A few weeks ago, during one of our far-ranging discussions, it somehow came up that one of my high school classmates’s son was the lone American on the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and has never been found.
The discussion eventually led to the black boxes used on airplanes to help determine the cause of crashes. Well, we all knew that “black boxes” and not “black.” They are painted a bright orange to be more visible. There are a lot of theories as to the origin of the term “black box.” Some believe that the mysterious contents of the device could be safely accessed only in a dark room, others think that because when they are recovered, they are usually charred. One of the people involved in our discussion said it was called a black box, not because it was black, but because it was developed by an engineer named Black.
Well, without doing any extensive research on this subject, I’m pretty sure that I know the answer. First of all, what is usually referred to as a “black box” is actually a set of two bright orange colored “flight recorders.” I worked with electronic devices for many years and the term “black box” has been around longer than I have. In the electronics industry, a collection of different circuit modules put together to do a specific job is often/usually called a “black box.” The idea is that the contents can be a complete mystery as long as you know what the output is for a given input. So my theory, at least, is that these devices, although painted orange, are called black boxes because the components were constructed and sealed into a single unit to serve a specific purpose.,
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
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