black box
When an airplane crashes, what follows is inevitably a search for the black box, or more accurately the two black boxes, one that records the voice conversations in the cockpit and the other that records data about the flight, such as location, speed, and altitude. The odd thing is that whenever the boxes are recovered and shown on the news, they are not black at all. Rather, they are painted bright orange for visibility at a crash site.
So why are they called black? Black box is a generic term for a piece of electronic equipment on an aircraft. The term originated in air force slang during World War II. The first black boxes were radar bomb “sights.” Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of R.A.F. Slang (1945) contains the following entry:
Black box or gen box, instrument that enables bomb-aimer to see through clouds or in the dark.
The term was also used by US air forces during the war. Hamann’s Air War (1945) defines black box as radar.
Later, the term expanded to include various electronic navigational devices. When the flight recorders started being installed on civilian aircraft in 1958, the name was applied to these devices. The original WWII black boxes were literally colored black and many pieces of avionics equipment still come in black housings, but the term is applied to all of them regardless of color.
There is another type of black box that also takes its name from these WWII devices. A black box can be a mechanism whose internal workings are not understood, but its function is. If an engineer knows that the device will give output Y if he inputs X but doesn’t understand why, then that is a black box. The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society records this from 1953:
As far as the layman is concerned, a phantastron is a “black box” which will divide the frequency of its output pulses by any integral number between 2 and 20.
This sense is from the fact that aircrews did not understand how their black boxes worked (the components and processes were closely guarded military secrets), they just knew they did.
(Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition; Historical Dictionary of American Slang)
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Copyright 1997-2007, by David Wilton
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I seems to me that a “black box” might have its origin around 1927. With the revelations done by the convicted KKK leader D.C. Stephenson in Indiana.
Black Box. Then Mr. Stephenson gave L. G. Julian, onetime business associate and also custodian of the much discussed “black box” in which the bulk of Mr. Stephenson’s documentary evidence was believed hidden, permission to turn over the black box to Prosecutor Remy. There were really two black boxes, both of which the Prosecutor received. The contents of the boxes were not made public, but it was announced that they included, among other papers, checks for $21,000 and for $24,000. Mr. Remy appeared pleased at the evidence disclosed.
Source: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,730850-1,00.html
This appears to be a one-off example of a literal black box, i.e., a box that is black. I’m sure you can find references to literal black boxes much further back than 1927.
This is interesting in that it refers to evidence within the black box, but without other citations of “black boxes” containing legal evidence, it would appear that this is a one-off usage and unrelated to the aviation/electronics senses.
well there are more articles where the “litle black boxes” are referred to as the containers of unknown evidence.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,736790,00.html
“"Last week Mr. Stephenson took the Indianapolis Times into his confidence and sent to the Times many of the documents contained in the “little black box” where he had foresightedly deposited written evidence of his transactions."”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,730736-2,00.html
Most important, most mysterious of his revelations concerned a certain “little black box” which was supposed to contain documents supporting his exposures.
Just throwing it out there, might be worthed taking a look.
These are not only from the same source (Time), but also are about the same incident. It appears that the “little black box” is a literal box that is small and colored black. It’s important to distinguish between collocations of the words intended in a literal sense and use of the phrase “black box” as a metaphorical object.
And since the modern, metaphorical use of “black box” is not box containing information, but rather a device of mysterious operation, this would not appear to be the origin of the phrase.
You are probably right, I gave it a shot.
At least I learned something.
Thanks for the time.
Teasing out simple collocations of words from a lexical phrase can be one of the more vexing problems. It’s good to know about this 1927 use though. Who knows what might turn up in further research?