A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1954, II: Just You Wait

 

Surely I'm not the only person who hears "[Henry] Wiggin Works" and thinks of My Fair Lady, the 1964 film adaptation of the 1956 Broadway musical based on the 1913 George Bernard Shaw play. I don't even watch musicals, but that particular song, like the dreadful menace of Cobalt-60 Doomsday bombs, from another movie I've never seen, is, well, I guess that's why it's called popular culture. 

You know what's not popular culture? The Wiggin Works, and, for that matter, Nimonic, and Nineteenth Century businessman and Liberal Unionist Henry Wiggin, and finally, the actual operator of the works, Mond Nickel, which probably merged with Inco at some more recent  point. The trademarks for "Nimonic" and other nickel alloys like Brightray, and Inconel, are now held by Special Metals Corporation, and various grades of Nimonic continue to be used in aircraft engines among other specialty applications. I see no evidence that it is used in nuclear reactor fuel slugs these days, although Cobalt-60 continues to be produced in trace quantities by the nuclear transmutation of Fe-58 in steel components into Cobalt-59 and hence Cobalt-60. (I did not know that!)  There's a Wiki page on the cobalt bomb, but it doesn't really get into the isotope as a signifier of universal nuclear destruction, upon which subject I am sure I have seen websites if not scholarly articles over the years. 

Not that any of this really matters. I want to talk about the British steel industry today. It just happens that special alloy steels are an important part of that story. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1954: Gormenghast

 

Just kidding. Today I'm talking about the pioneering nuclear power plant, Calder Hall, not Mervyn Peake's weird 1950 novel about a giant estate that's a country sort-of-thing. (I'd offer a more insightful summary if I'd ever been able to get into the darn thing. Anyway, here's one of Eleanor Morton's bits. The Mervyn Peake reference is a running gag at the end.) I'm just making a witty (YMMV, as the kids say) literary reference. Somewhat surprisingly I find that I'm the first to do it, maybe because all that "Second Elizabethan Age" stuff is down the memory hole. (Hah! Witty literary reference!) 

Calder Hall actually gets its  debut in the 4 June 1954 issue of The Engineer, exactly a month before the Cabinet reluctantly agreed to go ahead with the British hydrogen bomb, in a not-at-all coincidental development. But we don't cover the first two weeks of the month at The Engineer, so we missed it, and also the ominous foreshadowing that is a picture of a Ruston gas turbine set up to burn methane. "The purpose of the demonstration is to show that natural gas, which is available in almost unlimited quantities on many oilfields, can be burnt with the same efficiency and controls as liquid fuels."

Postblogging Technology, June 1954, II: We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us

R_C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

And that's the end of my month. If I may dwell on the political for a moment (Moi? Never!), this really is Pierre Mendes France's moment, and I cannot help a smile on my face and a lift to my feet, even more than when the Capital deal went through. (We'll leave aside the question of whether they can pay for their planes.) He has a vision for Europe, and he is going to close out the Tunisian and Moroccan adventures as well as Indo China. Newsweek seems to have capitulated to him, describing him as a Dewey Republican or such. I hope he'll have a chance to apply his vision to France, although the times are running against his economics, with the Anglo Saxons catching up with the Fourth Republic's Government-by-rentiers. On the other hand, Ike seems too sick to run in '56, which means that Stevenson will have a good chance, and we might see the back of the odious Dulles brothers. (Not that the prospect of seeing McCarthy and Allen Dulles tussling doesn't do my heart good.) James is predictably disappointed that there aren't more signs of the party rallying to Kefauver, but I will take what I can get. 

On the other hand, London is a bit giddy right now, so maybe I'm just being infected by the optimistic mood. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, June 1954, I: Wandering

The soundtrack of my childhood has some odd entries

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

You can hardly miss the story of my labours  in the press this month. You will hear about James soon, long since hijacked from the propagation of sound underwater to the propagation of cracks through thin aluminum alloy shells at some point soon. You have pictures of your grandchildren, sent through the regular mail, and I'm not going to repeat the anecdotes in the accompanying letter here. Suffice it to say that we are still "happy wanderers" in the streets of London, and that I'm growing hoarse singing the chorus with James-James doing the saxophone bits. It is not very serious, but it is a distraction from export credits and controlled currency exchanges!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging, May 1954: Transatlantic Conversation, Hurrah!

 

This is actually going back a bit, but Mossad has done a naughty telephone thing this week, and while Teleanswerphone was operating a pager system in New York in 1954, we're still six years away from the Motorola transistorised pager that made the technology ubiquitous. It's not interesting or significant, so how do I jump on that bandwagon? With something momentous that is also happening this spring, which is TAT-1, the first coaxial transatlantic telephone cable, which I've admittedly talked about around here in connection with the first announcement last December. I believe I've noticed the cablelaying vessel Monarch and also the technical details of the cable involved, and, no, I'm not going to hit my head on the Blogspot search function to find the entry, even if it is good for the blog's statistics. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1954: Project Tinkertoy

 

Scraped from an ad: https://snapklik.com/en-ca/product/tinkertoy-30-model-200-piece-super-building-set-preschool-learning-educational-toy-
for-girls-and-boys-3/05DL4PL73XTV5

I've been assiduously avoiding talking about "Project Tinkertoy" since the Bureau of Standards/Industrial Planning Division, USN/Kaiser Electronics Division, Wilys Motor Company pilot factory in Arlington, Virginia, hit the news, well before September of 1953, where Blogspot search turns up my earliest reference to it.  The thing is that Project Tinkertoy's press people are most impressed by the ceramic wafers that the Project Tinkertoy modular components are mounted on, and that is the part of the technology that most obviously has no future. Integrated circuits most definitely do, but that's a story that doesn't really get going until 1957, and apparently we're still one cycle of abortive precursors away from that, with the Army's 1957 Micromodule programme. On the other hand, the actual technology of the integrated circuit has a prehistory which is not well integrated into that of the various abortive precursors. So I'm going to take a rainy laundry day Saturday to look at that!

Postblogging Technology, May 1954, II: Four Minute Mile

R_. C._,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

We are finally caught up with the news from the Empire Games. Roger Bannister has run a four minute mile! Do you realise that he ran the last quarter, some 400 yards, in 56 seconds? 10 seconds is a good sprint time for 100 meters! It tires me out just thinking about it. And while British sportsmen do the country proud, John Foster Dulles keeps up the American side in Geneva by showing how to stick your head where the sun doesn't shine! I understand that he is trying to avoid having America take over from France in the role of "hapless colonial master getting beaten up by the Viet Minh," but I don't think that it is working. At least his efforts in the Middle East seem to be bearing fruit. At least so I think. But what do I know? Apart from that Capital Airlines is going to buy 60(!) Viscounts. I wish I got a commission instead of a paycheque!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie