The Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, on the other hand, just didn't go as fast as it was supposed to. Not much of a story, but jeez, the subtext.
Bench Grass
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.
Popular Posts
- Gathering the Bones, 18: Hew Down the Bridge!
- Postblogging Technology, October, I: Forest for the Trees
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- Postblogging Technology, November 1950, II: Platypus Time
- Postblogging Technology, December 1950, II: Christmas Corps
- Postblogging Technology, March 1944, I: Pulling In the Horns
- I Would Run Away to the Air: The British Economy, Montgolfier to 727, Part 1
- A Techno-Pastoral Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1950: The Chestnut Plague
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Friday, April 19, 2024
A Technological and Nimrodian Appendix to Postblogging Technology, Fall 1953: Delta Dawn
Saturday, April 13, 2024
A Technological and Muck-Raking Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December Titanium
By Anynobody - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18445244 |
Titanium is, we keep hearing, going to be one of the major structural elements in the North American XF-108 Rapier supersonic interceptor. We hear a great deal about how much of it is being used in the DC-7; and while the XF-108 will be cancelled, fifteen A-12s, 3 YF-12s and 34 SR-71s will fill some of the gap.
Another thing we here today is that a shortage of American titanium led to the surreptitious import of Russian titanium during the 1960s, so that the Soviet Union was spied upon by planes made with the Motherland's titanium. And as if that weren't enough to make for a story about oopsy-themed metals instead of planes, we have the sour suggestion that the real reason America is dragging its feet over titanium is that all that newly-built magnesium infrastructure would go to waste, and this finally makes the story of "Mag-Thor," or magnesium-thorium alloy, the slightly radioactive structural metal so widely used in the early years of the Space Race, but mostly on "New Look" weapon systems like the Bomarc missile, one of the great cringing embarrassments of Canadian industrial and political history of the last century, make sense. For Dow-Corning to make adequate excuses for the titanium shortage, there had to be a competitive magnesium product.
Saturday, April 6, 2024
Postblogging Technology, December 1953, II: Girls Who Won't Say No
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Norah Docker for woman of the year, 1953! |
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Sunday, March 31, 2024
Postblogging Technology, December 1953, I: The Louche Years Begin
R_., C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Saturday, March 23, 2024
A Socio-Technological Preface to Postblogging Technology, Decemer 1953: The Louche Years
I started the first installment of December technological postblogging yesterday before deciding that I was a bit too spent from the work week to have a hope of finishing it over the weekend. But before giving up (because it was hard), I did some pretty basic things, like finding the big Christmas song of 1953?
Which was Eartha Kitt's Santa Baby, which I'm saving for next week. Have some meta-commentary instead! So then I had a reaction. I'm not offended by Santa Baby. "Sex positive," I remind myself. We're sex positive these days. And it's a Christmas classic, which, I don't know, did we ever get it sorted out whether that saved Baby, It's Cold Out There? And it's not like Kitt invented the idea of putting double entendres in hit parade music. But it's Christmas. It's for the kids! So that was what I was thinking just before I thought to myself, "Speaking of louche things in popular culture, I forgot to make a fuss for the first issue of Playboy when it came out! When did it come out, anyway?"
December of 1953, it turns out. Begun, the louche years have! We are starting down a valley at the bottom of which is the moment when you're not allowed to complain about skin magazines at the front of the corner store, and all the cool high school teachers are sleeping with their students, and the "Me Too" moment, which might be over as a cry for justice, but sure seems like the mood in public culture. We may or may not be back where we started, but this isn't about before it began, some images below notwithstanding, and it's not about where we are now. It's about things that happened in the louche years, and here I'm thinking about that second wave feminist thing about pornography being a way to hold women back. Without going too far down that road, there's a story of images --or, should I say, because we're about technology around here, graphics?Saturday, March 16, 2024
Boom: The Space Race, 1
Everyone has a first public event they remember, and for me, it is the live television broadcast of the landing of Apollo 9. I was a bit young as these stories go, and this might have something to do with the fact that, as it turns out, this was four days before my fifth birthday. I was far too young to remember the two events sequentially, but heightened attention to the one might have leaked over to heightened attention to the other, I dunno. The point here, such as it is, is that I will have my 60th birthday this year. I try not to blather on about work around here too much, so I won't go into the details of why I am not getting all the paid time off that the contract says I get, just to note, once again, that it has to do with the lack of younger workers at my place of employment and in the Canadian economy in general. Hence the clever double meaning of the title of this series, a reference to the baby boom as well as to the "space race" that culminated on 20 July 1964. Do the two things go together? I sure think so right now!
Even if they don't, this blog obviously can't ignore the space race, and this is the first occasion in the progression of the technological postblogging where it seems appropriate to give the space race its own series. Notice how I've cleverly begun the enumeration of this series in Arabic numerals? That's so I'm not working out the Roman notation for "47" at some point in the probably not-so-distant future.
Saturday, March 9, 2024
A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1952, II: Around the Gyrotron
Today we are not talking about the BLUE STREAK so much as its guidance system, and we have been led to that discussion via a technology which was not used in it, the "tuning fork" gyroscope. My inspiration for this was taken from an article in Aviation Week about this new "gyratron" or "vibragyro," and an offhand mention of the fact that it had been tried by Smiths in the Smith's Automatic Pilot, SEP2 militarised as the RAF Mk10. The Sperry vibrayro of 1953 doesn't appear to have gone any further. The idea was revived by Westinghouse for the space programme in the 1960s, but it wasn't until they were made piezoelectric that they became common in such vital gyrostablising applications as electric skateboards.
So instead I'm going to talk about the technology that was used, and the concept of the BLUE STREAK as a total weapon system.