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.
Lady and the Trampis that movie with the spaghetti. Per the proffered selection of Youtube shorts, people also remember the Siamese cats. According to the Wikipedia summary, they're the villains. Also, the movie's plot sounds like everything wrong with Disney in the Fifties, but that can't be news to anyone who hasn't been catatonic since before Steamboat Willie. (Ooh, bed sores!) It turns out that it was a technical achievement, though, the first animated movie made with CinemaScope, which is a significant part of why the movie is so well loved today. The plot might be insensitive, sentimental, and shallow, but the whole thing is gorgeous. Gorgeous is what CinemaScope is all about!
It is my last day in Britain, and I have handed off this letter and other confidential papers to the courier. We are waiting on a taxi to take us to Waterloo, and from there to Southampton to catch our ship providing it hasn't been struck in. Montreal and by rail to Revelstoke, none of the troubles of Atlantic flying with two children in tow, thank you very much! James cannot travel with us as there is some tedious planning exercise in regards ground radar at the East Anglia stations, so he will be flying in by stages, eventually to Kelowna. So we will have a rented car for the vacation, after all! Just as well, since there are probably going to be some trips to Nelson when Nakusp palls.
As we continue to pack up and decide what we can't possibly live without in San Francisco (or Hawaii), some things just get overlooked, which is my excuse for not booking and confirming travel plans. We will be at the docks at Galena Bay at 5PM Pacific on the 5th. We have decided not to try to rent a car on Revelstoke, so make sure there is someone to pick us up if you don't want us to have to hitch a ride with a farmer!
This is a snip: Source is https://www.mike-hawthorn.org.uk/lemans2.html Discussion below.
There is something to be said, once again, for the idea that there is no historical era a person knows less about than that of the decade before their birth. Searching around after I personally heard of the Le Mans Disaster of 11 June 1955 for the first time last Sunday morning, I discovered that I was the last guy to the party. In fact, I proved to be so ignorant of the biggest story in the history of motor racing that I am too embarrassed to post the first draft of this paragraph, written in a distracted frame of mind based on some half-assed idea of what should have happened.
One thing that holds from that draft, which, I reiterate, you will never see because it was so dumb, is that it continues a theme from these posts, which is that people were pretty reckless back in 1955. This week's post could just have easily have been about the Salk vaccine contamination disaster, which still has me shaking my head as the contemporary press brings me further abreast of it. (The modern view, such as it is, being very much of the "Look forward, never back" variety.) On the other hand, there's a lot of America bashing around, here so a bit of a palate cleanser in the form of a look at an all-European fiasco is welcome! Even if I somehow get back to the America-bashing at the end. Sheesh.
What the heck, though, it's been a week, and I dearly hope that anyone reading this in a year's time has no idea what I'm talking about.
You find me in the doldrums of an ongoing election campaign. The world has discovered peace, and I have discovered just how angry a four-year-old can be. (Very!) She finds the disruptions of packing far too much to bear, and the intimation that she shall have a nurse while Mama is away all day is not to be countenanced. At least her baby brother is a placid little cuddle bear! And I shall be well clear of Britain when Tony Eden launches whatever manic midnight expedition he has his mind set upon by then. I am betting on Athens, but not ruling out New Guinea.
Responding to a 29 November, 1952 article in The Economist putting forward "rather pessimistic predictions" about the future of the Basin after the departure of English managers, writing in a letter published in the 30 April 1955 issue, P. X. Levandis, the Greek Agricultural Minister was pleased to refute those predictions by citing high production per hectare. I missed this letter because I don't do the end-of-month issues of The Economist unless I've screwed up my withdrawal requests, which never happens, practically. Well, hardly ever.
I did not miss, and mentioned in the postblogging, the response of the Liquidator of the Lake Copais Corporation, F, W. Willis. Willis refutes the claim of increased productivity of wheat and cotton by showing that Levandis is using misleading figures, specifically only those of the freeholding farmers. When land held by the company, or now the Greek government, and run as largescale farms are included, there is no trend line. Without going back three years to find out just how pessimistic The Economist was being, consider it not refuted. On the other hand, there's evidently a whole history here of the people who actually farmed the land, and something of an elephant in the room in terms of what was farmed. Wheat and cotton are cash crops, and in particular the great cash crops of third-quarter Nineteenth Century agricultural expansion that gave us bonanza farms in the Americas and Australia and more complicated booms in the Old World. (For example, the "salinisation crisis due to irrigation/irrigation failure due to rampaging Mongols" story about Iraqi agriculture derives from abandoning barley for wheat in this period.)
Wheat and cotton are, as these things go, extensive crops, not traditionally the ones you grow on expensively reclaimed land. The Greeks eat rice and make linen, right? Given the emphasis on the landholders, one wonders exactly how much consultation there was with the locals who might have been using the Lake for traditional purposes like retting flax for weaving prior to the beginning of excavation and pumping.
