America was founded in 1776 on the idea that 'all men are created equal,' the principle that led to slavery abolition and created the freest nation on Earth.

The Bob Woodson Center and Washington Examiner is offering an alternative to The New York Times and Pulitzer Center’s “1619 Project.” Theirs is aptly named “The 1776 Initiative.”

Responses to the 1619 Project are popping up everywhere. Countless conservative scholars have weighed in, both Civil War and founding-era historians have teamed up to cry foul, Hillsdale College is offering an online course to counter the narrative, the Heritage Foundation has compiled a trove of essays titled “1776: A Celebration of America,” and the National Association of Scholars has started a “1620 Project.”
The 1619 Project Is Infiltrating Institutions

Responses can’t come soon enough. Despite criticism, the 1619 Project is barreling ahead. The New York Times purchased ads that ran during the Super Bowl and the Democratic primary debates.

Although fact-checking the 1619 Project and offering academic criticism is important, it is not the most effective strategy for winning the hearts and minds of Americans.

Although criticism of The New York Times’ 1619 Project has not yet stymied the project’s success, giants in the conservative world are beginning to forge a tactical and strategic response that will outflank the project’s stated purpose of reframing the country’s history.

The 1619 Project is a series of essays about slavery and racial issues. Its primary claim is that racism has tainted every aspect of America’s founding and development. The project contains 18 essays, a collection of original stories and poems, a photo essay, a five-episode podcast, as well as other elements. The Pulitzer Center has also provided free reading guides, copies of the magazine, and lesson plans to educators.

In conjunction with the Pulitzer Center, The New York Times has already written and disseminated curriculum to public schools with the intention of reframing the country’s history by demonstrating that 1619, the year a slave not owned by Native Americans set foot on U.S. soil, is our true founding. Despite criticism from renowned historians, academics, and conservatives, the project continues to gain momentum.

The project was the dream child of Nikole Hannah-Jones, who is also the author of the project’s flagship essay, which argues, “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.” Hannah-Jones has shared that a fundamental restructuring of society must include financial reparations because “It’s not enough to simply have political power if you don’t have economic power. //

What’s Wrong With the 1619 Project

”Many major publications have pointed out the project’s historical, factual, and logical inconsistencies. Some of the best have been Joshua Lawson’s article in The Federalist, which pointed out that slavery was not unique to the United States and worldwide abolition lagged behind that of the northern states, and Lucas Morel’s work in the American Mind that argued American history should not be interpreted as a zero-sum narrative where the accomplishments of African Americans must displace the achievements of the Founders.

Twelve Civil War historians responded to the project with a letter to New York Times Magazine. The letter states: “As historians and students of the Founding and the Civil War era, our concern is that The 1619 Project offers a historically-limited view of slavery, especially since slavery was not just (or even exclusively) an American malady, and grew up in a larger context of forced labor and race.”

The historians go on to point out numerous historical discrepancies as well as instances where authors blatantly misinterpreted events to fit their narrative. Although the editor of the New York Times did respond to the letter, he neglected to publish it or to make any recommended corrections. //

Counteract Falsehood with Truth

One such response is a new free online course being offered by Hillsdale College (Disclosure: I am employed by Hillsdale College, but have not had a hand in the development of this course).

The class’ title is “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope” and will be taught by Hillsdale President Larry P. Arnn and Wilfred M. McClay. The course is based on McClay’s book, “Land of Hope: Invitation to the Great American Story,” winner of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s book of the year for 2019.

“The last thing we need, I think we all agree, is another history book. What we do need, what we’ve long needed is a clear and compelling narrative of the American story. An honest account that is also compelling and inspiring for students… And I think we have one,” said constitutional scholar Dr. Matthew Spalding of McClay’s book.

The purpose of the course is to counter narratives like the 1619 Project and to restore civic knowledge that leads to informed patriotism. According to Arnn, The 1619 Project is “an ideological campaign to undermine Americans’ attachment to our founding principles and to the Constitution by making slavery – rather than the principles of liberty that ended slavery and preserved our liberties for nearly 250 years – the principal focus of American history,” reports KPVI. The course is set to launch on February 12 and will encompass 25 lectures.

