A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1954: Microelectronics and Music

 

"Micro" indeed. The screencap is the first size comparison for the proximity fuze I've ever seen, which is why I took the screencap. If you're disappointed that it's not a video, here it is:

I'll start with some housekeeping. The ordering software for the holdings stored in the UBC Library's  Automated Storage Retrieval System is working, and has been for several weeks now. The aisle that holds Engineering and Aviation Week is still only intermittently operational, and your requests will be available when the Library tells you so. I am not sure of the details of this, and the desk librarians are not forthcoming. My best guess is that they cycle the aisle every few weeks; and the moral of the story is that I probably didn't successfully place my request for them last fall, and so missed some retrieval windows. Or not. It's not like the library is inclined to explain! 

Honestly, automated storage is such a fiasco, especially considering that it cam in just as physical acquisitions collapsed. I know that it could be worse. When I got back to Vancouver after my PhD, much of UBC's old technical journal collection was held off campus with no intention of ever making them accessible again. The intent was to destroy them and create a pdf  library in the cloud, and there is going to be a history of the fiasco of Google Books one day, but the short summary is that this was, as usual, placing more faith in computers than warranted. (Seriously, check out this disaster!) Instead, it all went to PARC, which may or may not have automated retrieval, but, importantly, actually works. The building of PARC somewhere in the no visitor's part of UBC campus did lead to The Economist and Time being withdrawn from the open shelves, which is annoying, especially considering that  the university used up the freed floor space for underutilised offices. But, on the other hand they didn't pulp Newsweek. 

So will I have Aviation Week and The Engineer next week, when I have a long weekend to finish October postblogging? Who knows? The important thing is that I got in 40 hours in Baldur's Gate 3 during my (short) vacation.

Fortunately, there's a lot of "microelectronics" to catch up with, going back to the proximity fuze.

 So, in character, I made fun of the "news" story about how interceptors like the Lockheed F-94 Starfire were accomplishing head on interceptions by firing a sheaf of 24 2.75" unguided rockets, which was practical because the rockets were proximity fuzed. The Wikipedia article traces the history of the FFAR rocket back through German precursors, but the relevant history goes a bit further back to the Unrotating Projectiles that kept British rocket scientists busy before the war. A 20-barrelled 7" rocket launcher is a lot of munitions, although the warheads were packed with cable mines rather than simple HE. Fuzes for the new weapons were a bit of an issue  to begin with, and there was more capacity to spare and a lower acceleration, making a proximity fuze much simpler in application than a shell fuze --although it's not like a precision clockwork timed fuze for a 3.7" AA was a simple manufacturing ask, either. 

Per the Wikipedia account, Samuel Curran, William Butement, Edward Shire and Amherst Thomson were hanging about the Telecommunications Research Establishment, where they used their giant brains to think up a doppler radar proximity fuze "in the early stages of World War II." Some day, someone has to do up a calendar of Chronologically correlated "early stages" and "late stages," so no-one ever has to use dates again. 

Peter Matthews, a teacher whose patience and dedication is amply demonstrated by the way he put up with me, was a member of a chamber quartet in his spare time, and loved to talk about music and acoustics  while lecturing on optics and wave mechanics. The impression I took away, which might not have been close to his own research interests, was that, while we learned wave mechanics to deal with electronics and prepare for careers in modern industry, the eye is a drastic kludge in comparison with our ears, and that wave mechanics were much better learned from a musician than an electrician. I simply cannot believe, and have said before, that any of the radio devices contrived in WWII were not first abstractly grasped by musicians first, and this certainly extends to the proximity fuze.

In 1936, John Poliakoff's Multitone, Ltd., brought the first vacuum-tube hearing aid to the market. The wearable hearing aid was still twelve years away, but there was already a great deal of pressure to make them smaller --not that that was the only market demanding a small vacuum tube, by a long shot. Our story touches grass with the UP working group deciding that this was the perfect occasion to experiment with proximity fuzes, and placing an order for 20,000 of Western Electric's finest miniature proximity fuzes. The story now ropes in Admiral Harold Brown of the Naval Research Laboratory, ont a particularly reliable interlocuter. According to the narrative, Bowen immediately deduced that the British were working on a proximity fuze. (I see that we now and finally  have a study taking down his self-congratulatory account of the introduction of high pressure steam into the USN by Tyler Pitroff.)

All the American scientists with good PR connections promptly invented the proximity fuze. Yay! (Among whom I see names from the National Bureau of Standards who might actually be legitimately hyped here.)  The problem is that this narrative is post-Butement et al. vs. Varian. This patent suit established that the proximity fuze was substantially a British invention and not subject to patent claims. The involvement of the Varian brothers in my suit leads me to cheer on Butement, et al, but let's face it. Had it not been for the Gordian knot being cut, the billion dollars that the United States Government spent on proximity fuzes during WWII would have been the target of every patent troll in America, because the proximity fuze is just so darn obvious. 

The problem here is that you can reasonably argue that a hearing aid is just a proximity fuze in disguise. The input is an inducted emf rather than one produced by an oscillating pressure plate, and the signal is processed by gating the doppler-shifted beat frequency rather than amplified, but improving the quality of the hearing aid experience allows for almost unlimited signal processing. The salient issue is that proximity fuzes in artillery shells have to withstand thousands of gravities of linear and angular acceleration. It is very hard to imagine how you could possibly build a vacuum tube-era device that would withstand this, but, honestly, you can just "pot" them in resin. Vacuum tubes don't work very well with resin in the tube itself, but you can bed the filament in the solid base of the tube. Western Electric is proud that its ruggedised pentode was available before British designers had come up with a sufficiently rugged version of their own, but considering that they were available less than a year after the work began, it is hard to see it as a big problem. 

What was a big problem was making 22 million VT fuzes. The Wikipedia summary lists the famous GE Christmas light plant in Cleveland, but also GE assembly plants at Shenectady and Bridgeport, and Crosley, RCA, Eastman Kodak, McQuay-Norris and Sylvania as subcontractors.  I've never heard of McQuay-Norris before, so I clikced on the link for you. A manufacturer of automobile engine parts in St. Louis that moved into electrical controls for gas appliances, the company rented a sweatshop in Manhattan, which would have been a poetically apt place for "girls" to assemble VT fuzes with the underestimated skills of a garments trade worker. There's just not a lot interesting going on here. Ample skilled labour and floor space make enough fuzes, not scientists and engineers having deep thoughts.  

Or, to put it another way, money.  I suspect that I would not be waiting for my journals if I paid as much for them as I just did for Tyler Pitroff's book. ($44 CAN from University of Alabama Press. Can't say that my nationalist Buy Canadian campaign against the Trump tariffs has started well.) The real money in electronics in 1940 was in sound and music, and that's probably why hearing aid manufacturers are the secret throughline in this story.