Just a quick mention on embalming: check out Jessica Mitford’s short story, Embalming Mr. Jones. I read it for an english class and still remember each excruciating detail…
It’s amazing the amount of detail we go to in order to make the dead look “decent,” even if that means that nothing inside (or out) is real.
Moving along!
Sterne’s article focuses on the importance of phonography and how it influences everyday life. One example of this in modern times is the black box used in airplanes. The purpose of the black box is to record the conversation in the pit of an airplane, and they often used by authorities to get to the details of a situation whenever a disaster occurs (when a plane crashes, is hijacked, etc).
As you probably already noticed, the black box is not actually black, it’s orange. In fact, it’s not even a box! There are some theories as to why it got it’s name as the “black box,” but none have ever been proved. Some of these theories include:
- the original design was a black box
- a journalist coined the term and made it become known as a ‘black box” in the media
- the only semblance of the piece remaining after a crash is a charred, black box with the recordings inside.
Additionally, it’s not even a box! It’s actually comprised of two separate parts. Check out this post for more information.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: the Story of Success provides transcripts of actual conversations that took place in the cockpit moments before a disaster. The seventh chapter of Gladwell’s work, “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes,” uses these transcripts to reveal the larger cultural factors at play.
For example, the crew on Korean Air flight 801 were so restricted to the Korean culture of being respectful to a superior (in this case, the captain) that it cost them their lives. This blog effectively summarises the chapter and provides some decent counterpoints to Gladwell’s theory.
These conversations are useful, because they help airplanes companies figure out how to train their crews effectively to prevent a given disaster.
Click here for a link to a site titled, “Last Words,” which has the recordings of black boxes from infamous plane crashes.