快猫短视频

DOES it matter which side of the road a country drives on? Well, in 1958 it worried Robert M. Stewart. Our reported his concern that too many nations drove on the right-hand side and so were affecting the rotation of Earth. Additionally, he fretted that a component of the vehicles鈥� momentum might tip the polar axis. Stewart therefore 鈥渄eplores the indiscriminate adoption of right-hand driving, and looks to the British automotive industry and the underdeveloped territories to redress the balance鈥�. If this was an April fool story, it was 128 days too late.

A less loopy, but more frightening, dispatch from the war between planet and internal combustion engine was to come in our . The catalytic converters that spare us some of the engine鈥檚 noxious emissions were newfangled then, and we warned that their high working temperatures could dramatically increase the risk of fire. The US Environmental Protection Agency had pointed out that a spark plug failure could allow unburned fuel to enter the car鈥檚 exhaust system, where it would encounter a hot catalytic converter. Whooomph! Of course, the 鈥渕otor men鈥� of Detroit thought the agency was worrying about clean air too much.

A new and less dangerous way of halting cars appeared in our 24 August 1991 issue. Police knew that spikes laid out across the road were the safest way to stop speeding criminals, but existing spike traps were too heavy to carry easily in police cars and needed more than one officer to deploy. Donald Kilgrow, a retired Utah highway cop, had come up with a design in which the stainless steel spikes were embedded in a lightweight 鈥渘ylon alloy鈥� called Zytel FN. As we pointed out, Kilgrow鈥檚 design was unlikely to feature in an action movie. Who wants a car chase where the bad guys鈥� vehicle just settles slowly into the tarmac? An explosive denouement 鈥� maybe involving catalytic converters and criminal levels of emissions 鈥� is far more cinematic.