R_.C_., The Lodge, Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada
Dear Father:
The election is well on over here and how I wish I was off the Spit casting my line, and I hate fishing. Of course, so do you, but it is good to see you out of Vancouver, if only to look at mining plays. You will see a great deal in this letter about how the inflation in Britain is due to prosperity and can only be fixed by wage restraint. That's the real fishing for what matters, which is votes. Britain will feel the hook this summer, but by then we'll be in Hawaii and San Francisco. Sorry, sceptred isle. You should have known better than to trust Rab Butler.
As Philco ("Philadelphia Electric Company") launches the marketing campaign for its Transac computer line in 1955, it was celebrating twenty-five straight years of leading the American radio industry by volume of sales. Curtiss-Wright, named for Glenn L. Curtiss and Orville Wright, started as a patent pool holding virtual monopoly rights over American aviation, from which foundations came a major aircraft company and one pole of the virtual duopoly of American aircraft engine manufacturing. The Douglas DC-7, currently winning the sales that will, it turns out, end the British airliner resurgence, is flying with four Wright R-3350 Turbo-Compounds, essentially demonstrating that, as far as long distance commercial flying goes in the mid-Fifties, there is basically just one alternative.
Today? There's still a Curtiss-Wright, sort of, but no engines, no computers. And it took barely five years.
Fortune is going to get you Philistines into abstract art even if it takes another 25 years
R_.C_., Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
The much predicted election is upon us. I cannot see "my" side winning, but I have to confess to some trepidation about the nation's choice this time around that goes beyond the partisanship of us wooly-minded young progressives. Anthony Eden is not, quite frankly, in his right mind. I expect the cabinet to restrain him, but I am also worried that he will run right over the men I am depending upon. Rab Butler hasn't the strength of character to stand up to Eden, and MacMillan is too deferential. If Eden hits on some disastrous policy that appeals to the 1923 Committee types, what is there left?
Or I could just relax and enjoy the optimism of this new Elizabethan Age. (Except, yikes, inflation!)
In a perfect world this would be a substantive post, as I left on my summer bike trip last Wednesday and arrived home yesterday. On the other hand, I'm owned one short, breezy, on-the-road post. Owed, man.
Anyway, my Dad died the winter before last of the slow and fading road to the west that my uncle is now following, removing the need to ride the Crowsnest to Grand Forks for my annual visit. I also accomplished my goal of riding (part) of the Okanagan last year, and was free to return to Highway 5A, "The Old Princeton-Kamloops Highway," which I last rode, in part, as a youth so many years ago, full of all the silly follies of youth that seem so absurd when you are possessed of the follies of old age.
Detail of 1779 chorographical map of New York (including chorographical details of adjacent parts of New Jersey but evidently not those of Pennsylvania) showing the "Minisink Valley." https://minisinkvalleygenealogy.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_10.html
So Braddock's Expedition is a bit confusing because American historians all talk about his two regiments, and military historians of the Nineteenth Century know that's about ten thousand men, which is a huge force by the standards of Eighteenth Century colonial warfare, and meanwhile military historians of the Eighteenth Century are, like, "what's a regiment?" It's not inaccurate, in that regiments did exist in the Eighteenth Century as political, financial and administrative elements, and the particular two battalions of the Irish Establishment that came out with Braddock belonged to single battalion regiments. American military historians are probably informed by reading about the Civil War, where, as was often the case in that era, it was found necessary to insert an additional tier in the command structure of the Age of Reason. That is, in 1755 there were so many companies per battalion, so many battalions per brigade, so many brigades per [insert tedious historiographical discussion here] division. In 1860, armies with lots of conscripts found that this wasn't enough supervision and turned the regiment into an organisational level between battalion and brigade. Conscripts, and their ROTC officers, just need more attention from more headquarters because they can't be trusted to know what they're doing on their own.
The aftermath of Braddock's Defeat is also confusing, because, we are told, a wave of Indian attacks caused settlers to abandon frontier settlements and flee eastward, with a strong subtext of a racial war against the Westward Drive, Frontier Spirit, and Manifest Destiny. And we are not told wrong, except that, with the exception of three extraordinary attacks, the trouble took place in what was then Pennsylvania's Northumberland County, now Monroe and Pike counties, or, in Eighteenth Century usage, the "Minisink Valley," which is not a valley at all, but the region north of the Delaware Water Gap cupped by the Poconos Mountains that was shared between Pennsylvania, New York, and West Jersey, as it still was. The attacks were absolutely Indian attacks, made specifically by the followers of Teedyuscung, probably a grandson of Tamanend and, if my tinfoil hat isn't fitting too tight, William Penn, with an internally Pennsylvanian objective, which was why the raiders spared New York and New Jersey, and why the raids were probably actually a pogrom, which is why almost all the attacks killed the patriarchs of the settlements raided, and probably why there's a slightly panicked subtext to Ben Franklin's reports about the refugees gathering in New Jersey. Because if they weren't leading members of these families, they were probably mostly enslaved. This was a Pennsylvanian civil war. The racial component isn't "Scotch-Irish" versus Indians, but rather a peasant's revolt.
