Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2017 April 24

Welcome to the Wikipedia Science Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

April 24

History of science, fringe theories

Science is filled with fringe theories that were ridiculed and laughed at first, but then as the evidence slowly built it was accepted. Alfred Wallace said

I thus learnt my first great lesson in the inquiry into these obscure fields of knowledge, never to accept the disbelief of great men or their accusations of imposture or of imbecility, as of any weight when opposed to the repeated observation of facts by other men, admittedly sane and honest. The whole history of science shows us that whenever the educated and scientific men of any age have denied the facts of other investigators on a priori grounds of absurdity or impossibility, the deniers have always been wrong.

is this really true? Has any historian done a survey and determined the % of fringe/obscure theories that turned out to be correct? Money is tight (talk) 09:11, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Whenever a fact contradicts a theory, either the theory falls or is modified to account for it. But the process can be slow, and well-established theories take time to change pending strong verification of the claimed facts. The nature of science is to fit theory to fact, not vice versa. Scientists may cling to pet theories well after there are substantial doubts, maybe hoping that even newer facta and even more comprehensive theories will prove the older one correct at least in certain scopes (and fairly obviously it must have been correct within its original scope:). But your question seems to be asking something a bit different...not "who had a theory even that was contracted by fact", but "who had a theory that wasn't supported until much later". DMacks (talk) 09:29, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

• "the disbelief of great men or their accusations of imposture or of imbecility" would count as proof by authority and ad hominem fallacies, thus unscientific.

Western science is based on the ideas of measurement, open publication and independent reproduction of results. It doesn't make assertions of holding absolute truth beyond this. Part of that is that it has to recognise the possibility of future development, either subtlety, loopholes or even existing unrecognised error. So claims "by great men" that something is definitively known now and forever are just no part of this.

I'd be interested to see more of these "fringe theories" that were robustly rejected but are now accepted. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:14, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Well there certainly have been lots of things like that, famous examples are Wegener's continental drift, heavier than air flight, and spooky action at a distance never mind the oldies like the Earth going around the Sun or phlogston or that disease was caused by microbes not miasmas or that disease could be spread by surgeons not washing their hands or the idea a vital force was unnecessary for life. However the conditions set are probably too difficult for any statistics to be got. How about all the silly theories that are dismissed and rightly so? We don't hear about the great majority of those. Who counts as a great man? etc etc really. Dmcq (talk) 10:38, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

The bold adverb in Wallace's quotation: the deniers have always been wrong. is so reckless and untenable that the claim must be dismissed as false. Alfred Wallace also insisted that faked "spirit" photographs were real and published "Vaccination a Delusion; Its Penal Enforcement a Crime (1898)", which hardly encourages one to believe everything he said. Blooteuth (talk) 10:40, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Notice that Wallace relativizes the claim with a "on a priori grounds of absurdity or impossibility," Science is built by empirically passing claims by the filter of experience, not by rejecting what appears to be absurd. But yes, the "always" should better be a "sometimes" here. Hofhof (talk) 10:57, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

• So when was heavier than air flight ridiculed as a fringe theory? After all, birds and bees.

A favourite in similar vein is that, "science said that humans would suffocate if travelling at the speed of a steam train". Yet this is an unfounded quote and appears to be either made up or misquoted. Dionysius Lardner was a Victorian scientist who did say that Brunel's Box Tunnel would involve trains accelerating to unfathomable speeds and flying apart, but that's because he was a single very poor "scientist" who no one, least of all Brunel, took seriously. He was the fringe theorist, if anyone.

Wegener never had a strong hypothesis for continental drift despite having found the evidence to prove it. He had the observational evidence from the surface to confirm that drift had taken place, but not the undersea measurements (made in the 1950s-1960s to support nuclear submarine navigation during the Cold War) that explained how it happened. He did guess at the right thing with mid-ocean ridges and ocean floor spreading, but that was later and extremely speculative. Even then though, he was unproven by science, rather than excluded. Chamberlin, one of his greatest critics said, "If we are to believe Wegener's hypothesis we must forget everything learned in the last 75 years and start all over again." (from memory) which is more about recognising how much of a shake-up would be needed and how it was still so unproven, rather than rejecting it as implausible.

We hear "science" claimed to have done many ludicrous thing, but we have to be careful that it actually did so. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:26, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

You can read the heavier than air statement and a few other bombastic things from Lord Kelvin at [1]. Have a look at Lord Kelvin for others like X-rays will prove to be a hoax. Dmcq (talk) 13:17, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

"bombastic"

An argument based on "because Lord Kelvin said so" is no longer scientific, it's an appeal to authority. This is Kelvin, asked for his own opinion, giving it - but that's not a scientific hypothesis with a formal logic behind it. In particular for the flight issues, he's making an engineering claim, not a scientific one. Science sometimes finds an objective and fundamental limit, like the Carnot cycle or Betz' law, but engineering limits are subjective and based on the limits of knowledge today. Kelvin recognised, like the Wright brothers, that powered flight was currently impossible because of the limitations of steam engines (I believe he had already seen Maxim's work here, through their acquaintance Lord Armstrong) but (unlike the Wrights) he didn't then go on to find an alternative engine and construct a lightweight and powerful one, so he assumed that the limit was permanent and unsurpassable.

Famously Kelvin also stated that classical physics was almost all worked out by around 1900, and this view stood until Einstein's 1905 paper on the UV catastrophe. But again, Einstein followed a scientific route and examined a known problem, published a solution to it, and was then widely accepted by other physicists because he had given a reproducible experiment, conclusion and theory to explain it. Quantum theory makes predictions and quite simple experiments can demonstrate these, so other physicists readily accept them. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:54, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Actually that bit about there being no more real science is almost certainly not his - see William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin#Pronouncements later proven to be false. Dmcq (talk) 16:33, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

It's difficult to do the counting. What counts as fringe/obscure? What counts as turned out to be true? And for whom?

For sure, we can say that science is not filled with fringe theories that turned out to be right. Cranks love to frame Einstein or Columbus as people who were laughed at.

Einstein was not some sort of outsider at his time, but this is by far not accurate. At the time of Einstein, a book called A Hundred Authors Against Einstein came out, trying to refute his work (many were not physicians, but philosophers), but he was not considered some sort of crank by the physics community. Some serious physicists believed him to be wrong, but still read, cited and tried to refute (with scientific methods) his theories.

I don't know of any source to corroborate or refute the claim that people laughed at Christopher Columbus. However, this is often claimed by cranks too. I suppose that he wouldn't have gotten the ships if people back then believed he was mad. Hofhof (talk) 11:15, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Columbus was wrong because he underestimated sizes, and thought that he'd cross what we now know as Asia, the Pacific, America and the Atlantic all in the time it took to cross just the Atlantic. But his notion of a spherical, circumnavigable Earth was mainstream even at his time - although reading the published literature of the day, or even of that 2000 years earlier, would have given him a better size estimate. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:28, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Rather than wrong, he was wrong on purpose. He was a cherry picker when presenting his project. He could have become a CEO today. He chose the smallest circumference of Earth, the farthest East distance and the the farthest West distance. And he got lucky that America was there. Hofhof (talk) 11:43, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Columbus illustrates the problem coming up with exact numbers for this question.

People were absolutely right to laugh at Columbus, he was an anti-science crank. Mainstream science knew almost exactly how big the Earth was, based on measurements and hard math, but Columbus subscribed to a fringe belief based on religion. Nowadays we remember him as having been vindicated, but it's only true vindication if he arrived in Indonesia like he claimed.

