Flour power
This couldn't be as mundane as a rehash of the moon landing conspiracy theories. And it wasn't.
In fact, it relates to another moon hoax, which was published by a New York newspaper in 1835. Rather than watching the BBC's Reel—which can be a little slow-going or dumbed-down—I decided to Google it and then whack Jimmy Wales' Wonkypeedeeyah! It beats paying attention to the Zoom call I was attending—video off, naturally.
The great moon hoax led me to Sir John Herschel; not because he had anything to do with it, he was just an innocent bystander whose name got dragged in. He invented blueprints, dontchaknow? Blueprints eventually gave way to xerography, a word derived from the Greek ξηρός (xeros) and -γραφία (-graphia), meaning dry writing
, by Haloid Xerox, which launched the first commercial copier in 1959. Most of Xerox Corporation's staff are located in Rochester, NY.
And this is where the whacking paid off. Rochester is known as both The Flour City
and The Flower City
, as well as—more mundanely—The World's Image Center [sic]
. Clearly these city names are like interwebz domain names: claim popular or common misspellings to prevent rivals from passing themselves off as yourself! (thumbup)
Not quite. Rochester has both flour mills, and flower nurseries, hence the dual nicknames. But my initial supposition was more amusing, to me at least.