Man o' War
Man o' War next entered the Potomac Handicap at Havre de Grace Racetrack in Maryland on September 18. Man o' War was assigned 138 pounds, conceding from 24 to 34 pounds to his rivals, which included Kentucky Derby winner Paul Jones. Man o' War faced an early challenge from Blazes then turned back a late run by Wildair to win by lengths while breaking the track record by seconds. Although Man o' War was not seriously challenged, the high weight and a poorly maintained racing surface took a toll: Man o' War came out of the race with a swollen tendon on his right foreleg.
The final start of Man o' War's career came in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, in the Kenilworth Park Gold Cup on October 11. The event was so highly anticipated that it became the first horserace to be filmed in its entirety, with the resulting footage later shown in movie theaters across the country. The race was originally intended to be a face off between the three great horses of the time: Man o' War, Sir Barton and Exterminator. However, the owners of Sir Barton and Man o' War agreed to a distance of miles, which was too short for Exterminator to run his best, and agreed to a weight-for-age format, under which the older Exterminator would concede weight to Man o' War. Therefore, Exterminator was not entered, and in fact raced that same day on a different track.
Fighting machine (The War of the Worlds)
The fighting machines of this film have several searchlights mounted on the fronts of their main "heads," facing forward for navigation and night illumination. As in Wells' novel, the tripod's three legs are completely flexible, even rubber-like in their appearance and movement, with no visible mechanical joints or pivot-points; they propel themselves by truly "walking" over any terrain. This can be viewed as faithful to the original novel, where Wells describes the fighting machines as being more organic than mechanical in their appearance. Spielberg's tripods also emit loud, deep bellows, which seem to be a means of calling out to one other, similar to how Wells' originally described them doing in his novel. The sounds used by the tripods in the film consist of one loud 113 Hz blast (between A2 and A#2 on the musical scale) for three seconds, followed by a deep 136 Hz blast (near C#3) for another three seconds, sounding very much like Earth lighthouse foghorn blasts. Some have noted that the bellows created by the Tripods sound similar to a Gjallarhorn, specifically the one the Minnesota Vikings installed after moving to U.S. Bank Stadium. The fighting machines are also equipped with numerous retracting and expanding tentacles for capturing humans and for other tasks. They also have two possibly detachable metal-wire cages attached directly underneath along the rear and on each side of the machine's main body, used for temporary human prisoner storage; a metal hatch in the body over each cage dials open, revealing an organic hole that then opens to allow a smaller tentacle to reach into the cage, pulling a captured victim into the machine every few minutes for off-camera blood processing. At one point, it is revealed that a human with explosives, after getting put into one of the cages and later being pulled into the tripod, destroys its interior by detonating the explosives, demonstrating an effective, yet highly risky method of bringing down a tripod.