Postblogging Technology, February 1955, I: Adding Oxygen

R_.C.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

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,

Ronnie

The Economist, 5 February 1955

Leaders

1955, everybody! 

The magazine opens with the state of play as Peking prepares the delegation that will go to New York and lobby the United Nations, or, to put it another way, lay the foundations for Ike to slip out from under WWIII. It's then off to talk about price rings, which isn't The Economist being The Economist, because Labour has found some Tory backbenchers who are in trouble with the Monopolies Commission, and instead of opposing price rings, the magazine needs to find a way to support them, which takes all of a page and a half and should not be regarded as a precedent later when Labour doesn't have the Honourable Member for Thwit-Under-Diddle over the barrel.

 

"More for the Colonies" The accompanying chart seems to show a rapid growth of spending under Labour and stagnation under the Tories, but in the next five years they will actually spend the money Parliament has allocated, and it's a "startling --and so far barely recognised-- boom." 

"NATO's Next Five Years" Lord Ismay has written a book of the same title, and we've got nothing else important to talk about, so here's a summary: Who knows? Thank you, that's a page and a half down. 

Notes of the Week

The Commonwealth Round Table in London this week  talked about Formosa, because why  not, then Suez, because ditto, then Malaya. In France, Mendes-France's supporters think that he can keep on being premier just like most of the French want if he can just form a "new left" coalition, but since a majority in the Assembly misses all the fun they had in Indo China and want to do it again in North Africa, and anyway the "new left" will probably let the Communists in, and that's bad. Both parties are talking about planning the future of transportation after the rail strike, and the magazine is in favour of things that look like planning, so it's really hard to make fun of all this planning, but if you say "planning" enough it's always funny. Because busybodies like to plan! The seven MPs expelled from the Labour caucus before Christmas has let it be known that they don't  like Christmas cake and don't believe in Santa and anyway they didn't want presents, just a socialist revolution and party recognition. Iraq and Egypt are squabbling, and Egypt is wrong. Russia is increasing its defence budget to 112 million roubles on unchanged total spending, which is probably more than sabre rattling, and also that Khrushchev fellow sure is something! Something about Communists and Japan. The British are at loggerheads at the appalling decision by Birmingham to let the pensioners ride the busses for free, which is now spreading to other cities and will bankrupt the country if it continues the way that it is going, although probably if Birmingham is willing to go to the trouble of holding a vote over it and introducing a private member's bill in the House to allow it, it should be permitted to go ahead. Several towns want to be turned into county boroughs and The Economist gives its go-ahead while reserving it for current changes in the Crofter's Bill in favour of just simply nationalising Skye. The Swiss say that the neutral's commission monitoring the Korean armistice has an impossible job (because the North Koreans won't let them monitor) and want the UN's permission to go  home. Somehow a Note about German labour movement prospects turns into a warning that German exports are going to increase again. An Obscenity Bill that will allow Parliament to ban horror comics without affecting worthy artistic statement turns out to be harder to write than expected. Scandinavians were having boring talks in boring gray Stockholm when the nice Danish prime minister had a heart attack and died and now everyone is sad in sad gray Stockholm. Reductions in town lot sizes to preserve farmland may be hurting the country's food production capacity due to loss of gardens, two reports commissioned by the Ministry of Housing says. the Ministry replies that it's just not so, and conservationists are up in arms. Hungary is going to be less Communist now, the Princess Louise Hospital for Children is converting to general use because fewer children go to hospital now, which is quite a nice thing, and talks continue about getting more trade into and out of China through back doors possibly but certainly not in violation of various sanctions, which would be wrong. 

  
 

His wife died of Addison's Disease the year before, and a liner 
named for him was lost will all aboard to an iceberg off Greenland
in 1959, the last known iceberg sinking with casualties. 

From The Economist of 1855 an editorial supporting one of the guys involved in the current crisis in the government but not the other, I guess. It's pretty embarrassingly sycophantic about the Duke of Newcastle, which reminds me of just how oligarchic Old England was considering that you could write the entire paragraph about a crisis a century before and just substitute different Dukes of Newcastle, the exception being the one who seems to be the bad guy here (Lord John Russell), and isn't that a lesson. 

