Why do we refer to “testing or going beyond limits” as pushing the envelope? In aeronautics, to push the envelope means to try to go past the edge of the aircraft’s perceived capability. In the 1980s, the phrase was popularized by Tom Wolfe’s book about NASA’s test pilot program, The Right Stuff. (Bookshop|Amazon) This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Push the Envelope Means Go Beyond the Expected Limits”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Mary. I’m calling from San Diego.
Hey, Mary, welcome. What’s on your mind today?
What’s on my mind is I was wondering what the origin of the phrase pushing the envelope is.
Pushing the envelope. And what got you to thinking about that phrase?
I had just used it in a sentence and then stopped and thought to myself, you know what, I don’t know where this came from.
When I thought about it, the only possibility that I could think of was if the postal workers were very busy around Christmas time and just pushing the mail through the system.
But really, I don’t have a clue to where it actually originates from.
So you’re talking about pushing limits. Is that the context in which you were using it?
Yeah.
Mary, it’s not the post office. The envelope is, I guess, more or less a mathematical boundary that defines a range of set of curves.
And so this usually is in aerospace.
And so in aerospace, it’s about an aircraft’s lift and thrust, speed, altitude, range, fuel use, structural strength, and other things.
And so the reason they defined this envelope, it’s the all-encompassing kind of all of those things, the maximum and minimums of all of these things, because they can change depending on the other factors.
For example, altitude can affect possible speed.
The higher you go, maybe your speed will drop.
The length of time an aircraft can fly at a certain speed will affect the amount of fuel that it uses.
And that affects its range.
And so all of these things affect the envelope.
And so engineers design the aircraft to do what they want it to do, but then test pilots get out there in the big blue and see if the math used in the design to create that theoretical envelope is correct.
And once they confirm that it is correct, then they push that envelope by going beyond the math, going beyond what the math says is possible, and see if the aircraft can do more than that, go beyond that mathematical boundary.
Wow, that’s pretty incredible. I had no idea.
Yeah, and how it got into mainstream English is Tom Wolfe’s book about the U.S. Space program, The Right Stuff. It came out in 1979. It was a huge hit, and the movie that came out about it was also a big hit.
And before that, typically people in the aerospace industry, I think, talked about the flight envelope.
It almost always had flight envelope.
So you’ll find it in aerospace industry magazines in the early 1970s of flight envelope this and flight envelope that.
But the figurative uses show up almost immediately after Tom Wolfe’s book in the 1980s.
And you can just see it just kind of take off from there.
So people talk about pushing the envelope in sports or pushing the envelope in politics or in science.
And it’s a great term.
It just immediately was borrowed into all these other fields.
It’s just the utility of it is astonishing.
But flight envelope is a term, not pushing the flight envelope, dates to the 1940s.
And then envelope alone, to indicate the larger encompassing or intersecting curve that originally comes from mathematics, goes well back into the mid-1800s.
An amazing explanation.
I had no idea that it reached back that far and pretty quickly took off after that book was published into common usage.
That’s incredible.
If you haven’t read his book, it really still holds a remark of the world.
Sometimes you look at a 1979 book and you’ll say, oh yeah, this isn’t going to hold up. That’s so long ago.
But it really does hold up and it’s still a very good read.
So I would recommend The Right Stuff if you’re looking for something engrossing.
Thank you so much for putting me with this explanation.
I had a lot of fun.
Our pleasure.
Push the envelope every day, all right?
Will do.
Have a good one.
Bye-bye.
Goodbye.
There was a recent miniseries based on the book, which is also worth watching.
And frankly, Martha, I hope more callers push the envelope and give us a ring.
What number would they call for that, Grant?
877-929-9673 is toll-free, 24 hours a day, in the United States and Canada.
Or you can send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.
