Philco, Roger: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, April 1955

 

Not to be indelicate, but what the fuck happened? 

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. 

Phil Silvers, not Sergeant Bilko

By GPS 56 from New Zealand - 1959 edsel, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38624467

I have mentioned, but it will bear repeating, that in the 25 April issue of Newsweek, the layout guy chose to illustrate the first story I have seen about Ford's decision to open a new division, which eventually became Edsel, with a picture of a Convair F-102 Delta Dagger. The Edsel is a legendary symbol of American incompetence. 

Hunh. I could have sworn that scene was from Back to the Future. Peggy Sue Got Married didn't even occur to me. Someone call a feminist theorist! 

The F-102 isn't. But remember the summer of 1953, the competing speed records set by the prototype Swift and Hunter, and the British decision to bow out of the competition when the F-100 set its own, on the grounds that the first flight of an American fighter designed for supersonic performance would create an unbridgeable performance gap that would last until the still top-secret Fairey Delta arrived. The prototype F-102's failure to achieve anything like its projected performance didn't precipitate national soul searching or even snide jokes. Instead, we usually hear about how the "area rule" heuristic saved the performance of an aircraft that served through Vietnam, the F-102A. Nor do we hear about the way the the failure of its Hughes fire control system finally buried Howard Hughes' reputation as an inventor/entrepreneur, and might, in other circumstances, killed the narrative of the inventor hero a long time before --well, turns out we're still waiting, or even the failure of the engine specified by the USAF, the failed Wright licensed version of the Olympus. We don't even hear about its weapon, the Strangelovian AR-2 GENIE rocket.

The story of Wright's generalised collapse into uselessness is a bit less mysterious after the SAE meeting reported in Aviation Week in which American engineers finally conceded that, in comparison to the French and British, American toolrooms didn't know what they were doing. Thank you. Is the Audit of War debate still on? Because I have more receipts. But here's another one. Rather than dig up the Aviation Week pictures I've already posted (I'm travelling on yet another summer vacation/family occasion, the marriage of my youngest nephew, L., later this afternoon) I'm just going to borrow from Wikipedia. 

The Philco TRANSAC line, which included a business computer (the S-2000), a special-purpose contract order for the NSA, the SOLO/TRANSAC-1000, and a series of aircraft computers. TRANSAC utilised the in-house Philco invention of the surface-barrier transistor and a novel architecture. Concerned that there were no other sources to reconstruct this history, Saul Rosen of the Department of Computer Science at Purdue, published a personal memoir through the department's technical reports series in 1991 that might be the most comprehensive account of Philco's work, with all of its self-acknowledged limitations as history. From the dates this was probably posthumous. Rosen was recruited away from Burroughs in 1957/8, in other words, in the midst of Eisenhower's second and more serious recession. Burroughs was fading away, and Rosen receptive to an offer of $13,000/year, a chance to stay in Philadephia rather than move to Silicon Valley, and a chance to use connections to recruit from Mauchly's attriting group. He left two years later in frustration at the paucity of resources committed to the project, which led to IBM winning the Air Force's ballistic missile warning system requirement with its 7090, because the Air Force had more faith in IBM's ability to materialise vapourware than Philco's. Philco was then taken over by Ford, for whom it already made car radios, and the computer line was euthanised two years later. 

To perhaps put some flesh on the bones of the discussion, Rosen refers briefly and obscurely to a two-month period in the winter of 1959 when his team was living in a cold motel in Shenectady so that they could do software implementation on the one existing TRANSAC-2000, which had been sold to the Naval Reactor Board with buggy programming and a nonfunctional FORTRAN compiler, which Rosen's team had to develop on night shifts while the computer was not in use. Rosen records a two-hour conversation from California talking down the father of one of his programmers, who felt that his daughter was "on the verge of a nervous breakdown."

So. This doesn't sound like a company that deserved to live, and the same can be said for Hughes Aircraft. One doesn't have the same fingertip feel for Curtiss-Wright or the much-autopsied Edsel Division, but a generalised picture of if we were going to generalise, this sounds like a whole lot of incompetence. 

I dunno. Alcohol? PTSD from the war? Complacency? I suspect that I'm on the wrong track looking for social or psychological factors. The engine story is evidently an underskilling one, and Rosen does emphasise personal issues. News Digest for Aviation Week on the 25th notes the death of Frank Halford at 61 and a twenty-nine-year-old engineer at Grummans. These are anecdotes rather than data, but cardiovascular and cancer-related health issues are both known to have been spiking in the period. Maybe it is alcohol. (And tobacco.)  

That eyeballs out as a trend. (The U.S. 2024 death rate due to cardiovascular causese is 19.93 per 100,000.) It's often said that Britain was "exhausted" after WWII. Maybe this is a picture of an exhausted country. 

Or maybe that's a 61 year old with a strenuous job projecting. Whatever. I'm on vacation!