Postblogging Technology, April 1954, I: Rab's Boom

R_C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

Greetings over there in drab and depressed America from swinging London! Rab couldn't find anything in the kitty for us, but at least there is money for machines, and that is the main thing. It appears that all of our old wars in Malaya and Kenya are ending, and the new one will involve Greeks, and so will be quite merry and sunsoaked. Or possibly radiation-soaked, as that is how we are doing wars these days. At least I have another four years before I turn 32 and have to retire! 

I am now exhausted by all the topical references and I haven't even got on to McCarthy, so I shall close with kindly greetings and head off to another day of calculating import duties on turboprop airliners in sterling zone economies. 
 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendx to Postblogging Technology, March 1954: Noise About the Type 2001

 

For me, there's something infinitely cosy about the first generation of professors at western Canadian universities. I've lived more than half my life near the campus of UBC, and routinely bike by the old neighbourhoods where these gentlemen built their homes, way back in the Twenties, and there lived reasonably comfortable lives during the upheavals of the Thirties. My case example is usually UBC's Garnet Sedgewick, an English professor for whom the kernel of the modern Koerner library is named, which gives me an excuse to insert the video below, filmed in front of it, with two-for-one Grace Park. This week, however, we're on about Robert Boyle (1883--1955) of the University of Alberta, born in Carbonear, Newfoundland, just in case anyone ever asks you what happened to the Beothuk. Boyle headed the physics department at UofA from 1912 to 1919, and was dean of Applied Science from 1919 to 1929, after which he went to the NRC in Ottawa, retiring in 1948. No family is mentioned, so my "cozy" image of a Boyle family settling into a quiet neighbourhood in Edmonton and growing happily old is completely off-base. 

Oh! And he invented sonar. Like a lot of other people, sure, but I wanted to share that photo and talk about cycling by old houses up  near campus. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, March 1954, II: Revisiting the Nuclear Submarine Question

 

The story here is that the United Kingdom is a rich, first world country and a Great Power. It fought the Second World War in alliance with the United States, now a superpower. At the time the metropolitan British Isles had 34% the population of the continental United States, compared with 20% today. It is fashionable to compare and contrast the technological achievements of the two states across a wide range of warmaking capabilities in WWII, and after, and to attempt to draw larger conclusions. It is particularly interesting to ask whether the steady decline in creditable comparisons over this period (or longer ones going back into the Nineteenth Century) is consequence or, perhaps to some extent, cause of the increasing disparity in national power (and, of increasing relevance, population). One such comparison is between the first nuclear submarine launched by the United States, Nautilus, commissioned on 30 September 1954, and the first British nuclear submarine, Dreadnought, commissioned 17 April 1963. 

Sea power is submarine power now

I looked at Dreadnought back in 2021, when the decision to build Nautilus (and the less-celebrated Seawolf) was first publicised. In the interest of pushing back against some of the cross-cultural comparisons referred to in the previous paragraph, I focussed on one of the more celebrated British contributions to American power, the "raft" that isolates the relatively noisy atomic machinery of modern submarines. I discussed developments in steam machinery in the 1950s, and even got into the hydrodynamic experimental submarine, USS Albacore, and its influence on the development of the nuclear submarine. 

What I didn't have was a contemporary view in the form of a leading article in The Engineer explaining what a mid-century British technocrat would deem important research questions needing to be worked out before the nuclear submarine could take the sea as the lynchpin of modern strategic power. So in this short week, I am going to take another dive. 

Postblogging Technology, March 1954, II: "We Didn't Know What the Hell We Were Doing"

R_C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

It has been a very busy week here in London. I had to throw some cold water on people over the CAB action against American Airlines (they of the "No Old Maid Stewardesses" policy) over their claim to be able to run Los Angeles to New York in less than eight hours. No, DC-7s cannot make that time, non-stop or not, and, yes, that means that, strictly speaking, they are in violation of labour laws that say that you can't have a pilot at the controls for more than eight hours, and, no, that doesn't meann that anything will be done about it, much less something as drastic as buying British. They'll just keep pretending until they get the 707, I explained. They're for sure not going to buy Comets, even if they could get one! 

Besides, considering that we're going to have an atom war with Communist France and Communist Italy next month, why worry about airliners? If America is as Communist as Senator McCarthy says, shouldn't we bomb us, while we're at it?) Yes, I'm being silly. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie