Molasses in January
Evan Zabawski | TLT From the Editor October 2014
Native Bostonians take issue with a metaphor.
The damage was not caused by slow-moving molasses but, rather, a wave travelling at an estimated 35 mph.
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THE COMMON METAPHOR FOR ANYTHING SLOW IS “SLOWER THAN MOLASSES IN JANUARY.” This raises two questions in my mind: (1.) How thick is molasses in January? and (2.) Where did that expression come from?
The first question is not too difficult to answer, so long as you choose a type of molasses. Fancy molasses is the highest grade made from the condensed, inverted and purified juice of the sugar cane. Blackstrap molasses is the more concentrated final byproduct and cooking molasses is simply a blend of the first two. Blackstrap molasses is about 10 times thicker than fancy molasses, with a viscosity in the tens of thousands of centistokes.
The second question is mistakenly answered by referring to the Boston Molasses Disaster of Jan. 15, 1919. At about 12:30 p.m. that day, a storage tank containing upward of 2.3 million gallons (13,000 tons) of molasses suffered a cylinder stress failure. The tank had never been truly sound and had leaked since it was built—so badly, in fact, that it was painted brown to hide the leaks.
The temperature had risen that day to 41 F from 2 F the previous day, and it is believed that the fermentation taking place inside the tank increased the internal pressure. At the moment of failure, the rivets shot out of the tank like a machine gun, releasing a wave of molasses 25-40 feet high and propelling a 2.5-ton piece of the tank wall 182 feet. Another piece of the tank wrapped itself completely around and sheared off one column, supporting the nearby elevated train. A total of 21 people were killed, another 150 injured and several buildings were knocked off their foundations and demolished.
The curious aspect of this disaster was that the damage was not caused by slow-moving molasses but, rather, a wave travelling at an estimated 35 mph. So much for the spirit of the metaphor. This speed was verified 10 years ago by Gareth McKinley, professor of teaching innovation at MIT. He stated that the “flow rate was mostly a function of inertia (i.e., mass) rather than viscosity.”
The metaphor had appeared in print repeatedly long before this incident and used in such a way as to suggest it was commonly said. One use appeared in the
Chicago Daily Tribune on Dec. 28, 1872, in an article about the Crédit Mobilier of America scandal, a commentary about the investigation into the sham company created to skim profits from the U.S. government’s funding of the First Transcontinental Railroad. The article reported, “Most of them had the matter under advisement for seven or eight months before they could satisfy their consciences as to the moral bearing of the transaction, showing that the average Congressional perception of right and wrong is much slower than molasses in January.”
By the time it appeared in John Adrian’s review of Milwaukee published in the
Detroit Free Press on July 11, 1886, where he wrote “…that its street cars are slower than molasses in winter and are as scarce as hen’s teeth,” it could be found in a handful of other publications.
Since the expression did not originate from the previous incident, one is left to wonder why molasses was chosen. Truth be told, there are far more viscous examples to be found, without needing to qualify them to a particular time of year.
Bitumen, or pitch, is a great example with a viscosity in the billions of centistokes. Thomas Parnell, professor of physics at the University of Queensland, began an experiment in 1927 to show how black tar distillate, brittle enough to shatter when struck with a hammer, could behave like a liquid and flow through a funnel. The experiment has yielded only 9 drops to date and won the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize (issued on the first Thursday of October each year to honor achievements that first make you laugh, then think) from Harvard University for being the world’s longest running experiment. Now that’s slow!
Evan Zabawski, CLS, is the senior reliability specialist for Fluid Life in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. You can reach him at evan.zabawski@fluidlife.com.