No wonder, then, that the Pennsylvanian Assembly settled quickly in the 1758 Treaty of Easton. But before that could happen, and just to drag this preamble around to relevance, Henri Bouquet, the Swiss Protestant (that is, Francophone) favourite of the Duke of Cumberland, had arrived in Philadelphia and there formed, not to get all genealogical, one of the ancestral units of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, most easily searched, I suspect, as the 60th (American) Rifles. Per the source most recently consulted --probably Wikipedia, but I forget-- this was formed from immigrant German workingmen. Wikipedia does not note that in 1756 the Germans who were immigrating to Philadelphia were mostly coming from German Flats, far up the Mohawk, where a German-speaking community had been growing by ethnogenesis from 1719. With regards to the demographic raw material, this can only have been the free Blacks who could not exist as such in the Eighteenth Century American cosmic order. This probably explains why Bouquet didn't need to subject his riflemen to some specialised training regime to turn them into another of the mid-Eighteenth Century's many ethnically-recruited special forces.Which is usually a bit of an anachronism in that the European units that trace their tradition to the Eighteenth Century special forces have all been long since de-specialed, pipe bands apart.
The American ranger tradition is an exception, and one that, I suggest, is rooted in race, not the primeval (hah!) forest of the American frontier.
I'm having a bit of a mix-up with my magazines, which I am sure I will have sorted out next time. In the mean time, enjoy a review of the news over two weeks in which the Chief of Naval Operations is allowed to just make stuff up and plant it in the press, an MP isn't allowed to complain about an actual security violation, and the Atomic Energy Commission outright lies about the United States having atomic warheads for guided air-to-air missiles.
Unless WWIII does break out. I can't rule it out, but I'm writing on the 15th, and I will be going to bed well before midnight, so I may wake up to find us in the midst of the final global battle between the imperialists and the Socialist Soviet of Workers and Peasants.
Tony Randall as sex symbol is the perfect lead into the musical act that closes the thumbnail below.
R_. C_., Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
It is my understanding that I am to call you "Daddio" and decline to do my homework until such time as there's a revolution or something, and there's really no point in doing anything but knock over newstands. I'm not even sure that I am allowed to care about Kefauver '56 or Aneurin Bevan, as they might be too square. (Bevan sure is. Binge drinking is for when you're young and irresponsible, not putting yourself forward as a potential prime minister!)
So, you know, who cares about stuff and anything? Not us young people today! (I am young, right? At least, I'm not thirty!) Anyway, because it is March and the technical press is still exhausted from the New Year's stuff, and the British press is waiting on an election, it will probably feel like this installment is all rebellion.
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
It won't hit the top of the charts until the summer, but Rock Around the Clock is the hit single from the Blackboard Jungle soundtrack. Did you know that the novel that Blackboard Jungle is based on is set in a British school? I didn't!
Yeah, well, I was tired yesterday and I needed to do some bike training (mainly wearing calluses into my tender tootsie) ahead of my summer bike trip, which is in July this year. That's why I'm talking about something that came up while I was half-finishing the March II postblogging.
The Special Report in the 7 March issue of Newsweek covered the then-ongoing movie industry revival, and the 28 March issue has some letters about it, including a self-promoting but still valid explanation from Lester Rand of the Youth Research Institute (kids like going to the movies), and a letter from Zira Siegel of Culver City, California, pointing out how extraordinary this self-portrait with the Junior MGM Players, shot by Newsweek staff photographer Dale Healy is. Siegel asks whether it is a composite, and the Editor replies that it is not. Leslie Caron is 20ft behind the lens; Debbie Reynold is three feet away leaning in, and Pier Angeli is sitting on a pillow.
Dean Schary doesn't even appear to have an online biography. He was just one of the anonymous staffers who made Newsweek, in spite of itself, a great magazine. And speaking of "in spite of itself," I first encountered the "U-bomb" in The Periscope, which feature, as was its way, got the whole thing so hilariously wrong that I was sent down the very productive rabbit hole that makes up most of this post. The U-bomb, it explains, means that the American atomic stockpile has been suddenly increased ten-fold, that there are enough bombs to "knock out the USSR with radioactivity," and that since the U-bomb "does not, (contrary to some reports) necessarily require a hydrogen bomb to set it off, the Soviets are in a position rapidly to overtake our lead."
So my boss is on his annual pilgrimage to the Old Continent to show everybody that he's a big shot in Canada, and we're training yet another ambitious young man as a future produce manager, as we do because the company totally has a skilled labour continuity plan that involves systematically identifying talent and nurturing it. "Nurturing" in this case tends to mean humping oversized orders around the back room, because our automated perishable ordering system is proving the brilliance of our plan to use AI to replace skilled labour. (Look, it's obviously not the computer's fault that we use the same produce code for two distinct kinds of carrots, but manually straightening out the order and inventory every day is precisely the kind of fiddling that AI was supposed to get rid of!) The upshot is that yesterday was my second day off in the last eight and I was not exactly filled with energy on what had to be a laundry day anyway.
