Frazz by Jef Mallett for May 26, 2022

OTOH, it’s the 2nd mouse that gets the cheese.

So, Walker didn’t walk it and Landy didn’t land in history. Hmmm…

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to be first. University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler stated in his 1980 publication Stigler’s law of eponymy that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Fittingly, Stigler himself was not the first to make this observation.

It didn’t take all of history for that guy to break that record, just all of recorded history. Which isn’t that long. There might have been a peasant in medieval Europe who was faster, or some native American hunter-gatherer in pre-colonized America. But because nobody recorded it, we will never know.

And most don’t know that the record has been lowered to 3:43.13.

It was run by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco in 1999.

The Bannister-Landy showdown at the 1954 Commonwealth Games in Vancouver drew a LOT more interest than usual for a distance race. There were 35,000 people at Empire Stadium, which had just been opened, and another 10 million watched on TV, a huge audience for that time.

Oh, Bannister won, 3:58.8 to 3:59.6, marking the first time two men had broken the 4-minute barrier in the same race (promoted as the “Mile of the Century” at the time).

I’m not sure that Caufield knows what the word “everybody” means.

Better than people will remember what you said but not who said it?

I’ve often wondered how fast the ancients ran in their Olympics. Could they have been sub 4 if timed by our measurements?

And how many ran faster than that before they invented clocks – or miles?

Charles Lindbergh became an international celebrity, but almost no one today remembers who was the second person to fly solo across the Atlantic. Which is interesting because they are also a household name: Amelia Earhart.

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” Gettysburg address, a speech long remembered.

He set a better record when he beat Landy in August; why isn’t anywhere how long that record lasted?

Just about everyone knows Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon and Buzz Aldrin the second. But VERY few people know who was #3. Do you???

Pete Conrad.

I was lucky if my old Fiat could break that record!

It took almost almost all of recorded history up to that point to have timers accurate enough to measure sub-second segments.

Who was the third man to walk on the moon?

I wonder if Mallet, while he’s on this historic kick, is going to mention Glenn Cunningham. He never beat the 4 minute mile but he had no toes on one foot and no transverse arch on either after an accident in a fire when he was younger, yet won several racing medals.