Light Fuse And Get Away
This is not, as it would at first appear, what the engineering wags used to call a “Wernher von Braun divorce” — indeed, the device our svelte maiden is strapped into is not even a rocket, despite all appearances:
According to Weird Universe, that’s Miss Margaret Travis, preparing with something less than full enthusiasm to demonstrate something called the Shapson Aquaplane at Santa Monica, California in 1935. It was, supposedly, a crank-operated device allowing a swimmer to achieve a speed of 12 knots through the water, although it seems not to have caught on as a technology.
Here’s a newspaper clipping and photo featuring a different model and swimmer, one Bobbie Sperry, whose facial expression suggests she’s even less impressed than Ms. Travis with inventor S. Shapiro and his whizbang device:
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Crank-operated or crank-designed?
Ah, I see he’s holding the propeller, not the fuse. I know some people like to be blindfolded, but not being able to see where you’re going as you cross a lake actually seems hazardous! I don’t think the water has your safe word on file.
“To the moon, Alice…”
Jackie Gleason, The Honeymooners
Are you sure they are different swimmers? They are the same height, have their feet buried in the sand in much the same way, have the same hairstyle and expression. The difference could be put down to the resolution of the two photographs. The two newspaper reports were from 2 days apart and obviously reporting on the same event. One or both of the reporters may have been an incompetent drunk.
I am sure of nothing. But (a) their faces and hair look different to me, who am notoriously faceblind; and (b) I put a lot of value on primary sources; certainly I preference them over my own random vague intuitions about what faces look like in a grainy news photo. If it’s good enough for the Chicago Tribune and the East Liverpool Evening Review, both of whom may have syndicated it from the same source, it’s good enough for me. Somewhere there is, or was, a cache of syndicated wire photos with captions; I doubt anybody in Chicago or Liverpool was making this shit up or sending stringers to Santa Monica for this. But the notion that there were several pretty volunteers on hand, all selected to the same standard of “pretty”? Pretty easy to swallow.
Perhaps a better quality version of the second image would help you see the similarity. The model may even be smiling here.
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And the first image:
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Note the position of the surf relative to the figures and the mountains in the background. Note the shadow of the girl pointing in the direction of the sea. In the picture with the inventor leaning forward the first of the buildings on the far shore can be seen at our right. In the picture with the inventor’s eyes visible much more of that shoreline’s buildings can be seen on the right and the shadow is correspondingly pointing further to our left. Note the shadow of the base of the central float on the body board at much the same level in both pictures.
These pictures were clearly taken at the same place and time and with a model of very similar physique and size. In a patch of sand similarly disturbed and with her feet dug in similarly. The hairstyle is clearer here and I would say very similar.
Hug, I don’t dispute the similarity, about which you are not wrong. But similarity is not identity, and my reasoning about the primacy of primary sources is not easy to shift. I’m going to go with the captions I’ve got unless I’ve got a damned good reason to think one of them is wrong, and the evidence of my lying eyes is almost never going to serve. I’m not trying to devalue your opinion, which could easily be correct; it’s just that I’m going with the best evidence I have, by the criteria that seem most reliable to me. I can’t really see why a newspaper would make up a totally bogus model name; that seems a bigger unlikelihood to me than that two similar-looking swimmers were brought to the beach to test a contraption for the press one fine California spring day.