The science of the time was right, Columbus had proved himself wrong. But most people remember it exactly opposite! ApLundell (talk) 14:28, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

That is a consequence of the myth of the flat Earth. Many people today think the contemporaries of Ferdinand Magellan expected him to fall off the world's edge or something, and by extension that all adventurers of the time, including lyin' Columbus and blood-bathin' Cortez, were heroes of enlightment. See for instance this article in the LA Times. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 15:49, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

What does this have to do with a flat Earth? No-one was claiming that. Andy Dingley (talk) 16:22, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Yep not many people believed that - but you might like a laugh from some modern flat-earthers, or maybe it's a head-scratch of incredulity, whatever Flat-Earthers Have a Wild New Theory About Forests :) Dmcq (talk) 16:38, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Myth of the flat Earth is not about flat-earther theory, but about the contemporary belief in the prevalence of flat-earther theory in the Middle Ages. But I could not find any backup for it having anything to do with Columbus being viewed as a pioneer of science, so I struck that part (and added a source). Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 16:46, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

No, it's an article that explains your modern belief in a supposed medieval belief in a flat Earth is itself a myth - just as everyone else is saying about Columbus. Columbus knew the Earth was spherical, so did everyone else. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:26, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Tigraan is saying that Columbus's reputation as a upholder and pioneer of science is a side-effect of the myth that his contemporaries believed Earth to be flat.

That makes sense. Columbus's mythical fearlessness at the risk of sailing off the edge completely evaporates when we remember that nobody seriously believed there was an edge.

He's remembered (because of the flat earth myth) as someone who challenged conventional wisdom and turned out to be correct. When in real life, the conventional wisdom was 100% correct, and challenging it was a stupid mistake that nearly cost his life and the lives of his crew.

ApLundell (talk) 18:02, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions explains how new scientific views replace older ones. At no point are successful new scientific paradigms ever really "fringe" theory. They are based on valid observation of the physical world and/or new ways of thinking about how it behaves. Einstein's theories of relativity are examples of this. His "thought experiments" with relativity led him to speculate about how space is "shaped". Astronomical observations of the planet Mercury showed that a relativistic calculation of its orbit was closer to the observed values than a calculation using Newtonian mechanics, and was the first major proof that relativity was valid. Of course, physicists who'd spent their entire lives using Newtonian physics were vocal in their criticism of relativity and of Einstein himself (this tied into the widespread anti-Semitism of the time). But gradually, the world of physics not only accepted general and special relativity, but developed it in ways Einstein himself rejected (but were later also proven valid - quantum entanglement was once described by Einstein as "spooky actions at a distance", but John Bell proved the phenomenon experimentally in the mid-1960s).

However, let me repeat - it's not a matter of all fringe science waiting to eventually replace what scientists believe now. New paradigms (ways of thinking about things) in science which succeed do so because they are closer to the truth than older paradigms (as the orbit of Mercury, correctly documented, showed relativity to be closer to the truth about motion of large bodies in high gravitational fields than Newtonian physics was). New paradigms in science mostly are new ways of using the same science that led to the paradigms they replace. You have to know and understand the old ways of thinking before you can come up with new ways of thinking about the same things that have any relation to how things actually work in the world. You can't just wake up one day and decide you're going to re-invent physics unless you study physics as it now exists.

Einstein was never laughed at by the people who were seriously using the tools of science to expand its frontiers. Einstein's first Nobel prize in Physics wasn't for relativity, but his work on the photoelectric effect, so the idea that some people have that he was this striving patent clerk who suddenly had a vision about relativity which was rejected by the entire physics community is wrong. He had a Nobel prize already by the time he started publishing his thoughts on relativity. This led the people who were at the leading edge of physics (and some of whose experimental work was going to confirm matter-energy equivalence very soon) to take Einstein seriously from the beginning. Where he had trouble was from people who'd never seriously thought the matter through or done work which called Newtonian physics into question. loupgarous (talk) 21:30, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

He had a Nobel prize already by the time he started publishing his thoughts on relativity. No, Einstein's first paper on special relativity was one of his Annus Mirabilis papers, published in 1905, long before he was awarded a Nobel. With that said, your broader argument is correct. Scientists didn't all instantly accept relativity, but many did consider it seriously. And of course the fact that Einstein was publishing in Annalen der Physik, one of the premier European physics journals at the time, demonstrates that he was hardly rejected out-of-hand by the scientific establishment. --47.138.161.183 (talk) 22:04, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Plate tectonics is an example I think. Stomach ulcers caused by bacteria was another discovery that ran against conventional wisdom. Greglocock (talk) 00:23, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

