Let’s get one thing clear: The “black box” isn’t black. It’s orange. Before airlines made that color standard for their flight recorders, some Boeings used a yellow sphere, and the British had a gizmo called the Red Egg. So why do they call it “black”? One explanation goes this way: In 1939, an aviation engineer named François Hussenot devised a means of capturing an aircraft’s history to a box of photographic film. Onboard sensors flashed into the box through calibrated mirrors and traced a running tab of flight parameters, including altitude, air speed and the position of the cockpit controls. Because the device worked like a camera, its insides had to be in total darkness; thus, perhaps, the “black"-ness of the box.

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Hussenot is said to have thought his box so important that he buried a prototype in the sand dunes near the coast of Aquitaine in June 1940 to keep it out of German hands. After the war, technology for flight recorders became widespread. Some devices used photography; others scratched the data onto spools of metal foil. None recorded cockpit audio, however.

Then in 1953, an Australian chemist named David Warren was asked to help find the cause of recent jet-plane crashes. “I kept thinking to myself . . . If only we could recapture those last few seconds,” he told an interviewer in 1985, “it would save all this argument and uncertainty.” Warren’s version of the device stored audio to a bobbin of magnetized steel wire. In his telling, the name “black box” came from a British government official, who in 1958 referred to it using W.W.II-era Air Force slang for subtle avionics.