Letters

Two letters on the woes of British agriculture. C. B. Bailey-Watson, now the public relations director at Bristol, writes to remind everyone that the Bristol Proteus is a great engine and so will be the BE25 so what's all this talk about the RB109 and Eland. To which the editor replies pointing out that the Proteus is old and sad and the BE25 is pretty much made up. (Bristol might claim that it is an 8000shp horsepower engine, but there is no transmission or reducing gear in existence that will take 8000shp.) E. Karwood is a spinster and is upset that parents might get another tax deduction, and "Expatriate" explains why African instructors at African colleges should be paid less than White expatriates. 

Books

Richard Aldington's Lawrence of Arabia gets a terrifically bad review, Wallace Notestein's The English People on the Eve of Colonisation, 1603--1630 gets a good one. Cynthia Asquith's Portrait of Barrie explains that it was all perfectly innocent. Two books on the French Union, one by Kenneth Robinson and the other by the Centre d'Etudes de Politique Etrangere, are very worthy. Alan W. Ford's The Anglo-Iranian Oil Dispute, 1951--1952, is an excruciatingly fair and balanced account of how the British government was absolutely right and all its critics were wrong. David A. Kemp and Margaret Sylvia Kemp address The Quantum of Damages in Personal Injury Claims with a special discussion of co-authorship credits. Maria Yen's The Umbrella Garden: A Picture of Student Life in Red China is about how terribly disillusioning life in Red China is, and how glad she is to be in Hongkong. 

American Survey

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_of_1958

"Spotlight on the Civil Service" Everyone should stop worrying about GOP abuse of the merit system, the security programme, and, in general, the Republican attempt to bring back the spoils system in disguise, because everything is fine, and anyway it is perfectly fine to fire all the senior civil servants after an election because it's all politics, don't you know. The Administration is so confident in the economic recovery that it has launched a 40 year 3% Treasury bond, the longest term since 1911, which is not at all like the 30 year 3% bond they launched in 1953 that some blame for deflating the country into recession, because it is not a check on credit, just an "admonitory pat." The President is reviving his incredibly modest plan for loss-guarantees of some risky private medical insurance offerings in the hopes that it will make America healthier while being too meek and small to provoke the AMA into crushing it like a bug. Steel shares are up because investors are confident in the future of the industry, and allowing investment in new technologies like "turbo-hearths" and to some extent oxygen-enriching in the European style, with possibly a turn to small-scale production that will be more economical when demand fluctuates, especially with speciality steels, coupled with fabrication capability, which is where the real money is. Congress is determined to kill Dixon-Yates, but the President is still fighting for it, which seems pretty futile when Congress is in charge of money! The new Panama Canal Zone treaty has been signed in spite of the assassination of its Panamanian negotiator and concedes some Pananian demands. Pay scales have been equalised between American and Panamanian workers, and Panama's rent goes up from $430,000 to $1.9 million (against $33 million in tolls last year) and Panama can now tax Canal Zone employees who live beyond the Zone in Panama. If there is an auto strike this year, it will be over the UAW's demand for a guaranteed annual wage. The Chamber of Commerce continues to push for privatisation, leading the Administration to start working on a census to find out just how much public enterprise there actually is. The Administration is throwing up its hands on butter prices and is just going to buy all the butter, turn it into ghee, and dump it on the Indian market, "in hopes of developing a new market." That's one way of putting it! A Communist has finally been convicted for just belonging to the Communist Party and not for thinking dangerous Communist thoughts. 

The World Overseas

The Central African Federation hasn't caused an African revolution, but that doesn't mean that Africans like it. The major change currently is that Whites are unhappier with the concessions they made than they were thirteen months ago. Field-Marshal Schoerner, who has just been released by the Soviets after promising to be a good democrat from now on, has been met with storms of protest in Germany on the grounds that he, while he was trying to enact the Hitler's pet apocalypse, he was arranging to fly out of the Army Group Centre pocket in Czechoslovakia in civilian clothes, allegedly to organise the Alpine Redoubt. This is clearly part of a subtle Russian plot to destabilise the West. Indonesia has declared a "state of war" in the Spice Islands, or southern Moluccas, acknowledging that they have never really pacified the Ambonese, who are in any case restless due to the deteriorating economic situation. Don't be fooled, Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist Party is as awful as any Communist. Here's why you should care, and what you should care about, in the Norwegian cabinet shuffle. The French are having a tax revolt, led by Pierre Poujade. As far as we can tell, American foreign investment is so low that it is practically a deficit, although since we can't actually tell due to lack of statistics, it is arguable that we should be worried about it at all, which is the magazine's chance to argue that we should be worried. the moral of the story is that if countries were just ever so much nicer, Americans would finally invest their money there. Mexico continues to work towards being the world's largest sulphur exporter, but there are various clouds on the horizon. 