The typical crank says "they laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Einstein" (or pick two others you like:) as an attempt to place themselves as the next such revolutionary thinker who just isn't appreciated yet, but is surely right as time will prove. The typical sound-bite response is "they laughed at Bozo the Clown too." DMacks (talk) 01:23, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

""The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who were laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers, but they also laughed ar Bozo the Clown". - Richard Feynman. Widneymanor (talk) 08:31, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Wikiquote says it is from Carl Sagan, but that is one of the "always misattributed" quotes. As Abraham Lincoln said, never trust what you find on the internet. Tigraan^{Click here to contact me} 11:04, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Yes - Can anyone explain to me how I looked up the Carl Sagan quote before posting, then attributed it to Feinman? Duh! Widneymanor (talk) 12:01, 25 April 2017 (UTC). Sorry - Feynman. Widneymanor (talk) 12:05, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

I must admit I wondered about that quote from Lincoln, but I see that in fact Lincoln used the internet. :) Dmcq (talk) 15:19, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Whoa! :-) Sagan appears to be referring to this catchy tune They All Laughed that has made my intransigent chocolate-craving day a bit more bearable. I normally eschew small-world karma, but in the comment section of this video about creepy clowns in horror films DEMON FRIEZ chalked up a win. Small potatoes, yes, but salty and popular. :-) Money is tight, science is based on empirical facts so yes what Wallace says is correct with respect to scientific realism which views science as an objective progression of facts that help us understand a singular reality. Regarding the percentage of fringe theories that have become accepted, from our article on fringe theory: "A widely known example is Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift, which eventually served as the basis for the accepted model of plate tectonics.[17][30] Other ideas which have made the transition include the germ theory of disease,[31] Birkeland's explanation of the aurora,[32] prions,[17] and complexity theory in project management.[33] Behavioral finance was described in a 2002 journal article as "at the fringe of ... modern financial theory",[34] but it has since been widely applied in many fields of business.[35]" So occasionally fringe theories do get accepted but it should be pretty obvious that the majority do not. Given the propensity for wacky ideas to be shared within innumerable letters, blog comments and books, the percentage is likely to be small and difficult to measure with any precision. -Modocc (talk) 19:14, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Thinking about how people like Ignaz Semmelweis were publicly denounced and died in ignominy when they were right, all along (Koch had a hard row to hoe with his Germ Theory for similar reasons, but had the great good fortune to be working when Pasteur was, and when microscopes graduated from curiosities to genuine tools of science so that objective evidence supporting the theory was then available), I think the touchstone ought to be the quality of the available evidence and reasoning supporting a given belief (much fringe science doesn't even rise to the dignity of being a theory - theories have to be undergirded by hypotheses which are logically proven by observation and/or experiment).

The case for prions, for example, isn't entirely settled among those who, like Patricia Merz and Laura Manuelidis, did some of the work crucial to identifying those deformed proteins. Dr. Manuelidis in particular has been quoted as saying that Stanley Prusiner. who coined the term "prion", did his Nobel-winning work on them on logically shaky premises and discarded other possible explanations for those particular encephalopathies without actually ruling them out by experimental work. Manuelidis' own work with what is usually regarded a prion-borne disease, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, suggests nucleic acid complexes around the prions are the actual infectious matter (when they were disrupted and the prions left intact, infectivity disappeared), so that viruses may cause some of what we think of as prion diseases, after all. Prusiner's work and prion theory in general may at some future date come to be seen as a fringe theory encapsulated in a Nobel prize. loupgarous (talk) 20:39, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

That would certainly be much better at explaining some things if true. I had wondered how prions reproduced, the existing theories just didn't seem good enough to me and I had wondered whether they were in fact catalyzed by the immune system forming a template and the result not being removed properly in the brain. Dmcq (talk) 21:44, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

Good point, and something that came up recently when really large clinical trials of drugs intended to block formation of the same kind of amyloids we see in scrapie failed to halt or even slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease. We obviously don't understand either the role of prions in or the pathophysiology of the slow encephalopathies as well as we need to. But in Alzheimer's disease, inhibiting amyloid formation doesn't slow disease progression, presence and number of amyloids doesn't seem to be a predictor of severity of AD progression.

