A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1953: A New Era of Strategic Bombing?

 

My first niece-in-law chose this for her wedding processional. For relevance see note!

The reader will probably be tired of my half-assed explanations of the carcinotron, but there have been a series of heavily publicised bombing exercises so far in the spring of 1953, and we are closing in on the decision, trivial at the time but gradually snowballing, to cancel the Valiant B2 (while in the United States the B-47 programme was sharply curtailed), the so-called "pathfinder" variant, leading to the cancellation of the "V1000" military transport variant, the VC7 derived from it, and in general the failure to field a British turbofan airliner prior to the VC10, which is more-or-less the "blowing the lead" that everyone was warning everyone else might happen in 1953. 

By wallycacsabre - sv3, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59596203

So what happened? In the spring of 1953, bombing raids were still being led by "Pathfinders," and 199 Squadron, at least, was flying Canberras modified for ECM operations with the other "pathfinder" Canberras. At some point in the mi-1950s, offensive carcinotrons went into the electronic warfare suite of the V-bombers. It seems like reasonable speculation that bomber penetration tactics were significantly modified by the introduction of the carcinotron*, that this happened in about 1953 (the first manufactured carcinotron tubes show up as antiquities on Internet sites devoted to such things with a 1952 date) , and that the carcinotron was defeated by monopulse radar, which might have first flown on the English Electric Lightning in the form of the AI23 (AIRPASS) in prototype form in 1958. The picture I am getting here is a window in the mid -Fifties from roughly 1953 to 1958 or so when strategic bombers gained a substantial advantage over radar defences. Given all the fuss made about decision processes amongst the historians of nculear deterrence, and their often formidable technical expertise, you might wish that someone would take this in hand and confirm or discount such speculation.

Oh, well, you're not here to have me repeat myself and I'm not going to do it, because, bereft of other obvious routes into the kind of general aviation history that might bear some rough fruit, I finally read the Wikipedia article on the De Havilland Sea Vixen, an aircraft that I'd been ignoring out of a general sense of disappointment that attaches to the Fleet Air Arm aircraft of the Fifties. 

And it turns out to be a bit gonzo! 

It's not so much the plane. I mean, on the basis of my new wikipertise, I will defend a great deal of the design. It's not just a retread of the Venom, and you probably can't hang a "typical de Havilland crap"sign on it just because a prototype crashed in a very public way. It's no Comet or Drover. It's got the same just-a-bit-too-weird-to-be-modern vibe as the Javelin and Scimitar thanks to the tail, but it is all-metal and has Avon engines rather than some goofy Halford centrifugal. It's two things: TACAN and "chemical milling." 

So I'm going all in on Wiikedia surfing here. I had honestly never heard of "chemical milling," as in the etched aluminum bars above, before encountering a reference to it as a method for producing the very thin skinning of parts of the Sea Vixen fuselage. It is engraving on steroids, the ancestor to modern photochemical machining (of microchips). The loving and attentive author of the Wikipedia article starts with Fourteenth Century plate armour, where it made really, really pretty armours possible while using full-hardness steel (you didn't need a cutting tool, which has to be harder than the armour) and not raising burrs. The author describes etched gradations on measuring instruments and the "trajectory information plates" for artillery, so I assume that this is being written out of an arsenal somewhere. The use of "photochemical milling" in photography and "making impressions on metal plates" is briefly noted, but not the connection with lithography, which, what with commercial printing and all, seems like a less edge case of the use of the technology in the Nineteenth Century before we get this classic: 

"Later, around the 1940s, it became widely used to machine thin samples of very hard metal; photo-etching from both sides was used to cut sheet metal, foil, and shim stock to create shims, recording heat frets, and other components.

I'd like to say that "around the 1940s" is a tell for a technology application that started out on the Secret List and never quite managed to climb all the way off, something like carbonitriding and RDX doping of propellants. But I can't, because of evidence and stuff. We sure know that it was being used on the Sea Vixen at the De Havilland plant in 1950, because they come right out and tell us so. A footnote in the article on Chemical Milling refers us to a 1960 article in The New Scientist, by the extremely energetic David Fishlock, who was a science reporter, and not a pioneering worker, so God knows when chemical milling was actually "a new method of working metal." 

That leaves us with TACAN, or "tactical air navigation," which turns out to be a descendant of OBOE. (Plane automatically asks a ground transponder where it is every few seconds, ground transponder tells it, circuit on the plane mixes outgoing and ingoing signals to turn it into a navigational plot instead of a signal bump.) As a bonus, the Wikipedia article directs us to a much more comprehensible account of VOR/DME than anyone bothers to give over at Aviation Week. Tactical Air Navigation was a VHF (hence the "V" in VOR) wavelength beacon allowing the Sea Vixen to find its carrier again, which did eventually became an issue, since it required the carrier to emit a constant single, and was perhaps an arrow in the British quiver as it tried to establish a British standard for international air navigation, and failed with the whole DECCA/DME thing, VOR being adopted by ICAN and only superseded by GPS. But the Americans did adopt TACAN in the late Fifties, so there's an example of British electronics technology being transferred across the Atlantic to America for you. It was also integrated into a surface search radar and a mapping radar display, as part of the whole "weapon systems" thing that everyone is going gaga over in 1953, even if  some of its proponents aren't completely sure what it is. Given that as of the summer of 1953 they've suddenly decided to go gaga over "cybernetics," albeit without using the word, at Hughes, I guess I can't be too critical if someone is being more restrained and just throwing around "system" without being sure whether it is when gun sights talk to autopilots, or when Convair gets to tell GE how to make engine installations. 

As another bonus, we get directed to the only history TACAN apparently has, the Battle of Lima 85 Site, in which it turns out that even the "primitive" North Vietnamese can detect and track down your bomber-guiding radar beacon, and that putting it on top of a picturesque mountain in the middle of Laos is not going to stop the sappers of the NPVA when it comes time to storm the palisade.  (Not going to put a "Public Engagement" label on this. Gaza is too spicy for me today.)

(The channel is weird, but this is some top-notch rhyming.)

Maybe the irony here is that cybernetics is the thought, based on the latest generation of AA director, that there should be a science of systems that would range from sociology to electronics, and this inspired a bunch of would-be social engineers to build the next generation of AA directors as "systems," and invent information technology, without getting even remotely close to psychohistory along the way. Not that we haven't heard about that this month, too. Is this the origin of processual archaeology? 

(Weirdly enough, and I think he'd appreciate having the whole discussion placed in a parenthesis in an afterthought, Stafford Beer, the late-generation cyberneticist, just had a moment over at Crooked Timber.)

___

*From: “The 11 Greatest Vacuum Tubes You’ve Never Heard Of” “These vacuum devices stood guard during the Cold War, advanced particle physics, treated cancer patients, and made the Beatles sound good.” By Carter M. Armstrong, 29 Oct 2020.