The Business World leads with a massive investigation of hire-purchase, which I would go into in more detail if I thought this was more of a story than the fall in the rate of childhood disease --that is, it's enough to make an observation about the times we are living in, without putting transitory numbers to an ever-rising tide. Speaking of which, Britain is starting to import cotton from India. Wasn't the point of the Indian Empire to stop Indian competition! It was! And everyone else in Britain decided to stop paying for it! But, no, you guys had to force cotton "operatives" out of the work they'd found in other parts of the country in shipyards and ROFs and rout them back to Lancashire to gin up (Ronnie made a funny!) exports, and now you're debating tariffs even though most of the Indian "grey cloth" imports are being finished and re-exported. 

Business Notes has what is practically another Leader in two Notes on the Government';s roadbuilding policy, then some finance, then a look at the industrial boom that, very rarely for the magazine, actually makes fun of "'it can't last'" reporting, then a look at the embarrassment the Coal Board is suffering by effectively buying "Stassen's coal" from the United States (shipped in American bottoms) and then selling it abroad at lower prices.

It could make up the loss by exporting more British coal, but The Economist is getting more and more exasperated by the delay in resumption of British coal exports. Will there ever be enough British coal for significant exports again? Sterling's unexpected weakness this winter is due to rising dollar imports. Steel nationalisation continues to unwind. The privatisation of business in the Suez Canal Zone continues with large capitalisation of new companies owned by firms like Vickers, Rootes, Austin and various rail equipment manufacturers to manage the 50,000t of ammunition, 300,000t of ordnance stores, 2000 vehicles, 30 locomotives, and 100 railway wagons, plus the 600 to 800 British workers to be left there after British withdrawal. Tea prices are easing. The Co-operative Building Society is offering 35 year mortgages. The textiles industry has launched a "guerrilla movement" against the British Institute of Standards by forming the Branded Textile Group, which seems like a terrible idea. Tungsten is up, Ford's free stock issue reflects its ambitious expansion plans, the Bristol Olympus is coming along impressively quickly, but The Economist is more impressed by the 6-1 power to weight ratio of its new and much smaller Orpheus, originally developed as the plant for the Folland Gnat, but will probably go into the Nato light fighter, whatever of the nine aircraft on offer is eventually chosen for the role. 

Cover missing

Flight, 4 February 1955

Leaders

"After the Storm" Flight is pleased as punch about all the airmindedness over the snowstorms in Scotland with the dropping of supplies and all, and proposes that some police agency could buy some helicopters against future such emergencies and an international code for signalling your needs by tramping letters in the snow for  overflying rescue aircraft to observe. Now that is a UN convention I'd be happy to give a few years of "talking about talking about" coverage! 

From All Quarters reports that Essex, Yorktown, and Kearsage are deployed in the Straits, with "over 100 aircraft each," while the USAF has moved a squadron each of F-86s and B-26s to Korea and Okinawa, which counts as deploying them over the Straits. The Koumintang has received 75 Sabres, and has light bombers, F-84Gs, and F-47s in some numbers. The Communists have moved two air divisions to the opposing shore, and while MiG-15s are available, they are thought to be mostly Il-10s and Tu-2s. This is because the Reds have no good airfields, but are building them now. Reports from the United States,  including an interview with General Twining, indicate that the Hughes Falcon missile is operational, and so is the Nike, while a design for an intercontinental guided missile is available for comment. General Twining thinks that the Soviet strategic air force consists of 1200 Tu-4s, which cannot reach the U.S. without air-to-air refuelling. Despite reports that the Swift has been rejected as an interceptor, final acceptance trials are going ahead and it will probably be used for ground attack. The prototype Blackburn Beverley has flown. Several Labour backbenchers are stirring things up over the country's "terrible failure" to get modern combat aircraft operational over the last three years. The Australian air minister is in town, and talk of orders of British transport aircraft and one of the V-bombers is in the air. The Leduc O.22 ramjet has been nicknamed "the Flying Furnace," although the designer is optimistic about its future. 

"Jet Lift: First Experiments in Control and Stability: Future Possibilities" It is supposed that these might be practical in the future. 

"Olympus Progress" I don't know how long Constance Bailey-Watson has been with Bristol, but she is earning her money by getting the Olympus in the press, even with nothing to say other than that it is progressing very quickly compared to the Proteus. To fill out the page, we are told that De Havilland Rockets has got its Super Sprite cleared in good time. 

