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.
You will see that I have, once again, not covered The Engineer and Aviation Week, and will, OF COURSE, be thinking that I have lost my copies again, and not at all about the fact that they are the most boring magazines I cover.
What, you wonder, will be my excuse this time? Did I leave them on the train? Were they destroyed in some kind of robot uprising, as in the movie that Ronnie went to the other week? And why are the robots always uprising, when it seems like strikes and "go slows" are more effective in getting a raise in the amount of robot oil applied? After all, when you have a car, it starts out being very reliable, and then when it gets old, it just stops working one day and you have to take it to an expensive mechanic who perhaps fixes the exact thing that is wrong with it, but not the fact that the car is old. And I guess the car is happy with this, and never "revolts," because the breakdowns get it all that it needs. Until comes the day that you replace the car. But what if you can't afford to replace the car? Or what if you move to a place where the busses and subways are so efficient that you are connected to the world in a way that makes a car pointless, and everything you need can be delivered, and the only time you need a car (or a robot, I should mention, since I started out talking about robot revolts) is when you have to travel to meet elderly relatives in some very old town in the country. Wait, I guess that's not something you should do with robots, and my analogy is falling flat.
If it qualifies as an analogy. So the point is that I am missing two of the regular magazines in this week's letter because the robots have been on strike for months, and not because I left them on the train again.
Twenty-five hundred years after the invention of the Chinese abacus, this abacus-like device has turned up on the frontiers of electronics. Its similar purpose: to help businessmen with their arithmetic. The network of black magnetic beads smaller than a postage stamp, is one of a number of input-output "memory" units in the new "702" electronic calculator built by International Business Machines. The 702 was designed for the world of commerce to help handle the vast quantities of sums involved in figuring business payrolls, inventories, production schedules.
Nakusp,
Canada
Dear Father:
And just like that, our business trip-slash-family vacation to Toronto in August is over, and we are back in blessedly cool Toronto. As far as I can tell the Super-Viscount will not be high-winged. On the one hand I'm not surprised since I think of high-wing airliners as a British affectation. On the other hand, the Lockheed C-130 is the closest plane to the Super-Viscount, and it is high winged. This is admittedly because the Air Force actually needs high wing cargo planes, but the C-130 could have been competition, and now it's not. The Super-Viscount is not going to enjoy the same kind of clear field that is giving the Viscount its enormous sales, but there doesn't seem to be any American competition in sight. It is, essentially, just the Britannia.
James is unfortunately not with us, as he flew out of Toronto on Navy business bound for an undisclosed location that is certainly not Hong Kong, where he is certainly not going to be interpreting in a very urgent meeting about Koumintang pirates.
I'm sorry that we weren't able to meet during our trip, but look forward to seeing you at Christmas.
So, and as will come as no surprise, I've had the experience of a short work week pulled out from under my feet at something like the last minute. It was perhaps not impossible for me to write Postblogging Technology, August 1954, I: I Know Eyewash When I See It, and I'm honestly not sure who besides me to blame for my taking a day off on the 11th and yesterday, but I'll settle for Larian Studios, for making Baldur's Gate III so seductive. That, of course, means that instead of something long, with a lot to chew over, you're getting a bit of a dive into semi-random thoughts I had this week.
In this case, and as a development of "smokeless powder is just another textiles industry development, therefore the modern rifle, and modern war, comes out of industrial cotton," I am wondering about how normal early telegraphy was. (Is the rifle, or telegraphy, more important to the transformation of war before 1914?) So
let's forget about all that "information industry" stuff, and look at the telegraph as it came in, and try to understand why people might take the first steps to improve on semaphore and heliographs and pony expresses, and see where we are.
This morning I am thinking about Raven the trickster, creator and king. but I also travelled on the weekend and visited my world-travelling doctor brother and his wife, who in conversation chanced to mention how much better the Pacific Northwest art held at the British Museum is than that shown here in its homeland.
"Raven and the First Men" is a Haida creation myth, here truncated. The second image is a rattle, used in shaman and healing dances. The specific meaning belongs to the owner who commissioned it, but the general theme is the transfer of power, which is another way to understand the creation myth. Deprived of its context by the decision to sell it to an outsider, it remains an eerie symbol of the relationship between Raven and one man, no doubt privileged. I would be stretching nonexistent wings in a ludicrous play at exegesis to go any further (Raven would approve!), but we can reasonably ask how it was made around here.
Because Betty Boop cartoonist Ving Fuller is in a What's New segment. Deep cut, I know.
R_., C., Nakusp, Canada
Dear Father:
Well, I left my current numbers of Aviation Week and The Engineer on the train when I dashed to catch a connection to Weybridge. So if this letter isn't to your liking, blame the clowns at Handley Page for not putting the tail of the Victor on firmly enough to balance flying without the "weapon system"-y radar that's supposed to go in the nose. (James thinks, anyway. He was right about the Comet, though!) This led to an all-hands-on-deck sales meeting over the Viscount replacement, from which I had to turn around for my flight to Montreal, upon which I am writing these words, far away from replacement copies, and there you go.
As for the meeting, the super-Viscount, or whatever they're going to call it, might be completely different from the Victor, but that isn't stopping the American industry, as you can see from the Newsweek coverage. to be fair, it is good news for them that the Victor won't be out setting high publicity speed records while there is a Vickers team still touring the States. I know I would have loved some British Pathe footage of the Victor prototype landing in Montreal, not that it was even vaguely close to ready for a trans-Atlantic flight, but a girl can dream.
