History of "jet lag"
Air & Space magazine posted a fascinating short history of "jet lag," beginning with what appears to be one of (?) the first printed appearances of the phrase in a 1966 L.A. Times article. From Air & Space:
“If you’re going to be a member of the Jet Set and fly off to Katmandu for coffee with King Mahendra,” wrote Horace Sutton (in a 1966 Los Angeles Times article), “you can count on contracting Jet Lag, a debility not unakin to a hangover. Jet Lag derives from the simple fact that jets travel so fast they leave your body rhythms behind.”Jet lag (Air & Space)
The reporter continued, “The Federal Aviation Agency has been so worried about the effect on pilots, not to mention diplomats and businessmen, that they have conducted a heavy study under the catchy title, ‘Intercontinental Bio-Medical Flight Project.’ ”
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It's not the first use of "jet lag" in print. The earliest use I can find is from a newspaper column published spring 1965. Eugenia Sheppard wrote a story about it that was circulated on the New York Herald Tribune News Service wire that year. She may have well have written it for the New York Herald Tribune, but I don't have any proof of that. Sheppard at the time covered fashion and, among other people and instances, describes designer Bill Blass and his jet lag on a trip to Paris.
Among other places, the column was published in the Mason City, Iowa, Globe-Gazette on March 4, 1965, and in the Hartford (Conn.) Courant on March 7. From the article, it's clear she didn't coin the term. She writes, "Somebody on Madison Ave. gave the disease the name jet lag, and it's a beauty."
I have no doubt that there are earlier uses in print, but I don't know of them.
Brings to mind one of my favorite ever bits of writing -
(from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition)
"...in hamsters traveling east, jet lag was reduced by small doses of Viagra."
GRANT_BARRETT @#1, Good catch! You should email the editors at Air & Space!
@MB (#2), Wow. That's an awesome passage. I haven't read Pattern Recognition yet. Maybe I should...
@Grant Barrett: You might want to get in touch with the Oxford English Dictionary too: its earliest citation for "jet lag" is from 1969.
@Pesco
Meh. My entire freshman class was supposed to read Pattern Recognition as "summer reading" before we got to college. Even the other sf nerds and Gibson fans didn't like it. The passage quoted above represents something close to half of the value of the book imho. (but of course, your mileage may vary!)
Jet lag is why I want to ride the huge manatee
i enjoyed Pattern Recognition myself. it was a change of style for Gibson but i found the notion of a coolhunter, allergic to branding, chasing memes around the world, to be a lot of fun.
According to the OED's corpus, the earliest citation for Jet Lag is in fact 1966. Perhaps it hasn't made it into the printed edition yet.
D'oh, that's what you get for writing comments whilst hungover - I meant 1965!
James Weiner, what do you mean "OED's corpus"? Do you mean the Oxford English Corpus? That's something different altogether, mainly because OED does not have a corpus, at least by the linguistic definition of "corpus." The OEC is a product of Oxford University Press's domestic US and UK dictionary departments, which are as separate from OED as, say, the the Queen is from Parliament. OED does have vast citation files but they are not publicly accessible.
The precursor to jet lag was called sea change. It was quite a bit different. Basically, an ocean voyage was isolating, and life shipboard followed a particular rhythm. This often led to social and psychological changes. When the ship docked, a new person often disembarked. MFK Fisher had a good essay on this. I think the phrase was originally from The Tempest, but it has acquired new meanings since.