead valve engine, but a terrible
00:43:58cylinder head. And he said, oh yeah, we can get you one made. And it was going to cost like
00:44:0410,000 bucks. But he said, yeah, we'll just, I'll just, we'll just call the guys at the foundry
00:44:08and, you know, just ship the head over and they'll pick up where all the bolt holes are
00:44:13and the water jackets. And you don't have to do anything. The combustion chambers, they'll just,
00:44:17they'll just do what they know works.
00:44:19Fix it.
00:44:20Fix it. 10,000 bucks, man. That's all it took. I kind of wish I had, because it was a unique
00:44:25opportunity. But again, if I had some bread, I'd make a sandwich if I had some meat.
00:44:34Well, these, these Royal Navy officers must've liked it because they could see that this was
00:44:42a workable process. They weren't just making something, they were documenting it as they
00:44:47went along so that when they built the next one, that the latest improvements would be
00:44:52included in it. But it wasn't being done by the classic process of there's a drawing office up
00:44:58in space somewhere occupied by people who know how to speak Latin and Greek and the poetry.
00:45:07And down here in the foundations are machinists who are covered with cutting oil and they have
00:45:15chips sticking to their cheeks and foreheads. And somehow drawings connect these two regions,
00:45:24heaven and hell, in a creative enterprise. But...
00:45:29Well, Rolls-Royce was like that in the early days. Every car was different. It evolved. Every
00:45:36time they finished something, they would just like, oh, what if we do this? And they just
00:45:39evolved. Even the small horsepower ones, like the 2025s of the, you know, say 1930 to 37,
00:45:4740, somewhere around there. I mean, the small horsepower ones were not, this was not,
00:45:51they were, they were sort of aristocratic, but these were for folks who were kind of like almost
00:45:56there, but not there. And they were going to drive their own cars. They didn't have chauffeurs
00:46:00doing all that. These were Buicks. These were, yeah, these were, well, as we would say,
00:46:06Newport Beach, you know, the Mercedes, well, actually the McLaren is almost the Newport
00:46:10Chevy. That's what we used to call the Mercedes-Benz down in Newport Beach was
00:46:14Newport Chevys. But yeah, they were just iterating. And if you get a 2025 from like 1935,
00:46:22it's much different from one that's in 37 in many details. And there are no interchangeable,
00:46:28not no interchangeable parts, but very little is necessarily like bolted on. So anyways.
00:46:36Here's the thing about Curtis is not only was he an aviation pioneer, but he productionized
00:46:44the aircraft industry. No one else did that. He did that. And they had to come up with a system
00:46:54by which they could build these coastal command reconnaissance aircraft. They shipped a bunch of
00:47:02them to England and it was a mad scramble. That's hence the title of the non-existent book,
00:47:10Rush Job. And Curtis later said, I, we burned the candle everywhere we could light it.
00:47:25And now I'm so burned out, I'm finished. So what did he do? He retired to Florida
00:47:34and conducted business by telephone to the factory. That's what Dick O'Brien did.
00:47:41Yeah. He dabbled in real estate such that he was able to get together
00:47:47sufficient territory to make Miami airport. He did a lot of hunting and fishing. He did not
00:47:57sit on the porch looking at the sunset with a warm rug over his knees. And I think he,
00:48:06he died of complications of appendicitis or something, but he was 52 years old.
00:48:17And he couldn't stop. He couldn't stop himself. And so these frenetic individuals,
00:48:31he looked at engines because they were the way for him to make motorcycles. When he raced
00:48:37motorcycles, he needed more power. So he added more cylinders. He wasn't interested in
00:48:43flow benches, he, dynamometers, uh, tedious detail improvements and put,
00:48:51put more cylinders on it. We've got something that works.
00:48:54It's such a fundamental personality type thing because there are people that, that all of that
00:49:02is irresistible. And that's where you get somebody like Ricardo who didn't like math.
00:49:06He liked to try things. He was a very good communicator, great writer. And
00:49:12you know, refined codified. He was good at marketing too. So, you know, he, he figured out
00:49:17flathead squish and tick the box like, Hey, I'm patenting this thing. And the way he sold
00:49:23Ricardo heads to everybody. Yeah. Made a fortune. Yep. I mean, you'd think fueling is kind of the
00:49:31same way in, in the sense of, uh, you know, all his work with, with exhaust ports, make them as
00:49:36small as possible at the least amount of surface area and move them away so that the intake ports
00:49:43become larger. Yeah. Um, well, I, I had some conversation with him both face to face and
00:49:52over the phone, Jim fueling. And he, I've also talked to people who've had dealings with him
00:50:00and they said, well, to be kind, let's say that if you go to lunch with Jim and you
00:50:10both make notes on the back of an envelope together, he leaves with the envelope.
00:50:20Um, but he was very generous to me when I was a first time speaker, only time in my case at the
00:50:29Superflow conference, um, in Colorado Springs. And he helped me get miked up.
00:50:38And later he said, I'm going to send you a, uh, a kit of books that you will find interesting.
00:50:48And there was a history of surfing in there. And there was also something about
00:50:54an obscure two-stroke that I'd read about in mechanics illustrated, uh, in the 1950s and
00:51:04all kinds of fascinating stuff. So he was a person who filled himself with details
00:51:11and had them all at his fingertips. So, uh, well, in addition to that 4360 in the backyard of his
00:51:20shop, a 28 cylinder radio folks. That's a big as a house, as big as a car anyways. And, um, he had,
00:51:29he had, uh, he had one of those engines, at least one in the back in a can, um, with big hooks. So
00:51:34you can move it around. And then he also had, um, at least one tank, he had some military vehicles.
00:51:40Yeah. He was interested in that. He had a tank, man. He just was,
00:51:43yeah, whatever. Transportation enthusiast.
00:51:47Eventually before he died, Curtis was taken for a ride in, uh, in an airliner powered by,
00:51:55uh, his company's later piston engines. And, uh, he obviously survived his encounter with the
00:52:05Wright brothers. Um, they continued to develop their engines, but not with the intensity and
00:52:15results that, uh, that Curtis did. And of course the irony of the whole thing is that in 1929,
00:52:24Curtis Wright Corporation was, was formed, um, bringing together, uh, both aviation, uh,
00:52:35entities to build airplanes and engines. And, uh, they finished up World War II
00:52:43in a very strong cash position and never really accomplished anything again.
00:52:49Because although they built jet engines and they constantly tried to interest, uh, buyers in
00:52:58theirs, in a civilianized C46, um, the public didn't want to walk uphill to get to their seat
00:53:08in an airliner anymore. As far as they were concerned, if you have to walk uphill,
00:53:13you have to walk uphill. That's some pre-war stuff right there.
00:53:17Antiques, men, tail draggers. What do you even, that's all I want is a tail dragger.
00:53:25And of course that, that is wonderful, that moment when the tail lifts
00:53:29and it seems to happen almost at once. You know, the airplane's moving and then the next,
00:53:35next moment you see the tail is up and it stays like that for quite a while. And then finally
00:53:41the air wafts it away. Well, I flew in a B-17 out of Knoxville, uh, with Peter Egan many,
00:53:47many years ago now. And, uh, that was remarkable because you have all that,
00:53:52um, you have all the vibration of all three wheels on the ground,
00:53:57four engines getting the wah, wah, wah. Cause they're, they're basically the same RPM,
00:54:01but not quite. So you get these really interesting waveforms that make it sound
00:54:05interesting. The plane's shaking and shaking and the tail comes off and it shakes a little
00:54:09bit less. And then, and then you just get an inch off the ground and it's serenity. I mean,
00:54:15it's still loud and everything, but you just, then you're on this cushion of air and there's
00:54:19no, no more of that wheelie vibration. And it's like, oh, and they had the, uh, they had the,
00:54:25there was no, um, top turret or anything on it. And we, I would call it the sunroof. So there's
00:54:31a big open area in the top of the fuselage and you can stick your face out it. Like you could
00:54:35actually, you know, if you're tall enough, get your head to stick out the top of this plane
00:54:39while it's flying. And it was one of these beautiful, misty Tennessee days where it was
00:54:43sunshiny, but there was a lot of humidity and there's green rolling Hills. And it was,
00:54:48it was out of this world. Um, I want to talk about Curtis cause we were, you know, we made the
00:54:54SR 71, you know, saying like, oh, 1964, 1980 was going 43 miles an hour in 1964. We were doing,
00:55:02you know, many thousands of miles per hour. And, uh, but I don't want to discount the progress
00:55:09that he himself made because it was 42 horsepower, 42 miles an hour, maybe 50 to a hundred horsepower.
00:55:16And then you were talking about the Curtis D 12, uh, that was 485 horsepower, unsupercharged
00:55:26in 1921. Yep. Like no messing around. We're just, they just are going, going, going. And that's,
00:55:35so that was his seaplane that went 177 miles an hour.
00:55:42And then that's the motor that the British air ministry ordered and led to
00:55:50all the wonder and amazing around to manufacturers as a suggestion.
00:55:57I like it. Nevermind that it's foreign. Have a look. You might learn something from Charlie Kirkham.
00:56:07I was always fascinated with, um, the idea that the Merlin, the Merlin cylinders are up.
00:56:16Up. Are they not right? Whereas the German engines were inverted. Do you mean?
00:56:23Yeah. I mean, in the rain, like the Ranger six, which was an American American in line six,
00:56:28the cylinders all placed in face down in a line of six and they put the crank up to get prop
00:56:34clearance. And the pilots are always saying, uh, it would be better if I could see the runway,
00:56:41but I can't. So I carry this six inch piece of rubber foam and just tuck it under there when I'm
00:56:48landing so I can see out. And, uh, that's why you will see on F6F, which has a, an R2800 radial up
00:56:59front, uh, that the, the fuselage slopes upward to where the pilot is located. So that he has
00:57:06some chance. Oh yeah. That's the carrier there. And it was worse with, with the, um, F4F, uh,
00:57:15Corsair, which, uh, for weight and balance had the 2800 sort of extended out front. And it was just
00:57:24this monstrous thing in front of you. You couldn't see a thing. And it was official policy in the U.S.
00:57:30services, no carrier operations. Meanwhile, the British developed a circular approach to the
00:57:37carrier so that as you're turning, you can look across on a cord of your circle and see the
00:57:45carrier. And, uh, they developed methods for a circular approach and that was adopted for that
00:57:52aircraft in the U.S. Navy. So, um, it was able to, to make its contribution. To do quite a lot.
00:58:01Yes. Yes, indeed. Now, uh, Curtis, the Curtis side produced liquid cooled engines because of,
00:58:10uh, Glenn Curtis's, uh, best little engine in the world for exactly three minutes.
00:58:17But, uh, the U.S. Navy fostered the development of air cooled engines because they felt that the
00:58:25lightweight, uh, and simplicity of an air cooled would be more compatible with over water operation.
00:58:35So, um, air cooled radials were developed intensively from, uh, the mid twenties.
00:58:47Um, Lindbergh flew to Orly, flew across the Atlantic ocean and landed at Orly airport near
00:58:56Paris, um, in 1927 with a, uh, J5, I think nine cylinder air cooled radial. So such progress was
00:59:10made in the cooling of air cooled cylinders by making all the air that came into the nacelle
00:59:17go through the fin space. Eventually the Navy said, we're not buying any more liquid cooled ever.
00:59:23Half of our problems, uh, in over water flying have to do with cooling system problems. So
00:59:29forget that. So it's, uh, horses for courses. Yeah. Well, you know, why do you like a fifties
00:59:37motorcycle? Cause it doesn't have brake fluid. So you don't have to deal with seized hydraulics
00:59:43when it's been sitting forever. You just have cables and drum, ruined paint, ruined paint.
00:59:48You don't have to worry about it. There's no brake fluid, brake fluid smells. I hate it.
00:59:53I hate how it feels and it strips paint beautifully. So we, that's why fifties
00:59:58motorcycles are cool. You don't have to mess with that. And then you don't have any of these like
01:00:03water pump seals or hoses or radiators or any of that. Who are you there? So
01:00:11leaping out of my bed and going outdoors to my van in which I had just arrived from
01:00:17Florida, pre Daytona testing to let the water out of my race bike engines,
01:00:24because in a dream, evidently some computations were going on in my head that said,
01:00:31you idiot, your bikes are freezing. Fix it. So they say they're cold, Kevin. Yeah, you got it.
01:00:42So you wouldn't have a lot of coolant in the race bike. They don't like that at all.