A young Benjamin Franklin wrote this doggerel verse in 1728 to serve as his epitaph. Franklin, who loved to write humorous and satirical verses as well as essays, made copies of this verse for friends at various times in his life. This version, not in Franklin's hand, was among the papers owned by Franklin's grandson, William Temple Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790). Epitaph, 1728. Manuscript verse. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (61)

At the age of 28, Benjamin Franklin wrote this mock epitaph. (1) Over the years, he wrote different versions and passed them out to friends.

The Body of

B. Franklin, Printer;

Like the Cover of an old Book,

Its Contents torn out,

And stript of its Lettering and Gilding,

Lies here, Food for Worms.

But the Work shall not be wholly lost:

For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more,

In a new & more perfect Edition,

Corrected and amended

By the Author.

It is interesting to note that Franklin (1706-1790) – Founding Father of the United States of America, foreign diplomat, statesman, author, soldier, scientist, author, inventor, printer – a true Renaissance man, a polymath – chose to refer to himself simply as a “printer” and liken his dead body to an old book:

International Bulletin of Missionary Research

Vol. 36, No. 4
October 2012
pp. 200–204

Radio Missions: Station ELWA in West Africa

Timothy Stoneman

The 14th Amendment says states that infringe the vote must lose representation in Congress. It’s time to make this happen. //

The U.S. Constitution is famously short—a mere 7,591 words, including its 27 amendments. That makes it all the more remarkable that 110 of those words have been, in effect, lost to the ages.

These forgotten words form Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, which was designed to guard against the infringement of voting rights. The lost provision is simple: States that deny their citizens the right to vote will have reduced representation in the House of Representatives. //

From widespread closure of polling locations and expanding imposition of voter identification laws to escalating purges of voter rolls, assaults on the right to vote nationwide illustrate that we need these lost words back, urgently. //

clause might have been this one: The clause failed to specify how Congress was to obtain the data that could serve as a first step in pursuing a punitive reduction in representation.

This proved a serious obstacle when, in the 1870s, Congress made its one serious push to impose the penalty of diminished representation. //

A select committee of the House of Representatives focused on administering the country’s ninth census made a list of state laws that the committee regarded as infringing on voting. Then the committee decided to ask census respondents nationwide whether their right to vote had been denied or abridged on constitutionally impermissible grounds. So, the committee reported out a bill that would have the secretary of the Interior—then responsible for administering the census—determine where and how much voting infringement was occurring and, in turn, proportionally reduce any offending state’s representation in the House.

This proposal elicited an objection that the Interior secretary was being made the final arbiter of a responsibility entrusted by the reduction clause to Congress itself.

Pan Am was once the largest international airline in the United States.

The three-part documentary TV series “A More or Less Perfect Union,” produced by Free to Choose Network, will air on various PBS stations across the nation this month.

The documentary is a personal exploration of the U.S. Constitution by Justice Douglas Ginsburg, who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and is now a senior justice on that court.

Ginsburg explores the Constitution and features interviews with, and perspectives from, constitutional experts of all political views—liberal, conservative, and libertarian. He examines the key issues of liberty in the U.S. both from a historical and contemporary perspective.

Among those issues are freedom of the press and religion, slavery and civil rights, the Second Amendment, separation of powers, and the number of ways that the Constitution’s framers sought to limit the power of the federal government.

Does anyone know how exactly they backdoored the machines?

Yes and no, what we do know is that some of the machines had to be both secure and insecure, so that they could interoperate without raising any "red flags" by not interworking with secure machines...

We know from the book "Spy Catcher" written by Peter Wright published in the early 1980's that one method was to supply an "algorithmicaly secure machine" but with an "acoustic side channel" that leqked key information in it. Basically MI5 had gained audio access via an "infinity device" to the "Crypto Cell" at the Egyptian Embassy in London. They could thus hear the mechanical cipher machine running. Whilst it did not give the "key" what it did do was give the "wheel" starting points, turn over points, and which were rotated at any time. This reduced the "attack space" GCHQ had to deal with from "months to minutes".

As for effecting the "key stream" back in WWII the stratigic not tactical German high level cipher machine was the Lorenz teletype cipher machine. It used 12 cipher wheels with "movable lugs" on the wheel periphery, that caused a "key stream" to be built by XORing the lug positions. The wheels sizes were essentialy "prime to each other" thus whilst they were only 30-60 steps each their combined sequence was the multiple of their step sizes which was immense. At Bletchly Park the traffic from these machines was codenamed "Fish" and the machine "Tunny". The work of two men broke the machine sight unseen due to a mistake made by a German operator. There are various pages up on the web that will give you as little or as much information on it as you would like.

