Miniature golf [1927–31]
Recreation fad of small golf courses with eighteen very short holes complicated by windmills, waterfalls, and tiny sand traps. Its popularity was easily explainable. It was a cheap place to take a Depression date, had a low skill threshold with multiple achievement levels, and let you pretend for a couple of hours that you were part of the refined country-club set. Over forty thousand courses sprang up across the country, and at its height it was so popular it was even a threat to the movies, and the studios forbade their actors to be seen playing miniature golf. Died from overexposure.
The source of the Colorado River doesn’t look like one either. It’s in a glacier field up in the Green River Mountains, and what it looks like is tundra and snow and rock.
But even in deepest winter there’s some melting, a drop here, a trickle there, a little film of water forming at the grubby edges of the glacier and spilling over onto the frozen ground. Falling and freezing, collecting, converging, so slowly you can’t see it.
Scientific research is like that, too. “Eureka!”s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals’ density are few and far between, and mostly it’s just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong.
Take Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. Their goal was to measure the absolute intensity of radio signals from space, but first they had to get rid of the background noise in their detector.
They moved their detector to the country to get rid of city noise, radar stations, and atmospheric noise, which helped, but there was still background noise.