Did you ever know something that you thought everyone knew, but it turned out that almost no one knew it?
When I was growing up out in the middle of nowhere in Texas, we used to play tag football using an armadillo as the ball. Naturally, the rules forbade kicking or passing the ball. We never hurt the armor-plated varmints, just carried them around by the tail until someone tripped and the ball escaped. Most of the charm of messin’ round with ‘dillos was that our parents had expressly forbidden us from having anything to with them since everyone knew that if an armadillo scratched you—as it most positively would do if you were foolish enough to let it—you could catch leprosy.
I knew about armadillos and leprosy from the time I was old enough to be able to pick one up by the tail, so I was surprised sometime in the late 1970’s to read in the newspaper that scientists had just discovered that humans could catch leprosy from armadillos. Evidently, wherever those scientists had come from they didn’t play much armadillo football. Their loss.
If you go back to the 18th century, there were lots of sea captains who had noticed a strong southwest to northwest current in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but since the current couldn’t always be located and there was no generally recognized central depository of naval knowledge, it became one of those things that those sea captains thought everybody knew but was actually a secret.
Note. I wonder if the internet, the great central clearing house of all known knowledge and cute cat photos will put an end to this knowledge vacuum. Just think…For the rest of time, when someone googles ‘Texas armadillo football’ they will find this blog post. Well, this and nine million articles about Texas State University’s Fighting Armadillos.
Ben Franklin was one of those rare individuals who craved knowledge and just had to solve the unexplained. In 1753, after successfully serving as postmaster for Pennsylvania, Franklin was appointed deputy postmaster for the British colonies. As part of his job, Franklin oversaw the delivery of mail to and from England. The mail from England generally came from London on speedy little packet ships that were specially built to transport passengers and mail quickly. Mail sent to England might travel on the packet ship’s return there but might also travel on merchant ships traveling to a port in England.
Franklin found that the slower merchant vessels sailing from Newport to London crossed the Atlantic faster than the packet ships traveling from Cornwall to New York, despite the fact that the faster packet ships took a shorter, direct route. In 1768, as part of his duties, Franklin traveled to London and back. On the journey, he recorded careful measurement of both air and water temperatures. Initially, Franklin incorrectly attributed the differences in travel time to the Earth’s rotation, then he believed it might be due to prevailing winds. It took years for Franklin to correctly attribute the current to temperature differentials.
After gathering information from numerous sea captains, Franklin became convinced that there was a strong and continuous “river” that started in the Gulf of Mexico, skirted along the coast of the colonies, then crossed the Atlantic. Franklin believed that, if the limits and boundaries of the currents could be charted, then sea captains could purposely enter the current while eastbound and avoid the current as much as possible while westbound, thus cutting many days off the time it took to travel across the Atlantic.
Franklin was correct, of course. What he began documenting was a phenomenon first noticed by the Spanish Explorer, Ponce de León, in the sixteenth century. It was León who called the current the "Gulf Stream" (in Spanish, "Corriente del Golfo") due to its origin in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Gulf Stream is a powerful warm ocean current in the North Atlantic Ocean. Originating in the Gulf of Mexico, it flows northward along the eastern coast of the United States. As it moves northeastward, it transports warm waters from the tropics toward the North Atlantic. The Gulf Stream is characterized by its swift and narrow core, which can reach speeds of up to 4 to 5 miles per hour (6.4 to 8 kilometers per hour). The warm waters have a significant impact on the climate of the eastern United States and western Europe, moderating temperatures and influencing weather patterns. The Gulf Stream also plays a vital role in marine ecosystems, affecting the distribution of marine species and serving as a critical migratory route for various marine life, including fish and sea turtles. Its complex dynamics make it a subject of scientific study and a key element of global ocean circulation.
There is a oft-quoted story in several history books that during the American Revolution, Franklin kept the information about the Gulf Stream from the British, but furnished it to our allies, the French, so that their ships could defeat the British Navy. It’s a great story, but nonsense, since the British had obtained copies of the chart almost a decade before the revolution started. There is no telling how this idiotic story make its way into so many published accounts. Sometimes, those stories tat everyone know to be true turn out to wrong after all.
Like we only use 10% of our brains, a penny dropped off the Empire State Building will kill a person on the ground if it hits them, lightning never strikes twice in the same place, and peeing on a jellyfish sting will relieve the pain, and the 5 second rule.
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