Which is fine, because this is the month that Flight grudgingly fessed up to an explanation for why the United States has the Matador, and we don't. We have the UB.109T, or RED RAPIER. So why have I chosen a Bomarc for my thumbnail?
Because.
On 31 March 1958, the Canadian electorate got its long-awaited opportunity to send Canada's Natural Governing Party to the benches, electing "Prairie populist" John Diefenbaker and his Progressive Conservatives by a swingeing 53% to 34% popular vote majority. Diefenbaker proceeded to reign over the Party for an immensely destructive decade-and-a-half. Anyone who has read as much contemporary Newsweek as I have and wonders whether my narrator's cynicism is anachronistic is referred to my Dad's collection of old Brothers-in-Laws albums to illustrate one fairly common reaction to Dief the Chief. One might even draw larger conclusions about contemporary events if it were desired!
Although as far as aerospace defence issues are concerned this would be a red herring. Cancelling the upcoming Avro long-range supersonic continental interceptor was an unfortunate necessity, and the fact that the Bomarc was insane has nothing to do with the fact that Diefenbaker was also crazy. And since Wikipedia has pictures of Bomarc and not RED RAPIER, there you go.
Here in London the winter of our discontent is rushing to an end. The Economist is at its wit's end trying to portray Rab Butler as some kind of genius after income tax cuts had to be followed by a 4.5% bank rate, and is worried about a Labour resurgence ahead of the election that can't now be too far away. The thought here is that Churchill can't possibly go on any longer, as his senility is leading to public blundering about in diplomacy after we came far too close to a war over Formosa. Whoever replaces him, and it now looks much more likely to be Eden than Butler, will have to call a general election. The tortuous theory that Bevan has staged his little revolt to undermine Labour (and Hugh Gaitskell's) prospects seems a bit conspiratorial, but it might be true.
Thais have discreetly pointed out how insulting the dinky American exhibit at the recent Bangkok Trades Fair was.
If you're wondering how I got so much more political of late, it's because I've been pricing homes in Berkeley and wondering how we can afford them. It is time for our little Air Force family to stop wandering, since I have to settle down somewhere and practice once I join the California bar, and I have actually had a very intriguing response to some feelers I have put out. It turns out that having a personal connection with Bill and David is very attractive in some circles! James and the Air Force have to decide whether they will part ways some time in the next ten years, and we certainly do not want to drag James-James and little Lizzy through one nursery school after another! Bill and David will certainly have a big enough company to require a Vice-President In Charge of Something Indefinitely Important by 1965. and in a perfect world he'll be married to one of the company's patent lawyers.
So, you see, some people are making plans, even with Korea II, 1948 War II, or even WWIII upon us!
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
The memorial to the IDF paratrooper losses in the 28 February 1955 OPERATION BLACK ARROW is sited between Kibbutz Mefsalim and the fortified border of the Gaza Strip. Mefsalim's armed security was successful in holding off attackers on 9 October.
This post is about the contemporary British Fireflash and American Sparrow beam-riding air-to-air missiles, so of course there is a perfectly good reason that I picked this old picture of a Vought F7U Crusader for thumbnail. A very good reason. I'm certainly not picking on Vought, Westinghouse, and the United States Navy. No sir!
At least if your musical tastes are as lowbrow as mine (it's a brain chemistry thing, I swear!), the "suggested next video" that appear in the personal playlist feature was an exercise in self-abnegation. I would play the Silencer' version of "Wild Mountain Thyme," which does speak to me, and after a few choices out of my frequently-viewed list, there's Ella Roberts' "Loch Lomond." The self disgust came from thinking, "OMG, the AI thinks I like this shite!" The despair it provoked about the way the world was going came from the fact that the AI couldn't learn, no matter how many times I stopped and refreshed at the first note of Ella Roberts' overblown Gaelic kitsch, it just could not learn. Nowadays it gives me this, which is still not the version of "Northwest Passage" I ever search for, but is at least in the first place not bad, and in the second, one that leans into the moment. (Future readers: You may not believe that Donald Trump managed to shine up Canadian nationalism, but trust me. It happened.)
Maryland has an NHS designation for "Historic Inns on the National Road." This is the Tomlinson Inn at Grantsville. Built around 1818. James K. Polk slept here! By Generic1139 - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ w/index.php?curid=21602442
All that being said, "Loch Lomond" is so popular for good reasons. "You'll take the high road/I'll take the low road" is a lyric meditation on mortality. The whole thing is genuinely affecting. It's sad that it has to be yoked to young love, Culloden, the Rising of '45, the Highland Clearances, but now in the fashion of the Internet I will turn it on its head and talk about high roads, low roads, the '45, and the National Road that the Federalists built from Cumberland, Maryland, over the Cumberland Narrows to Redstone Creek and on to Vandalia, Illinois via Wheeling, West Virginia, in way of having an argument about whether the Constitution allows the Federal government to fund "internal improvements," as opposed to lying down on the (privately built, toll-gated) freeway to die.
