Thursday Photo Caption Contest: February 23

"That Christmas, all the kids clamored for the iHorn."

Perhaps it was the effect of all four of those Seussian megaphones, but your captions were extra funny this week. We could indeed hear you now and we did need a Ricola to soothe our throats from chortling, but we finally had to call in to this week’s special guest judge.

Congratulations to Mandi! Your clever pun on tickled the iFunnyBone of Priscilla Foley, Archival Program Director at the National Archives at Boston.

We first spotted this spectular image on their Facebook page. And while we wish the man was listening for Horton or a Who, it turns he is listening the for aircraft.

The caption on Facebook read: “Acoustic location was used from mid-WW1 to the early years of WW2 for the passive detection of aircraft by picking up the noise of the engines. It was rendered obsolete before and during WW2 by the introduction of radar, which was far more effective. This photo shows an early model of an Army acoustical aircraft detector (around 1920). The operator would try to detect engine sounds from incoming planes. In calm air conditions a range of about 15 miles could be achieved but the speed of the aircraft in existence when the system was eventually abandoned was such that only about 4 minutes warning of approach could be given.”  RG 227 MIT Radiation Lab Publications Office Photographs.

The week’s photograph features a man and a low-tech device—give us your funniest caption in the comments below!

"Your caption here!"

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