The Mysterious Fifties: A Technical But Also Historiographically Cranky Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1956

 So I thought I might write about exotic rocket fuels today to celebrate whatever SpaceX is or isn't doing yesterday, but then American commercial aviation decided to be the one to not to do anything yesterday. Besides, it turns out that the fluorine fuels --and who am I to turn down free clicks by talking about fluorine chemistry?-- were to go into the Dyno-Saur, which definitely deserves one or several Technical Appendixes when the time grows nearer. So I wrote about something else! Something also relevant! Air traffic control! How exciting.

If you are not a Canadian, (and why should you be?), it is probably hard to credit just how important the Avro Arrow is to our national psyche. John Diefenbaker, the Prime Minister who cancelled it, was the first "Prairie populist" to reach the PMO and is himself a bit of an unhealed wound in our national soul. This isn't a post about that. It's the introduction of a post about something else. (The Grand Canyon Mid-air collision, if you're too impatient to wait for the jump.) It is not inspired by the excellent Wikipedia article about the CF-105, from which this beautiful picture comes, but rather the accompanying article about the Orenda Iroquois engine that was to power it. That article is weirdly wrong, setting out a strange and counter-factual popular history in which the Iroquois engine was developed in secrecy and perhaps only adopted for the Arrow after the Rolls-Royce RB. 106 was cancelled, and whatever happened to the Wright J67, happened. Like the notion that Sputnik was a surprise, or that the Eisenhower Administration was functional, it belongs in a weird, alternate Fifties history, the kind that the Wright conglomerate would have written if it had decided to fail at literature instead of business. Both articles cite the same source, and it is certainly possible that the RB. 106 was favoured over the Iroquois at some point in development, but to say that the Iroquois was some kind of secret is just wrong. 

"In 1954, the RB.106 program was cancelled, necessitating the use of the backup Wright J67 engine instead. In 1955, this engine was also cancelled, leaving the design with no engine. At this point, the Pratt & Whitney J75 was selected for the initial test-flight models, while the new TR 13 engine was developed at Orenda for the production Mk. 2s.^[45]"

What do you even do with this? The J67 was just a licensed version of the Bristol Olympus! The Grand Canyon crash has not been obfuscated, but maybe it helps us understand the causes of obfuscation. In any case, it sure is relevant the day after the first national U.S. commercial air flight stop in 23 years. (NPR link to minimise the risk of link rot, in case the reader of five years has had it driven out by all the good news and happy occasions since.) 

Postblogging Technology, July 1956, II: Much Seempler

R_, C.,
And Family,
Lake House,
Nakusp,
Canada

Dear Father and Little Ones:

Daddy's squadron is in Aviation News this week, which makes it official that it is all shaken out and that he can have his August weeks. I will be up on the 2nd regardless. James should arrive on the 14th, as he is catching a ride with the RCAF all the way to Nelson. I can't quite believe that we are flying after the Grand Canyon crash, especially when yours truly has been inside the aviation press far too long to believe their claims about safety. (Not that air travel is unsafe, just that it's not safe as  houses. Speaking of which, I hope the roof is finally "fixed" fixed now!) But we have only so much time, and as delightful as the train, or having my own car would be, who has the time any more? And if we do have it, we want to spend it with you.

Your Loving Daughter and Mother,

Ronnie

(At the age of 61 I just read the plot synopsis for the first time. Wow. That's a lot darker than I realised!)

Postblogging Technology, July 1956: Matching Audience Passband

R_,C_.,
And Family,
Lake House,
Nakusp,
Canada

Dear Father and Little Ones:

The little ones will have no care for the first few pages of this letter, but perhaps some day many years from now these pages will meet their eyes, and they will know that I was thinking about them. I hope for now that they are having too much fun in and around the lake amidst the cherry trees to think of boring old Palo Alto. 

Unlike their mother, who is having sudden second thoughts about flying into Kelowna in just three weeks time.

Your Loving Daughter and Mother,

Mama

Life, Aquatically: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging June 1956

 

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.

Burning Cuyahoga: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1956

 

I've got one word for you, son: Organophosphates. 

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?

I Cast Fireball! A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1956

[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 

"Privately, however, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and President Dwight D. Eisenhower were aware of progress being made by the Soviets on Sputnik from secret spy plane imagery.^[2]  [Wiki]

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. 

Postblogging Technology, June 1956, II: Communism Invests, President Pukes

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.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie