charley horse

May 29, 2020

29 May 2020

A charley horse is a sudden cramp in the leg, a common affliction among athletes. The term arose in baseball in the late nineteenth century, we know that much for certain, but as to who Charley was or why he had a horse, or if the phrase refers to a horse named Charley, no one has any good idea. The origin of the term in that regard is a mystery.

The earliest use of the term found to date is in a letter from Jim Hart, manager of the Louisville Colonels baseball team, published in that city’s Courier-Journal on 21 March 1886:

Ely is still suffering from a sore arm, and Reccius has what is known by ball players as “Charley Horse,” which is a lameness in the thigh, caused by straining the cord.

Another early appearance is in the same newspaper a few months later, on 14 July 1886:

Several years ago, says the Chicago Tribune, Joe Quest, now of the Athletics, gave the name of “Charlie horse” to a peculiar contraction and hardening of the muscles and tendons of the thigh, to which base ball players are especially liable from the sudden starting and stopping in chasing balls, as well as the frequent slides in base running. Pfeffer, Anson and Kelly are so badly troubled with “Charley horse” there are times they can scarcely walk. Gore had it so bad he had to lay off a few days, and is not entirely free from it now. Williamson, too, has had a touch of it.

(I have yet to find the Chicago Tribune story referenced here. Most likely it is from a few days earlier, and the Courier-Journal story may be a word-for-word reprint. Reprinting such stories verbatim was a common practice among newspapers of the day.)

Quest appears in many of early explanations for the term’s appearance, but whether or not he coined it is unknown. The only thing we can say with confidence is that he frequently used the term.

There are a number of old explanations for the term floating about, but either they have no evidence to support them, or they come too late to the be the origin of the term. The oldest of these dates to 1887, shortly after the term first appeared in print. From the Boston Herald, 12 July 1887:

For the benefit of many inquiring readers who have never had the considerable complaint, it may be said that “Charley horse” is a complaint caused by the straining of the cords in a ball player’s leg. The name is said to owe its origin to the fact that a player afflicted with it, when attempting to run, does so much after the fashion of a boy astride of a wooden horse, sometimes called a “Charley horse.”

Children’s hobby horses of the era were indeed often called Charlie horse or Charley horse, so it is a plausible explanation, but it is speculation with no solid evidence behind it. One might think that since the explanation appears shortly after the term’s appearance in print, but this does not add to its veracity—such early explanations are very often wrong. But the appearance of this explanation so soon after the first known appearance indicates that the term is probably older, as the general public was already becoming familiar with it.

H. L. Mencken, in his American Language, traced the term to Charlie “Duke” Esper who played for a number of teams in the 1890s. But as we have seen, the term predates Esper’s professional baseball career, so he cannot be the source of the term.

Another is that it comes from an old, lame horse named Charley that dragged and smoothed the infield for either the Chattanooga or Sioux City team (take your pick). The Chattanooga story is chronologically possible, but has no evidence to support it, and professional baseball wasn’t played in Sioux City until after the term had appeared, so that one is out.

Yet another explanation is that players on either the Chicago White Stockings or the Baltimore Orioles (again, take your pick) bet on a racehorse named Charley who came in last. Later that day, one of their players pulled a leg muscle, and he was dubbed “Charley Horse.” The Chicago version is said to have happened in 1886, so this story is probably too late, given the attestations from players in that same year that the term had been in use for some time. (Usually, and especially for slang, oral use of a term predates its appearance in the written record by some period, typically a few years.) As for the Baltimore version, that story is associated with John McGraw, who didn’t play until the 1890s.

The fact that versions of some of these tales pop up in multiple cities indicates that they were exchanged and retold multiple times. So, it seems likely that such stories arose because players in the 1890s were using the already existing term charley horse to rib and make fun of players (or horses) that were lame and that in the retelling of these baseball yarns and jokes the stories became the origin of the term in their minds.

Discuss this post

Sources:

“BASE BALL: A Letter from Manager Hart.” Louisville Courier-Journal, 21 March 1886, 10.

Dickson, Paul. The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, third edition, 2009, s.v. charley horse.

“From the Outfield,” Boston Herald, 12 July 1887, 5.

Popik, Barry. “Charley Horse (Charlie Horse).” The Big Apple, 22 February 2016. https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/charley_horse_charlie_horse/

Shulman, David. “Whence ‘Charley Horse.’” American Speech, 24.2, April 1949, 100–04.

“STILL SLUGGING. The Heavy Batting Record of the Louisville Club.” Louisville Courier-Journal, 14 July 1886, 6.

blockbuster

May 28, 2020

28 May 2020

To most of us today, a blockbuster is anything that is gigantic or enormously successful. It’s often used in relation to movies, television, and bestselling books. But the word originally referred to a World War II bomb, one big enough to destroy an entire city block.

The earliest instance of its use that I have found is in an Associated Press article from 25 July 1942:

The western air front meanwhile produced news of two-way attack, comparatively heavy German raids on Britain which cost the Nazis seven out of 40 bombers, and an assault by the RAF on Ruhr and Rhineland by forces several times as large as the German attacking unit. Again, the RAF dropped its two-ton “block buster” bombs, especially on Duisburg.

After this date, uses of blockbuster in reference to literal bombs are common during the war years. But metaphorical use of the term to refer to anything big quickly followed. A story in the Ladies’ Home Journal of November 1943 about the return home of Sgt. Harold Loch, gunner on the B-17 Memphis Belle, which had just completed 25 bombing missions over occupied Europe, uses the term in a crossover from bombing to figurative use when Loch does not arrive on the train as expected:

Only then did mom break down and sob on pop’s shoulder. Sadly they trooped home. The day was an emotional block buster for them all.

The bombing metaphor is also “dropped” in this Time magazine article from 12 June 1944, which describes U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s announcement of plans for a post-war United Nations:

Blockbuster. The President then quietly dropped his blockbuster. The U.S., he said, has an objective today to join other nations for the general world peace—but without taking away the integrity of the U.S. in any shape, manner or form.

And about a week after this Time magazine piece, we see a use of blockbuster without any obvious connection to bombs, but which crosses over into the world of entertainment. A 17 June 1944 letter to Billboard magazine quotes a circus side-show performer using the word to denote something that is literally large, to wit, herself:

Radio broadcasts were to the liking of our actors. They believed that they had reached their goal. Every freak, dancer, singer, musician and talker vied for the honor of going on the air. They created their own songs and patter. Cracked-voice front talkers became announcers and emcees. Remember it all started two years ago and the same broadcasts are still going on. The fat gal still yells: “I’m Baby Blockbuster. I weigh 700 pounds; am single and looking for a husband. How would you like to hold me on your knee?”

Shortly after the war, boxing takes up the word, using it refer to fists or punches which pack destructive power. There are many such uses in the late 1940s. Here is one of the early ones from 5 January 1946 by sportswriter Sid Feder:

Midway through that heat, Morris fired a left hook that practically sank out of sight in Jack’s midsection, and for half a minute the Georgia Negro slowed to a walk. Before the round was over, however, he was back in there with his blockbusters again, and it was obvious the party was just about over.

By the mid-1950s, Hollywood discovered the blockbuster film. There is this from Variety of 12 September 1956:

Aim is to convert the theatre eventually to a single picture policy. Initially the theatre will run on a solo pic basis whenever it books one of the so-called block buster films, such as “The Duchin Story” and “The King and I.” For entries it doesn’t regard as strong enough to stand alone, it will revert to the tandem setup, the hope being, however, to establish the house as a single feature situation.

And the next month, this piece titled “Hollywood’s Blockbusters” by Hollis Alpert appeared in the October 1956 issue of Women’s Day:

This is the season of the blockbuster movie. For the past year or more word has been seeping through about the preparation of four movies, each of which is to be the biggest, greatest, most awe-inspiring ever made. They are ready for release, and toeing the mark to challenge the box-office records set by Gone With the Wind, the most popular movie of all time. Two of these new movies, War and Peace and The Ten Commandments, will be at least as long as Gone With the Wind and should challenge the endurance of movie audiences, anyway. The other two, Giant and Around the World in 80 Days, are not quite so lengthy, running about three hours each, but nevertheless rank among the costliest and most lavish films ever made.

Also in the 1950s, another sense of blockbuster developed in the United States. This time it once again referred to literal city or suburban blocks, but what is destroyed are racially segregated neighborhoods. Blockbusting became the term used when a Black family moved into what had previously been an all-white neighborhood. Here is an example, a United Press story from 2 October 1955:

They deny that any responsible Negro groups organize or promote such movement. The movement into white neighborhoods is the result of the Negro’s desire for better housing and his increasing ability to pay for it, they say.
There are many areas where “block-busting” has taken place without difficulties. In other cities, disturbances have resulted.

While the first literal blockbusters were British bombs, the early metaphorical and slang uses that we have seen are American. But there is one early British metaphorical use cited by the OED. In this case, the metaphor underlying the use is a mystery to me. Perhaps someone with knowledge of the politics of Northern Ireland in the 1940s can enlighten me. W.R. Rodgers writing in the New Statesman and Nation of 20 November 1946:

Nor is the Labour Party in Northern Ireland likely to ignore a loyalty which faces it with one of its greatest problems, namely, how to hinge the interests of Protestant and Catholic, Loyalist and Nationalist, not merely on the economic, but also on the emotional plane. That task is not made easier by those English Labour M.P.s who in their speeches show only a blockbusting contempt for Ulster.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Alpert, Hollis. “Hollywood’s Blockbusters.” Women’s Day, October 1956, 80.

Associated Press. “Furious Rostov Battle Continues.” Albuquerque Journal, 25 July 1942, 2.

Feder, Sid. “Beau Jack KO’s Reif in Fourth.” Daily Press (Newport News, Virginia), 5 January 1946, 5.

“The Great Blueprint.” Time, 43.24, 12 June 1944.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. blockbuster n.1, blockbuster n.2, and blockbust, v.

“A Hero Comes Home.” Ladies’ Home Journal, 60.11, November 1943, 116.

Major Privilege. Letter, 17 June 1944. In “Ballyhoo Bros.’ Circulating Expo.” Billboard, 56.26, 24 June 1944, 34.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. block, n.

RKO Hatching Single Pic Artie Plot for N.Y. Nabe in “Gold Coast” Experiment.” Variety, 204.2, 12 September 1956, 5.

Rodgers, W.R. “Black North.” New Statesman and Nation, 26.665, 20 November 1946, 332.

United Press. “’Blocks Busted.’ Minority Housing Barriers Falling.” Detroit Free Press, 2 October 1955, 26.

Photo credit: Imperial War Museum.

blimp

May 27, 2020

27 May 2020

Growing up down the road from Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey, home the U.S. Navy’s lighter-than-air program, I always had a fascination with blimps and dirigibles. Many of my friends’ parents worked on the Navy blimps, and some of their grandparents were on the ground when the Hindenburg exploded and crashed. And growing up, I had always thought I knew the origin of the word blimp, but I was wrong. There are many speculative origins that have been proposed, including the one I fell for when I was a boy, but the origin of the word is unknown. There is one plausible origin story that very well be correct, but we can’t be sure.

People have been riding in balloons since 1783, when the Mongolfier brothers took to air in one. But it was not until World War I that lighter-than-air craft really came into their own, and it was during that war that the term blimp was coined.

Even in the first recorded use of the term that we know of, the anonymous writer asks where the word comes from. From the Daily Mirror, 25 January 1916:

“Blimps”
I was amused to hear what the Air Service call the lighter-than-air machines, i.e., the airships and balloons. They call them “blimp,” “submarine searchers” and “babies.” But why “blimps,” I wonder.

The next extant use of the term is about two weeks later by naval officer Harold Rosher in a letter to his father on 11 February. Rosher was killed shortly afterward, and his letters were collected and published that September:

Visited the Blimps [small airships] this afternoon at Capel. They are really most interesting.

Note that when preparing the letter for publication, the editor added the definition in square brackets, apparently thinking the general public would be unfamiliar with the word.

Blimp is used by American writer Ralph Paine, writing about the British craft, in 1918. Again, the unfamiliarity of the word is called out in the publication, this time with quotation marks:

Two can play at the bombing game, and in the Dover Strait the English “blimps” take a hand at it, those small dirigibles which gleam high overhead like silvered sausages. They are useful on the submarine patrol when the weather is fair and clear, and during the summer days they cruise for a dozen hours at a stretch, drifting above the shipping lanes. Their mishaps are often entertaining, with a spice of humor, for their crews do not take the “blimps” too seriously.

But by 1919 the word had become familiar enough to be applied to large or overweight persons. The first such use that I’ve found is in a description of the upcoming Jack Dempsey–Jess Willard fight in July 1919. At 6’6.5” (1.99 m) tall and 235 lbs. (107 kg), Willard was the largest heavyweight champion in history and known as the Pottawatomie Giant. The day before the fight, on 3 July 1919, sportswriter Grantland Rice penned the following:

The populace at large believes that Dempsey at least has an even chance and so once more they are coming in the hope to see a living story, not of fiction, but of fact, where the small stranger overthrows the giant blimp.

