Fred Bauder wrote:
let's just get a grip and wipe the article. take the long-term view -- will anyone remember this in twenty years' time?
Maybe not outside of the US, but probably within it. I still vividly remember when Jessica McClure ("Baby Jessica") fell down that well in Texas in 1987. She should have an article too.
Yes and there was another child in the 1950s, and the chicken that lived after his head was cut off, again from the fifties, and Bridey Murphey, etc.
See:
I certainly think that there is a place in an encyclopedia for the offbeat and ephemeral. They can be a source of endless fascination to the reader who discovers them and proceeds to introduce them at a dinner-table conversation with the words "Did you know that....?" Articles about Jessica McClure, Bridey Murphey and [[Mike (headless chicken)]] are all perfectly appropriate.
In science and technology there are any number of attempts that might have worked but were superceded by a more practical idea that wasdiscovered before the old plan could be put into operation. Thus the Collins International Telegraph Company scheme to lay a telegraph wire from New York to London via Alaska and Siberia, quashed by the undersea cable laid by the "Great Eastern". Also the 1920s plan to put a series of floating airports as refueling stops across the Atlantic, which quickly lost its appeal after Lindbergh's famous flight.
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