Postblogging Technology, June 1951, II: Dies and Transistors

R_. C_.,
Arcadia,
Santa Clara,
California

Dear Father:

Reggie is back in Formosa, as he wrote last time, so I have taken over the letter again. I know that you're going to worry, but honestly this is just exactly as much work as this young mother wants, and a good distraction not from my darling, but assorted hovering grandmothers. (Don't get me wrong, I am so grateful for the  help, it's just a bit too much sometimes.) I am just starting to believe that I will be back at Stanford in the fall. As for the places you've found, I have settled on the Camino Real place. And, again, thank you! 

You were asking about when you would see Fortune in these letters again. I honestly don't know, but I am not sure that I want to redirect the subscriptions to Macao when they are just going to have to be redirected to Palo Alto in a month. Especially if we have a Korean armistice next month, as it looks. Everything will go a bit nuts, and that especially includes the Pacific air mail! 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, July 1951, I: To Be Born Into An Age Without Clerks

R_. C_.,
Arcadia,
Santa Clara,
California


Dear Father:

Following on my telegram and my note in Mother's letter, I have quite a long one of my own that split the airmail envelope, which is why Mother is taking it back to Vancouver with her along with a camera roll. I will try to be professional in this letter, although my heart is breaking as we get ready to lift off from the harbour for Formosa. The Navy calls me away from my wife and son, until my leave in September. We are to close our little show. Wiser heads, etc, and now Koumintang pilots will not be trained for the electronic reconnaissance mission. From here on they will be conducted in routine flights between Clark and Okinawa, which finally has a proper electronics shop. I now have official word that my next posting will be to the Martin plant in Baltimore. Ostensibly I am going to get my first taste of bringing a new aircraft into service on the electronic side of thing, due to the very elaborate new radar on the plane. However, there is some suggestion that I should reacquaint myself with acoustics and pick up some oceanography. 

Your Loving Son,
Reggie

Postblogging Technology, June 1951, II: In The Time of the Magnet

Magnets and electricity are funny things. The language of electromagnetism currently permeates our discourse. You think you know what you're talking about, and then, bam, it turns out that you don't. This is especially true of "amplifiers," which sound like blindingly obvious gadgets that give an extra oomph to an input current. There's all kinds of uses for a gadget that turns a small input into a large output. But that's not what they do at all, and it isn't until you understand what they actually do that you appreciate why conversations about historic amplifiers so often turn to logic gates. 

Which turns out to be pretty important when everyone's talking about these new "computers" they have now. I have included a Kerrison Predictor, a very simple computing fire director, here because it contains a magslip element. Magslips are more often described as electric motors than as computing elements, probably because if we don't distinguish "control" from "computing" discussions about automation become impossible. Magslips also don't use the "one weird trick" that makes magnetic amplifiers possible. See? You think you know what's going on, and then the language betrays you! 

Postblogging Technology, June 1951, with Bonus Political Thumbsucking: .280 British And Related Subjects

 

As the adrenaline leaks out of the Korean crisis, the technology question in June of 1951 is more clearly about boy toys than ever. The United States is in a full-bore Fokker panic over the MiG-15, and the first discussion of the JS-3 threat in the popular press suggests that the European theatre might actually be taking hold in the public consciousness in the way that Marshall Plan/Atlantic Pact enthusiasts have long hoped it would. It is, however, a strange crisis. It is going to be thirty  years yet before anyone entertains the thought that the United States plus West Germany plus the United Kingdom plus France plus Italy plus various "show willing" powers might be expected to win a conventional war in central Europe; and, of course, 

There is something unreal about the very idea of a conventional war between two nuclear-armed blocs. While we know from seventy years of political practice that the arms gap in central Europe is a pretext for a seemingly permanent argument over the size of the NATO partners' defence budgets, there is the curious fact that the United Kingdom is going to slowly decline from being a positive example of high defence spending to the much less credible  status of defence moocher over this period.

 I say curious because the nominal explanation for Europe's predilection for neglecting arms spending is its metrosexual leftism, but since when does that include Churchill's Conservatives? With four months to go to the British 1951 general election, it might be too early to make a partisan case, but it is certainly time to get the facts are in order; and in this case the facts also have some interesting things to say about the way we talk about technological praxis and racism. 

Postblogging Technology, June 1951, II: Let's Here More About Raw Material Controls!

Wow!

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada.

Dear Father:

Ronnie is in confinement. I promise a telegram as soon as we have word, but I have no such thing. I have been able to distract myself with the letter, but now that I am done I really want to go walk back and forth and take up smoking, just like in all the movies. Except if I hear about one more 50-year-old dying of a heart attack I am going to turn into a natural fabrics, vegetarian, pacifist anti-cigarette type myself, which won't be good for my career. Stifling my opinion of the "China blockade" is hard enough! 

Hmm. Turns out that ranting about politics is a bit distracting. Maybe I should go talk to Uncle George. 

Your Loving Son,
Reggie