R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Not much to report except that we're still flying, but not as much now that the Navy has decided it is going to trump the Air Force with rain barrel-atom bomb detection instead of planes. Still, we are officially pushing ahead with atom-bombing with Neptunes, and we keep seeing Ernest Lawrence around Livermore, which is making everyone curious about what's going on. One theory is that he's on the hunt for a "thin" bomb that's better than Little Boy. There's definitely something going on about a "super bomb." Everyone is guessing that someone has figured out a practical way of making hydrogen go boom, and maybe the rumours start with someone who has.
Another story is more boring. Maybe he's looking for a summer home nearby. Wouldn't be my choice, but I'm not a Nobel-winning experimental physicist.
Ronnie and I went out for lunch with Fat Chow and Mrs. Ch. the other day. Is this story about Lhasa true? We sure would miss him around here if he had to go back to International Man of Mystery work! I don't know how he does it -he seemed green about the gills at the way Ronnie was taking the corners on the way up here.
You know who else is green about the gills? Uncle Henry, over the Tucker indictments. He's suddenly so keen on good publicity that he offered me a car. I had to say no, because i) I don't need one, and ii), James told me very, very firmly that it would be an awful "look" on a young naval aviator. So no new car for me. At least, no Kaiser-Fraser.
Your Loving Son,
Reggie
Flight, 16 June 1949
Leaders
"Air Display and the Public" and "Evere: A Symbol" Flight likes air displays and wants more of them, and reminds everyone that if they're boring, people will go to the movies instead. The Belgian one was nice.
"Anniversary: Belgian Air Force, Supported by Other Nations, Celebrates 35th Anniversary of Service" It was loads of fun, and the USAF F-80 Shooting Stars did aerobatics with wing tip tanks. (I'm told that the Air Force fighter goonies need them to keep the wings from going boing boing.)
"Glimpse of an Achievement" The Information Services Division of the Control Committee did up a three reel German documentary about the Berlin Air Lift which has been cut to 11 minutes and redubbed because it was boring and long, and, let's face it, the Airlift is yesterday's news. Now back to our regularly scheduled coverage of Congressional investigators seeing if a hollowed out pumpkin with a uranium typewriter in the middle will fit in Louis Johnson's sock drawer!
Here and There
The first declassified Air Force List since the war is out. Hillers claims to be the largest helicopter manufacturer in the world, with an output of three per week. The latest version of the Russian AS-90 18 cylinder radial used in the Lavochkin and Tu-70 gives 2100hp takeoff rating, with the M-300 reported to have a 3000hp rating. The French are ordering 100 Dassault 450 Ouragon fighters. The XF-90 had a test flight. (Separately, Arsenal VG wants you to know that it is working on the VG 90 high speed research aircraft, which is 20 better than the VG 70, which has been flying for a while.) J. Carlton Ward gave a talk to the Aeronautical Chamber of Commerce about air power. Off-prints are available.
"HMS Gamecock Entertains: Navy Day at Royal Naval Air Station Bramcole" The Navy had an aerial display, or, as we say in a country where we talk English like we mean it, an air show. Also, Liverpool had an air show. In Surrey, some air force reservists showed off their hats.
Civil Aviation News
The Helmore Committee recommends that members of the Air Registration Board should be a appointed by the Ministry on a three year basis. The Government is introducing new regulations on registering chartered airline flights, and this is bad. Dr. D. F. Stedman, of the National Research Council's Chemistry Division in Ottawa has a new windscreen water repellent coating, FC-10. It's swell. BOAC has named its 22 Canadairs the "Argonaut." class. TWA is buying another 22 Constellations. KLM and the Netherlands Indies Civil Aviation authorities have combined to start the first weather ship in the Indian Ocean. I'm not sure that the crew should get too comfy with their jew jobs! (Where would an Indian Ocean weather ship even be? My globe has all sorts of exotic islands way down south near Antarctica, but planes don't go near there! The big weather problem in the tropics is typhoons, and weather ships won't stay out for those. Tracking them is more of a job ofr us intrepid aviators.)
Ian H. Driscoll, "South Pacific Travel: Personal Impressions of Some Important Routes and Their Equipment" Speaking of! New Zealand's civil aviation authorities have come down firmly that only Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch should get international airports. My vague understanding of New Zealand is that Aunt Grace really loves her sheep jokes, and that it is another of those countries where most of the population is crowded into one part of the country, in this case the northern island. That offers the usual sticky problem that the only practical way of getting to the remote southern island is by plane, and you can't get the planes to fly there. On bothering to look it up, it turns out that Christchurch is the biggest city on the southern island, although that still isn't very big, so New Zealand is facing the problem head on, by, I guess, subsidising one international airport on the South Island, which is its very imaginative official name. Wellington happens to be a daft place for an airport, so it might get a seaplane base instead, speaking of daft. The New Zealanders are also backing another international airport for Fiji. The author took a swing through Australia while writing this article, although not to research it, I would think, considering how much Flight probably pays. He thinks that Mascot (Sydney) and Essenden (Melbourne) is on the swing, and he really liked the Convair he flew in. Someone has to! At that point he took the "regular BCPA Skymaster" bound Sydney to Fiji. There's a three-times-every-two-weeks Sydney-Australia service, and a once-every-two-weeks Vancouver-Auckland flight that I guess he couldn't catch. With the introduction of the DC-6, the frequency will probably be about doubled. Flight leaves Sydney at 2 AM, because civil aviation hates everyone, arrives Fiji at 0800 Sydney time the following morning. Fiji's current international airport is way down on the south side of the island, so if you want to visit the capital (Suva), you are faced with a 146 mile taxi drive and a £5 bill. There are small plane and flying boat services between Nadi and Suva, and elsewhere in Polynesia, which are briefly mentioned before it is off to Pago Pago in American Samoa, where "visitors are not encouraged." The author then flew off to the Cook Islands and Rarotonga before returning to Fiji and catching a BCPA DC-6 on its way from San Francisco to New Zealand with a full load of British settlers.
"Each to its Trade" Pictures of the Handley Page HC Hastings C.1 and De Havilland Devon, and then on the opposite page some pictures of Mosquitoes in the air to bathe our eyeballs in beautiful machines. Fair compensation for being forced to endure the existence of the loser transports!
"Deck Landing: A Comparison Between British and American Methods" The Americans and British have quite different approaches to landing jets on aircraft carriers without Oh My God You Killed Everyone. Neither one actually works, but depending on which country you're trying to upset, you can say that one or the other is better. Before the jet hits the tower and sets the gas alight and everyone dies.
"Portrait of a Pioneer: How "H.P." Founded the Fortunes of the Handley Page Company Forty Years Ago" According to Uncle George, this isn't at all how Frederick Handley-Page "founded the fortunes" of Handley-Page. But it is a fun story about the days before WWI that Flight won't shut up about.
"Joint Conference: Two Further Important Papers: Experience with Turboprop and the Outlook for Flying Boats" F. M. Owner of Bristol talked about the flying trials of the Theseus, which has been mounted on a Lincoln with two Merlins inboard. Unlike turbines, the airflow entering a turboprop is very turbulent, which makes it very hard to measure inlet temperature and generate thermodynamic data. (The kind that helps with efficiency calculations.) It is also hard to measure the residual direct jet thrust, especially when you do it this way. "The general impression" is that the Theseus is just fine. It is hard to reconcile that completely with a story about icing in one of the test plane's long distance flights to Egypt via Malta. Edwards says that the icing problem is solved, but maybe that is only for the Dart? A separate story tells how KLG is building a laboratory specifically to measure turbine temperatures. Also, that paper by D. Keith-Lucas about how giant flying boats are definitely better than giant land planes gets a summary. As usual, the secret assumptions are that passengers are fine with slow flying boats and that governments won't build airports that are bigger than airports that are too small to accommodate flying boat rivals. Neither of these hopes have ever worked out yet for flying boat builders, and I'm particularly interested by Keith-Lucas' observation that jets won't fix the problem with airscrew size, which is that flying boats can't have propellers that are longer than the distance between the engine and the water. That is because the flaps also have to have room to deploy, and the faster the plane goes, the bigger the flaps have to be.
C. G. Collins, "Revolutionary Refuelling: Will Be Demanded for Ultra-large Aircraft: The Principal Problems Reviewed" A 285,000lb Brabazon will carry 11,500 gallons of fuel, which means that a 2000 gallon tender delivering 120 gallons per minute will take 96 minutes pumping time, and that complete refuelling would take five tenders and five hours! (But using six tankers at the same time would only take a quarter of an hour. My mind boggles.) This makes rapid airfield turnaround a bit of a challenge. New American airfields have pipe runs and connection hydrants, and it is hoped that future airliners will feature underwing or fuselage refuelling points. The author has seen an underwing refuelling attachment that will take 200 gallons/minute, but internal pipes probably won't take any more than that. There have been experiments with a 300 gallon/minute delivery, but apart from bursting an aircraft from the inside out, there's the problem of putting that through a hose (visualise the way that a fire hose whips at 60 gallons/minute!) and, when all that is said and done, you are exhausting a tender in six minutes, which is ridiculous, and leads to the thought of a gas station for airliners, which may be on the way.
Correspondence
Geoffrey Dorman reminds everyone that the Royal Aero Club is going to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of its founding "in a balloon" next year. J. D. Browning thinks that a national aeronautical museum would be super keen. "Flying Boat Instructor" explains how that Sunderland that rescued the wounded off Amethyst got off the step in spite of taking off down-tide. The reason is that higher water speed and lower water friction cancel out more or less. Christopher Hook writes to take issue with the 11 November letter from K. J. G. Bartlett that said that hydrofoils have been tried and don't work. This was in connection to an article about his "hydrofin," which is sure to work, I. J. Chantler,a senior assistant at the Reading Technical College, writes to slightly correct the story about how how, now that local authorities have taken over the former Miles Technical School, it no longer teaches aeronautical subjects. (Or stock fraud, either.) Actually, it still offers those courses to the students who were first enrolled at the Miles school, and will until the graduates, two of whom recently won a prize for their examination papers, graduate.
Engineering, 17 June 1949
R. J. Wilkins, "Experimental Method for Research Into Reinforced Concrete" Electrical strain gauges such as the standard ones made for industry by the British Thermostat Company have potential for assessing the strength of pieces of reinforced concrete. Wilkins used them on some standard laboratory pieces and then used other methods to determine the strength properties of the concrete over time.
Literature
James Pellaton's Watch Escapement is a very important work in horological circles, because it is by an instructor at the Swiss School of Horology in Lausanne, and the Swiss know clockworks. Engineering wants you to know that it read the book very, very, very closely, so when it says that, while a very good book on horology, it is not the best book on horology that can be written, you should trust Engineering. Or, more exactly, the reviewer Engineering chose, who is not at all an expert on horology who has a book out next year. T. D. Walshaw's Diesel Engine Design is topnotch. "Praiseworthy," "authoritative," "My favourite drinking buddy," etc.
W. J. Duncan, "A Review of Dimensional Analysis" I don't know if they did this in your Stone Age day --heck, did you even have dimensions back then?-- but at the Institute we were analysis-happy with the cancelling of a foot-pound here and the multiplication by a Hertz there. It seemed like a neat way of checking that our algebra hadn't gone astray. Trust a mathematician to spoil our fun by showing that it is much more complicated than that, although I should have suspected after tensor calculus. On the bright side, if you do make it more complicated, you can get even more interesting results. Duncan uses a simple matrix to derive Poiseuille's Law, which isn't the most earthshaking scientific result ever, but which is super neat and shows just how useful this stuff could be in, for example, aerodynamics, which isn't exactly afloat in solid dimensional analysis to begin with. (Who knows what dimensions coefficient of lift is in? I do! But not "Favonius," that's for sure.)
Austen J. Smith, "Problems in Bronze Foundry Practice" People have been casting in bronze since before the day of the Duke of Chou, and they've always had problems with the bronze "freezing" in the thin bits of the mold. Well, here's some science about that. A lot of science, and it's just the start, since there are other aspects of the problem, such as the tendency for tin to come out of solution that aren't considered here.
T. G. Haldane, "High-Voltage Transmission in Britain" This is a precis of a talk given to the British Electrical Power Convention that was followed by an extensive discussion that is going to come up a number of times in the next two issues, so I'm going to try to get at the gist of it in one go. Haldane's basic point is that electrical transmission between different regions of the British National Grid is just going to be more and more important as time goes on, and it becomes cheaper to transmit electricity than to transport coal. To stay ahead of rising demand for electrical power (to 38 million megawatt hours by 1968) and to share total generated power, which is planned to increase more than four times in the same period to meet that demand, he proposes a "400 kV national bus bar." Currently, Britain has a 200 kV "national grid," and the analogy is that Britain will go from (figurative) cable to (figurative) bus bar to transmit all of this electricity efficiently and reliably, especially from the dams in Scotland, but, more generally, from everywhere to everywhere else. The article is mainly about the advantages of this, and downplays problems. Much of the discussion is, then, about problems. Some think that 300kV is too low, and that 400 should be aimed for, even though there aren't actually the components to carry it yet. Others think that it is too ambitious, focussing on likely problems between the "national busbar" and the much lower voltage local grid. Yet others point out that lightning-proofing equipment isn't the same as climate proofing, and that the first winter of hte national bus bar scheme might prove exciting. Some hijack the conversation, especially about the 400 kV improvement, to talk about high-voltage direct current transmission. Yet others think that that is even more utopian and unreal, but the proponents come back with intertransmission between the British and Continental grid, and think that this is the right time to talk about making sure that the Channel Tunnel that no-one is building should have a direct-current 400kV transmission line.
Somewhat related, so that I will get to it out of turn here, is another talk to the same convention by Lord Citrine, "The Position of the British Electrical Supply Industry" Many of the future demand figures I used above actually come from this talk. Citrine points out that the industry has huge financing capability and intends to spend 400 million in the next five years. It is shortages of men and material, especially turbines, that is the main problem at the moment. However, there are also problems with siting power stations, with many locals getting all upset about giant smokestacks and the like.
There's a lot of catalogue-worthy "articles" about special purpose machine tools. The first one is a blurb about W. H. Marley and Company's automatic keyway-cutting broaches.
"50 kW Turbogenerator for Instructional Purposes" Speaking of catalogue articles, here's one about a set of turbogenerators that C. A. Parsons is making for engineering schools. They would be installed on university campusses to provide power, and the engineering students would come by and ooh and awe and say, "That's how a small turbogenerator with many interesting features works!" I'm not sure I see the point.
Launches and Trial Trips Four steamships (Orca, Jason, Persic and Flatholm) include a freighter, two freight liners and a trawler. Two diesels (Vikingen, Steiningham Stange) are both single-screw oil tankers.
Regional Notes Strike a consistent note of heavier steel production to meet massive domestic backlogs and an overseas order catalogue in spite of disappointing coal returns. In Scotland, the South Yorkshire and the Northwest this is because of labour shortages which are being slightly improved by coal miners returning from other industries, while in the Southwest it is due to labour troubles. At the back end of the month, Scotland worries about weakening American demand. The Scottish numbers suggest record steel production this year, and the Northeast reports shortages of specialised steel, particularly high carbon. South Yorkshire reports a heavy backlog of dragline equipment for opencast coal mining and increasing interest in drift mining as an alternative.
Leaders
"The Founding of Thermodynamics" It is the centennary of Joules' "On the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat," so Engineering writes about it at length. June is going to be history month at Engineering
so it is just as well that the second leader makes a case for history being important by reviewing the legal history of the recovery of damages for delay in the delivery of machinery. You can't recover for delay unless the contract specifies it unless the firm or individuals responsible for the delay reasonably ought to have known it was urgent. In Britain, anyway.
The Honours List takes up a big chunk of space. Lots of engineers get into the Order of the British Empire. Some nice events include a London Science Museum exhibit for the blind and a talk about Joseph Bramah at the Royal Society for the Arts.
Letters
Several correspondents for and against the metric system, and A. J. K. Honeyman continuing his argument against A. C. Vivian's proposal to include "effective ductility" of steel in the British Standards.
E. Crowther, "The Institution of Gas Engineers: Presidential Address" People say that the producer gas industry is on the way out due to electricity and the latest threat, district heating. They're wrong. The industry will grow and become ever stronger as the engineering of carbonisation advances.
J. Lenaghan, "Aluminum Alloys for Shipbuilding" Aluminum has its advantages, but a great deal has to be learned about extrusion and the production of sufficiently stiff sections for shipbuilding use. Aluminum may have good strength for weight, but being less dense than iron, sections of similar use to steel are bulkier. The author doesn't say that, and in fact much of the piece seems devoted to the various issues of rapid strain hardening in aluminum alloys, which comes up in extrusion but also rivetting. Aluminum needs to be cold-riveted with aluminum rivets alongside steel plates being hot-rivetted, which honestly seems more complication than is worth in shipyard practice.
Labour Notes has three main drifts. First is increasing unemployment (but also increasing total employment!) in the United States, second is the problem of standardising wages in the electrical supply industry, and third is some unfortunate work stoppages on the docks mainly due to sympathy strikes spilling over from a Canadian dispute.
"Early Railways in Derbyshire" I know you can't invest in history, but this is actually pretty fascinating. It's slow going from the point of view that it helps a lot to know the geography of Derbyshire, which I obviously don't, but it is about railways in a shire in England that's right in the middle of the Midlands before locomotives! Starting in the 1790s and alongside the canals, people built "tramroads" and "woodenways" on which heavy coal wagons were pulled by horses and sometimes winding engines like in the coal mines. (Remember our Oregon vacation when you took me to see the place where you and Uncle George were with a wagon that was let down the side of a mountain by a pulley and winch back in the old days? Like that, but with a steam engine for lifting.) One of these old tramways was still in use in 1946!
Notes on New Books looks at F. Johnson's Metal Working and Heat-Treatment Manual, P. S. Houghton, The Milling Machine, The Machinery Publishing Company, Die-casting Machinery and Samuel Field, The Principles of Electrodynamics. Apart from being skeptical that we need another electrodynamics textbook, they are bland, short notices, except for Houghton, who is torpedoed on score of serious errors and unnecessary material.