Here is your biweekly news summary, boiled down to a single sentence: Peter Sellers is the funniest thing in the world and the cobalt bomb is the scariest. Are they related? They are! Pardon me for giving away the plot of a movie that's still in the theatre, but the reason that the Grand Duchy of Fenwick wins its war with the United States is that it captures a doomsday device, "the Q-bomb." If you can't laugh at the end of the world, what can you laugh at?
There is nothing to make you want to buckle down and write an informative newsletter full of the latest developments in the field of metallurgy quite like February in London. We haven't quite seen the kind of Scottish weather that had Flight beside itself about helicopter rescue flights, but there have certainly been some days when I wouldn't have minded being rescued from the rain and gloom by a glamorous helicopter of the sort that can't actually fly in that kind of weather.
Alas, its job would have been to carry me off to the north of London, pram in tow, to drop in at the studio and see how they're doing at corralling madmen into acting instead of drinking. Show business is show business, even when it features ghastly alien plagues from beyond. I would write a learned appendix to this answer about what I think of all the alien plagues from beyond these days, but I would probably be arrested on suspicion of thinking about what Das Kapital might have to say about 1929, and then where would my children --and husband, if there's a difference-- be?
Your Loving Daughter,
Who Knows Ever So Much More About Wave Equation Boundary Conditions Now,
Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein visits Vancouver Technical High School in 1954 because one of his nephews went there and the Field-Marshal was actually a fairly normal person with a life and stuff like that.
Major General Wilfred George Fryer, RE (1900--1993)
There's some fairly weird shit going on about Monty that doesn't speak well of WWII nerds, and one of the heights of this weirdness is the claim that he "held back" Eighth Army after Alamein because he knew that if Commonwealth forces cornered Rommel's Afrika Korps (what, there were Italians there, too? Get out of town!), the Germans would turn around and go all "Nazi supermen are our superiors" on their pasty Limey (now with bonus Antipodean content) asses. If you've a mind to refute that "thesis" with facts, you will explore the fighting after Alamein, and in particular the attempt to encircle the retreating Axis forces via an inland hook around the town of Sirte. To do that you will have to resort to the official histories, if not the archives, as no-one but an official historian could possibly care about the New Zealand Division's travails in the crusty saline bogs south of Sirte that very nearly exposed the isolated force to the Axis counterattack that didn't happen and which would have led to someone actually knowing that Eighth Army was fighting in December of 1942. If you go to Wikipedia you will learn that no less a figure than Milton has something to say about "a boggy Sirte, neither sea/Nor good dry land." And if you go to Civil Engineers in War, the special series of The Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, you will get, via W. F. Fryer's "The Military Water Problem in the Western Egyptian Desert, 1940--43," a deep hydrological explanation of the roadbuilding problems discussed at some length by the official history, and otherwise apparently of interest only to the local historians of Sirte, and certainly not to the grand theorists of Classical Antiquity, which is why this post comes to tophets via a weird digression through Wilfrid Fryer's discussion of the problem of watering the Western Desert Force.
So, nothing much has changed in that I am back in glamorous London. (Joke! Rose Dolores is in the news. It turns out that Dolores Del Rios also used the "most beautiful girl in the world" tagline, though.) The letter is a bit different in that I am finally reunited with my magazines. I hope that you don't mind that I'm a bit shorter with Aviation Week than I have been in the past, but two things have changed. The first is that Aviation Week's editor since 1945 has just disappeared. Robert H. Wood's departure from the publisher's chair was announced by his deputy in the 21 January issue, effective 2 February, but Wood did not contribute an editorial for the next issues and I have no idea what became of him. I have no idea why this matters to me, but I feel sad. Second, I am very tired of treating advertising-disguised-as-editorial content seriously.
I've continued to read to James-James before bed, since it was such a hit at Christmas. After some experimenting I've hit on a book he likes, a wartime fantasy in which some siblings romp around on a flying bed. It's marketed above his age, but he seems to be enjoying it, and I am thinking about The Hobbit when we are done. Best to get him started on fantasy and science fiction early considering the work his mother is doing. (And by that I mean patent law, and not helping out around the studio.) Too bad about the old job. I know if I were at the desk I'd make sure those Australians buy the Avro Vulcan!
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
PS: I guess we know how the world ends now: With clouds of Cobalt-60.
The Continental versions of Penguin Classics are allowed to have naughty covers. Ooh la la! I like the single name author credit. This is a classic, not smut!
So, anyway, it looks as though the problems at the UBC Libraries automated retrieval hub are now confined to email alerts, and I probably had my recalls waiting for me for a week the last two times I tried to get at Aviation Week, Flight, and The Engineer. I suspect this because this time around I also recalled Fortune, The Economist, and Newsweek from the PARC offsite storage facility, and got an alert for The Economist only. The upshot is that I have now all of same and might blame the need to process Aviation Week and The Engineer for being late with postblogging this week, whereas in fact it was the 31 January number of Newsweek that bogged me down yesterday. We get to hear about fallout next week!