Here and There reports that it costs £216,000 to train a B-52 crewmember, which is eye-opening considering the reported £20,000 cost of an RAF pilot's training, Fairey is expanding its works in Canada to produce electronics for missiles, and is keen to produce the Rotodyne there. 

Convair sends in a nice long article about the Tradewind, and Saro a pictorial of its ski conversion of the Auster J.5G Autocar. Apart from being a flying boat with a prematurely overpowered turboprop engine, it turns out that the designers of the Tradewind saw fit to insert a long extension shaft on the engines to keep them out of the way of the spray, which can only have increased trouble with the powertrain. 

This also fails to fill up the page, so there's room for a disapproving review of The Cold Dawn, the concluding installment of the BBC's War in the Air coverage of the war in Europe. (It misses too much stuff and fills air time with too much silly stuff. Now here's drawings of made up Soviet airplanes!)

Aircraft Intelligence reports that C. D. Howe is fibbing when he says that the Avro Canada flying saucer has been cancelled. Avro is continuing it and looking for USAF support. No-one should worry about the A4D in spite of the recent crash, Lockheed's Marietta, Georgia, plant is coming along well, and Hurel-Dubois' H.D. 70 is a potential twin-Dart transport. Various light planes are coming along around the world. 

"Beverley Build-Up: Production and Development Progress at Brough" A four page mostly-pictorial with some details about weight-saving measures like the Fiberglas window frames. 

"Rocket Propellants: Oxidants and Fuels Discussed by two Experienced Users at B.I.S Lecture" That's the British Interplanetary Society, not the British Institute of Standards! Mostly they talked about hydrogen peroxide, whcih is apparently much safer than people think. 

"Production Conference: Further Summaries of Papers Given at Southampton" A paper by G. W. Richards, a director of High Duty Alloys, notes that most of the demand for  high strength aluminum alloy forgings ten years ago was for engine parts, but aircraft makers have become increasingly interested. Large sections are wanted, the chief challenge being providing a flat forging area. With the 12,000t press available to High Duty, the largest practical forged piece was 600 square inches. A paper on integral forming followed, and then one on high-speed machine tools for aircraft production. "Integral" forming is vexed by the fact that no-one can agree on what it takes for a piece to be integral. Many clever things have been done with template-controlled high speed tools at Wadkin of Leicester, and they have finally mastered the sawing of honeycomb pieces, allowing practice to catch up with theory as you  might recall the failure of honeycomb boards in either the 2.0.2 or ConvairLiner back in the day.  

"Mountain Waves: Theory and Practice" Scientists and gliders had a meeting to talk about glider pilots dying less when flying over mountains, which doesn't seem high on glider pilots' list of priorities, but what does Ronnie know?

Correspondence

M. G. K. Byrne recalls that the HP 88 was the first actual British jet plane with a slab tail. J.O.N. thinks that the British industry needs to be more modest and shut up when Miles Thomas says he has to buy an American plane now and not a British plane in two years. Hugo Hoopman recalls the old days, before the war (J. D. Rawling, below, is on about similar), and ties it back to the SeaMaster. D. B. Parkinson and D. W. Sutherland agree that the letter to Flight calling for the elimination of windows from the supersonic airliners of the future was stupid. 

The Industry reports "the largest photo-electric controlled door opening mechanism in the world," from Radiovisor Patent, for Vauxhall, to keep out dust. 

Civil Aviation reports that BOAC is cutting two weekly Stratocruiser services to New York because of lack of aircraft. American wants a medium-range turboprop bigger than the Viscount by 1957/8. Douglas has 117 DC-7s delivered or ordered and the momentum is unstoppable. Pst, anyone want an Atlantic airliner, cheap? Like, cheap cheap? BEA has had its best year ever, and the Greek national airline is a great big money pit and Athens has promised to look into it in return for parliament voting it some more  money.                                                                                                                                                                               The Economist, 12 February 1955

Leaders

Big news gets big coverage and Malenkov's fall only gets two-and-a-half pages because there's not much to say except that it was engineered by Khrushchev, who is such an unlikely Soviet leader that it is hard to believe that there won't be further changes in the next few weeks as Khrushchev consolidates his faction's grip on power, reasserting "Stalinist orthodoxy" after Malenkov's thaw and the turn away from consumer goods production. Speaking of which, Clement Attlee sure is acting like some kind of leader of the left even though his main job should be to prevent the party from swinging left in foreign policy once it is defeated in the next general election and relegated to another five years in opposition. (It says here. On the bright side, he doesn't seem to be opposed to atomic bombs.) Mendes-France is on his way out, so for some reason we have to worry about Italy again. And about the plight of modern secondary schools that aren't grammar or technical schools, because one of their students got in the papers for saying that it was "just" a school.

