How come that black box is red and round?
“How come that black box is red and round?”
“All the better to see you with.”
‘The Big Bad Wolf’
Secrets of the Bright Orange ‘Black Box’
By
Ben Zimmer
Updated April 14, 2014 11:00 a.m. ET
Time is running out to find the “black box” from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean’s waters. But the search teams are looking for not one box, but two: a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder.
And neither of those boxes is actually black. Bright orange paint makes more sense for retrieval efforts. So how did “black box” become such a commonly known term for these aviation instruments?
When electronic gizmos started showing up in the cockpits of planes, many of them actually were encased in black boxes. In World War II, one such “black box” proved to be quite useful for pilots on bombing missions for Britain’s Royal Air Force as it allowed the crew to locate targets on the ground, even through clouds.
For most of the war, such technology was hush-hush, but the Dec. 7, 1944, issue of Flight Magazine reported on the “astonishing release of a well-kept secret.” The magazine said the radar-equipped device was known to the Royal Air Force as the “black box” or “gen box” (”gen” being British military slang for “information” or “instructions”).
The surreptitious wartime “black box” caught the imagination of engineers. They began to use the term in a more figurative way to refer to devices with inner workings that weren’t immediately understood by outside observers, who could only see input and output. Calling such devices “black” suggested mystery and secrecy rather than implying anything about their color.
In the late 1950s, civilian planes began to carry flight recorders, but “black box” wasn’t immediately applied to them. In fact, one early recorder had a more accurate (and more colorful) name: the Red Egg.
While there are many theories about how flight recorders came to be called black boxes, it likely stemmed from the earlier usage for inscrutable instruments. In newspaper databases, the earliest examples come from late 1963 in articles about two plane accidents: a Swissair flight that crashed shortly after takeoff from Zurich and a British Aircraft test flight that stalled over Wilshire, England, killing the crew.
As the cockpit voice recorder joined the flight data recorder as standard equipment on planes, both earned the “black box” designation in media reports on the search of crash sites. The more technically minded in the aviation industry would prefer using the abbreviations “CVR” and “FDR,” but “black box” is what the public knows.
That is fine with Patrick Smith, a pilot and the author of “Cockpit Confidential,” which seeks to answer all sorts of air-travel queries. “It’s a useful form of shorthand,” Mr. Smith told me, adding that “it is still used colloquially within the industry.” Despite its imprecision, “black box” is instantly evocative.
—Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of Vocabulary.com and VisualThesaurus.com.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303603904579492012965659896