(Roughly) Daily

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In January of 1942, as the U.S was entering World War II, a Pennsylvania dentist (and friend of Eleanor Roosevelt) named Lytle Adams submitted the design of a new weapon to the White House, suggesting that it could be effective against the Japanese.   Adams’ creation was a bomb that would drop over 800 hibernating bats– to each of which was attached a small incendiary device…  as the bomb descended from a high-altitude drop, the bats would awaken, disperse, and nest in structures– which in Japan at the time were largely made of bamboo, paper, and other highly-flammable material.  Later in the day the incendiaries would go off, starting fires across a wide area.  Adams estimated that 100 bombs might start as many a 1,000,000 fires.

The U.S. military developed the “Bat Bomb”; and while the yields were never quite what Adams predicted, they were impressive enough to drive investment of an estimated $2 million.  The project was abandoned only when it became clear that the Manhattan Project would finish before the Bat Bomb was ready.

Read more about the Bat Bomb here.

[TotH to Quora answerer Tal Reichert]

* Albert Einstein

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As we try to find the ploughshare, we might recall that it was on this date in 1849 that Lewis Phectic Haslett was granted the first patent for a gas mask.  In fact, Haslett was building on a long tradition: the ancient Greeks used sponges as make-shift gas masks, and the Banu Musa brothers in Baghdad described a rudimentary gas mask (for protecting workers in polluted wells) in their wonder-full 9th century Book of Ingenious Devices.  Still, Haslett’s creation was the forerunner of the modern gas mask.

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