But what you need to remember is that,

1, The failings of the Lorenz machine are shared by many other machine ciphers not just mechanical ones.

2, Virtually all machine ciphers pre AES have both strong and weak keys with a range in between.

The US Field Cipher based on the Boris Haglin coin counting mechanism suffered from the second issue, in fact it had rather more weak keys than strong. This was not a problem for the US military as they "Issued key scheduals centrally" thus knowing what were strong keys and what were weak keys they only ever used the strong keys. The knowledge of weak and strong was as far as we can tell worked out by William F. Friedman, and it was deliberatly implemented as such by him. That is, the big weakness of any field cipher machine is the enemy will capture it and may well end up using it or copy it's design to make their own machines (see the history of Enigma type "rotor" machines to see that in action).

Thus the reasoning was either the enemy is smart and will know about the strong keys and weak keys in which case nothing won or lost. However if they do not and assume all keys are the same, then your cryptanalysis team has just been given a great big bonus to make thier lifes easier. What was not known then and still not widely recognised was the British invention of Traffic Analysis in all it's forms and the huge card file database they used with it. This enabled them to identify specific traffic circuits and individual operators without the use of cryptanalysis. Which gave not just vast amounts of "probable plaintext" but also "probable cillies" and other bad operator habits. All of which made breaking of even strong keys very very much easier. Thus traffic under weak keys becomes a leaver to put in the cracks of strong keys...

What is also known is that Crypto AG supplied customers not just with the actual crypto machines but a whole lot of key generation support... This was in the form of manuals and machines, all of which pushed Crypto AG customers into producing either "weak key scheduals" or "known key scheduals" but the actual encryption machines worked identically to those who used "secure key scheduals" thus were fully compatible, so no red flags raised.

The thing that we forget these days is that designing crypto kit is actually a hard process. Whilst it's easy to come up with complex algorithms, they are almost impossible to implement in a mechanical system that is reliable in use. Likewise for their pencil and paper analogs. Also they are eye wateringly expensive to make. If you are ever lucky enough to get your hands on just a single Enigma rotor you will see it is superbly engineered from many many parts each one of which requires a great deal of engineering thus there are hundreds of hours of work in each Enigma machine even though the outer wooden box might look crude to modern eyes. Thus only fairly simple algorithms got implemented based on minor variations to odometer or coin counting mechanisms.

Untill DES came along nearly all "electronic" cipher machines were based on simple circuits like shift registers and SR latches. In most respects many were just simple copies of mechanical cipher algorithms. So the likes of a Lorenz wheel became a "ring counter with reset" and the lugs replaced by a "plug board" the algorithm remained the same, along with all it's weaknesses... Even when put in software in 4 and 8 bit CPU systems or later micro controlers those old defective mechanical algorithms came along as "counters mod N" driving "lookup tables"... In part this happened due to "inventory costs" if you've invested a fortune in mechanical cipher systems you want your new shiny electronic systems to be compatible, likewise those that are CPU based. It's the same old "legacy issue" that almost always works more for your enemy than it does for your security.

But acoustic side channels are known to be not the only ones. Even theoreticaly secure One Time Pad/Tape systems are practically insecure when implemented in machine form. The UK high level super encipherment machine known as Rockex used by the Diplomatic Wireless Service (DWS) and designed by Canadian engineer "Pat" Bailey suffered from this as I mentioned years ago on this blog. In essence the Pad/Tape "additive" was done in a circuit using Post Office Type 600 relays. Even though the open to close times could be adjusted there was always a slight time asymmetry that got out onto the telephone pair used to connect to the telex network. This time asymmetry could be used to determine the "addative" thus strip it off leaving the plaintext...

One solution to this is to use a "shift register" or secondary relay that "reclocked" the data signal so that the time asymmetry seen on the line was not that of the relay doing the encipherment, but the time asymmetry of the reclocking relay. In essence the contacts of the reclocking relay were "open" during the critical time period of the encipherment relay changed state.

