In the Cockpit?

SEELEY LAKE – Someone nervous about flying in an airplane would no doubt derive comfort from knowing a pilot of Sully Sullenberger or Tammie Jo Shults' caliber was in the cockpit. But what are pilots doing in a cockpit? Isn't that a place where rooster fights take place?

Cock fighting (as well as bear-baiting) was a popular form of entertainment in Elizabethan England. The cock pit was a round enclosure with walls too high for the roosters to escape. To allow spectators a better view of the action, rows of seats often surrounded the enclosure, much like the circular theaters of the time, most notably Shakespeare's Old Globe Theatre. In fact, a famous London cock fighting arena built under Henry VIII was later converted into an indoor playhouse and named The Cockpit.

Perhaps the most famous quote associating a theater with a cockpit comes from Shakespeare's prologue to "Henry V," a play that moves from the courts of England to the fields of France and onto the battlefield of Agincourt where thousands of soldiers wage war both on horseback and on foot. The prologue discusses the problem with the audience when it asks, "Can this cockpit [theater] hold / The vasty fields of France?"

Obviously the answer is no, so the prologue goes on to beg the audience to compensate by using their imagination.

"Suppose [imagine] within the girdle of these walls / Are now confin'd two mighty monarchies /.... [which] The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder."

"...with your thoughts; / Into a thousand parts divide one man, [i.e., though you only see two men fighting on stage, imagine you are seeing two thousand]/ ...Think when we [actors] talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i' th' receiving earth..."

Associating the theater stage with a cockpit would have the inevitable effect on an Elizabethan audience of conjuring images of a noisy, bloody fight to the death between two roosters, a fitting metaphor for the many-times-multiplied noise and blood and gore and death of war.

It is primarily in this theater sense – cramming too much into a space that can scarcely hold it all – that the control center of an airplane became known as a cockpit. But first the image was dragged through the bowels of a ship.

Because in 1700 one of the safest and most motion-free areas of a ship during a naval engagement was the rear section of the lowest deck, that is where the ship surgeon generally set up his "hospital." Safer and relatively motion free it might have been, but the space was still cramped, crowded, poorly lit, smelly and bloody. Since those conditions also applied to a cock fighting arena, the hospital area became known as the cockpit.

During World War I the term became attached to the cramped control area of an airplane and by 1935 similar claustrophobic conditions extended the term cockpit to the driver's seat in a race car.