Notes of the Week notices that there still isn't a ceasefire in the Formosa Strait, but the chances of not having a world war over it are growing and at some point there should probably be a conference over it, but not now. There is not to be a railway inquiry, and Pinay's failure to organise a cabinet means that France is without a government again even though the "critical situation in North Africa urgently requires one." Pakistan is officially becoming a republic, The Economist hopes that it won't make much of a difference. The Government will introduce a Clean Air Act in this session. The Economist worries that it will be well-intended but hard to implement. It is willing to call the platform of the Kenyan settlers' United Country Party to be effectively apartheid. The Poles are purging some police and scolding others, which is a good sign. The Communist vote against Mendes-France that brought his government down was inspired by their fear of German rearmament, but is bad news for Africa, where Mendes-France was seen as "the only Frenchman capable of taking action to promote the kind of French African in which they wish to live." Algerian nationalists are consequentially very upset with the Communists. The International Labour Organisation is divided by the potential Russian return to the organisation. The Economist grudgingly agrees with the threatened strike at London Airport because BEA's behaviour has been so provocative. The refugee situation in Indo-China deserves a mention. It looks like there might be a compromise settlement in the Copper Belt. 

Letters

J. Grimonds writes from the Commons that "[i]f the nation wants to take over the ownership of the railways it should take the risks (and benefits) of ownership." The Branded Textiles Group writes to explain why it is attacking Standards. It's because of free enterprise. T. G. Stobie thinks that instead of supporting British agriculture we should have a few model farms in case we have to do it again someday. Lyndon Jones of London writes to point out that cotton is always complaining. Rolf Gardener writes from Shropshire to explain that the problem with Africa is that we've let the Africans get swollen heads, and the solution is apartheid, but only so as to preserve the precious fertility of the soil, you see. 

Books 

Hubert Douglas Henderson's The Interwar Years and Other Papers gets the lead review because Hubert Henderson is a leading economist, so his views about this and that are of enormous and lasting importance, well worth extracting from a Nation Leader here and an address to "Section F of the British Association" there. Isaiah Berlin's Historical Inevitability is . . .I have to stop now and remind myself that Isaiah Berlin is the great philosopher and Irving Berlin is the great songwriter, and they are different people, even though they both might be accused of being famous for the sake of being famous if you are cool to the one's music and the other's thoughts about Soviet Russia. Berlin (Isaiah) seems to be working himself up into some real books, which will be much more welcome to me than another version of White Christmas. Colm Brogan's The Educational Revolution establishes that Brogan is like that beloved uncle who is opinionated, blimpish, sometimes unexpectedly wise, and to be taken in small doses in case he turns from amusing to exasperating. Not that I know anyone like that! Koppel S. Pinson noticed that there weren't enough histories of modern Germany around, and has written one that you should definitely read if you've already read all the others, as among other things you will spot the mistakes. A. C. Ward has edited the Illustrated History of English Literature, volume II, which makes it from Ben Jonson to Samuel Johnson, so I see this is going to take a while, but the reviewer is content for Ward to dawdle along. Derek Wragge Morley's The Evolution of an Insect Society offers some useful perspective on the rest of the issue by sticking to wood ants, which are fascinating. F. S. C. Northrop's European Union and United states Foreign Policy is a very worthy book. DeSoutter's All About Aircraft, Somervell's History of the United States, 2nd Edition, and R. F. Butler's History of the Kirkstall Forge are worthy of shorter notices that establish that even a layman's introduction to aviation is exhausting, that Somervell is fascinating even when he is silly, and that the Kirkstall Forge's history is pretty much the history of England in hammered steel.

