Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
This is a snip: Source is https://www.mike-hawthorn.org.uk/lemans2.html Discussion below.
There is something to be said, once again, for the idea that there is no historical era a person knows less about than that of the decade before their birth. Searching around after I personally heard of the Le Mans Disaster of 11 June 1955 for the first time last Sunday morning, I discovered that I was the last guy to the party. In fact, I proved to be so ignorant of the biggest story in the history of motor racing that I am too embarrassed to post the first draft of this paragraph, written in a distracted frame of mind based on some half-assed idea of what should have happened.
One thing that holds from that draft, which, I reiterate, you will never see because it was so dumb, is that it continues a theme from these posts, which is that people were pretty reckless back in 1955. This week's post could just have easily have been about the Salk vaccine contamination disaster, which still has me shaking my head as the contemporary press brings me further abreast of it. (The modern view, such as it is, being very much of the "Look forward, never back" variety.) On the other hand, there's a lot of America bashing around, here so a bit of a palate cleanser in the form of a look at an all-European fiasco is welcome! Even if I somehow get back to the America-bashing at the end. Sheesh.
What the heck, though, it's been a week, and I dearly hope that anyone reading this in a year's time has no idea what I'm talking about.
You find me in the doldrums of an ongoing election campaign. The world has discovered peace, and I have discovered just how angry a four-year-old can be. (Very!) She finds the disruptions of packing far too much to bear, and the intimation that she shall have a nurse while Mama is away all day is not to be countenanced. At least her baby brother is a placid little cuddle bear! And I shall be well clear of Britain when Tony Eden launches whatever manic midnight expedition he has his mind set upon by then. I am betting on Athens, but not ruling out New Guinea.
Responding to a 29 November, 1952 article in The Economist putting forward "rather pessimistic predictions" about the future of the Basin after the departure of English managers, writing in a letter published in the 30 April 1955 issue, P. X. Levandis, the Greek Agricultural Minister was pleased to refute those predictions by citing high production per hectare. I missed this letter because I don't do the end-of-month issues of The Economist unless I've screwed up my withdrawal requests, which never happens, practically. Well, hardly ever.
I did not miss, and mentioned in the postblogging, the response of the Liquidator of the Lake Copais Corporation, F, W. Willis. Willis refutes the claim of increased productivity of wheat and cotton by showing that Levandis is using misleading figures, specifically only those of the freeholding farmers. When land held by the company, or now the Greek government, and run as largescale farms are included, there is no trend line. Without going back three years to find out just how pessimistic The Economist was being, consider it not refuted. On the other hand, there's evidently a whole history here of the people who actually farmed the land, and something of an elephant in the room in terms of what was farmed. Wheat and cotton are cash crops, and in particular the great cash crops of third-quarter Nineteenth Century agricultural expansion that gave us bonanza farms in the Americas and Australia and more complicated booms in the Old World. (For example, the "salinisation crisis due to irrigation/irrigation failure due to rampaging Mongols" story about Iraqi agriculture derives from abandoning barley for wheat in this period.)
Wheat and cotton are, as these things go, extensive crops, not traditionally the ones you grow on expensively reclaimed land. The Greeks eat rice and make linen, right? Given the emphasis on the landholders, one wonders exactly how much consultation there was with the locals who might have been using the Lake for traditional purposes like retting flax for weaving prior to the beginning of excavation and pumping.
R_.C_., The Lodge, Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada
Dear Father:
The election is well on over here and how I wish I was off the Spit casting my line, and I hate fishing. Of course, so do you, but it is good to see you out of Vancouver, if only to look at mining plays. You will see a great deal in this letter about how the inflation in Britain is due to prosperity and can only be fixed by wage restraint. That's the real fishing for what matters, which is votes. Britain will feel the hook this summer, but by then we'll be in Hawaii and San Francisco. Sorry, sceptred isle. You should have known better than to trust Rab Butler.
As Philco ("Philadelphia Electric Company") launches the marketing campaign for its Transac computer line in 1955, it was celebrating twenty-five straight years of leading the American radio industry by volume of sales. Curtiss-Wright, named for Glenn L. Curtiss and Orville Wright, started as a patent pool holding virtual monopoly rights over American aviation, from which foundations came a major aircraft company and one pole of the virtual duopoly of American aircraft engine manufacturing. The Douglas DC-7, currently winning the sales that will, it turns out, end the British airliner resurgence, is flying with four Wright R-3350 Turbo-Compounds, essentially demonstrating that, as far as long distance commercial flying goes in the mid-Fifties, there is basically just one alternative.
Today? There's still a Curtiss-Wright, sort of, but no engines, no computers. And it took barely five years.
Fortune is going to get you Philistines into abstract art even if it takes another 25 years
R_.C_., Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
The much predicted election is upon us. I cannot see "my" side winning, but I have to confess to some trepidation about the nation's choice this time around that goes beyond the partisanship of us wooly-minded young progressives. Anthony Eden is not, quite frankly, in his right mind. I expect the cabinet to restrain him, but I am also worried that he will run right over the men I am depending upon. Rab Butler hasn't the strength of character to stand up to Eden, and MacMillan is too deferential. If Eden hits on some disastrous policy that appeals to the 1923 Committee types, what is there left?
Or I could just relax and enjoy the optimism of this new Elizabethan Age. (Except, yikes, inflation!)
In a perfect world this would be a substantive post, as I left on my summer bike trip last Wednesday and arrived home yesterday. On the other hand, I'm owned one short, breezy, on-the-road post. Owed, man.
Anyway, my Dad died the winter before last of the slow and fading road to the west that my uncle is now following, removing the need to ride the Crowsnest to Grand Forks for my annual visit. I also accomplished my goal of riding (part) of the Okanagan last year, and was free to return to Highway 5A, "The Old Princeton-Kamloops Highway," which I last rode, in part, as a youth so many years ago, full of all the silly follies of youth that seem so absurd when you are possessed of the follies of old age.