Time, 20 June 1949
Letters
George Reteille of Detroit thinks that if we don't talk about air crashes, they'll go away --Sorry, Time, not Flight. If we don't talk about recessions, they'll go away. Novelist Charles Yale Harrison is free to flaunt his return to cigarette smoking after a heavy heart attack at 49. But, Doctor Clarence Mills of the University of Ohio points out, he needs to be aware that it's what is killing him. Mills points to his own study showing that smoking is clearly linked to fatal heart attacks, especially in the young(ish). Four letters about horse racing. Bill Huie defends his book, Case Against the Admirals, ghost written for an Air Force general, and vindicates himself against accusations that an article he wrote about college football was sloppy (Colliers retracted the story), that Readers' Digest apologised for errors in Case (Time mistook a letter from Admiral Denfield for a letter from the editor), and points out that everyone does accept the AEC's explanation for the missing piece of uranium. Time apologises for all of its mistakes. Man of the Half Century will not go to President Truman. FDR and Churchill both get two votes from seven offered. Milo Brooks is upset that "increasingly skimpy bathing suits" are exposing vaccination scars, and someone else tells him that foot injections are an option. The Publisher's Letter is pleased as punch that Time's article about Salvator Giuliano is being used for teaching in Norfolk, Connecticut, and that students and teachers are writing in to learn more.
National Affairs
"The Other 99.4%" Most Americans are boring people who live worthy lives, and not Hollywood stars atomic scientists or communist spies. Sometimes, however, they do exciting things, like the crew of the Sinco and people from the Rocky Mountain states who were rained on, and people near Wilmington, Delaware, who were stunk out of their homes by the rotting corpse of a dead whale that washed ashore. Bache and Co. is selling canned gold dust at $3,9445 a 100oz can, which is a loss on resale to the Treasury, but popular because for some reason it is the only kind of gold it is legal to hoard. That's not boring! I'm also a little surprised that Uncle George and the Earl haven't got us involved in this, as it sounds like the sort of thing they relish. Maybe it's not illegal enough?
"Good for the Soul" Harry Truman is in Arkansas for a WWI veterans' reunion and for visiting plain folks who like red eye gravy on hominy grits with bacon and eggs and peaches in thick cream. Gordon Gray, an R. J. Reynolds heir who has flitted through law and journalism, is the new Under-Secretary of the Army.
"Nincompoops At Work" Last week, the Army leaked that it had investigated TVA chairman Gordon R. Clapp and found him unsuitable for a temporary occupation job in Germany. The anonymous source asked how he could be deemed a fit chairman of the TVA if he wasn't up to even a temporary job in Germany. Another anonymous Army source in Washington broadly implied that it was because he was a Red, and that further comment should come from Clapp. Who accordingly replied that he had never applied for or been considered for an Army job. The Army then went to its files, found that they hadn't done any such thing, and sent the new Under-Secretary out to apologise and lay all the blame on "some damn fool of a nincompoop" at G-2 who took it on himself to send some press clippings from Senator McKellar's grandstanding at Clapp's confirmation hearings to Frankfurt for reasons that still don't make a lick of sense. Unless you assume, with Estes Kefauver, that someone at War wanted to get one in at Clapp and the TVA, which really isn't the Army's job, but might be Gordon Gray's. It's very confusing that they're both named "Gordon."
"Hot Words" Taking time out from attacking the TVA, Senator McKellar was cross-examining Paul Hoffman about the ECA being a big waste of money that he was wasting corruptly.
"It's on the House" Time, and everyone else, has discovered that Joe Martin is sending Representative Earl Wilson to Switzerland to attend a meeting of "Frank Buchanan's bleating, pacifist Moral Re-armament Movement," along with four other Congressmen, at a cost of five grand. Time, and everyone else, is appalled.
"Inside the Purse" Somehow, the trial of Judith Coplon ended up entering a slew of confidential FBI reports into the public record. According to various agents and anonymous informants, many people are communists, and mysterious deaths are sweeping the table clean of anyone who could reveal the Cheka's evil doings. The one thing that's for sure is that the FBI did nothing wrong. There's also a long story about the Hiss-Chambers trial, but it makes me too angry to write.
"One-Way Ticket" Puerto Ricans are a bit upset that the chartered planes flying out of San Juan for New York have had four crashes in two years costing 116 lives in spite of having full CAA clearance. The latest was a Commando that made a forced landing at sea off the island due to engine failure with 81 on board, with 28 deaths.
Americana reports that the Harvard Lampoon is offering a prize to the student with the lowest grade who doesn't get expelled, that Henry Newman of Stanford has determined that humans can take a quart of whiskey a day by topnotch science involving getting dogs drunk. Couldn't wait to tell Ronnie about this, but it turns out that there were already a million campus jokes about it. Diamond Match Company is closing down its Oswego plant for ten weeks because of competition from cigarette lighters and paper matches.
"A Call from the Neighbours" The Alabama Ku Klux Klan is in the news for a series of raids against suspected speakeasies and non-segregated restaurants around Birmingham.
International
"Under the Sun" General MacArthur recently published a letter defending himself from Soviet accusations that he is undermining Japanese democracy. Things seem to be getting under the "American Shogun's" skin lately.
"No Camels, No Gnats" Ronnie explained that the title of this boring article about the foreign ministers' meeting in Paris is from the Bible. It is important to the development of English poetry, she said. Three times as boring!
"We Know the Russians" Berlin's railway association is striking over being forced to take a quarter of their pay in East Marks, and the Russians have no idea what to do about it, because they have no experience breaking strikes the democratic way. I'd write an ironic sentence, but the irony would have to go in all directions at once, and that's unhealthy. I could explode.
Commissioner McCloy is the subject of this week's cover story. You might remember him as the guy who was born to an impoverished mom on the wrong side of the railway tracks who somehow went to an exclusive private school and was hired out of Yale into one of those exclusive New York law firms.
"Fed Up" Two Americans and one Russian have abandoned their countries by renouncing their citizenship or defecting to Sweden. More entertainingly, Delbert Eugene Hill, "America's Only Lady Magician," who went over to Britain as a Special Services Division entertainer, and who deserted on receiving a reclassification to "latrine duties," was finked out by his girlfriend while living as a woman and touring as a magician. I honestly don't know what to say. I wonder if he knew "Husky, 26-year-old Elphinstone Forest Gilmour," an entomologist working for the Natural History Museum who abused his privilege of unlimited access to its beetle collection to . . . sell beetle collections to . . . private collectors . . . I can't go on.
It being Time, stories about the Labour conference and the Czech Communist party's recent synod with the Czech Catholic church are piled on top of a picture roll of Stalin taking a salute,looking very old. At 69, he is known to have heart trouble, has a puffy face, and his hair has gone white.
"Temporary Roof" Korea is between Japan (going democratic) and China, which is going Communist. Korea, compromising, is going in both directions. The Truman administration wants to give Korea $150 million in ECA money, arguing that the Communists will take over the south if they don't. Congress wants to know why Korea should get money he won't give "South China." In South Korea, the country is under modified martial law enforced by police originally recruited by the Japanese, who use "Japanese methods," which involve plenty of broken rib cages and punctured ear drums. Rhee isn't just under pressure over his police's inability to handle strikers without guns. He also has 200,000 refugees from the north that he can't feed, and an army that is too small to defend against North Korean raids.
In Latin America, the congressional election has led to instability in Colombia, while Sears has opened up a store in Rio, and it is very exciting. A Brazilian Air Force C-47 has crashed, which is news (C-47s crash all the time) because it is the biggest air disaster in Brazilian history. Mexico City's Lake Xochimilco barely has any water in it any more.
Science, Medicine, Education
"Schmidt's Eye View" Cal Tech's Palomar Observatory is going to use its 72" Schmidt telescope to photographically map the entire sky over the next four years. It is an expensive project jointly funded by Cal Tech and the National Geographical Society, and gives Time an excuse to explain how the Schmidt telescope works. It has a concave rather than a parabolic mirror, with a correcting plate at the focus. This eliminates spherical aberration, because the edges of the photograph aren't distorted relative to the centre. It doesn't have the same resolution, which Time translates as having less range ("only" 300 million light years). But we'll get the stars out to 15 billion light years in the next pass! Seriously. That's how big they're saying the universe is now.
"Happy Ending" Louis Crook, a professor of aeronautics at Washington' s Catholic University, has been awarded a trillion million dollars of Air Force and Navy money for being the only inventor ever of the spark plug shield. He now plans to sue everyone else over everything. Apparently his patent also invented the coaxial cable?
The big news is that Morris Fishbein is out at the AMA and, in particular, the Journal. Sounds like real "Et tu, Brute" stuff, right on the floor during the opening session of the AMA annual convention. Time says it is because the AMA thinks he is doing more harm than good with his fight against "socialised medicine." That is, the AMA will be able to fight "socialised medicine" much more effectively once they've sent Fishbein to Siberia. Or the capitalist equivalent. Palm Springs?
"Windfalls and Weather" Most US colleges think that financial disaster is just around the corner without great heaps of the public money, which makes the Institute's $5 million haul from the alumni, Cornell and Harvard receiving millions from Walter Teagle (Cornell) and a Rockefeller(!); and Yale getting a cool 2 million for psychiatric studies just a bit embarrassing.
"Anti-Party Line" The National Educational Association has decided that members of the Communist Party shouldn't be allowed to work as teachers, which the New York Post thinks is a bit much, since it's not hard to see this ending up with FBI informers working the campus to find secret Commies who are trying hard not to look like Commies by, say, teaching partial differential equations with secret Communist propaganda. A blind student, Boniface Yturbide, has graduated from the University of Nevada at the head of his class. Also, various commencement speeches were either too boring or too controversial. Hoover did his part for the cause at Ohio Wesleyan, where he denounced students for caring more about their old-age pension than the stuff they should be caring about, like there being too much Government these days. John Marquand, on the other hand, told Governor Dummer Academy that there's all sorts of things that you shouldn't be contented by, like mosquitoes and poison ivy, and he wants the Class of '49 to fix them for him, which Time somehow turns into the "ample supply of discontent in the US and the rest of the world at graduation time, 1949." Because we just saw the first Soong of spring, I'll bet.
"War Babies" Everyone knows there's lots of war babies. Now, Oscar Ewing, head of the Federal Security Agency, which is in charge of worrying about these things, I guess, is warning that Amerci\\ica needs 30,000 more classrooms for a million more students.
Business
"Caught Short" Speculators who sold wheat short on the Chicago Exchange have taken a bath as the farmers get their bumper crop into the silos after all.
"Torpedo's Wake" A federal grand jury indicted Preston Tucker for faud, conspiracy and violation of securities laws this week. Trading in Tucker stock, most recently quoted at 40 cents, issued at $5, was suspended. Harold Karsten, alias Abraham Karatz and Flloyd Cerf were indicted with him, along with five former directors. The grand jury charges that Tucker raised $28 million through stocks and franchise sales on false pretenses, and no-one is sure where the money went. Tucker responded by calling the indictment "the biggest rape of free enterprise ever perpetrated in this country." We will see how this turns out. More importantly, Uncle Henry will see how this turns out!
There's an article about J. C. Penney's next, which Ronnie might be able to tell you more about., and another about the Pennsylvania Central. Both are more interested in financing than new products.
"Things to Come" GE has delivered its first gas turbine-electric locomotive to Union Pacific for testing. It has twice the horsepower of a diesel of the same size, and GE hopes that it will eventually have three time the life between overhauls of a modern diesel electric.
"Flying Tours" Lewis C. Burwell's Resort Airlines non-scheduled airline is not at all an airline in disguise that makes extra money because it is allowed to ignore CAB rules, because it is only for holiday travellers. All year round.
"The Top Ten" The US Treasury's annual list of 1947's highest salaries has only one Hollywood name on it, Preston Sturges, at $810,000 in salary and bonusses before taxes. The rest are business men, with American Tobacco's Vincent Riggio leading the list at $484,202, Randolph Hearst in the middle at $300,000, and G. A. Bryant, of the Cleveland building firm, Austin, is the poorest of the Big Ten at a mere $270,780 per year. To help us understand the people who lost money on Tucker franchises, it helps to know that ten automobile dealers made more than $75,000 in 1948. "As usual, no dividends, royalties or capital gains" were included.
Not really a business story, but I usually skip the Cinema section, is "All This and Movies Too," which is about the rapid growth of the drive-in movie business, which is branching into "barbecues and bingos," and building more elaborate windscreens and the like to attract custom.
Press, Radio and Television, Art, People
"People's Faces" "Highstrung" Philips Lord's new show, The Black Robe, has average real people from the streets of New York acting out court cases or something. It doesn't have any sponsors yet, but Lord is happy enough with it that he has turned it over to Ed Sutherland to direct for NBC, and is off to his 3000 acre private island in Maine to contemplate being so rich that you can own a private island and get any old thing on TV.
"Gag Removed" Back in 1939, the Baltimore courts imposed a rule forbidding the press from reporting suspect's confessions or past criminal record before they appeared in court. Last July, most radio stations chose to break this "Rule 904" over a particularly awful murder, and were fined. This month, the fines, and rule, were overturned by the Maryland Court of Appeals on free speech grounds.
"Together Again" Collier's published a hit on Walter Winchell last year. Winchell struck back in his columns with, as Time puts it, "the shrill insistence of a dentist's drill." This month, the two kissed and made up with Collier's printing a Winchell story (for which it paid $12,500, says Winchell) on the interservice fight over at the Pentagon. Time wants everyone to know that this is a sad turn of events because Winchell is a bad, bad man.
On the other hand, the guy at London Mystery Magazine who answers mail to Sherlock Holmes addressed to 221B Baker Street is a very nice person and everyone should buy the London Mystery Magazine. Speaking of mysteries, the Chicago Sun-Times is paying for tips about unsolved muirders.
The Art pages start with a painter who is dead, because Leonardo da Vinci's Beatrice D'Este is on tour, and one who is still breathing, because Peter Hurd has a new museum in Roswell, New Mexico, which is where he used to live. It gives people a reason to visit Roswell. Also, Edward John Burra is odd, and is having his fifth one man show.
Bernard Shaw and Paul Robeson are both terrible people who like communism and Oscar Hammerstein is a nice composer who scolds Paul Robeson. Elizabeth Taylor's mother has announced her seventeen year old daughter's engagement all around rich kid, William Pawley, and not all around West Point football star, Glenn Davis. General Arnold's son has graduated 450th from West Point and married a girl who didn't date him for his brains. The son of Mr. Helen Hayes and, uhm, actual Helen Hayes is setting the stage on fire at the age of eleven and will surely go on to be a big star. T. V. Soong and the missus have arrived in the United States to visit their three daughters, all going to school in America. Sonja Henie has been burgled, Joe Louis is being sued. Milton Berle is feuding with Dorothy Kirsten Leland. Frederick Ogilvie has died, as has Sigrid Undset, Louis Haines, Louis Jean Malvy, John McCutcheon and William Robert Timken.
The New Pictures
Haven't we heard about Joel McCrea's new oater already? I thought we had. Anyway, it's Colorado Territory and also has Virginia Mayo as a "dingily blonde half-breed." Time didn't like it, but liked the mountain climbing.
The Judge Steps Out is a "smug little movie with a dubious message," Ann Southern and Alexander Knox. Tulsa is a movie that pyromaniacs can love. Johnny Allegro can only be explained, Time thinks, by someone in Hollywood wanting to see George Raft in as many movies as possible. The bad guy is a right wing mastermind plotting to bring America down with a flood of bogus money, who uses a bow and arrow to hunt his enemies through a tropical jungle. That doesn't sound inexplicable at all! (Time leaves out the part about the right wing conspiracy. No point in giving the great unwashed the wrong idea.)
Books
Animal Farm's George Orwell has his most ambitious book out yet, and Ronnie says that everyone is talking about it. It's about the communistic dictatorships that rule the world in the distant future of 1984. (That's why the title is Nineteen Eighty Four. Time predictably likes it, because it sees the book as an attack on socialism and not the call for reforming the left that Orwell intends. For some reason, this middlebrow's dream book is second up after Christopher Morley's The Man Who Made Friends, maybe because Time has worked itself up to run Morley over in a tank. It doesn't like the way Morley writes, it doesn't like his pretentiousness, it doesn't like the fact that the book is a "fuzzy allegory that pretends much and says little." It doesn't even like the way that Morley smokes a pipe. So there!
After a pan and a paen, Time ends in the middle, as a middlebrow must, with John Gunther's Behind the Curtain, which is a fun read but "little more than a recapitulation" of recent events in eastern Europe.
Flight, 23 June 1949
Leaders
"Give and Take" Americans are very jealous and ungrateful and awful for not saying "thank you for the jets" more.
"Joint Conference" Flight is trying to be understanding about the whole "atomic secrets"thing, but American spy-mania is a bit wearing, so it can see where people are coming from in saying that Britain should keep its secrets tit-for-tat. But they are wrong and stupid.
"East Yorkshire Day" East Yorkshire had an Air Pageant and a Cirrus Trophy Competition. The winner gets a British light aircraft engine that works. The second prize winner might get one, too, if the organisers can find two.There's also a long article about the Evere Aerio-dromo-aticalic Pageantdisplay.
"Viscount Developments: Second Prototype to be Tay-powered" Stop me if you've heard this one, but the Brits are going to take the second prototype Viscount, which it turns out there's no use for as the test pilots haven't crashed the first one, and put jet engines on it. Specifically, the Tay, which is an up-powered Nene that Pratt and Whitney and Hispano-Suiza are both eager to build. Also, maybe this will lead to a jet Viscount airliner, even though everybody says that it won't and everybody says that this is a bad idea. Because Flight can't stop saying this for some reason.
"Insular Event" Cowe, which is on the Isle of Wright, is having an Entertaining Air Display and also Rally. Meanwhile, the RAF is putting on an All-Day Reunion Programme at Aldershot, which involves dropping some Territorial Army paratroopers.
"Unique Anniversary: Ministers and Manufacturers Honour a Pioneer Firm" There was a party for Handley Page at Grosvenor House. Speeches were had by all. Mr. Handley Page looks like a white whale in his evening dress. There's also a history/antiques collectibles article about all the planes that Handley Page ever built after Civil Aviation News. Did you know that Handley Page built a prototype bomber that looked like a cross between the Battle and the Skua? Or a plane named the "Gugnunc?"
"Nene Production in Australia" The Australians are going to make the Nene, and the time between overhauls for the latest Hercules has been raised to 750 hours.
"Technical Majority: D. H. Technical College Comes of Age and Gets a New Home" The De Havilland Aeronautical Technical College is 21 this year. It is celebrating by moving into Astwick Manor at the north end of Hatfield aerodrome. Hurrah! Someone still says "aerodrome!"
Civil Aviation News
Flight is upset about the reorganisation of the Air Registration Board. The Argonaut-Northstar-Canadair Four-D.C. 4 is going to do some proving flights. More proving flights. But for BOAC this time. The first day of the new QBI procedures under the new Metropolitan Control Zone was a complete SNAFU at Northolt. Various people have various opinions about how it shouldn't have happened. ICAO is having a Third Assembly, the MCA is having a Fire School, and Alitalia has had two very good years. Ernest Charles Geary, of KLM, has died at 41 of a heart attack. Adelaide is getting a new airport on reclaimed swamp and marsh. That's not how I imagine Australia.
Flight scolds Australia for flying so many American planes, what with the dollar and all. BOAC is offering a £468 round-the-world ticket in conjunction with all the Australian and Canadian airlines you'd need to actually use it. Passengers will be allowed to take a break in Sydney, Auckland, Fiji, Canton Island and Honolulu. Air Ceylon's Skymaster service to London has been cut to "39 hours 30 minutes." Less than 40 hours! Some airlines are still boycotting Idlewild.
Here and There
The Australians are aiming at holding a round-the-world air race during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.
The Air Registration Board has certified the Double Centaurus, clearing the way for someone to use it for something. It was embarrassing at Evere when a Tiger Moth towing a Union Jack couldn't keep up with the other planes towing other flags. The explanation turns out to be that the Union Jack used had five more seams than the other flags, and a souped up Tiger Moth was substituted in the next flyby. In America, we'd just use a Sabre, but that's because we actually have fast airplanes. SBAC is pitting all the British jets against each other in a Challenge Cup soon. The USN's new sonar-ranging bomb for lifeboats is a "lifesaving bomb." Noel Wood, engineer and general manager of the Sheffield Corporation, suggests that since all reservoirs ought to be roofed in, it would make sense to build the roofs strong enough to support helicopter landings.
"Anglo-U.S. Conference: Viewpoints on Materials: Operating Influence on Design" A. E. Russell's talk on "Materials and the Designer" gets an extended precis. He first briefly described the solution of the key problem of providing an efficient box structure for wings, and showed that the most efficient solution involved using the skinning to provide torsional stiffness. Stiffness is a function of strength and depth, so he looked at various standard Alclad sheets (which give up some stiffness to have a soft and corrosion-proof outer covering) to discover torsional stiffness with depth, and found a very high range of scatter around manufacturer-specified strength. He offers a nice chart of the stress-strain curve from his lab, and moves on to recent work on adhesives, which is promising. Is metal-metal bonding ready for everyday use? Not yet, as the characteristics of the adhesive bonding level through the vertical cross section isn't known. The middle might be gooey, I translate. Moving on to the question of dimensional tolerance, he shows that excessive thickness as little as a hundredth of an inch can add 5% to the structural weight of an aircraft, and that some skin samples seen in his lab have a thickness of up to 7% above specified. Major P. Litherland Teed reinforces Russell's about alclad and is skeptical that it has any value in war production. He is quite fond of aluminum-magnesium alloy, and while he admits that improvements in steel production are continuing, steel's rapid loss of tensile strength at low temperatures rules out its use in stratospheric aircraft. Moving on to fatigue, he points out that studies have shown that up to 75% of structural failures in Britain are due to fatigue. Some metals, notably steel, have unlimited fatigue life as long as they do not exceed maximum stresses, while some metals have no maximum stress limits (apart from the level where they tear!). An example of this is 17ST aluminum.
Christopher Dyke's "Operating Factors and Design" shows that it is not always possible to cram in more flights per day per plane by increasing the speed, so that speed increases can't always be sold on this basis. For example, going from three to four London-Paris flights requires increasing cruising speed from 235mph to 420mph. He further shows that "sleeper" flights between London and New York become uneconomical at 325mph, and that the next major step in improving the returns for a trans-Atlantic airliner occurs at 500mph. Turbine powered aircraft will need cloud-warning radar to avoid turbulence. As flights increase, stacking will become worse, and he suggests increasing from for to six or even eight engines so that some can be shut down in the stack. Automatic first-circuit landing will be essential. Better runways are more important than lighter planes. Piston engines that can operate economically at 50% maximum rpm are necessary (you can get down there more easily if you just blow gas through the cylinders to cool them, but that's not economical), as are turboprops with a wider rpm range, and better air traffic control to allow turbojets to run optimum schedules. There's the usual blah-blah about better automatic controls, power eggs and so on.
Correspondence
D. S. Griffin is happy that everyone likes his national aeronautical museum idea. J. E. T. Tennant, R. A. Fry and Roger Tennant explain how ramjets work to D. Smith, whom I slandered last week by suggesting that he didn't understand turbojets. He actually doesn't understand ramjets.
Engineering, 24 June 1949
O. Bordy, "The Bailey Suspension Bridge" You've heard about the Bailey Bridge. Everyone has. Well, did you know that there was a suspension bridge designed by the Experimental Bridging Establishment? Given just how different the use cases between a simple truss structure and a suspension structure are, you'd have to wonder if you could even use any of the same materials, but that's what Donald Bailey's group eventually did. Also, you would wonder if there would be a use for it! Dr. Miller, who gave a talk on it at MIT in '47, described it as "a solution looking for a problem." And while you may say, "Oh, that's an American getting back at the sting over 'heavy American materials,'" the fact is that there was all of one actual Bailey suspension bridge built, down in Burma, and it really does seem to be a case of "We need to use it somewhere." The Corps (and the Red Army) got just as much use out of long girders, because they're as modular as the whole thing needs to be, and they have the stiffness in compression and torsion that a suspension bridge needs, and which the Bailey set designs out at first principle. Whatever. Given enough ingenuity and money, you can make a suspension bridge out of deliberately short components meant to lock together under gravity, and foist it on some hapless Burmese peasants. So there. Not Dr. Bailey's finest hour, but if you're in a hurry to get through a precis of an issue of Engineering, it's heaven sent.