Which in theory should have made it secure... But open relay contacts like open switch contacts can be "jumped" because in reality they are small value capacitors. This is what the "infinity device" was all about. It enabled you to put a high frequency signal on the telephone pair that would see the encryption relay change state through the open contacts of the reclocking relay... So you needed to add extra circuitry to prevent the time based side channel from the encryption relay being seen on the line. Thus leaving out that extra circuitry made a very secure system nearly totaly insecure to anyone with the appropriate device in line, yet it retained total data level compatability with it's secure counterparts, so again no "red flag" waved.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas faced down a 'high-tech lynching' by the same people who now claim to be America's arbiters of racial justice. //

The documentary shows a few of the slurs prominent people and publications have applied to Thomas that would be furiously lambasted as racist if applied to someone with different philosophical commitments. Apparently racism only matters to the people who control culture if it can be used as a political weapon against their opponents. It is therefore permitted to live and even fed, precisely because it is useful to its keepers, rather than rejected equally by all. //

Thomas’s story doesn’t end there, though, because he is not an asterisk. His monumental body of constitutional scholarship vindicates his mind, and God Almighty vindicates his soul. As a reflection of those graces, perhaps, while he has every reason to be vindictive and bitter, Clarence Thomas has chosen not to be. Instead, he is grateful, effective, and joyful. //

Thomas’s honorable discharge of his duties regardless of the suffering they have brought doesn’t erase the sins committed against him, but it does redeem them. It transforms a stepping stone to glory into a stumbling block of shame. This is the American story. It is Thomas’s story. It can also be yours.

It’s unclear what damage, if any, the Titanic sustained.

Another piece of our culture, sacrificed on the altar of so-called progress. //

Those who do not remember The Naked Gun are doomed to repeat it.
David McNew/Getty Images

“We will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed.” —The New York Times

More than any movie since "Saving Private Ryan," "1917" immerses the viewer in the realities of war and what it requires of human beings. //

The plot is the stuff of a standard action/adventure flick: two soldiers on a desperate mission to stop a British unit from charging into a trap.

At a more substantive level, however, it’s a movie about the humanity and inhumanity of war. On that front, it’s the best since “Saving Private Ryan” (1998) and definitely worth seeing.

Like Steven Spielberg’s tale of a squad of soldiers trampling around the Normandy countryside after D-Day, this Sam Mendes storyline is equally implausible. As a set piece of military history, it is to be scrupulously ignored.

Yet, there are reasons to engage with “1917” as a serious war film.

For one, the movie gets the details exquisitely right. Here, “Saving Private Ryan” set a high bar. It would be difficult to have a more realistic appreciation for what it was like to land on “Bloody” Omaha Beach during the Normandy invasion without a time machine.

More recently, Chris Nolan’s “Dunkirk” (2017) hit that mark, as well.

These movies have avoided the kind of groaning missteps that detract from otherwise excellent movies like “Patton” (1970), which paraded around “German” armor that were clearly just American tanks painted up with Wehrmacht symbols. //

To understand just how accurate the look of the movie is, compare “1917” to Peter Jackson’s incredible documentary “They Shall Not Grow Old” (2018), which relies exclusively on recovered archival footage from the World War I.

magine an old leather-bound book just pulled out from a wooden shelf. Its yellowed pages release dust as they open. Even before you begin to read the book, the unique smell of it fills your nose.

This familiar scent is not only a simple pleasure for people who like to peruse libraries and bookshops. These smells have a cultural heritage value, and they are at risk of being lost. For every old book that falls apart, is thrown away or kept locked behind a temperature-controlled curatorial door, these scents become harder to experience. It is a problem that is far from unique to books – from perfumeries and pubs to entire cities, the background scents of our lives are changing all the time.

For Cecilia Bembibre, a researcher at the UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage, the smell of old books is important. She is developing different techniques to recover “extinct” scents from the past and to preserve those around today for the future.

It’s a facet of heritage that is often, quite literally, overlooked. “The proposals made by cultural heritage spaces such as galleries, museums, historic houses, are mostly focused on the sight,” says Bembibre. “The engagement they propose tends to be visual. [With] some exceptions, the stimulation of senses, like the objects that can be touched or smelled, is reserved for children.”

Bembibre is trying to rectify that neglect of scent. “I wanted to address an issue that has been researched quite little – that has to do with smells as the olfactory heritage of humanity.”

The battleship Yamato was among the largest and most powerful battleships of all time. Yamato has reached nearly mythical status, a perfect example of Japan’s fascination with doomed, futile heroics. Built in 1937 at the Kure Naval Arsenal near Hiroshima, //

839 feet at the waterline and weighing seventy thousand tons fully loaded, Yamato was the largest ship of the war, eclipsed only by postwar American aircraft carriers. It and its sister, Musashi, were armed with nine eighteen-inch naval guns, mounted in turrets of three; six 155-millimeter secondary naval guns; twenty-four five-inch guns; 162 twenty-five-millimeter antiaircraft guns; and four 13.2-millimeter heavy machine guns.

All of this firepower was meant to sink enemy battleships—more than one at a time if necessary. The extremely large number of antiaircraft guns, added during a refit, were meant to keep the ship afloat in the face of American air power until it could close within striking range of enemy ships. //

Unfortunately for Yamato and its crew, it was obsolete by the time it was launched in 1941. The ability of fast aircraft carriers to engage enemy ships at the range of their embarked dive and torpedo bombers meant a carrier could attack a battleship at ranges of two hundred miles or more, long before it entered the range of a battleship’s guns. //

Yamato had taken ten torpedo and seven bomb hits, and was hurting badly. Despite counterflooding, the ship continued to list, and once it reached thirty five degrees the order was given to abandon ship. The captain and many of the bridge crew tied themselves to their stations and went down with their ship, while the rest attempted to escape.

At 14:23, it happened. Yamato’s forward internal magazines detonated in a spectacular fireball. It was like a tactical nuclear weapon going off. Later, a navigation officer on one of Japan’s surviving destroyers calculated that the “pillar of fire reached a height of 2,000 meters, that the mushroom-shaped cloud rose to a height of 6,000 meters.” The flash from the explosion that was Yamato’s death knell was seen as far away as Kagoshima on the Japanese mainland.

When it was all over, the Surface Special Attack Force had been almost completely destroyed. Yamato, the cruiser Yahagi and three destroyers were sunk. Several other escorts had been seriously damaged. Gone with the great battleship were 2,498 of its 2,700-person crew.

'America’s Revolutionary Mind' rebuts historians suggesting that the American Revolution advanced self-serving motives based on slavery, race, and class. //

Looking back on his youth, former President John Adams reminisced, “The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.” Echoing Adams, author C. Bradley Thompson, proclaims that “the real American Revolution” was a “moral revolution that occurred in the minds of the people” before the war ever occurred. Thompson advances that “this transformative event created a kind of society unlike any other that had ever existed,” and one that continues to affect our lives today.

Here's what every president's signature looks like

The Enterprise, or “Big E,” was commissioned on November 25, 1961. The ship’s subsequent twenty-five deployments read like a history of the Cold War and modern U.S. foreign policy. She made some serious history. //

As the Heritage Foundation puts it, “the high density of nuclear power, i.e., the amount of volume required to store a given amount of energy, frees storage capacity for high value/high impact assets such as jet fuel, small craft, remote-operated and autonomous vehicles, and weapons. When compared to its conventional counterpart, a nuclear aircraft carrier can carry twice the amount of aircraft fuel, 30 percent more weapons, and 300,000 cubic feet of additional space (which would be taken up by air intakes and exhaust trunks in gas turbine-powered carriers).”

John Carrier leads the MIT Sloan Executive Education program Implementing Industry 4.0: Leading Change in Manufacturing and Operations. He also teaches in the F1 Extreme Innovation series, a collaboration between Formula One and MIT Sloan Executive Education. A native Detroiter who sees the world through a lens of systems thinking, Carrier recently watched the film (twice) with process improvement in mind. Here are three business lessons that “Ford v. Ferrari” demonstrates with historical accuracy and a touch of Hollywood flair.

Lesson 1: Don’t adopt new tech until you know what problem you are trying to solve

To test the aerodynamics of the GT40 prototype, the original Ford engineers put a large, heavy computer with attached sensors into the car. The Shelby team ripped out the computer and instead taped strings over the surface of the car, then observed the exterior of the car to see how air traveled over and around the vehicle. "Often the best model of the system is the system itself," Carrier says.

Another takeaway from this example is that the strings make the issue observable,

Unlike a computer printout, the streamers provided direct and immediate visual measurement of the entire system. Indeed, the very presence of the computer in the car distorted the performance of the system, as it significantly increased the weight of the car.

Lesson 2: Flatten your decision-making.

In the movie, Ford’s decision on the Shelby program went through the classic “15 middle managers,” visualized by a red folder circulating the Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan, headquarters, known as the Glass House. The red folder is the perfect analogy for the “hidden factory” of middle management. (A “hidden factory” is any activity or set of activities that reduce the quality or efficiency of operations but are not initially known to managers or others seeking to improve the process.)

Shelby eventually shortens the feedback loop by insisting he report directly to Henry Ford II.

“Paraphrasing a conversation I once had with Jay Forrester, the father of system dynamics, the purpose of middle management seems to be to turn the message 180 degrees while adding a time delay — the absolutely optimal way to destroy the performance of any system,” Carrier says.

Lesson 3: Learn from others.

In the Daytona race, Shelby bet his company to the Ford Motor Company on his driver, Ken Miles, winning — even against another Ford team in the race. Meanwhile, the Shelby team observed that the second Ford team in the next pit bay was having much faster pit stops. Shelby discovered they were utilizing NASCAR pit crew members.

“The lesson here is simple,” Carrier explains. “Look outside your own team, company, and/or industry for better ways of doing what you’re doing.”

Spoiler alert: In the case of Ford, all their hard work and lessons learned paid off. The GT40 MK II defeated Ferrari at Le Mans in 1966, capturing first, second, and third places. And they won again the following year.

History misses this plane--and for good reasons. //

Quiz time! Which secret American military project during World War II proved even more expensive than the $2 billion Manhattan Project which developed U.S. atomic bombs?

That would be the $3 billion B-29 Superfortress—the huge four-engine bomber designed to fly across huge distances and drop those atomic bombs.

The silver-skinned B-29’s four huge turbo-supercharged R-3350 Duplex Cyclone radial engines allowed the 37-ton aircraft (when empty!) to fly relatively fast at 290 to 350 miles per hour and at altitudes exceeding 30,000 feet, making it extremely difficult for Japanese interceptors to catch up with them.

But even as World War II ground on to its conclusion, the Air Force appreciated that the Superfortress’s advantages would soon vanish due to the advent of turbojet-powered fighters. As the Cold War gathered momentum in the late 1940s, it further became vital for the Air Force to have a nuclear bomber that could strike Russia from U.S. bases.

These needs culminated in a new B-29D model with engine power cranked up nearly 60 percent using a 3,500 horsepower R-4360 Wasp Major engine and a skin made of stronger but lighter 75-S aluminum alloy. Together, this lowered the weight of the wings by 600 pounds and increased speed to nearly 400 miles per hour. Other trimmings included a taller tail fin, hydraulically assisted controls, and wing and window de-icing systems. //

out in the 1950s, only the older B-29s were called into perform non-nuclear strikes—where they suffered unexpected losses to Soviet MiG-15 jet fighters. With speeds approaching 680 miles per hour and high climb rates, the MiG-15 demonstrated that even the B-50’s higher speeds and altitudes were of little advantage due to advancing jet technology. This led to the cancellation in 1949 of an experimentally re-engined model first called the YB-50C with 4,500-horsepower engines.

However, the B-29 and B-50 by then were at the forefront of pioneering air-to-air refueling technology, which would allow the kind of extended range bombing raids the SAC was aiming for. Initially, this involved converting B-29s into KB-29s tankers, that would use a long hose to refuel nuclear-armed B-50s.

In 1949, the B-50A Lucky Lady II became the first aircraft to fly around the world in an epic ninety-four-hour flight between February 26 and March 2. (An earlier attempt by B-50 Global Queen, had to be aborted due to engine failures.) She was refueled by no less than four pairs of KB-29M tankers flying out of the Azores, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines and Hawaii along its 23,452 mile-long journey. This record would finally be beaten in 1956 in less than half the time by a brand-new B-52 jet bomber. //

The various B-50 variants were finally retired in the 1950s, their aluminum airframe aging poorly after seeing much hard use. A half-century later, the C-135 family of planes based on the 707 airliner continue to perform the numerous support roles the B-50 had pioneered—especially the air-to-air refueling technology which continues to undergird U.S. airpower into the twenty-first century.