Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
You will perhaps notice the lack of a 16 August Time. A funny story about that --but I don't care to tell it, because, well, Ronnie and I --I know everyone disapproves, but. . .
Fortune's August, 1948 article on working in August, which couldn't have been written in August, but might have been inspired by a June heatwave, because the writer and the staff artists threw their heart into it. The results are still a pretty inconsequential story. As far as it is about anything, it is, perhaps, a mild recommendation to not be so liberal with the salt pills. (Remember salt pills?) Or, it is an impressionistic account of air conditioning's ongoing penetration of American life.
That said, looking back from 2018, it is a reminder that, seventy years ago, they sometimes had to close factories and even offices because it was too hot to work. Distant times! The same issue carries Ala'i's tone-deaf efforts condeming Iran's ongoing dam projects for diverting the "one-tenth" of Iranian agricultural labourers who were healthy enough to work, and the ongoing "Deutschmark miracle," in which the miraculous recovery of the German economy somehow happens around and behind the miraculous recovery of German agriculture, which provided the key ingredients for a steady rise in the average German caloric intake in the summer of 1948.
Taken together, "laziness" is a great explanation for low productivity if you're using your monopsonic power as an employer to deny your labour force enough food. The coal crisis tended to bring European economies face to face with the limits of this logic. I'm not sure that other people took it on board, and that particularly applies to the United States.
This is important because, through the Marshall Plan, Americans were in a strong position to dictate terms of aid; and the idea that European socialists were lazy was ubiquitous. It would also be irrelevant, since the class of American business leaders who could be found to express opinions about these things seems to have overlapped fairly strongly with the class of American business leaders who were underemployed due to their extrusion from actual management duties. It is not irrelevant because the theme was taken on board by British thought leaders. The echoes of the theme of perennial low British productivity have been heard on this blog before, but with the formation of the Anglo-American Council of Productivity, they become the story of the day, and invite some investigation.
Well, here we are, back in the good old Western Hemisphere. Or as close to it as Arcata comes. What a strange little town. At least I am doing something useful. As predicted, we ended up installing Bill and Dave's little bit of electronics in a Catalina amphibian. It may not be the most likely plane for the job, but it can land on an airfield, and it has room for the contraption, and for someone to do whatever the heck it is we're doing with it. Distracting me, it seems. But here I am, with a summer job to do with the Navy, and the airlines are in charge of testing out the landing lights. They're in the pocket of "Big Lightbulb," they say, leaving me in the hands of "Big Electronics." The Navy is set on the notion that radar and autopilots and such are the key to better landings, without autolanding. The Air Force's recent embarrassment with their robot C-54 letting down the gear and settling in for the landing, still 70ft above tarmac at Los Angeles, underlines some peoples' claims that you have to have the human decision maker "in the loop."
Please don't get the idea that I'm taking a position, here. The Brits are pretty sure that autolanding is the way to go, but I can also see the arguments against it. It is pretty hard to see how it could work for a busy airport, because it imposes a five minute delay between landings. Even if you can get that down, you would be doing it with more, expensive machinery, and there are thousands of airports in America. On the other hand again, there's an article about a robot television factory in this issue of Fortune that just blows my mind. Maybe we will all be put out of work by robots next week.
I handed your package off to Uncle George in San Francisco on the weekend when I was down state visiting Ronnie and the gang and concentrating on not smacking Miss K.'s boyfriend in the face. Well, ex-boyfriend, now, as pretty much everything everyone predicted, happened. Her mother knows, but they're keeping Dad in the dark.
As for Uncle George, he groused, but agreed that it has to be done. He did draw the line at flying, however, and has booked passage for Nagasaki in September, then on to Davao. We should have something by Thanksgiving --real Thanksgiving, not American.
For reasons having to do with layout and marketing, customers have difficulty finding the "breakfast aisle" at the store at which I usually work. The particular arrangement means that this aisle, adjacent to the bakery at one end of an irregular lozenge, actually contains pancake mix, pancake syrup, diabetic candy (no, I don't know, either), and pretty much every kind of spread. But as far as it goes, when I am working in the high traffic central aisles, I might as well wear a t-shirt that reads, "The peanut butter is in Aisle 13." No other item is so often sought for, and so hard to discover. I have no idea what that says, but I do know that the 3 August, 1948 Engineering covered the same talk on the theme of "How We Are Overcoming the Unexpected Difficulties of the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme" as did The Engineer, along with several other subjects that, it seems to me, deepen and enrich our understanding of the absolutely bonkers issue of Fortune that I cannot talk about this week for the usual reasons of schedules-altered-on-the-fly. (And, to be fair, my failure to think through the implications of a day-to-night swing that has essentially cost me a weekend day this week, and given me an extra one next week.)
I hope I'm building up anticipation for the August, 1940 issue of Fortune. Bonkers. I promise you. In the mean time, this is pretty much a peanut-butter-and-jelly technological appendix, except it comes before the subject.
It's also a little timely, given that I am talking about the Tanganyika Groundnuts Scheme, which we're going to need in the next few years as the Tanzania Biofuels Scheme, if we're serious about long term survival as a species.
(Since this happened seven years ago, somehow, a link.)
I was thinking about doing an appendix on the vocoder, which turns out to be a very important technology, but that would be hard, and blind landings and runway lighting are considerably more pressing. I usually date electronica's invasion of popular music to the Beach Boys, and while I'm sure I'll turn out to be completely wrong about that, it sure hasn't happened by 1948!
So that's the original California Gurl covering Rebecca Black's ironically-enjoyed autotune hit from 2011 as a way of seguing to Arcata, California, the home of the American blind landing. More or less.
Well! Don't let me tell you that I am not cross with you! Instead of being off in the Lincoln to Arcata, I am sitting here in a rented Cadillac, Wong Lee keeping me safe, waiting for Fat Chow to escort Grace out of the terminal. Don't get me wrong! I'm glad to have Grace and James home and safe! My heart was in my mouth for the entire time they were in Hong Kong. I guess I should admit that I was wrong about Mssrs. Wu and Kwan. Now if only we can make good on the bullion.
I left myself some space so I could finish this letter, which, as you know, did not get off until we had seen James and Grace off to Santa Clara the next afternoon. That left me time to talk to Reggie on the phone. Except for a bit of heat over politics, I'll draw a veil over that, except to say that he is full of enthusiasm for the latest British developments in blind landing, and can't wait to pester his CO about it. I don't suppose it is news that he thinks that Arcata is wasting its time fiddling with lamps when it could be fiddling with cockpit radar --even if he admits that he can't figure out a way of using it.
Bill and David stopped by the apartment immediately that Miss K. left to be with her beau, so that I could pass on your package. I was very carefully not curious at all, although I couldn't help noticing that there is a story in Engineering about the little gadget I carried from London in my luggage. I have a feeling that it doesn't explain what makes it so important to Bill and David!
Also, received yours of last week, no longer cross. Thank you! No just don't read this letter, change your mind, and send my application in to Hastings College, instead. (Sorry, joke. All will be understood if you read every word to the end, but since when do you do that?)
So here's a technical appendix that looks at radar developments, and a particularly significant aircraft development delay due to problems with the "avionics," as we say now.
It will also not escape attention that it is a "Zombie Day" post, as I've already mentioned. It's because of overtime. On the bright side, my boss has decided to burn three of my accumulated paid days off leading into my holiday at the end of next week, so expect a bit more activity around here in the near future.
Three years ago, the RAF spent its nights over Berlin in a perverse attempt to hasten an age of peace and love with a wild spasm of violence. This year, seventy years past, they are bombing it with candy. Okay, their ally is: I wanted to work the Candy Bomber and the night offensive into the same paragraph, and it was hard. Also, radar.
In our long, rear-view mirror interpretation of the beginning of the Cold War, stories tend to be shaped to fit. In the final version of the story of the English Electric Canberra
the main stories are Britain's "exhaustion" after WWII, and the Cold War alliance of the NATO powers, which obviously started with the Cold War, which began . . . when it did. Iron Curtain Speech? Berlin? Korea? Let's just say, given that the Cold War is a metaphor, that it can begin when I say it does, and this month, I say it starts with the Berlin Airlift.
Neatly folded into the story is the production triumph of the Canberra. Nine hundred were built in the United Kingdom for the RAF and the RAAF, and an additional 400 at the Martin works in Baltimore, Maryland as the B-57, which is quite an extraordinary thing to happen. The military-industrial complex frowns on producing foreign weapon systems, and for fairly good reasons.
Since the Canberra had a somewhat late and troubled service entry, a model narrative has Britain "broke," and the United States paying for it, because the Cold War might get hot, in which case the RAF would have to do its part in stopping the Soviet steamroller from reaching the Channel in 48 hours, or whatever.
