Postblogging Technology, June 1954, I: Wandering

The soundtrack of my childhood has some odd entries

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

You can hardly miss the story of my labours  in the press this month. You will hear about James soon, long since hijacked from the propagation of sound underwater to the propagation of cracks through thin aluminum alloy shells at some point soon. You have pictures of your grandchildren, sent through the regular mail, and I'm not going to repeat the anecdotes in the accompanying letter here. Suffice it to say that we are still "happy wanderers" in the streets of London, and that I'm growing hoarse singing the chorus with James-James doing the saxophone bits. It is not very serious, but it is a distraction from export credits and controlled currency exchanges!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging, May 1954: Transatlantic Conversation, Hurrah!

 

This is actually going back a bit, but Mossad has done a naughty telephone thing this week, and while Teleanswerphone was operating a pager system in New York in 1954, we're still six years away from the Motorola transistorised pager that made the technology ubiquitous. It's not interesting or significant, so how do I jump on that bandwagon? With something momentous that is also happening this spring, which is TAT-1, the first coaxial transatlantic telephone cable, which I've admittedly talked about around here in connection with the first announcement last December. I believe I've noticed the cablelaying vessel Monarch and also the technical details of the cable involved, and, no, I'm not going to hit my head on the Blogspot search function to find the entry, even if it is good for the blog's statistics. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1954: Project Tinkertoy

 

Scraped from an ad: https://snapklik.com/en-ca/product/tinkertoy-30-model-200-piece-super-building-set-preschool-learning-educational-toy-
for-girls-and-boys-3/05DL4PL73XTV5

I've been assiduously avoiding talking about "Project Tinkertoy" since the Bureau of Standards/Industrial Planning Division, USN/Kaiser Electronics Division, Wilys Motor Company pilot factory in Arlington, Virginia, hit the news, well before September of 1953, where Blogspot search turns up my earliest reference to it.  The thing is that Project Tinkertoy's press people are most impressed by the ceramic wafers that the Project Tinkertoy modular components are mounted on, and that is the part of the technology that most obviously has no future. Integrated circuits most definitely do, but that's a story that doesn't really get going until 1957, and apparently we're still one cycle of abortive precursors away from that, with the Army's 1957 Micromodule programme. On the other hand, the actual technology of the integrated circuit has a prehistory which is not well integrated into that of the various abortive precursors. So I'm going to take a rainy laundry day Saturday to look at that!

Postblogging Technology, May 1954, II: Four Minute Mile

R_. C._,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

We are finally caught up with the news from the Empire Games. Roger Bannister has run a four minute mile! Do you realise that he ran the last quarter, some 400 yards, in 56 seconds? 10 seconds is a good sprint time for 100 meters! It tires me out just thinking about it. And while British sportsmen do the country proud, John Foster Dulles keeps up the American side in Geneva by showing how to stick your head where the sun doesn't shine! I understand that he is trying to avoid having America take over from France in the role of "hapless colonial master getting beaten up by the Viet Minh," but I don't think that it is working. At least his efforts in the Middle East seem to be bearing fruit. At least so I think. But what do I know? Apart from that Capital Airlines is going to buy 60(!) Viscounts. I wish I got a commission instead of a paycheque!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Vacation Week Short That Is Also A Sacred Spring Contribution: Hurrians, Mitanni, and Owning Land

 I am just back from a cycling vacation in which I finally rode the Okanagan Rail Trail from Kelowna to Vernon. This turns out to be a trick, because between the exquisitely appointed section in Kelowna and the somewhat rougher but eminently ridable section between Lake Country and Vernon that passes through my childhood summer camping grounds, there is an  "unimproved" section that was very rough riding, and quasi-trespassing, as the landholder objects to the transformation of the CN rail right of what through their property into a recreational/highway bypass rail trail. 

It turns out that that the landowner is the Westbank First Nation; the parcel is remediated wetland, and I imagine was classified as reserve land because of seasonal bird hunting, which was ruined by the CN's railbed. The contrast between the all-but unpopulated Okanagan-owned parcel and the stretch approaching Oyama just north of it, in which one lakefront property after another evidently had its own private access across the tracks (at least my family settled for a culvert underpass, never used for its intended purpose of watering livestock) is striking. The Salishan-speaking Okanagans left a clear imprint on the geography that their descendants still occupy, but that doesn't make them any less of a marginalised group. You can draw all the property lines on a map that you want; if you don't have the social power to make them work, they are just lines. 

Postblogging Technology, May 1954, I: The Fall of Dien Bien Phu

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

I shall be brief here as I am finding myself excitingly indispensable at work as the aviation world scrambles to find replacements for Comet 1s now and Comet 2s soon. I was not completely convinced by my professors' talk about learning to "think like a lawyer," but I find myself called upon to read a  great many contracts. In fact, to make all the jokes about my useless schooling as completely obsolete as a Handley Page Halifax, some of them are in French! (I'd volunteer to read the ones in Chinese, too, but, first of all, there aren't any; and, second, it might raise suspicions.) It is nice to have help at home, but I am missing my ambles with James-James already! Your son, by the way, has been dragooned to Farnborough to give his perspective on a water tank they are building big enough to take an entire Comet fuselage so that they can prove that fatigue happens to Geoff De Havilland and other suspects. 

And if you think I've gone a bit mad with the accompanying illustrations, we have splurged on a copying machine that makes producing them a breeze, and I might have gotten a bit carried away.  

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, April 1954, II: Lewis Strauss's Boom

 

R_. C_.,

Shaughnessy,

Maybe Newsweek has it garbled, as it often does? Or perhaps this is 
the TX-16 "Emergency" cryogenic bomb that was never test detonated, 
and the 40 megaton yield is a post BRAVO revised yield estimate. Or
someone at Lawrence Livermore (oh, who am I kidding, it's Teller)
 is talking up their first designs, "highly innovative" devices that
fizzled. Anyway, 40 megatons! 

Vancouver,

Canada

Dear Father:

As some have predicted, the Comet has fallen, this time,  think, for good. I have no idea how long it will take for everyone to accept that it was too flimsy to fly, but it is all embarrassing enough that it may take a while, and no-one is going to want a Comet 2 or 3 until it is all settled. Whether anyone will want a Comet 3 at all is another question. No doubt champagne corks are popping at Weybridge right now!

Spring is coming to our fair city, and I have to say that James-James has the legs of a trooper. I have conceived a notion of seeing this city, and he seems willing to walk as far as my own legs will go! He is a very charming young man, too! I hope that that continues into adulthood and he does not become another engineer with his head in the clouds! 

Or a cloud of radioactive ash, as seems to be he fashion of the day. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie