The last thing anyone anticipates when playing around with a washed-up buoy is that their fun could be potentially fatal. This is the unexpected shock a family from South Wales received when they realized that their children were in fact clambering over an unexploded bomb from WW2. The family, of Burry Port, had decided to go to a beach near Pembrey Country Park for a spot of bodyboarding when they made the remarkable find. After initially seeing the object from afar, curious mum Kelly Gravell approached it for a closer inspection.
Gravell explained how it's not uncommon for oddities to wash up on the beach, and at first glance, the explosive looked almost identical to a buoy. Layers of seaweed and barnacles that clung to the sides made accurately identifying it even harder. Her naturally inquisitive children, daughter Erin, 6, and son Ellis, 4, instantly began to mess around and jump on it. Kelly’s husband even took photos of the kids’ fun and uploaded them online.
The family was totally unaware of the object’s true nature until days after the encounter. A friend notified them of a Facebook post uploaded by Pembley Park that alerted beachgoers to the discovery of an unexploded bomb. Officials were eventually able to identify it as a 70-year-old mine of the U.S military. Mrs. Gravell admits she was shocked by the revelation that their innocent trip could have ended in disaster, adding that she’s never heard of anything like this happening before.
The local council officer said that although it’s common for buoys to wash ashore in the area, it was writing on the side of the bomb that clearly identified it. The incident was eventually resolved by the Royal Navy coast guard who donated the mine in a controlled explosion not long after its discovery.
The space race was dominated by men and it was tough for women to make their mark. But some did, and to them, we should be eternally grateful for their inspirational work which helped us learn more about the cosmos. Evelyn Boyd Granville was one such person. She faced prejudice throughout her early life as an African American woman but her calm determination won through in the best possible way.
Not only was she the second person of her race to study for and achieve a Ph.D. in Mathematics, but she was also a teacher too. She then turned her attention to technology and used her vast intelligence to work for IBM on some of their early computing systems. So, every time you use a computer, Evelyn Boyd Granville helped you get to that point.
This was just the beginning of her career which would reach its peak as man was sent to space. She joined NASA and designed software that looked at satellites in orbit and closely examined them as part of Project Vanguard. She also worked on the Apollo projects as part of her amazing career.
Margaret Hamilton was also employed to make sure the Apollo missions ran without a hitch. She was the manager of a team that built the systems which told the modules where to land on the moon. That’s crazy complicated stuff - and she was in charge of it! She was also the first person to realize that what she did could be termed as ‘engineering’ but without there being any mechanical parts. So, she came up with the job title ‘software engineer’ to describe her role at the forefront of innovative technology.
Hamilton’s projects which were applied to the space missions could be just as useful in everyday life. As computers became more widespread, the notion of them ‘crashing’ was a cause for panic. She developed programs that could recover data in the event of a crash as well as stop crashes from happening by finding errors before they caused problems.