On May 6, 2005, at 5:16 PM, Keith Henson wrote:
At 01:11 PM 06/05/05 -0700, Warren Ockrassa wrote:On May 6, 2005, at 6:39 AM, Keith Henson wrote:
At 02:52 AM 06/05/05 -0700, Warren Ockrassa wrote:
snip
This reminds me of the Ballad of John Henry. You might or might not know it; the story is that John Henry, who worked on railroads in the 1900s, was faced with a steam-driven track laying machine, and he refused to accept the premise that the machine was superior to human ability. So he placed a bet: He would lay a mile of track before the machine could.
Please excuse my annoyance, but taking the very first Google link on "John Henry" would have taken you here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/john_henry/
Please excuse *my* annoyance, but the title of the note very clearly suggests I was referring to the LEGEND of John Henry, not the facts behind his story.
I might be wrong about this. Can you point me to any accounts of the legend where John Henry was up against a track laying machine?
Doesn't look like it. It's entirely possible (probable) that I was in error. My impression had been that it was a tunnel driller (rathe than a steam drill or steam hammer), but that didn't make any sense to me because it seemed that a machine of that type wouldn't have existed either. Refs I've dug up, though, all seem to paint Henry as having been, basically, a hole driller; explosives, it seems, were put into the holes to blast out rocks.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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