American Survey

"Narrowing the Far Eastern Gap" The Economist deduces that the main concern over the Formosa Straits is, of coure, British-American relations, since the American commitment to the Koumintang is so obviously reasonable and uncontroversial. The House has voted to extend Selective Service for a further four years, 394--4. The President's position is that the Army has to be cut by 140,000 men, to 1.027 million, which has General Ridgeway disagreeing in public. Fortunately, while Admiral Radford also disagrees with the President, he wants to use atom bombs on Communism, not bullets, and obviously the way a President controls his Chiefs of Staff is with divide-and-conquer tactics. Harvey Matusow, former star anti-Communist witness and former member of Senator McCarthy's staff, has a memoir out asserting that he gave false testimony in many cases and was even coached to lie on the stand by Roy Cohn and fed spurious information by the Senator, that he had been paid well for the work, and had broken with his old employment because he thought the book would pay better. He specifically admits to having lied about Owen Lattimore, which means that he may be called to testify when the Justice Department tries to get charges against Lattimore reinstated again in a few months. Chief Justice Warren seems amenable to the Congressional idea that the Chief Justice should submit an annual report on the state of the federal judiciary, which leaves some supposing that he has Presidential ambitions. The Economist has a look at banking way out west California way. Congressional investigations into stock market fluctuations and price support mechanisms, chaired by senator Fulbright and Representative Celler are coming, and the magazine doesn't know what to think about that. Union welfare funds are also overdue for investigation, speaking of which, here's a look at the way that the Texas Railroad Commission uses its power to control Texas petroleum production to stabilise prices at the expense of Texas pumping less oil than it could. 

 

The World Overseas

Mendes-France's fall is big enough news to require 1 1/3 pages even if there isn't much to say. Japanese politics is a bit of a mess right now, with Hatoyama denying being a practicing Christian after his visit to the Grand Shrine at Ise to report his accession to the premiership to Amaterasu, which has the Socialists up in arms, even though they don't support arms in general.  The final published version of the Soviet budget shows that while arms spending has increased, it is still lower than it has often been as a proportion of budget spending and that even though investment in  heavy industry has been boosted, spending on consumer industries remains important. South Africa's Bantu Education Act is terrible because, while it was necessary to take African education away from the churches, who couldn't afford to do it properly, the substance of the Bill is more apartheid, because the churches were teaching Africans that equality was possible, and now the state school-run schools will tell them it is not. In the wake of the failed Costa Rican counter-revolution, it is supposed that the United States' intervention on the side of a liberal regime will damage its position with other Latin American regimes that supported the invasion, whether the OAS will lay blame at their feet or not. Something incomprehensibly tedious about Gatt and the ECSC follows. 

The Business World

A single Leader this week to consolidate thoughts about the plan for investing in rails and roads, which a recent Royal Commission report said, have had no net investment since 1939. 

Business Notes

Finances, the budget surplus (falling, but still good), more on the unexpected increase in the labour force, with a revised upwards estimate of 290,000 people, the sale of Rio Tinto to a Spanish group, the opening of a trial Woolworth's self-service shop, English Electric's bid for the Vulcan Foundry, part of "the redeployment of British industry to make diesel locomotives, the NRDC's difficulty in finding inventions that were actually languishing, which was its original purpose, and its success in commercialising government and "semi-official research organisation" inventions. Also, finance, money, and such, including an explainer on the recent decline in the value of the Canadian dollar. 

                                                                                                                                                                

Flight, 11 February 1955

Leaders

"Lebensraum" London Airport sure is big, but that doesn't mean that London doesn't need more airports. Flight recommends that we don't close Croydon, as planned, in 1960, in case we  need it later.  

From All Quarters reports that Boxer and Midway have joined the Seventh Fleet and that there has been one dogfight between F-86s escorting a B-45 and MiG-15s so far. Handel Davies is the new Air Ministry Scientific Advisor. Woodrow Wyatt (Lab., Aston), was on the Secretary of State for Air on the Hunter's tendency to stall when its guns are fired. The Minister only acknowledged engine surge at certain altitudes and said that the Hunter was operational. Wilson followed up by asking whether the Hunter's intended air-to-air missile armament was delayed and inadequate, and whether it was in fact true that Britain had no air defence now that AA Command had been disbanded, etc, etc. Vancouver-born H. G. Conway has joined the board of Short Brothers. The Swedish Navy has bought a Decca Navigator chain for the area around Stockholm.  A. D. Baxter gave a talk on rockets to the R.Ae.S. this week in which he couldn't actually say anything because of secrecy, so instead he  just summarised recent work on propellants, control, mechanics, and flight performance. 

