TIL Ray Bradbury first titled Fahrenheit 451 “The Fireman”, then called a local fire station to ask what temperature it would take to actually ignite books. The responding firemen placed him on hold and burnt a book, then reported that the heat required was “Fahrenheit 451″.
via reddit.com
That’s such a fire fighter thing to do.
“You know what? That’s a good question. I’m gonna put you on hold while I find out”
My dad used to design kitchens at Lowe’s and one day he got a dude from one of the national labs looking to buy a countertop. Dad sent him home with a sample of a quartz-composite countertop to make sure the color will look good with his existing cabinets. The dude asks my dad what the composition of the countertop is and whether it’ll melt if he puts a pot on it (since it’s a composite and not pure stone) and Dad gives him some rough numbers and reassures him that it won’t melt if he puts a hot pan on the counter. The dude comes back with week later without the sample. The dude gives dad a detailed list of the countertops composition, to the nearest hundredth of a percentile, and the exact temperature it melts at, because he took it to his lab and melted it down. tldr, it’s not just firefighters.
Imagine giving someone a sample of the granite you use to make countertops and they come back a few days later just to tell you they fucking dematerialized it
Ok, but this is just, like, what people do if they have access to equipment. We just… put shit in it. Just to see. At this point, I’ll try and hit just about anything with an arc, just to see. I’ll sand and polish anything you’ll let me, if I’m bored enough. If I had a machine that could melt something down and tell me exactly what was in it? I’d be just waiting for parts of my world to become “trash” so I could de-materialize it and turn it into knowledge of what it was.
fahrenheit 451 is so awesome, i wish there was a word like "bradburian" to describe this writer's unique style that describes entire worlds with the amazement and phantasy seen in the eyes of a child, which i mean in the best way possible. if you look at pictures from ray's writing den stuffed with memmorabilia of a childhood in "greentown", you'll see what i mean. and you know what, it might be a firefighter-thing to tell a random caller about the temperature at which book paper catches fire, but it's also a bradbury-thing to call a fire station about this in the first place. i cannot understate how much i love this writer.
