There is this old joke about the American space program, which people usually bring up around (!@#$%^&*) Tax Day, that goes something like this:
When NASA started sending astronauts into space, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity. [Yeah, no shit, Sherlock.]
To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside-down, on almost any surface including glass, and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 C.
The Russians used a pencil.
Your taxes are due again – enjoy paying them.
I thought this was a pretty good joke, and actually had a lot of truth to it.
Then the other day I was trawling around teh innarwebz, bored out of my gourd (which is a distressingly common occurrence these days, now that I’m not in a civilised country anymore), and this hoary old chestnut popped into my head for some reason.
So I decided to go look into it.
The joke is just that – a joke. It’s 100% false.
As the Quora link points out, Paul C. Fisher was never contracted or even asked by NASA to create the pen that bears his name. NASA didn’t spend $12 billion on developing a pen; Paul Fisher spent over $1 million OF HIS OWN MONEY developing a pen out of patriotism – and, as it happens, pretty darned good business sense.
The attributes of the pen are actually accurately described by the joke. But that’s about it.
As for using a pencil INNNN SPAAAAAACE!!!!?
Well, yeah, you could – but the problem is that graphite breaks and flakes and chips and floats around and gets into electrical wiring, where it tends to short out circuits.
There are about a bazillion things that you DO NOT WANT to happen in outer space, with zero gravity and zero outside pressure. Having a critical system short out because some numbnuts used a graphite pencil which then flaked and chipped and ended up sending microscopic pieces into a nearby wiring conduit, has to be pretty damn high up that list.
Here is what the Fisher Space Pen looks like:
And it costs only about US$60, maybe a bit more depending on which specific pen you order.
Now that, right there, is American ingenuity and hard work put to good use.
The point of this post isn’t to bust a myth. I’ll leave that to people with the time for such nonsense – and also with the time, ability, and patience to challenge websites like Snopes which have a serious liberaltard bias.
No, the point of this post is to make a note of what is truly great about America – or was, back when it was a nation.
There was a time when individual Americans would see a problem and get on with solving it themselves. They wouldn’t wait around for the government to do it, like a lot of Asian cultures do. They wouldn’t consider it a problem for the local “Big Man” to solve, like most Hispanic cultures do. They wouldn’t stay on their knees and pray to the Lord to solve their problems for them, like a lot of European Calvinist cultures tended to do.
No, they would say a prayer to the Lord, ask for strength and grace, and then stand up, dust themselves off, and get on with doing whatever needed to be done.
Here’s another good example of it, which comes straight from John Ringo’s highly entertaining, and highly prophetic, book The Last Centurion.
Ever heard of a barn-raising?
That is where the members of an agricultural community come around from far and wide to help an individual family raise or repair a barn on their land.
The men do all of the hard work and heavy lifting. They hack and saw and hammer and thump and spit and curse and groan and sweat until the whole barn is finished.
The women get together and cook up a feast for everyone with whatever is at hand.
The children scurry around and laugh and play and cause a bit of nuisance here and there and chip in where they can without hurting themselves, usually under the watchful eye of an elder.
Once the barn is raised, everyone sits down and eats a hell of a lot of food – because raising a barn in the summer sun is VERY hard work.
And then, they all scarper off back to their own homes and families.
You know what is remarkable about this tradition of community unpaid labour coming together spontaneously to solve a problem that nothing and nobody else can solve?
IT ONLY HAPPENS IN AMERICA.
Now, John Ringo made the assertion that it only ever happened in America, which is plainly not true, because the Pommie Bastards have their own term for it. So do the Finns, a fairly large number of whom came over the seas and settled in what we now know of as “New Somalia” – oh, whoops, sorry, I meant to write “Minnesota”.
The point is that Americans inherited a tradition of spontaneous order and assistance, and then enhanced it and built upon it, entirely organically.
I fear that this is something which America has lost. More and more these days I am seeing a great lassitude taking over much of its population – at least, in the big cities. I’ve indulged in that myself during my time there – “oh, it’s not my problem, it’s not my responsibility, someone else is supposed to come along and do that”.
This attitude works, more or less, in a functioning society where the garbage gets picked up, the sewage gets flushed away, the streets get cleaned, and people generally show up on time to do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.
But that order is breaking down – and not just in the USA, but throughout the Western world.
All you have to do is visit the streets of any American city. My parents were just there Stateside visiting with our relatives, and upon returning they remarked at their great shock in seeing so many homeless people all over the streets of several cities in New England – and not necessarily in the most heavily populated areas either.
That American tradition of individual self-reliance and responsibility is breaking down, fast, in the urban areas. In the countryside and rural parts of America, it’s still there – because it has to be. You don’t run a successful farm or blue-collar business without having a certain amount of grit, tenacity, and sheer cussed bloody-mindedness, after all.
And let’s not even get started about Los Angeles and especially San Francisco, where vagrancy is off the charts and human faeces litter the sidewalks along with used injectable-drug needles.
The kinds of Americans who created the Fisher Space Pen, without even being asked to do it, are dying out. They still exist, but there are fewer of them every year.
Time will tell whether a nation can exist and endure when innovators and brilliant thinkers are replaced by financiers and technocrats. My guess is that it will not. But, we will see.
In the meantime – why not go buy a Fisher Space Pen for a loved one? It’s a badass thing to have, after all, and the pen itself is heavy enough to be used as a CQB weapon if you have absolutely no other choice.
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"I prayed for twenty years and got no reply until I prayed with my legs." – Frederick Douglass
The fact that blacks and cuckservatives alike adore MLK and not Douglass tells you everything you need to know. The spirit of Yankee Enginuity is a long lost relic. A Ben Franklin will not be walking through that door anytime soon, as he has been legislated out of existence. They Have To Go Back.