Sunday, January 07, 2007

Revealed - Neil Armstrong didn't fluff his lines after all

Hi tech analysis by Australian computer programmer finds Neil Armstrong's missing 'a', you can find it too!

Everyone knows the famous line that the astronaut Neil Armstrong said when he stepped onto the moon - "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind". The arguments and debates have raged for years, about the missing letter 'a'. For those who may not realise this, the line that Neil should have said was the grammatically correct "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind"

Neil was initially convinced that the transcript was wrong, after all he had rehearsed the line many times before. In the following years the audio tape was analysed many times by NASA and it did indeed seem that Neil had fluffed his line. In fact as the years went by Neil even began to doubt himself and started to accept that maybe he did miss out that ever so important "a" after all.

Now that has all changed, Peter Shann Ford, a computer programmer from Australia claims to have found the missing 'a' using sophisticated computer software to analyse the original recordings.What makes story even more amazing is that you can try this for yourself!

Ford downloaded the audio recording of Armstrong's words from the NASA website. Then using software designed to enable disabled people to communicate via computers he analysed the recording. Amazingly the software revealed evidence that Neil did in fact say the missing 'a'.

You can try this for yourself, the original recording can be downloaded from NASA by clicking here

You can view the paper written by Ford that explains how to replicate the results yourself by clicking here (file is in PDF format)

And you can download a trial version of the software here

2 comments:

  1. Hi Agent Magenta,

    Very interesting post.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Maybe it was nerves and he inhaled the a .

    ReplyDelete