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.
By way of housekeeping, borrowing services are now being suspended mid-semester, if you are lazy and dumb and miss overdue notices because they are sent to the Google Mail account you give marketers, and which is therefore soul-crushing to even check. And so there will be no Engineer until at least January. Last week was Thanksgiving, a great Canadian food holiday, and my stat holidays were carried over to next week, when I have a four-day weekend, followed by a vacation the next week, so that's when I plan to do my postblogging. Be there or be square! You wouldn't want to accidentally miss a major landmark in the history of technology like Jacques Cousteau's Palm D'Or for The Silent World! You know, like someone did.
That said, I'm not posting about Aqua-Lungs or, for that matter, SOSUS this week, having done both, and unfortunately I am not posting about Cousteau's underwater flying saucer, which is not until 1958, or his prototype underwater cities, which is the Sixties. Rather, the inspiration for this week's post is The Economist's ongoing whining about the Peruvian/Ecuadorian 200 mile limit, the extension of their maritime frontiers over their Humboldt Current fisheries, a typical Fifties imbroglio that hits differently in this "Super-El Nino" year (the "El Nino" concept seems to have first gained salience in 1982), and in general to our generations-long shift from seeing the ocean as a source of infinite abundance to an overharvested marginal ecology. I thought I was going to talk about the first UN Law of the Sea Conference, a big deal at the time (1959, as it turns out), but it's not even a blip on the horizon in 1956, and is all but forgotten today.
It turns out that I have some interesting things to say about our coming to know the underwater world, though. And it has all the fun stuff, including pseudoscience, patent (or scientific discovery) trolling, and a classified military contribution.
The Wiki entry on the Cuyahoga River of northeastern Ohio is actually pretty interesting. The word seems to be Seneca. The river isn't long, but is important, running through the major Ohio city of Cleveland. It appears to have been the western border of the Haudenosaunee, but local archaeologists and historians are having difficulty sorting out the pre-contact ethnology of the Whittlesay cultural horizon, which might be Fort Ancient, which I think is thought to have been Siouan, but also Algonquin-speaking and associated with the Monongahela horizon, which is thought to have ben Iroquoian. Historically both Ottawa and Wyandot (Huron) communities are know, which for me raises the question of early Catholic parochial activity in the region. We're told that it isn't surprising that the attested first Catholic church in Cleveland, St. Mary's-on-the-Flats, has no history prior to 1878, even though the Diocese of Cincinnati was erected in 1821, well before the beginning of significant Irish Catholic emigration, a bit of an issue in its own right, and the parish had a resident pastor from 1835, with St. Mary's being dedicated on 7 June 1840 by a visiting French bishop, who seems to have made something of a revivalist tour through Catholic, and especially French Catholic America. So in other words the early Catholics of Cleveland were probably Metis rather than more respectable Irish Catholics and that's probably why the early colonial history of the region is so obscure.
The same can't be said for the Cuyahoga Fire of 22 June 1969, which turns out to be No Big Deal in the long history of at least thirteen Cuyahoga river fires, but a very big deal and watershed (did you see what I did there? Because I did it!) in American environmental history. Or at least that's the impression the Wiki gives. It's the sheer density of industrial development along the river, rather than any particularly egregious polluter, that accounts for the frequent fires. And, notwithstanding the subject of this week's post, it was bog standard POL surface slicks that caught fire and not sudsing organophosphate artificial detergents, such as are responsible for the "foaming rivers" of Jolly Old England going back to the Fifties. Honestly, when I opened the "Cuyahoga River" article I was expecting to hear something about mass market U.S. laundry detergents, foaming rivers, and eutrophication, not oil slicks catching fire. I was especially not expecting to hear about rhetorical links with narratives of decaying urban centres and, sigh, structural racism. Whatever you might think about burning rivers, it turns out to have been a strong driver of White Flight.
Which is kind of too bad, because there's a lot of hinky stuff going on with organophosphates!
While you're asking him about the Ark of the Covenant, can you talk to Dr. Jones about site preservation and find documentation?
[Insert some kind of PSA about pyromania not being as much fun in real life.]
This here is a hobby of mine, and I do have other hobbies, mostly of the nerdy kind, and like most nerds of a certain calibre I was brought up to sneer at Dungeons & Dragons and prefer some more niche RPG ruleset; Baldur's Gate III, besides being a fun game, has been an eye opener in terms of the incredible piece of folk art that is Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons. While by no means perfect, I am in awe at the sustained intellectual effort of millions of people over decades that turned the sprawling mess that was AD&D into a balanced and logical way of structuring play. Not the least of all of this was the balancing of the iconic "Fireball" spell.
Wizards of the Coast nerfed "Fireball," is what I'm saying.
