Our earlier conversation about gram weenies, another name for ultralight backpackers, prompted a San Diego, California, man to write with the story of Bill Lear, the inventor of the LearJet, who once said he’d trade his own grandmother for a one-pound reduction of weight in the design of one of his aircraft. As a result, Lear’s engineers adopted the term grandmother as a synonym for one pound. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Grandmother = One Pound”
Not long ago, I was talking about the term gram weenie, which is a hiker who measures out every single gram that he or she is carrying.
They’re like ultralight hikers. They’re obsessing about, like they don’t even carry pennies because they’re too much extra weight.
Oh, exactly. If they have pills that are in foil, they’re cutting around the foil.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Do they shave their heads before running?
Probably.
Blow their nose and all that.
Anyway, Graham Weenie, that reminded Jan Kunze of San Diego of the story of Bill Lear, who invented the Lear jet in the 1960s.
And Jan writes, he once said that he would trade his grandmother for a one-pound weight reduction of his plane.
Thereafter, his crew, from engineers to the bench mechanics, referred to a one-pound reduction as a grandmother. As in, how many grandmothers this week? Or that idea is worth half a grandmother.
And I wasn’t so sure about that, but I looked it up in a book about the invention of the Lear jet.
And I wanted to read you just a little bit of that. Lear has cut hundreds of pounds from his jet after the engineers had squeezed it down as far as they could.
One afternoon, he strode into the seat manufacturing division of the plant and asked to see the aluminum shell around which the pilot’s seat is built.
Why couldn’t we cut a square foot right out of the back here, he asked, drawing a square on the aluminum.
This part doesn’t support anything.
The engineer working on the seat grinned sheepishly.
Another grandmother and a half, said Lear.
And so they actually used grandmother as a unit of measure.
That’s funny.
And it reminds me, if you know anything about space travel, NASA does this.
They count things down to the microwave.
To the last grandmother.
Yeah, the book The Martian was great on that.
A lot of math surrounding the weight of things and how much fuel you need to leave the surface of Mars or to propel your rocket ship to the place it needs to go.
Every tiny little thing costs you.
That’s true in life, too, isn’t it?
We should all travel light and cast off your worries and cares and criticisms.
There are words in the strangest places, probably in something you read.
We know you made a note.
You looked it up.
Share that word with us and we can all talk about it.
