Crop dusting in the 1970's...

Your mention of Calcium Carbide stirred up a memory of the house I grew up in. It was a mansion built in 1889 by a rich banker in the territory of New Mexico in a boom railroad town named Las Vegas. (Yes I know there was a later town with that name in Nevada). In addition to the twenty two rooms it had nine fire places and every room had a gas light fixture each with a large 18 inch diameter medallion protecting the adjacent surface. The lines all led to an underground brick lined tank with an entry slide for introducing calcium carbide and water which generated Carbide gas. (Now commonly called Acetylene). By the time we moved to that house in 1937 none of those fixtures were functional and the tank was not discovered until years later. Another small wonder that the place was still standing. Sorry, but way off topic from crop dusting.

Best regards,

Robert

 

still standing?
Nice little town. Check out the paragraph titled 'Outlaws' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas,_New_Mexico

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No apology needed. This is all interesting and educational. It triggered an incident my history at Boeing when we made a bet with a kid that he couldn't build an operational ram jet. Well, he did get it to run for a millisecond. Airflow was provided by a tank vacuum cleaner down stream drawing air through a small diameter glass tube that he formed with a blow torch. He not only managed to run his little experiment, however brief, but he managed to blow out the basement window when the vacuum cleaner exploded from the fuel mixture in it. Somehow he escaped serious injury .

 

Unfortunately not. The Highlands University President Donnelley exercised the right of eminent domain and had it torn down in 1956. Broke my mother's heart. None of the plate glass windows nor the parquet flooring survive.Some of the items from the mansion are still around, a large fireplace mantle and imported British tile in a Museum in Santa Fe, the pipe organ in a Masonic Lodge in Denver, some of the stained glass windows in a private home in Santa Fe, large hand carved newell posts in another Santa Fe home. The historic preservation movement was a little slow in getting to town. Sad.

Best regards,

Robert

 

About 15 years ago, the students at Georgia Tech built a "car" (it was really more like a bed frame on wheels) powered by a pulse jet engine! Just like your kid, they never got the engine to run more than a millisecond, but during that millisecond, it was the loudest thing in Atlanta! Never saw it again after that.....

 

The V1s from the London Blitz were really noisy, too. When the noise stopped, everyone knew to duck. The Tempests and P-47Ms seemed to have the most luck catching them.