21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) (31 page)
Read 21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff) Online
Authors: Steve Stack
Three feet make a yard, which is also pretty much the length from the tip of your nose to your thumb, and when merchants of old were selling fabric or material they would measure it by holding it up to their face and stretching it across their extended arm.
The yard’s rough metric equivalent is the metre which is, wait for it, the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. Practical, huh? To be completely fair, it was originally supposed to be one ten millionth of the distance from the equator
to the North Pole, which is a much easier measurement for the ordinary man to check!
Imperial measurements are full of sensible units:
- An acre is the amount of land one man could plough with one ox in one day.
- A stone is roughly the weight of the largest rock a man could comfortably hold in one hand.
- A mile is about 1,000 paces.
While the metric system has taken over, being the legal and official measurement of all trade, the imperial measurements are still clinging on to many aspects of our lives. We still measure distance on our roads in miles, and speed in mph. Most people weigh themselves in stones and pounds. Farmers and landowners still refer to how many acres they own.
And things are likely to stay that way for some time to come. Imperial measurements certainly deserve to be on the endangered list, bureaucracy has seen to that, but their simplicity and practicality should mean that they live on for a while yet.
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Professional tennis matches used to have a person sitting in front of the umpire’s chair with one finger and an ear pressed to the net, listening out for any contact between ball and net cord during the serve. Their cry of ‘Let!’ signalled the need for a second service.
This is another of those jobs that has vanished off the face of the earth, but most people don’t seem to have noticed. If they were reinstated tomorrow, you wouldn’t be able to miss them, but their absence seems unremarkable today.
It was possibly the most dangerous job on the tennis court. Sure, you got to sit down all day, were only needed for the first stroke of every point, and could eavesdrop on the mutterings of the players as they changed ends, but you were frequently on the receiving end of a tennis ball to the side of the head. Which would hurt. A lot.
Net cord judges were replaced by electronic devices across the ATP World Tour in 1996, and by the four Grand Slam events shortly afterwards.
They are now well and truly extinct.
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I’ll be honest, as a non-driver I really don’t understand what a choke does to a car engine. Even after researching the subject, I am not really any the wiser.
As far as I can ascertain, it controls the ratio of fuel to air that enters the engine. When the car is cold and you need to start it up, the choke helps to reduce the amount of air getting in and (in theory) allows you to start the car without difficulty.
This used to be a manual process. When starting up many cars manufactured in the last century, you would have to pull the choke out – a button or lever on the dashboard – and then gradually let it back in as you made your way along the road. Release it too early and the car could stall.
Nowadays, most vehicles have automatic chokes and young drivers are none the wiser as to their existence. They just turn the car on and drive off.
Such youth won’t even remember the days when you had to run in a new engine. A handwritten sign would go up in the back of the car saying something like ‘RUNNING IN ENGINE, PLEASE PASS’, to avoid getting beeped at for going so slow. You would have to keep the engine below a certain number of revs for the first few hundred miles. For most drivers, it was a flash forward to how they’d be driving when they hit their 60s.
But again, modern technology means that this sort of tortoise like behaviour is no longer necessary, and pretty soon we’ll have all forgotten it ever happened.
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Many of us were taught to put two spaces after a full stop when typing any sort of document. At least, we were if we grew up in the day when typewriters proliferated, but this is no longer the case. Actually, it wasn’t the case before typewriters, either.
Typographers of old went to great lengths to ensure that the printed word was crisp, clear, and readable. To achieve this, they developed a system of proportional type where wide letters took up more space than thin letters, reflecting the way they tended to look when written down by hand.
Then typewriters came along and really buggered things up. You see, manual typewriters use monospaced type in which every letter and symbol is the same width. This is vital to ensure that they actually work and the keys don’t stick all the time, but one side effect was that you needed to leave two spaces after a full stop for anyone to actually notice it was there.
The need for monospaced type died out in the 1970s when computers and electric typewriters invaded the office space. Proportional type was restored.
But generations of people had grown up with the two space rule, and it proliferates to this day, albeit in dwindling numbers. It simply isn’t needed any more. It looks odd, as you can see from this entry which, in tribute to the dying art, has used two spaces throughout.
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When radio first entered people’s homes in the 1920s, it was a technological marvel, and the machines used to receive radio broadcasts were given a very modern-sounding name: the ‘wireless’. It received signals through the air, you see, the music and talk and sound didn’t travel along wires. It was a bit like magic.
But, as technology improved and players became smaller and more portable, the wonder started to wane, and no one really thought the whole wireless thing was a big deal any more. And anyway, ‘radio’ sounded far more modern. So ‘wireless’ was used as a term of endearment, a quaint old-fashioned way of saying ‘radio’.
But then, almost without anyone noticing, the word ‘wireless’ became cutting edge again. Everyone and his donkey are emailing, tweeting, blogging, and browsing using wireless technology. The word is back, and looks like it is here to stay.
Which is all well and good, but it does mean that you can’t really say, ‘Shall we have a listen to the wireless?’ or ‘I wonder if the United match is on the wireless this afternoon?’ without youngsters looking at you as if you are insane.
The word may live on, but its original meaning is all but lost. I think that is rather sad.
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I was born in 1970, so the first pocket money I ever received (some years later) was most certainly decimal, but mixed in there was the odd coin from the pre-decimal days, still in use under a new denomination.
Take the shilling, for example, the staple coin of the realm before the 1970s. This carried on being legal tender, but was now worth 5p. I remember the coat of arms on one side and the young Queen’s head on the other. Many was the time I would wander down to the corner shop with two of them in my pocket ready to purchase a 10p mix-up bag. The florin was frequently used as a 10p piece itself. Halcyon days.
Not every coin survived the move to decimal, however, even though examples could be found in charity collection boxes and down the backs of sofas for years afterwards. These were the crown, half crown, and threepenny bit. The only exception was the sixpence, which was worth 2½p and carried on till 1980, although by then they were few and far between.
I particularly recall the novelty of coming across a threepenny bit, with its weird 12-sided configuration, and the farthing, which was worth a quarter of a penny and had a wren on the side. We couldn’t spend them, of course, but that didn’t seem to matter.
But not all the decimal coins survived, either. My kids are dumb-founded by the concept of a halfpenny, so much so that I daren’t tell them about the farthing. ‘But what could you buy with it?’ they ask, and I tell them, ‘A Black Jack or a Mojo.’ But lots of prices included the halfpenny in the 1970s, it was not uncommon to pay 12½p for a can of something at the supermarket, and few shopping trips were carried out without some ha’pennies in the change.
The halfpence piece was phased out in 1984, and some of the other coins were resized. Ten-pence pieces used to be big blighters,
and the five pence was also a lot larger back then, so much so that the introduction of the microscopic versions we have now caused much consternation at the time.
But not as much as the withdrawal of the one pound note, which happened the same year. Having been around for 150 years, it was replaced by the pound coin.
Of course, we all move on, and once a coin or note ceases to be legal tender, it quickly vanishes from circulation, confined to the collections of a few enthusiasts or the junk drawers of elderly grandparents. Still, that doesn’t mean we don’t have fond memories of the coins we grew up with, the coins in our first week’s pocket money, the coins we bought our sweets and crisps with.