Daily Bread for 1.19.13

Good morning.

Saturday brings unseasonably warm weather, with a high of forty-seven, for a breezy, sunny day. There will be 9h 31m of sunlight, 10h 33m of daylight, with tomorrow being one minute longer.

On this day in 1937, Howard Hughes sets a transcontinental flight record. The New York Times wrote about Hughes’s accomplishment the next day:

Hughes H-1 Racer

All landplane distance speed records were broken yesterday by Howard Hughes, millionaire sportsman pilot, who reached Newark Airport 7 hours 28 minutes and 25 seconds after he took off from Los Angeles, Calif. He was then forced to stay aloft until the runway at the field was clear and landed at 1:03 P. M. His average speed was 332 miles an hour for the 2,490 miles he traveled…

At 14,000 feet, at which altitude he flew most of the way, he passed over the clouds, set his course and leveled off. He throttled his engine back until it was delivering only 375 horsepower and hunched himself over his instrument panel.

He was wearing a new type oxygen mask for high altitude flying. With nothing to see except the top of the cloud stratum he began experimenting with it. He finally adjusted it so that it fed too much air and not enough oxygen and he began to feel faint. Over the Sierras he had fears for a moment that his attempt might not be a success, but at last re-adjusted the mask so that the gas revived him.

Two years later, in Wisconsin, another sort of record:

1939 – Chicken Plucking World Record
On January 19, 1939 Ernest Hausen (1877 – 1955) of Ft. Atkinson set the world’s record for chicken plucking. [Source: Guiness Book of World’s Records, 1992]

Google-a-Day asks about competitive sailing: “What is the common term used by the America’s Cup organization, for an object shaped like an airplane wing, designed to direct the flow of air over its surface?”