To the best of my memory, I heard that “ancients” expression from a grad school professor around 1974. We were studying international relations, this in the wake of the Vietnam antiwar protests, youth revolt & counterculture and our prof, an old fashioned FDR liberal, scoffed at the protesters’ belief that they had invented well, protest movements.
When he pointed out the obvious, that popular uprisings and the writings which inspired them go back many centuries, his younger charges actually expressed their chagrin that all life, innovation and original thought did not begin with them (”don’t trust anybody over thirty!”).
He characterized their youthful arrogance as “The ancients are stealing our wisdom!”. As a recent Vietnam vet at the time, I found that hilarious.
For what it’s worth, our discussion of carbide lights sent me to eBay. Lots of them out there but I passed. Grandpa was a WW1 vet and worked in the coal mines until he saved enough to go to trade school and learn steam generation & operation. He got his license and a much better paying job as the boiler operator in a local factory, and worked until he was sixty six. The miners had lost their jobs by 1932 anyway; Grandpa would go to the mines to dig coal to heat his house but except for that his miner’s tools were souvenirs of an earlier time.
Once again, that diagram of the moment of impact between Hunley and Housatonic is an awesome image. Well done!
I still see that image as just a "freeze-frame" of a screen with all objects (Housatonic, water level, Hunley, spar, torpedo) independently movable and positionable using the mouse. (BTW, that yellow, cross-hatched "box" shows the range of the Hunley's "closest approach" positions described by the Housatonic's Captain Pickering.)
Note that the hull contours (hence the "draft") of the Housatonic I used were those of her "class" vessels -- the "Ossipee Class". That was done, because there was then (and still is now) a controversy over the Housatonic's draft. Somehow a number crept in (probably from another vessel by the same name) that indicated the Housatonic's draft was half that of her sister vessels -- which is an impossibility. (That big a difference in draft and displacement would place her in a different class entirely!) [Imagine claiming the Missouri had half the draft of the Iowa...]
And that discrepancy still exists. See the "Draft" specification at
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Ossipee_(1861)"
versus that same spec at
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Housatonic_(1861)"
Since the draft of the target vessel radically affected torpedo placement (and the Hunley's deployment scheme) we settled on using the "Class" specification. But, believe me, the discussions were lively! '-)
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Wow! It just struck me that it has been long enough since those "pre-raising" forum days that even our "history discussions" and working sketches are now "history!! Talk about making me feel my own age... LOL!!
Again, thank you for the compliment of seeing significance in my own work -- that I had competely overlooked!!!
Sadly, Americans seem to be losing the (pioneering and depression eras) values of "making do with what's available by the sweat of your own brow". :-(
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BTW, a note of personal thanks for this friendly, informative and enjoyable conversation!! IMHO, FR could use much more of the sort...