I don't know if this is directly relevant to the slow encephalopathies we associate with the presence of prions or not - the natural history of Alzheimer's disease reminds me of sporadic Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, but we never accidentally did the "experiment" that the manufacturers of cadaver pituitary-derived human growth hormone and various transplanters of nerve tissue from CJD infectees did to prove that the disease is transmissible by inoculation either by transplant or systemic injection of a hormone derived from infected pituiaries. loupgarous (talk) 22:08, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

Measuring a blow to a ball

I wonder if we only know the weight of the ball, distance and curve of the strike, we could know how the blow was. What physical details else would you need to know to compare strikes? Hofhof (talk) 11:47, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Not easily. See inelastic_collision for a start. You'd also need to know what materials(s) the ball and bat were made from to determine how much deformation occurred for starters. 196.213.35.146 (talk) 12:27, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

And also the bat's angle and speed. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:31, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

And wind direction and speed, temperature of bat, ball, and air, air pressure etc etc. You could at best make a crude estimate of force. Fgf10 (talk) 14:23, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Let's ignore extreme cases (nano-size hydrogen balloon hit by a relativistically moving cat's whisker inside Jupiter's Great Red Spot). More like hitting a baseball. Can the stated three parameters give a reasonably accurate calculation of the energy imparted on the ball? How crude would that estimate be, in real Earth conditions? Think spherical cow in a vacuum. 91.155.195.247 (talk) 18:47, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

The trajectory of the ball tells you what its initial velocity was. But that only gets you so far. To take the next step, to determine its acceleration, you need to know how long the bat was in contact with the ball. That depends on a lot of messy details concerning the physical characteristics of the bat and the ball: their elasticity, deformability, and so on. If you were able to compute the acceleration, that plus the mass of the ball tells you the force that was imparted. That plus (again) the time the bat was accelerating the ball, along with some assumptions about how much energy is lost to heat, sound, etc. would give you the work/energy. (Although the OP didn't ask anything about energy; it's not actually clear what they were asking for: "how the blow was"?) CodeTalker (talk) 20:13, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

And not just how long of contact with the bat, but the exact spot on the bat, which direction the grain is (i.e. where the bat's label is), and where the ball arrive with respect to the batter's "hot zone" - as per Ted Williams' book The Science of Hitting, which may still be in print and which anyone who wants to hit well is advised to read. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:25, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

I think it depends on what the observer wants to know. Those factors all have to do with how efficiently one can transfer energy to the ball using a bat. If all you really care about is how much energy was transferred, then the details of the bat don't really matter. If you care about the average force delivered, then all you need to add is the duration of the contact. Whether the ball was hit well, or hit poorly doesn't matter very much from the point of view of the ball. From the point of view of the ball, a medium force strike at the sweet spot of the bat could look the same as very hard hit somewhat off-target. Of course, if the observer wants to know about the characteristics of how the bat made contact, then you would need to know such details about the bat. Depends on what one wants to know. Dragons flight (talk) 06:55, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

You'd often use change in momentum, and impulse, in a problem like this. The impulse is the integral of F.dt The particualr shape of the plot of F vs t is hard to calculate but has no bearing on the velocity of the ball once it loses contact with the bat. Greglocock (talk) 00:19, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

It's a little unclear what it meant by "the distance and curve of the strike" and "the blow". In baseball, "strike" is counterintuitively used to refer to instances where the ball is not legally hit, but in general English I would understand it to mean "the action of the ball being hit" and yet you seem to be using that action as both the input (the strike) and what you're hoping to extrapolate (the blow). It might help if you listed out the actions in chronological sequence, with some kind of note regarding which ones we should take as "known" and which ones we're trying to figure out. Matt Deres (talk) 20:19, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