"Abode of the Gods: Seeing Is Believing At Bristol's Engine Division" On the occasion of the 150 hour type testing of the Olympus 101, it is time to reacquaint ourselves with the work going on down there. First of all, the Olympus is a very hefty engine. Second, the works will be able to put 16 Proteus engines through a month and can produce more if foreign orders eventuate. Also, the Proteus is so good it is actually another engine from the original Proteus of 1949. It has a specific fuel consumption of 0.464 at 400mph and 30,000ft, and that's pretty good for economy, especially since it burns kerosene instead of avgas, and range, too.  It is light enough to go into the Super Constellation but not the DC7, and incidentally Bristol has recently shaved 600lbs off the Britannia, for example with titanium firewalls. 

Here and There reports that the order grounding the F-100 will soon be lifted after the rudder reduction is completed. New Zealand will see its first helicopter in operational this week, which I find amazing. Surely it's not that backward?

"Integrated Flight System: Collins Two-Instrument System for Radio Navigation and I.L.S. Approach"   It's two cockpit dial with three needles and a float levelIt has several gyros, and can direct the Collins autopilot. It has lots of competitors, but do you see them buying advertorial space in Flight? No!

Constance continues to make her presence known with another Bristol advertorial, this one about the plastic drop tanks being made at Filton. 

"South African Airways: An Outline History of the Union's 21-year-old Airline" I'd summarise this but I have Coloured ancestry, so I'm not allowed. I am allowed to talk about the review of Episode 13 of War in the Air that shares half a page with the "Outline." It's about the War in the Pacific, which gets a kinder although still nitpicking review. A two page pictorial about Britannia assembly follows. Another follows shortly covering air survey companies looking for oil in Canada. 

Aircraft Intelligence reports that the Folland Gnat is being modified for carrier trials, RAF radomes are getting various striking colour finishes. One of the three prototype McDonnell F-101A Voodoos flew straight there from St. Louis with a B-47 guide plane, while the other two were shipped. 

 "High-Altitude Transport Problems" Boeing engineers gave two papers on the subject to the IAS Annual Meeting. One investigated proposed criteria for design fatigue life, while the other covered miscellaneous design safety considerations like engine fires, landing distances, and ditchings. 

The Aeronautical Bookshelf gets almost a full page to cover John Field's Aerial Propaganda Leaflets, Philip Morgan (ed.), Glass Reinforced Plastics, Proceedings of the Toronto Meteorological Proceedings, H. Delon, Limits of Liabilities in International Air Law, and Arthur Judge, The Testing of High Speed Internal Combustion Engines (4th Ed.) 

Civil Aviation reports that the "new" Comet 2 will be just as economical as the old, will have 1200lb of structural reinforcement in the cabin, 1200lb more takeoff power for better runway performance, and better fuel venting. Rotorfilms is a new British helicopter firm for aerial filming, Vickers is expanding Viscount production, regular air service between Moscow and Tirana has started, and Princess Margaret has been flown to Trinidad, where she can't get into any trouble. Bell's new VTOL is "The U.S. aviation industry's answer to the British flying bedstead." I am  having trouble seeing that, but they are making it in Buffalo, which is a very sad town nowadays and needs what it can get. (Bell is also working on one of those tilting rotor schemes in Texas, which  has been getting more publicity.) 

Correspondence

J. W. R. Taylor, J. O. Keeping, and M. F. A. recall the old days, before the war. E. P. Beer proposes an empirical electrical resistivity test for structure fatigue in situ, which the editor doubts will be able to get a large enough sample size to be useful. 

The Industry reports that KLG's new torch igniter for jet combustion chambers is the best yet. 

Fortune's Wheel tells us what was in the 1930 issue, a good mix of stuff that seems contemporary (an article about new methods of  making glass), old-fashioned (a survey leading private islands off America), and both at the same time, with someone being disgruntled about all the things that came in billions these days, like the $28 billion loss on the NYSE the previous year. This week's cover picture is the Fairmeadows subdivision outside Palo Alto. 

Letters

The Secretary of Defence is pleased with the recent profile of the Secretary of Defence. Neil McElroy of Proctor & Gamble is not pleased with his profile. Frank Healey of Bing Crosby Enterprises points out that it was Bing Crosby Enterprises, and not RCA, that first put pictures on magnetic tape. Bruce Smith of the Institute of Public Administration in New York points out that maybe crime is increasing in America but we can't tell because not all administrations are reporting so Fortune shouldn't be so critical of FBI fearmongering. Mrs. Philip Rabinowitz wants more articles about executive's wives. Louis Wolfson points out that he has no intention of calling Sean Avery a Communist, but it is a fact that he is objectively a Communist by virtue of talking up depressions. Dallas Hurd of GE points out that the people who worry about how there's no inventors any more are just grumbling. Stuart Adams writes to point out that while the Air Force reported research into the social origins of Air Force contractors, it did not pay for the research, which was funded by the report author, Stuart Adams, with the assistance of a small grant from The Ohio State University Development Fund.