And now we seem set on a course of discovering whether "real" fireballs have always been nerfed, by reality, as it gets more and more likely that someone will actually use them.
I'm not going to talk about H-bombs today, not even in the sense that Sputnik was launched into orbit by a very big rocket, which came out of efforts to build a fireball-casting ICBM. ICBMs are, from a certain point of view, not particularly ambitious rockets, since they don't aim to put things into orbit. The American Vanguard program did, and to a very ambitious apogee of 3,969km, at that. (Starlink satellites orbit at less than 600km, and the ISS at 420km.) As of June 1956, PROJECT VANGUARD aims at putting a Vanguard satellite into orbit in September of 1957, but the press is reporting the possibility of delays due to engine firing failures in test runs. In the event, the first successful Vanguard launch was six months late, whereas the Russian Sputnik launch occurred on schedule on 4 October 1957. The Sputnik program was well-publicised, and the target launch date was known, and met, and it is one of the greater distortions of Twentieth Century history that
The point that easily gets missed here is that Vanguard was the designated American satellite and rocket, and it turned out to be mainly good at casting fireball at the launch facilities. Fire: Fickle servant, cruel master, etc.
We can talk about the sociological dimensions of the "Sputnik Scare," or whatever we want to call it, at length. I am, after all, the product of Sputnik schools, as indeed is our entire modern world. Sutnik isn't the actual origin of the endless STEM educational crisis --that goes back to WWII, or even WWI-- but it is the key moment in the timeline of our collective imginarium that substitutes for the technological history of the Twentieth Century. (The reality of draft-dodging Ostdeutsch turning a traditional medicinal plant into a snake oil anti-schizophrenia drug, and then leveraging that into an Irish generic pharmaceutical giant on the backs of quasi-anonymous-but-Nazi-curious investors is not one we want to hear.
On the other hand, Vanguard was such a complete and utter technological fiasco that had significant consequences for my life. So it deserves some muckraking, I decided.
Seems like the guy I'd rely on to distract me from my plane crashing into the sea.
R_. C_., Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
We are all rushing towards the last day of school here, but I'm not quite so distracted that I'm not feeling a bit guilty at seeing Flight gamely flogging the Tyne while the air slowly goes out of the Proteus. Don't get me wrong: If you have to buy a turboprop to put in your airliner, the Rolls Royce job is the one you want, just because they made the Dart work, and no-one else has made any of them work, the gas generators in helicopters aside. But that doesn't mean that I don't feel guilty selling the Vanguard to TCA! I just can't help thinking that slow and loud was not the right bet for a long range airliner, even if the Viscount seems to be just the thing for shorter routes.
Now back to important career-related activity like fitting a visit to a showroom to see an air conditioner into a Sports Day.
That is quite the artist's impression of the King of Rock and Roll.
R_.,C_. Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
In anticipation of your question, this month's Fortune, claims that Sievert Thurston and Western Hotels now have the inside track on Uncle Henry's "Hawaiian Village." My first assumption is that Thurston planted the story with Fortune, probably just the column editor. It's not like Henry Luce is taking an interest in our affairs! That doesn't mean Hilton is out. My theory is that Uncle Henry is shaking them down, and that it will blow up in Uncle Henry's face, as usual, and that we should keep our money out of Uncle Henry's hands, as usual. I mean, his developments usually do get built, and Hawaii is the coming thing, but this just seems a bit rich for my blood.
"One of the earlier geodesic domes constructed in the United States." Photo credit https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Harald-Reportagen, or Kurt Liese (1915--2010)
(If you're wondering over The Engineer, my tentative theory is that it briefly appeared on the Hold shelves during my August trip and has by now been retracted back into the stacks, possibly without notice of same reaching my Library Account, although it is at least as likely that I just didn't register some notification or email. I shall try again.)
I thought about running this last week, but, on the other hand, it's officially a thing when there's two different articles about barbiturates in the same week. The age of Homo medicus! (Which turns out to be some dietician-anthropologist-paleontologist science thing, my apologies to Edward H. Hagen for not searching out some more authentically patronising Fifties label for patients using psychotherapeutics.
Just a month to the end of school! It's like I'm eighteen again, except for the part where I'm not! We have arranged for the kids to fly with Dr. K. K., who is flying into Vancouver to give a "job" paper, and is, like graduate students everywhere, willing to take on a bit of extra work involving minding the younger set. Uncle George is right. It pays to cultivate these connections!
Speaking of which, I have passed my FBI clearance check and am now allowed to work with Bill and David (in a very junior capacity, mind!) on their initial public offering, which will go ahead next year, obviously you didn't hear it from me, etc. I guess you should especially not tell the FBI, all things considered!