The saving grace here is that I would be remiss in not covering something of a blockbuster development in the history of the Iron Age Mediterranean, notwithstanding that I heard about it on a political blog, and they heard about it from The Economist. (Otherwise I could talk about Forbes' Road and the Duke of Cumberland.)
Well, here I am, a young mother and unemployed, like, apparently, very few other women in London right now. I do miss my job selling turboprop airliners to Canadians, but the higher calling of secret diplomacy to stop WWIII was more important, I suppose, even if the actual work was done by the American voter, who seems to have been more motivated by the recession than the atom bomb's red glare.
You shouldn't worry that I will get bored, though, because a good economy turns out to be a good time to make movies. The lads in Bray have the rights to a movie version of that runaway BBC serial. After some going around and some waving of the latest Economist talking about the difficulties exhibitors are having finding non-pornographic "X" rated films to show, they have decided to do the movie version as an "X" release. Given the fuss over the BBC 1984 adaptation, it's pretty clear that you don't have to be get very gruesome by old Hollywood standards to warrant an "X," and it is hoped that it will bring in the teenagers, who apparently have time on their hands from all quitting school at the stroke of sixteen.
The British Greenland Expedition has been over since the summer, and since I'm not going to bother going through the archives, I'm just going to say that it's been a few months since the announcement of the existence of the Lomonsov Ridge, an "unusual ridge of the continental crust in the Arctic Ocean" that emerges as the New Siberian Islands in the Eastern Hemisphere, and maybe Ellesmere Island or Greenland in the Western.
There might be some people on the New Siberians mining ivory. Otherwise, God just made them to amuse himself. Which is also something you can say about the Lomonsov Ridge. It made a desperate play for relevance in the Cold War because the Americans and Soviets were playing at keeping the drift patterns in the Arctic Basin secret so that they couldn't find each others' Apocalypse Ice Station Zero airbase that no-one built because, come on, seriously. Though on the other hand "come on, seriously" was a scarce commodity in the Cold War and the Reverse Bungie Cord air pickup system, which is also relevant this month on account of it trying to start WWIII by getting two CIA operatives put on trial in for espionage in Beijing, appears in one story about those ice floe bases.
But that's not the story holding everything together this week. That would be the story about the Oklahoma oil field services company doing boat drills off New York.
Brazilla Carroll Reece was born in 1889 in Butler, a town in the far northeast of Tennessee that was inundated by the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watauga Dam, begun in 1942, and completed in 1948. He attended a small Baptist college in town, and somehow made the transition to city life well enough to complete a master's in economics, and work at NYU until he completed a law degree. Or perhaps he didn't, because the next line in his Wikipedia biography says that he "also studied at the University of London.
He ran in the Republican primary in his home district in 1920, campaigning on his war record, term limits, and against "exempt profit taxes on corporations." Having won the nomination, he cruised to victory in the general, but lost in 1930 over what the biography characterises as TVA politics, even though the TVA was still two years away. (Hoover vetoed a precursor plan.) He recovered his safely Republican seat in the wipeout of 1932 notwithstanding accusations of voter fraud, retained it until 1948 when he resigned to run for a Senate seat, and recovered it in 1950, holding it until his death, still fighting for the TVA and against the New Deal.
A photogenic man and a longterm politician, it isn't surprising that there are a great many Google Images hits for "B. Carroll Reece," the one chosen here making his high colour (creepy affect, great performance) and homeboy shavecut particularly obvious. (One-sixteenth Cherokee, I'm sure, although to be fair he was consistently pro-civil rights.) So here I am, amplifying colour again. But that's only a part why he's in the introduction to this here "Technological Appendix." The rest is his ridiculous performance leading on from being slapped down in the 1952--54 United States House Select Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations. The chairman launched an attempt to discover how tax-exempt foundations were promoting "anti-American values" but gave up under pushback. leaving Reese to continue a lone campaign to prove that the Kinsey reports were promoting socialism and communism via sexual deviance in the form of an attempt to "reduce our meager knowledge of social phenomena to the level of an applied science." The mix of legitimate concerns --for example, the way that the foundations were promoting oligarchy-- with right wing craziness is fascinating, but, hey, what about R&D?
As is by now my tradition of many years, I am writing a "letter" that I will be leaving on my pillow at the knock on the door. And because it is a tradition, I don't even have to apologise any more! I should probably put something embarrassing in here that you can read when I am already halfway to Kelowna, and if I can think of anything embarrassing, it will certainly go in!
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
PS: Please call Bill Radford and tell him not to start WWIII, since for some reason we seem to have decided that the chain of command runs from the senior senator from California to the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and apparently only Matt Ridgeway stands in the way, President be damned. It's not that World War III won't be terrible. It's that it will be so embarrassing to explain how it happened to the children of a future generation.
The remarkable correlation between geographic and genetic difference in European populations (Callaway (2008) via Bintliff):
(Okay, so this is actually Ewen Callaway reporting in New Scientiston John Novembre, et al, "Genes Mirror Geography Within Europe," Nature 456 (2008): 98--101.)
Time to say goodbye to migration in history?
This is a map that does a terrible job of showing why I have a neighbourly and proprietary interest in the settlement that gives Quatsino Sound its name. In my childhood it was linked to the rest of the world by a water taxi service from Port Alice, and we used to do weekend school trips there on the taxi to give the old day school and its aging staff of Catholic priests some purpose in their latter days, long story short. The actual Quatsino community was mostly Kwakiutl (not Kwakwaka'wakw per the band) associated by default with the Fort Rupert community in Port Hardy, and probably descended from the community that ran the Newhitty port of trade that used to compete with the old Hudson's Bay Company in the maritime fur trade.
The perhaps under-reported implications of the genetic difference studies is the collapse of migrationist explanations of the spread of the Iron Age. We're seeing something like that occur in real time on Northern Vancouver Island as the European settler populations basically give up and leave the region. This post is another exercise in reading backwards, inspired by a recent trip (my first, at the age of 60! It was a family thing) to UBC's Museum of Anthropology.
I have no idea whether we'll actually be able to make a family tradition of Christmas in Nakusp, but it does seem like a more agreeably rural and reliably snowy place to celebrate my children's childhood than Vancouver, so I'm willing to give it a try if the roof doesn't fall off. For that I suppose we should consider the lodge, but Campbell River is even less likely to have a white Christmas than Vancouver!
Last seen around here playing Calamity James as an adorable autist, Doris Day sings "Que Sera, Sera," an incomprehensibly popular hit considering the otherthings people were listening to at the time, but certainly a compelling bit of music in its own right. For that reason I grant a full and free pardon to whoever named the Que Sera Sera, the that gave a name to the Dakota that flew in the Polar battalion of Seabees and the construction materials from which were erected, at the freaking South Pole in freaking 1957, Amundsen-Scott Station.
The International Geophysical Year of 1957 is pretty pivotal to the history of science and technology on account of Sputnik, but if I want to have material to Technological Appendix about in 2027/8, it might be best to leave Sputnik, and Vanguard, until they come up chronologically. But the point of my appendices is to follow up on things as they blow up in the postblogging, and, oh boy, the Antarctic has blown up this fall.
There's actually an International Geophysical Year reason for this, which is that people do everything backwards and upside down in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Antarctic exploration year runs from November to roughly May, so November 1954 is only two Antarctic exploration years before the Big Show starts with Que Sera Sera landing att he South Pole on 31 October 1956 in what is already the second year of OPERATION DEEP FREEZE.
On 2 March 1954, Tudor I G-AGRI, belonging to a young Freddie Laker's Air Charter, Ltd, was flying 9500ft near Paris on a freight trip from London to Bahrein when it entered cloud. Slight icing was experienced, and the de-icing and anti-icing systems were deployed, due to which the Indicated Air Speed fell from 155 to 135 kt. The captain maintained altitude via electronic control. This capability, built into the Tudor's SEP4 by its now forgotten manufacturer, Smith's Instruments, was developed from the military requirement a bomber's bombsight be able to fly the plane in the targeting run. It was enormously convenient to be able to correct course and altitude via a single knob, or "joystick," as we would say now, but it was also fuel efficient. Taking the plane off autopilot would inevitably lead to course and engine power adjustments, and gas is money. This might, in fact, be why Captain J. M. Carreras did not increase engine power, although the final report notes that "He did not again consult the airspeed indicator." (It is likely that there was no stall warning indicator, as these were facing resistance from the aviation community. At this point, "[n]oticing that the autopilot was applying large aileron corrections and that the directional gyro indicated a turn to port," the captain disengaged the autopilot, with the disruptive results noted, and "the aircraft made a rapid descent in a spiral manoeuvre." The fact that, contrary to regulations, neither pilot was strapped in at the time might explain much of this if we had any clarity about what was going on in the cabin at the time.
Later in the report, we learn that "[t]his resulted in an increase in the angle of attack until flying speed was lost." Saying things without wasting sentences is why we invent new words, and in this case I am lost as to why the word isn't "stall." The upshot is that Carreras regained control and pulled out at 2500ft and the plane continued on its merry way to its refuelling stop in Malta, a flight distance of 2000km, at which point the airframe was "found to be severely overstressed." The airframe dossier says that it was scrapped "circa October 1956."
The relevance of this anecdote is that the Tudor was originally ordered as an interim long range large airliner for the "charters," that is, BOAC and the short-lived British South American Airlines that was for some reason, probably related to possible dollar earnings, created alongside BOAC. The Tudor I, with grossly inadequate seating, was followed by the stretched Tudor II, of which BOAC ordered 79 before returning it to the shop for poor "hot and high" capability, which, for the British aviation historian, will trigger memories of the VC10, or the Ensign, for us antiquarians. The Tudor IIs were on their way to becoming something like the Tudor IVs improvised out of some of the initial Tudor Is for BSAA when BSAA began losing scheduled services for never-explained reasons over the Atlantic: Star Tiger and Star Ariel in January of 1948 and 1949 respectively, with a total of 51 people on board. The plane was withdrawn from service, BSAA closed up shop, and the remaining Tudor Is/IVs sold off for freight or occasionally chartered passenger service.
