Talk:Dionysius Lardner

Re: Apocryphal Asphyxiation Quotation

I've just looked at the Google-digitized October 26, 1861 issue of Scientific American (vol. V, no. 17, p. 261), which apparently summarizes or quotes a publication cited as the London Engineer. It appears the false Lardner quote results from a mental mash-up of an unrelated (still erroneous) calculation by Lardner about a dangerous train situation with two other train-related potential asphyxiation dangers.
According to his Wikipedia bio, Lardner claimed the gradient in the Box Tunnel on the Great Western Railway would let the trains over-accelerate and lead them to break up (presumably at the end of the tunnel?), but his calculations left out the effects of air resistance and friction, so were proven wrong.
The main theme of the SciAm/London Engineer (SA/LE) material is speculation/planning by engineers for intercity transport by pneumatic-driven trains, i.e. similarly to message systems formerly used by the Paris post and by various businesses in the 19th & early 20th centuries, the last common usage of which is seen in bank drive-up windows. The vacuums powering such a system could in theory have caused asphyxiation, but the SA/LE material discounts that problem due to the inevitable leakage around and into the cars in such a system.
Then quoting SA/LE: "The original apprehension as to the danger of riding in railway tunnels was that the passengers would be suffocated, like the two unfortunate men, last week, in the Blisworth Tunnel of the Grand Junction Canal." Following up on that lead, I found http://www.engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp?id=202, which cites "an incident on 6th September 1861, in which two men died of asphyxiation from steamboat engine fumes inside the tunnel." Thus, different tunnel, for a canal rather than a train, and they died of bad air, not its absence. SA/LE continues: "Dr. Lardner was a stout opponent of the Great Western Railway, and we believe he made a strong point as to the Box tunnel. Eminent medical authority had to be called in to show that the danger of suffocation would be very slight, indeed, ...".
Thus, the real and at that time current and well-known fear of suffocation by underground fumes (whether in mines or tunnels) was somehow associated with the fictional danger of lack of air in a never-realized engineers' pipe dream, and the merged pair were somehow grafted as an urban legend onto Lardner's invalid prediction of mechanical failure in a specific real railroad tunnel project, the result being that he is falsely remembered for predicting death by vacuum of passengers in what now seem ridiculously low speed vehicles.
Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia contained "A Treatise on Hydrostatics and Pneumatics" that he wrote and has been digitized by the Hathi Trust in multiple versions. Someone with a better science background might be interested skimming that to verify the absence of any hint at the idea of speed-created vacuums, and thereby put the whole thing to rest.
Lardner may have been a, let's say 'cad', in real life (see his bio), and he may have been a better writer/popularizer than scientist, but his association with the idea of death by vacuum of train passengers is apparently better explained by the vagaries of imperfect memory and oral tradition than by anything he wrote.
—This unsigned comment is by Frphnflng (talk • contribs) February 8th, 2016.