01:00:46The track, it's too slippery. Yeah. Well, that's why they have those trays under their
01:00:52bikes to collect oil from blowups and liquid from anything else. I've been admiring all these
01:00:59armor race bikes that I should wish to copy in some form. And I was looking at one guy's
01:01:03XS650 and I thought, damn, he's got a huge sump on that. But then I realized, oh,
01:01:09and I thought, damn, he's got a huge sump on that. But then I realized, cause he has a very
01:01:13compact tray that's underneath the engine. They do put, they do put drop sumps on these. There's
01:01:17a plate you can get cast on that plate, but a cast piece that drops the sump plate where the
01:01:23filter is and the pickup and it lowers the oil level below the crank. Cause as it is stock,
01:01:31um, the, the crank spinning in oil, like that it's actually in it. It's pretty
01:01:36for sustained higher RPM operation, not ideal, lots of heat. And so when you drop the oil level
01:01:42below the cranks, you're going to pick up several horsepower on the dyno. And you're also going to
01:01:45reduce the operating temperature of your engine. Yep. In the early days of single cylinder racing
01:01:51in England, between the wars, one of the first things that would happen when one of the wizards
01:01:57of tune would be hired at by a company that normally didn't do any racing such as new Hudson
01:02:05is that the wizard would reduce the diameter of the flywheels. So there's to reduce their ability
01:02:13to trap oil between the crank and the close fitting crankcase,
01:02:19um, which you could see if you had an oil temperature gauges,
01:02:23uh, because the engine is transmitting a lot of power into the oil that is now not going to the
01:02:31rear wheel. And that's why a longtime Harley racing manager, Dick O'Brien said, when it starts to wet
01:02:39sump, he can just see it said, especially Daytona. It's like a big invisible hand came down and just
01:02:46stopped it. I had a 1971 Triumph TR six car, uh, with a non overdrive. And I want to say the rear
01:02:54axle ratio was like three, seven to one. And, uh, on the freeway, if I went 3,500 RPM, which was
01:03:04probably about 70, everything would be fine. And if I, and it was, this is the pretty knackered
01:03:11power plant. Don't get me wrong. This is not perfect condition and perfect combustion chambers.
01:03:17But if I whiz that up to four grand, I really wanted to get somewhere four grand and I'm going
01:03:2180, the water temperature would go up and the oil pressure would go down because it didn't like it.
01:03:29It didn't like all that worrying about, and it just made everything hot because all the,
01:03:33they call it windage, but you know, it's oilage. It's the oil getting and just getting smacked
01:03:39around like that. The oils, you know, it's got to drain off everything. That's where they, sometimes
01:03:43inside crankcases, they'll put screens to grab the oil and let it drain down the side of the crankcase
01:03:49rather than getting smacked around on all the flinging parts. This brings us back to Glenn Curtis.
01:03:55Oh good. Cause the OX5 had these problems in high degree and what they came up with was later
01:04:05also applied to the R4360 28 cylinder radial, namely perforated steel sheet.
01:04:14Because what it does is it allows the oil to pass through, but it takes a lot of its energy
01:04:21so that instead of hitting the walls of the crankcase and bouncing off back onto the
01:04:26crankshaft, it obediently clings to the walls and trickles down to the sump like a good little
01:04:35quart of oil. So there's the wonderful story about Luke Hobbs, who was in charge of the 4360
01:04:45development program, actually the whole design process. He's sitting in his August office.
01:04:51He gets a phone call from the dyno room and one of the men says to him,
01:04:59I think we've got it, sir. Well, get up here. I want to hear all about it. So the guy standing
01:05:05outside of his door with oil dripping off of his elbows, holding these parts. The problem was,
01:05:13this is a two-speed supercharger engine and the two speeds were achieved by a drain and fill
01:05:21fluid couplings, clutches. So what was happening was that when the speed change happened,
01:05:33one of the pairs of fluid couplings would throw all its oil out
01:05:39and it was causing a loss of 300 horsepower.
01:05:43Remarkable.
01:05:47Yeah. So what they did was they got a die, a crude die made,
01:05:53or they did it piecemeal by welding and they came up with perforated metal that could be fitted into
01:06:01the fluid coupling case with one-inch spacers to the walls so that when that shower of that
01:06:11exploding, explosion of oil took place, that the screen slowed it down enough that it could
01:06:19just trickle down the sides of the cavity to the scavenge pump. So OX5 was the engine developed
01:06:28from the water-cooled V8 that Curtis used in France and Italy to win those flying meets. And
01:06:37the OX5 was, I think there were like 12,000 of them produced. And my mother rode in a JN-4,
01:06:48a Jenny, Curtis Jenny aircraft, powered by an OX5 when her indulgent dad said,
01:06:55you want to go up in that crane? You bet.
01:06:58Amazing.
01:06:58Yeah.
01:06:59Yeah, of course we do. Of course, yes. Well, excellent. Yeah, I was thinking of all this
01:07:06windage oilage stuff. I'm also seeing crank scrapers that some of the V8 guys have used
01:07:11where you have a piece of sheet metal that you kind of bolt between the pan and the bottom of
01:07:15the block that has a cutout that's, you know, very closely arranged to the edges of the
01:07:20crankshaft meant to keep the oil from coming back up into the area of turbulence.