Dempsey went on to crush Willard the next day, with the larger man retiring to his corner after the third round.

Two weeks later, humor columnist Arthur “Bugs” Baer would use blimp to describe an overweight golfer two weeks later in his 17 July 1919 column:

“How many balls have we left, caddy?”
“Five, sir.” (Wondering where the old sapp gets that we stuff.)
THE OLD BLIMP KNOWS that he can’t finish the voyage with only five pills in his fuel tank. They cost fifteen smackers a dozen, too.

While no one knows for certain why the aircraft are called blimps, the most likely explanation is that it is echoic, coined after the sound made when something strikes the gasbag. Late in life, Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard, who had been a midshipman at Capel air station during WWI, claimed to have witnessed his then commanding officer, Lt. A.D. Cunningham, hitting the gasbag of one of the craft with his thumb, and amused by the sound uttering the word “blimp.” It’s a plausible story, but Goddard didn’t get around to relating the tale until 1951, and the gap of several decades militates against its accuracy. Another possibility could be that it was coined as a play on blob and/or lump.

The origin that I fell for as a boy was that the military had two classes of lighter-than-air craft, Type A, Rigid and Type B, Limp, and blimp comes from the latter. Unfortunately for this explanation, there is no historical evidence for such designations.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Baer, Arthur “Bugs.” “Two and Three.” Atlanta Constitution, 17 July 1919, 13.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. blimp, n.1

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, s.v. blimp, n.1.

Paine, Ralph D. The Fighting Fleets. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.

The Rambler. “This Morning’s Gossip.” The Daily Mirror, 25 January 1916, 12.

Rice, Grantland. “Majority of Early Arrivals at Scene of Bout Favor Challenger.” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, 3 July 1919, 23.

Rosher, Harold. In the Royal Naval Air Service. London: Chatto and Windus, September 1916.

Zimmer, Ben. “A Weighted Term Floats Back into the News.” Wall Street Journal, 8–9 June 2019, C4.

Photo credit: Department of the Navy, 1933.

blackguard

May 26, 2020

26 May 2020

In present-day use, a blackguard is a scoundrel or villain (when it’s used at all that is; it’s a rather old-fashioned term). The term dates to the early sixteenth century as a two-word, noun phrase, and it was compounded, with attendant loss of the / k / in the pronunciation, by the late seventeenth century. The word’s history, while on its face rather straightforward, tells us of class distinctions, religious bigotry, the world of seventeenth-century whores and pimps, and eighteenth-century, Oxbridge students.

From our position today in the twenty-first century, we can’t tell exactly what the two elements meant in the early uses. The black refers either to black livery of servants or clergy, dirt and soot covering menial servants, a connotation of evil and bad reputation, or a combination of some or all of these depending on the specific context. The guard, in the early uses, is not a reference to a literal body of soldiers, but rather a metaphorical use to refer to a body of people gathered for some purpose.

The oldest extant use of the term appears in financial records of the Church of St. Margaret in Westminster in a receipt for torches costing six pence:

Item Receyvid for the lycens of iiij. torchis of the blake garde vjd.

We can’t be sure exactly what the blake garde here refers to, but it’s probably to black-liveried, professional mourners that accompany a burial.

In other early citations the term is applied facetiously to soot-covered servants of the kitchen and scullery. William Fitzwilliam, the first earl of Southampton, writes in a 17 August 1535 letter:

Of the blak garde of the kings ketsyn bee two of the principalls.

And there is this by William Fulke in his 1579 sermon “A Refutation of Maister Rastels Confutation,” in which he advocates for the defrocking of Catholic clergy, some of whom he claims were kitchen servants raised to the priesthood:

That bagpipers, horscoursers, gailers, alebasters, were not admitted into the Cleargie without sufficient triall. We affirme they ought not, nor yet any of the scullerie or blacke garde, as some yet liuing were made Priestes in Queene Maries time.

And John Webster’s 1612 play The White Divel has this exchange between where the character Flamineo attempts convince Vittoria that she is better off with her husband Camillo than the man she really loves:

VITTORIA: I did nothing to displease him, I carued to him at supper-time
FLAMINEO: You need not haue carued him infaith, they say he is a capon already, I must now seemingly fall out with you. Shall a gentleman so well descended as Camillo.—a lousy slaue that within this twenty yeares rode with the blacke guard in the Dukes cariage mongst spits and dripping-pannes.

