The famous account of the JATO Rocket Car was one of the original Darwin Awards winners: a man who supposedly met his death in a spectacular manner after mounting a rocket engine on a common automobile. It was originally circulated as a forwarded email.
The story, however, has now been debunked, and is classified as an urban legend.
This legend was again convincingly debunked in 2003 on the pilot episode of the Discovery Channel show MythBusters , titled "Jet Assisted Chevy, Pop Rocks and Soda". They replicated the scene and the thrust of the JATO with several commercially-available amateur rocket motors. The car did go very fast, but nowhere near the 300 mph (500 km/h) reported in the original story, and failed to become airborne.
Jet Assisted Take-Off
This is the text of what appears to be the most popular version of the message, judging from usenet repostings:
History
The original Darwin Awards were fictitious. Both were contained in a 1990 Version posted to rec.motorcycles of the JATO Rocket Car urban legend. When this urban legend was debunked, it was specifically pointed out that the mentioned Darwin Awards were fictitious. It contained a reference to the 1985 mention of a Vending Machine Tipover Darwin Award. It was Paul Vixie who wrote this introduction to the JATO urban legend that first included the term "Darwin Award". Vixie credits Charles Haynes with making the (informal) Darwin Award Nomination, but it was Vixie's specific wording, with the first sentence crediting Haynes stripped off, that was actually circulated and actually referred to the Darwin Awards as if they actually existed and were common knowledge, though the message wasn't widely circulated until it was reformatted.
It remained fairly dormant until 1995, when the message surfaced again in rec.pyrotechnics with the email header stripped off the introduction, though the main story is still indented. Three days later the introduction is fully integrated into the story and it appeared on rec.humor in a form that made it a truly infectious meme. Shortly after it was reposted in 1995 it quickly began to spread, being posted on Usenet 24 times within the next month. In 1996 the legend was further embellished with references to the year of manufacture of the car and G-Forces and to the form which was widely circulated via email (55% of all postings on usenet which included "JATO Rocket Darwin Award impala" also included "g-forces"). Though this urban legend had apparently been around long before 1990, it appears to have been the addition of the Vixie Darwin Award introduction and the subsequent two edits to integrate that introduction and then posting on rec.humor that may have boosted its meme status and the 1996 embellishments almost doubled its popularity. Popularity peaked around the end of 1996.
In 1996 after numerous inquires, the Arizona Department of Public Safety issued a news release posted on their website concerning the story. It termed the story "an Arizona myth."
Forward to October 4, 2006: Paul Harvey's Morning Radio Show comments repeat the above story in a more encapsulated fashion.
Cult of the Dead Cow, a high-profile hacker group and ezine, published an extensive elaboration in 1998 that in a detailed and plausible manner attempts to explain the most common details of the Rocket Car legend. Four adult males under 25 engaged in assorted illegal activity, welding, drinking, Rube Goldberg engineering, and scouting to build the rocket rail car when they happen upon JATOs in a junk pile. After a lengthy and well-written history of the car's planning, group dynamics, secrecy and construction, "CarInTheCliff" describes the car's only test in such a manner as to account for all the elements of the circulating legend plus the elements he has added while discouraging repeats by example.
The Darwin Awards meme was also spread by Wendy Northcutt, who collected the Darwin Awards on a public website in 1993, and circulated new stories in a regular newsletter.
See also
- Rocket car
References
- ^ Wendy Northcutt, The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action, Dutton Books, 2000
External links
- Possibly the true story by those who started it (The original link, http:
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