If at this point you're thinking about tapping the screen where the title says "Comet Inquiry," you're just going to have to wait for the break, because all this talk about air disasters is a great excuse to post
The cat is truly out of the bag after Senator Knowland's floor speech, of which I am glad that someone had the consideration to give us all of five minutes warning so that we could get well clear of our apartment before anyone was curious enough to look in at us. We are now in transit to Hong Kong with the understanding that we are not wanted in London until January. Which means last minute Christmas plans, if you haven't let James' room to a lodger yet.
Since James and I are a bit worried about our letters being intercepted, I will answer a possibly sensitive question here instead of by post. We do not know when we might be going back to London. We expect we will. We have seen no reason to think that the holdup on cooling down the Qemoy crisis was anything but politics, and that a Democratic victory won't mean a prompt cooling of the Straits crisis. At the same time, those poor Russian sailors are not going to be released soon. They've become an issue in internal Koumintang politics. Whether the crisis will be sorted out, therefore, depends on whether Moscow is willing to swallow the insult. I'd like to say that I have a line on Russia's man in Taipei, but I have no idea how much to credit him. He might be some kind of confidence man, so I am being very cautious. The Koumintang is more than ordinarily enthusiastic about shooting each other down by the water at the moment, so everyone is being understandably close lipped except the people being inexplicably garrulous. So all I can say is that if I know anything, Moscow will. If I don't, all I can say is read the papers for yourself.
Britannica. Which lifted it from Shutterstock, how the mighty have fallen, etc.
The Aswan high dam is one of the biggest dams in the world, which is understandable, since it controls one of the world's most important rivers, although one with perhaps a bit less volume at the outlet than I expected.
So, yeah, thought I'd start with negging the Nile. I'll let you all know if it decides to date me. The numbers, per Wikipedia, if you're a dam fan, which no-one is except when they're visiting them because civil engineering is boring unless you're there to see it is that it is 111m high and 3,830m long, and because it is an earth embankment dam, it is a kilometer wide at its base. It has an installed generating capacity of 2100 MW, which isn't actually that much by a jaded BCer's perspective. The Revelstoke Dam generates more current, and even the Keenleyside flood control dam at Castlegar that plays an important role in the tech blogging "story" such as it is by flooding beachfront Nakusp on its 1968 completion, still has a 185MW capacity. This is because its main purpose is to regulate the flooding of the Nile, for which reason it impounds a 5250 square kilometer, entirely within the boundaries of Egypt, and it is the most historically consequential dam on the world's most historically consequential river.
The introduction to the Wikipedia article notes that it exists in large part for political reasons. The British had a plan to manage the Nile with sacrificial zones in Sudan and Ethiopia, to which Nasser and his colleagues said, "Thanks, but no thanks," which, given the historical reluctance of upstream authorities to sacrifice sacrifice zones when sacrificing is called for, seems like it was a wise choice notwithstanding the high evaporation rate off the Aswan reservoir.
In terms of its political history, there is a lot of meat on the High Aswan Dam bone. Were I to write about that, there are many satisfactory blog-sized conclusions that could be drawn, such as that John Foster Dulles was preposterously unqualified for his role; that the China Lobby is enough to have you rethinking the Great Terror (We could use a man like Robespierre today!); that, er, something about the post-Six Days War territorial settlement in the Middle East (Erik looks around, cringing pathetically); that imperialism is bad.
I do want to talk about politics, but not those politics, even if I come around to the margins of my cringe, because civil engineering is boring, and so people just can't help talking around it, and if it isn't geology and geography, it is . . .well, it's something that hopefully some scholar of science fiction has put a name to and received tenure for, because it's goldarned important, the usurpation of reality by a story that scratches the science fiction itch, and that's as felicitously as I can think to put this insight.
We have had an exciting few weeks as various European diplomatic efforts and one American one have inserted themselves in our little Crisis. We got to show the French the Tuapse detainees, which drew some looks from one fellow, who seems to have been a China hand who has talked to people who perhaps do not have the family's best interests at heart, but there is some urgency to the action, as the Europeans do not have a feel for American politics and find it hard to believe that a single mid-term election could end the McCarthy era at a stroke. WE can hardly argue the point without raising questions about just who we are, so hopefully someone else has. I wish I could coach them. While Lindley is a nepotism hire at Newsweek, he's perfectly right that any prediction based on historical that Eisenhower will lose in '56 if the Democrats take the Senate is stuff and nonsense. It is hard to see the way that the Democrats are falling in line behind Stevenson as anything as conceding in advance. The idea is that if Kefauver really wants to be President, he needs to be thinking about beating Nixon in '60. But what I want to ask is how likely it is that Ike will even run in '56 given his health. He really doesn't seem to be enjoying being President right now. Sherman Adams might be able to carry the load when the GOP holds Congress,but he is not going to enjoy tussling with the Democratic leadership in the back half of his term, so why try for another?
Anyway, that's my thought. Hopefully this Crisis wraps up before Christmas.
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