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**Bertie the Bunyip[_25_]**

mixed nuts wrote in
:

Bertie the Bunyip wrote:
cavedweller wrote in
news:ecad1ae9-5348-4dfc-b881-
:

On Jun 5, 11:21 am, Bertie the Bunyip wrote:

Actually, "Foo" came from Smokey Stover, and was a corruption of the
french "feux" ( Smokey was a fireman) He called himself a "Foo
fighter" and juxtaposed with the term UFO (which at the beginning of
it's life just meant anything that pilots couldn't identify and had
nothing to do with little gray men) a UFO became a foo fighter to
USAAC pilots in WW2. While I'm sure the Forward Observation Officer
thing is also true, Smokey Stover was really popular at the time and
was the source of a large number of slang words used during the war.
I always loved his car!

The car(s) had two wheels - predating the Segway.

Yeah, that's right. I have a vague memory of an article in Popular
Mechanics about someone building one. I think they might have published
plans for it, even, as they did back then. Quite a challenge to make
something like that! I suspect it must have had a single castering wheel
hidden underneath fore or aft.

Bertie