Heighten the Contradictions!

Business Roundup reports that the economy took a little rest break over the last two months, but everything is fine. Inventories aren't growing, key indicators are looking up, and everyone's policy is just right and incomes continue to grow, as they grew even in the business "recession," as Fortune calls it. 

  In particular, there are no concerns about inflation except the risk of excessive wage settlements due to a tight labour market. 

Business Notes From Abroad reports that it has doubts about Nehru's approach to the Indian economy although it is understandable. France is the sick man of Europe, while Germany is the annoying neighbour that is up every morning at 5am for brisk calisthenics in the street followed by a cross-country run. Germany no longer needs to import capital, and can borrow on foreign markets in marks and repay in dollars, part of a general trend of erasing the dollar gap. 

Editorials

The lead Editorial proposes that what the world needs now is a gentle deflation, full international convertibility, and an end to inflationary "flexible monetary policy." 3% Treasuries are always a good thing! Editorial Notes makes fun of the Lead Pencil Manufacturers' Association plea for protective tariffs, commiserates with car dealers over the tragic necessity of hoodwinking buyers, and complains that exempting Federal highway bonds from the Federal debt ceiling is bad accounting.

So you might recall that away back in the spring of 1953, the incoming Administration was solicitous of the deep thinkers of the business world who proposed that what the country needed now was sound money. Credit was tightened, and we moved into a recession. Now that we have recovered from the recession, the deep thinkers have resumed their calls for sound money, and it looks like the Treasury Department is listening. Have lessons been learned? They have! Gilbert Burck and Charles Silberman propose to explain "What Caused the Great Depression" without being unorthodox, and so they emphasise the role of declining effective demand. Income growth is concentrated in the upper income groups, population increase slows, inflation of real estate prices throttles the housing market. But t would all have been a mere recession had it not been for the stock market speculative bubble, so the real explanation turns out to be easy money. A follow-up article tries to discern the common denominators amongst the Depression generation of 25-year-olds. It turns out that they're optimistic.

Charles Taft offers a pretty vacuous look at what 1980 might look like. He's worried that businessmen will ignore politics, resulting in Americans not getting the middle-of-the-road government they so desire, and in fact possibly giving way to creeping socialism. After that, "The Cadillac Phenomenon," an article about the life insurance industry's difficulties finding good investment opportunities, and the movie industry's return to profitability. Look out for Oklahoma to prove that the Todd A.O. projection system can give Cinerama effects on a single-camera budget.)  

Edmund L. Van Deusen, "Better Alloys on the Way" B-52s can land because their landing gear struts can take unprecedented loads. They can do that because they are made of novel metals, but not titanium, magnesium, beryllium, or other modern miracle metals, but rather just iron alloyed with the same old chromium, nickel, carbon, and so on. Even the new heat treatments aren't that new. What's going on? Science! Vacuum melting has caught on, making the steel composition more exactly predictable. Ductile iron (cast iron with magnesium alloyed) is becoming more prominent, with 100,000t produced in 1954. Some of this so far, and more later, is due to modern work on the theory of materials that emphasises understanding metal crystallisation in terms of those electron shells that make things so complicated that you'll regret asking James to explain almost as much as when you ask me the difference between "Sein" and "Dasein." (Math, German, it's all the same.)  Low-alloy steels simply use small amounts of strategic chromium, nickel, and so on, to modify the iron-carbon relationship and make it possible to forge and heat treat bigger pieces than were previously possible. Higher alloy exotic steels and ones with non-traditional alloys like silicon have different electrical properties, and that's where the magic of quantum physics comes in if we are ever to design the steels we use in, yes, electronics. This is where the article peters out, the big graphic doing much of the work, but there's a box on titanium that explains why we don't have titanium aerocars yet even though someone promised. It's hard to work with, is the explanation.

It's not that it's huge and ostentatious. It's that it's huge and ostentatious
 and overlooks the Hudson at the Tappan Zee.

The Rockefeller brothers, who get a feature, illustrate the advantages of the American aristocracy, who can marry pretty girls instead of heiresses. 

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