The account of the JATO Rocket Car was one of the original Darwin Awards winners: a man who supposedly spectacularly met his death after mounting a

JATO JATO (acronym for jet-assisted take-off) is a type of assisted take-off for helping overloaded aircraft into the air by providing additional thrust in the form of small rockets. The term ''JATO'' is used interchangeably with the (more specific ...

unit (a

rocket engine A rocket engine is a reaction engine, producing thrust in accordance with Newton's third law by ejecting reaction mass rearward, usually a high-speed Jet (fluid), jet of high-temperature gas produced by the combustion of rocket propellants stor ...

used to help heavy aircraft to take off) onto an ordinary

automobile A car, or an automobile, is a motor vehicle with wheels. Most definitions of cars state that they run primarily on roads, Car seat, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport private transport#Personal transport, peopl ...

. It was originally circulated as a forwarded

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

. In 1996, after numerous inquiries, the

Arizona Department of Public Safety Arizona is a state in the Southwestern region of the United States, sharing the Four Corners region of the western United States with Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. It also borders Nevada to the northwest and California to the west, and ...

issued a news release posted on their website concerning the story. It was termed the story "an Arizona myth." The story was also debunked in 2003 on the pilot episode of ''

MythBusters ''MythBusters'' is a science entertainment television series created by Peter Rees (producer), Peter Rees and produced by Beyond International in Australia. The series premiered on the Discovery Channel on January 23, 2003. It was broadcast in ...

'', titled " Jet Assisted Chevy".

Usenet posting

This is the text as it appears, possibly most frequently, in

usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

repostings:

History

The original Darwin Awards were fictitious. Both were contained in a 1990 version of the JATO Rocket Car

urban legend Urban legend (sometimes modern legend, urban myth, or simply legend) is a genre of folklore concerning stories about an unusual (usually scary) or humorous event that many people believe to be true but largely are not. These legends can be e ...

posted to the

Usenet newsgroup A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are not only discussion groups or conversations, but also a repository to publish articles, start ...

. 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 Paul Vixie is an American computer scientist whose technical contributions include Domain Name System (DNS) protocol design and procedure, mechanisms to achieve operational robustness of DNS implementations, and significant contributions to open s ...

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 referred to the Darwin Awards as if they actually existed and were common knowledge, though the message was not widely circulated until it was reformatted. It remained fairly dormant until 1995, when the message surfaced again in 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 in a form that made it a truly infectious

meme A meme (; ) is an idea, behavior, or style that Mimesis, spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying c ...

. 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". Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacker group and

ezine An online magazine is a magazine published on the Internet, through bulletin board systems and other forms of public computer networks. One of the first magazines to convert from a print magazine format to an online only magazine was the computer ...

, published an extensive elaboration in 1998 that claims to explain how the story came into being, describing the most common details of the Rocket Car legend. Four males under 25 engaged in scouting, welding, drinking, and Rube Goldberg engineering to build a rocket rail car after they happened upon JATOs in a junk pile. Supposed author CarInTheCliff also describes the car's only test plus the elements he has added while discouraging repeats by example. In this account it is also claimed that the story had first circulated long before 1990. 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.

The ''MythBusters'' investigation

To test the storythe very first myth they tackled

Jamie Hyneman James Franklin Hyneman (; born September 25, 1956) is an American special effects expert who was co-host of the television series ''MythBusters'' alongside Adam Savage, where he became known for his distinctive beret and walrus moustache. He ...

and

Adam Savage Adam Whitney Savage (born July 15, 1967) is an American special effects designer and manufacturer, fabricator, actor, educator, television personality, and producer, best known as the former co-host, with Jamie Hyneman, of the Discovery Channe ...

, with help from honorary MythBuster Erik Gates, procured a 1966 Chevrolet Impala, and after they were unable to obtain actual JATOs, they substituted three model rockets in succession to produce an equivalent amount of thrust ( for 15 seconds). They also installed a rocket rack and reinforced the car so that the rockets would not tear off the roof, and even made use of a hydraulic system that the previous owner had installed on the car to lower the front of the car and make it more aerodynamic. However, when tested in the Mojave Desert, the car did not go anywhere near the reported in the original story, and failed to become airborne. The program has revisited the story twice, in 2007's " Supersized Myths" (the rockets exploded on the ramp) and their 10th Anniversary episode " JATO Rocket Car: Mission Accomplished?". The 12 motors were built by John Newman, Rick Maschek, and others with one motor first being static tested, successfully, at the FAR site (Friends of Amateur Rocketry) to avoid another explosion. On the two cars used, the motors were stacked vertically to keep the cars going straight in the event one or more of the motors did not ignite. The car was weighted towards the front in an attempt to improve its aerodynamic stability but no attempt was made to ensure the thrust vector of the rocket pack was being applied through the center of gravity (CG) of the car. The thrust vector proved to be far too high above the CG causing the car to immediately nosedive as it left the ramp and smash into the ground. The still firing motors propelled the car up into the air a second time, where it did a rotation until smashing into the ground.

Dodge Coronet TV ad

To advertise the stopping power (rather than speed) of the 1958 Dodge Coronet's 'total contact' brakes, a

bottle was fitted to a Coronet and it was driven at speed across the El Mirage dry lake. This commercial was broadcast during the Dodge-sponsored '' Lawrence Welk Show''., segment begins at 30:00

References

External links