01:07:28Well, a viscometer is a pair of concentric cylinders. One of them is fixed and its torque
01:07:37is measured. And the space between them is filled with the oil whose viscosity is to be measured.
01:07:45And the one cylinder is rotated. And that's basically what a crankshaft in a close-fitting
01:07:53crankcase is, a gigantic viscometer.
01:07:57Allow me to say Velocette, people. I have the large crankwheels in my 54 Velocette. So they
01:08:04have the big ones and the small ones. And I have the big ones. And what the big ones do is pump oil
01:08:09in to the primary case because there's no seal on the drive bearing. And so the dynamics of that
01:08:18engine, even with you drilling a hole under the magneto and putting a breather in that it did not
01:08:23have, that's basically the place we all put the breather in, put a brass fitting and run it up to
01:08:28a bottle or back to the oil tank. And so then I thought, well, I don't want oil going into my
01:08:33primary drive. I'll get my buddy to machine my crankcases and put a seal on the drive side.
01:08:40We'll put a lip seal on the drive side. That'll solve it. And you know what that did? That pushed
01:08:46a lot of oil out the breather that never happened before. It's got to go somewhere. Still doing it.
01:08:50And then the small ones, the small ones will actually remove oil from the primary if it's in
01:08:55there. They kind of make a more of a vacuum. Just, yeah, anyway, we could go on. I could talk about
01:09:03Jim Constock and his reed breather that he makes for Norton Commandos that is now being manufactured
01:09:08by NYC, Norton, New York City, Norton, Kenny Cummings, also an arm eraser. And it's a big
01:09:15screw-in reed breather, beautifully done, six bolts straightly holding it. And then
01:09:22the pipe goes off of the bottom of the engine. You take out this huge plug, you screw in that
01:09:27reed breather and you run it back. And when you start a sump Norton, a wet sump Norton,
01:09:31because they're dry sump, meaning the oil stays in the tank and there's a scavenge pump
01:09:35that pumps it back to the tank to be sent down the pressure line. If you're Norton sumps and
01:09:42you kickstart this thing, normally you'd like, oh, let me drain this out. And I'm like, I'm not
01:09:46draining this thing out every time it sumps. You kickstart it and the reed breather will clear the
01:09:52crankcase faster than the scavenge pump. It was remarkable. It was great. And all the problems
01:09:59went away, not problems, but it used to weep a little oil here and there. And that reed breather
01:10:05was working. We had negative pressure in the crankcase because it was always
01:10:11cutting it off. It was awesome. I'm not the only person who's looked inside of one of the
01:10:16high-performance 600cc fours that were the backbone of beginner racing in the U.S. for such a long time.
01:10:26You look in the gearbox and you say, well, the gearbox is way up here
01:10:31and the oil pump's way down there. And there's a lot of space here. I wonder what we could do
01:10:36with that. It turns out that one of the race teams, of course, this is just a rumor.
01:10:46It might never have happened. One of the race teams, a guy comes in and he says,
01:10:54I got a vacuum pump here. It fits in that space. We could evacuate the crankcase.
01:11:04Oilage, windage, zero. Let's do it.
01:11:09Well, of course, there's the top fuel drag motors. They talk about having seven pumps
01:11:15working on the engines, vacuum pumps.
01:11:18Yeah.
01:11:20And also that the fuel going into the cylinder is nearly a solid column.
01:11:28Yes.
01:11:31Anyway, surely this is related to Curtis.
01:11:36Well, everything's related to Curtis because there he was at the beginning.
01:11:41Yeah.
01:11:43The roots of the plant.
01:11:46Well, thanks for listening, folks. That's another one of the books. Appreciate you being here and
01:11:50sharing the time with us. Share the podcast with your friends if you think they would like it.
01:11:54And again, podcast brought to you by Octane. Click that link in the description. For real,
01:11:59click it. It makes a difference for us. We appreciate your comments and we appreciate
01:12:05Wes Orloff for triggering this podcast and using his considerable skill to
01:12:14math out what may have happened on that day at the beach back so long ago.
01:12:21Yes.
01:12:22Just remarkable. And Kevin has vowed to write us up a story that would cover all this stuff
01:12:30using Wes's research. So we'll get that posted here and share that with you in the future.
01:12:36Thank you for listening and we'll catch you next time.