As suggested in Knickerbocker Rules, "strike" referred to several things, including a plate appearance, missing the ball, and hitting the ball either fair or foul. Called strikes didn't exist yet. What we think of as a swinging strike (as opposed to a called strike and a foul strike) was referred to as "struck at and missed". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:54, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

The OP is a frequent, but not necessarily daily, contributor. It's to be hoped that he'll come back her and clarify. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:43, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

Why does everybody assume that the OP is talking about baseball? My first thought, and Google Canada, was soccer. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 02:34, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

You may be right. That's why the OP needs to come back here and clarify. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:53, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

I had no specific sport in mind. Commenting on any of these would be fine. And it's not even necessary to be a sport with a bat. If you could only see the ball, what could you discover from what hit it? Hofhof (talk) 10:22, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

Classic American Cars

• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

I need an expert to find out the car models. May you please help me?--Grand Depot (talk) 13:24, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

I zoomed in real close and it looks to me like it says Chrysler on the hood (bonnet). 196.213.35.146 (talk) 13:49, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Which photo do you mean exactly?--Grand Depot (talk) 14:18, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

I think its a late-1920s Chrysler Imperial, not sure which exact trim package or model though. --Jayron32 15:45, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

I think the one in the bottom middle is the one with the logo and that it is a Chandler Motor Car. Dmcq (talk) 17:00, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

For clarity's sake, it appears to me that photos 1, 2, and 4 are of the same car, and photos 3 and 5 are of the same car (but different from the one in 1, 2, and 4). Deor (talk) 20:30, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Just had another look. Pictures 3 and 5 are of a car made by Rickenbacker (car). If you look at the back of the car in the last picture they have the hat in the ring emblem on the back. And I'm pretty certain of my identification of Chandler Motor Car for the others. Dmcq (talk) 13:56, 25 April 2017 (UTC)

I zoomed in and enhanced the logo on the grille of picture 4, and it definitely looks like it says "CHANDLER". But in looking at all the models pictured in the Chandler Motor Car article, it doesn't seem to be any of those. ~Anachronist (talk) 06:20, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

I think the blue car at the top of the article is the same except it doesn't have the roof up. Dmcq (talk) 10:29, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

In the earliest days of motor car manufacture, the factory would often supply just the chassis and engine (plus brakes, etc.), and the customer would have custom seats, bodywork etc. added by their favoured coachbuilder: this practice still persists in some limited (expensive) markets. Is it possible that in the relevant era an official government body might have ordered one or a batch of cars to their particular non-standard specifications either from the manufacturer, or for completion by a separate coachworks? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.217.249.244 (talk) 00:02, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

For a long time (1919 to mid-1990s), General Motors advertised their mass-produced vehicles as having "Body by Fisher", which resulted from GM's purchase of Fisher Body beginning in 1919. Fisher also sold "coachwork" (vehicle bodies) to a number of different manufacturers for a while, including Ford (which once considered purchasing the automotive operations of Rolls-Royce, supposedly to be able to place "Body by Rolls-Royce" escutcheons in their cars' door sills where GM products had ones saying "Body by Fisher"). Those of us who live in wet or snowy climates and have been able to see our Chevrolet products rust in real-time viewed the whole "Body by Fisher" narrative with sour derision. loupgarous (talk) 00:20, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

@Dmcq: It could be, but the front fenders and running board are so different between the 4th picture above and the blue car in the article, that I assumed they were different cars (e.g. the fenders are connected to the running board in the blue car). But the anon's comment about custom bodywork being common in those days may account for the difference. ~Anachronist (talk) 06:09, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

They put an air speed measuring instrument onto the running board - my guess is they put in a running board of their own or chopped the one that was there and the front fender used to go on top of the part of the running board that was removed. You can see a mark across the bottom of the back of the fender where it may have bent back. There's no need for any assumption about customized bodywork. Dmcq (talk) 09:27, 27 April 2017 (UTC)