I was going to move directly on to the next postblogging installment when my long weekend finally begins on Wednesday (Thursday? I'm a bit shell-shocked on my eighth working day in a row, especially with a shift from 5am to 4pm starts in the middle. Guess when I did all my writing?), but there's something of an embarrassment of riches in this last installment, and I don't just mean the first publicity press image of a would-be business celebrity photographed in a leather jacket versus three-piece-suit formal wear. It's not quite Brando's borderline fetish outfit , but the times, they are for sure changing.
(For no particular reason.)
Here's another way that they're changing:
This looks like it is from Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, but I doubt that it is original there, or in Kennedy. It would look even better in a chart, particularly with the German production shooting for the stratosphere in 1938, compared with the all but stagnant British totals. It's just as well that the chart cuts off there. British steel production doubling in a decade would not fit the thesis well. Neither would a generation of stagnant American production, although Germany's climb back to Herman Goering Werke-levels of production by the mid-1950s is a bit more on the nose. It is probably time to talk about productivity and innovation in steel.
Aside from fashion and steel, this week sees the first glimmerings of the Xerox, and a weird digression into "computers" by the Goodyear Corporation. Arguably, if you were living in 1948, the imminent fall of the Republic of China and an American recession would have been more important at the time, with side order of world(ish) war to follow, culminating, as far as bridging the years go, with the Truman Administration's failed National Emergency in steel.
But let's go with what we've got.