But at around the same period when blackguard was being used to refer to scullery servants, it was also in use to describe attendants liveried in black. For instance, there is this description of black-uniformed sailors at the 1513 Battle of Flodden written sometime before 1550:

This yer þe Skottyshe Kyng cam in to Ynglond with a gret power, whan þe Kyng was in France; & with hym mett þe Erle of Surrey with a gret power; & þer þe Skottyshe Kyng was slayn in þe fild & his ded body was browght to Rychemont. & at þat fild was my Lord Amerall, with his maryners, callyd “the black gard.”

And John Foxe’s 1570 edition of Actes and Monumentes, an anti-Catholic polemic, uses blackguard to describe black-cloaked Dominican friars in contrast to the gray-cloaked Franciscans:

With these and such other like reasons, the Gray Fra[n]ciscans voyded their aduersaries, defendyng the Conception of the Virgine Mary to bee vnblemyshed & pure from all contagion of Original sinne. Contrariwise the Blacke gard of the Dominike Friers, for their partes were not all mute, but layd lustely from them agayn, hauyng great authorities and also the Scripture on theyr side.

With some of these literal descriptions, though, we can start to see connotations of disrepute creeping in, as with Foxe’s description of the Dominicans.

And about a century after Foxe, blackguard was being used to denote criminals, as in this 1674 citation from News from Whetstones Parke, or, a Relation of the Late Bloody Battle There, Between the Bawds and Whores:

The first onset was given by Gammar Jilt, that flung a Bottle of Steppony, and beat out one of Doll Tiremons Eys, who in revenge pluckt off the old womans Nose, and flung it just in another Bawds Chops, who Spitt it out again in the Face of a young Whore that she was Engaged with, Hoods, Scarfs, Pinners, Laces went miserably to Racke, Biteing, Kicking, Scratching, and Confusion fill'd the place, never was there a Sadder Sight, here lay a Nose, there an Eye, a little further a Sett of Teeth, here a peice of a Necklace, there a parcel of Black Patches, and by and by the Ruines of a glorious Tower trod under Foot; The Bawds were never so Bang'd, nor the Morts so Mortified, but who had the better of it is hard to say, For Fortune had not yet declared in favour of either party, when the Pimpes, Hectors, Bullies, Bully-Rocks, Bully-Ruffians, Bully-Sandies, and the rest of the Black-Guard, taking the Alarm, came in Multitudes to part the Fray.

And roughly some seventy-five years after the description of this “battle,” the word is in use to mean someone who is dishonorable or scurrilous in general. From a complaint about the word humbug that appears in the January 1751 issue of The Student:

Upon the presumption therefore of having a little smattering of English, from the advantage of a liberal education, I will venture to affirm that this HUMBUG is neither an English word, nor a derivative from any other language.———It is indeed a black-guard sound, made use of by most people of distinction.———It is a fine make-weight in conversation, and some great men deceive themselves so egregiously as to think they mean something by it.

Unlike this student’s opinion of humbug, the word blackguard does mean something, although rarely something pleasant.

Discuss this post

Sources:

Dyboski, Roman, ed. Songs, Carols and Other Miscellaneous Poems. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1907. Early English Text Society.

Foxe, John. The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1570 edition). The Digital Humanities Institute, Sheffield, 2011.

Fulke, William. “A Refutation of Maister Rastels Confutation.” In D. Heskins, D. Sanders, And M. Rastel, [...] Ouerthrowne. London: Henrie Middleton, 1579, 779. Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership, 2011.

News from Whetstones Parke. London: D.M., 1674. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. blackguard, n. and adj.

The Student, or the Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany, vol. 2 of 2. London: J. Newbery, 1751, 42. Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

Webster, John. The White Divel. London: Nicholas Okes, 1612. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

black box

May 25, 2020

25 May 2020

Whenever a commercial airliner crashes, which fortunately has become rare these days, there is the inevitable search for the black box, the flight recorder that provides data on the last moments of the aircraft’s flight to crash investigators. And almost inevitably the news stories will point out that the so-called black box is actually, in fact, orange, painted that color to make it easier to locate. If that’s the case, why is it called a black box?

To answer that, we need to go back to the early days of electronics, when electronic devices were literally packed into metal housings that were black. An early example is naval, not aeronautical. In 1931 the old battleship USS Utah was converted into a remote-controlled target ship, and a 1932 article in Astronautics describes the remote-control system:

On the destroyer that directs the activities of the crewless U.S.S. Utah is set up a radio transmitter. [...] For the sending of control messages, there is located on the destroyer a little black box, with keys arranged like those on a typewriter. By simply pressing one of these keys, an operator can direct the crewless battleship to make a complete turn, lay down a smoke screen, blow its siren, or go full speed ahead.

(Ironically, the Japanese sank the target ship Utah in the attack on Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941.)

To bring it to the world of aviation, there is this 1936 piece that was widely syndicated throughout the United States about a black box used in simulating air force bombing runs:

The camera obscura or “target station” is a portable black box mounted on four wheels and pulled by a truck bearing a two-way radio apparatus. As the bomber plane approaches, its swooping image is projected through a lens in the roof of the box, upon a large square of paper or chart, inside a small, light-proofed chart-room where the scorer traces the path of the plane and records hits and misses.

Nor was this usage restricted to the military. Here is a 1937 story about the first police radio-cars deployed in Jackson, Mississippi:

Within the next week or so, Jackson’s police cruisers will be at an instant’s call of headquarters, as final installation service is completed on the city’s shortwave broadcasting set and auto receivers, officials said.
The big black box with just a couple of dials and a few switches to identify it as a transmitter has already been placed in the police headquarters, and the connecting wires and other equipment are being attached and placed as rapidly as possible. Noel’s Auto Electric service has charge of the installation.

Of course, World War II saw the widespread use of sophisticated mechanical and electronic devices in aircraft and ships. The gun sights, as described in the 1943 newspaper story, on a B-17 bomber were controlled by a black box:

The second secret and the answer to that question have emerged together with a demonstration for newspapermen of the “automatic computing sight.” It is installed in the turrets of all Flying Fortresses. With this sight turret gunners are able to knock down anything with 1,000 yards by the mere twisting of a dial and the pressing of a trigger.
A small black box packed with intricate machinery and attached to the guns automatically sights opposing aircraft and directs unbelievably accurate fire to the target.

These devices were literally black boxes, but they also shared the characteristic of being sophisticated devices whose internal mechanisms weren’t understood by the users. Not only were they black in color, but they were black in secrecy and inability to comprehend how they functioned. After the war, the term black box came to be used to refer to any system that could be described by its inputs and outputs, without knowledge of exactly what the system did to achieve those outputs. This article from the 1949 issue of the Bell System Technical Journal puts it this way:

In principle, one needs no knowledge of the physics of the transistor in order to treat it circuitwise; any “black box” with the same electrical behavior at its terminals would act in the same way.

And:

We shall now take the purely empirical view and regard the transistor as a black box whose performance is to be determined by electrical measurements on its terminals.

But this last has little to do with flight recorders, which are called black boxes because of the history of calling any electronic device in a housing that, regardless of its color. The New York Daily News has one of the early examples of calling a flight recorder a black box in a January 1961 story:

The little black box in the world’s worst aviation collision spoke its long-awaited piece yesterday, helping explain why 134 persons died on Dec. 16.
The box—a flight recorder from a United Air Lines DC-8 jet—showed that a few seconds before the jet crashed with a Trans World Airlines Super Constellation over Staten Island, the jet—
1—Was traveling almost 300 miles an hour faster than it should have been going.
2—Was 3,700 feet higher than its pilot thought it was.

So that’s the explanation. Rather simple really; such devices were once colored black but no longer are.

Discuss this post

Sources:

“Automatic Rocket Control Foreshadowed by Crewless Ship.” Astronautics, No. 19, May 1932, 4.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2011, s.v. black box, n.

Pugh, Thomas and Neal Patterson. “Crash Jet Traveled Too Fast, Too High, Recorder Reveals.” Daily News (New York), 10 January 1961, C3.

“Radio Equipment Being Installed.” Daily Clarion Ledger (Jackson, Mississippi), 1 January 1937, 14.

Ryder, R.M. and R.J. Kircher. “Some Circuit Aspects of the Transistor.” Bell System Technical Journal, 28.3, July 1949, 367–400.

“Uncle Sam Is Practicing Aerial Bombing in Quiet.” Marshfield News-Herald (Wisconsin), 10 November 1936, 4.

“Where It Gets the Sting.” The Asheville Citizen (North Carolina), 5 July 1943, 4.

Photo credit: YSSY guy, 2015, used under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 license.