Literature
R. W. James, The Optical Principles of Diffraction of X-Rays X-ray diffraction is an important way of studying materials, and since it is an electromagnetic wave, it has "optical" properties, although since these are being traced through solid materials of radically different dielectric properties from crystal to crystal, they are much more complicated than simple ray tracing in air. James apparently offers another demonstration of the use of Fourier analysis to optics, which must make things even more complicated. And that's before taking into account quantum mechanical effects! Engineering finds the treatment very fresh and interesting, but too brief.
Le General de Fontagnes, Topographie Here is the state of the art according to the Director of the Topographical Section of the Geographical Service of the French Army. No-one beats the topographical engineers of the French Army at anything, as the vaunted Prussian General Staff learned to its dismay. (See what happens when you put cavalry men up against engineers? Why the French forgot that in 1940 I will never know.) So this is the book to get to learn about the current state of topographical affairs, at least if you read French.
J. L. Kent, "The Causes and Prevention of Slamming in Ships" Uncle George likes to say that slamming lost us more ships in the Battle of the Atlantic than torpedoes. I don't know if that's true, but Kent, reporting on work at Haslar, explains why. Slamming is associated with high speeds, steaming in ballast and shorter ships (there's a relationship between the length of wave and ship's length). All of this is well known. What is more important is the cause. In a sense, the ballast issue, which was so pressing when ships had to cross the Atlantic westbound empty due to lack of exports, has led to a great deal of "intuitive" blither-blather that boils down to keeping the ship loaded so that it will be stiff against bending, which is thought to cause the slamming. A bit of thought about ship's structure will show that that is the wrong tree to be barking up, and the tank studies reveal what is going on, which has to do with air cavities forming beneath the ship, faster or slower depending on momentum of the ship, thus weight and distribution of weight. This leads to the conclusion that the right hull form will greatly reduce slamming, although so will building --perhaps-- uneconomically large ships. The long story made short is that there is a solution and we should look into it.
"Research Work on Tin" The Tin Research Institute is mainly interested in tin-alloy materials for bearings, electro-plate coatings tin-plate and hot-tinning. Tin is a greasy and slippery material and ideal for that kind of thing. I think.
"Automatic Camshaft Grinding Machinery" The Norton Company's Cam-o-Matic can automatically grind cams according to a master cam loaded onto a central spindle. It can have up to 21 master cams at once, and changing over from one to the other is as simple as adjusting the dog wheels with a plate steel template. This catalogue entry comes to a premature end, so in the space below the picture, we learn that the London Midland has a very swank new train traffic control room.
"Testing Tower for Helicopter Rotors" In defence of the Bristol Aeroplane Company, helicopter rotors are longer and (slightly) more complicated than propeller blades, so an outside tower for spinning helicopter rotors around very fast to see what happens to them has to be bigger, and have a bigger safety net, and some machinery for making the blade pitch whilst spinning round. I have no idea what else to say about them.
Leaders
"An Electrical Stocktaking" As I said above, Haldane's talk on the "national busbar" set the electrical supply industry abuzz last week, and this leader is Engineering's noncommittal, mamby-pamby review of an idea whose time has come. But that's Engineering for you, and the fact that the second Leader is about the local authority's "Road Plan for Lancashire" tells you all you need to know about Engineering. Where should that exchange go? Near Maldon or near that other town that's near it? Gosh gee whiz I think I'll worry about that all day!
"The Education and Training of Technologist" Okay, I'll admit that learning up a bunch of smart-mouthed young engineers must be serious work, but it can also be boring work about worthy institutions and coordinating coordination and all of that Economist stuff. Here's an example.
The Whitworth Society and the Society of Heating and Ventilation Engineers are having summer meetings, or had them. So is the British Society of Civil Engineers. Of the three, I'd go to that one, because they are hearing about bulldozers. Vroom vroom! The Ministry of Supply's Radiochemical Centre is accepting orders of capsules of radium and radon as gamma ray sources for industrial radiography of ship's welds and golf balls.
Obituary Mr. Charles Day was born in 1868, and after various youthful employments joined Mirless Watson, the British licensees of the Diesel engine in 1898 when they overrspent and were eaten alive by vultures. Ever since until he was asked to volunteer to retire, Day was in charge of "heavy oil engine" development and did a very good job of that and being the stereotypical "blunt, hard charging businessman." Engineering reminds us that he actually had friends who enjoyed his company, so there.
Follows yet more response to Mr. Haldane, if you were wondering, than a short and relevant catalogue bit about "Power Transformers for 200 kV Systems" and a not at all relevant one about the Lodge and Shipley Company's "Centre Lathe with Copying Attachment" The attachment that copies the curve off a template is particularly neat, and so is the transmission that lifts the cutting tool when the tracing stylus goes off the template. It's fun to hear about the difficulties of designing, building and exporting 500 ton transformers through congested British rail and road systems, but all the details of this copying-and-control apparatus and that blends together in my head. I pity the poor mechanical engineer, who has to learn one eccentric trick after another just to get production up and running.
"Photo-electric Control of Furnace Flames" Remember the gas engineers predicting that their industry is upwards bound and ever onwards? Well, here's one about the epidemic of explosions in British boilers due to gas temperature dropping too low to sustain a live flame, leading to flammable gas puddling and then exploding when it does take light. There's plenty of reasons for this besides poor quality gas, but a useful solution is a photoelectric eye that catches the flame as it dulls and shuts the supply valve.
Labour Notes is about Labour (the Party) trying to persuade Labour (the Movement) to shut up about pay increases in an election year. Dressed up fancy-like to make it seem like there's a principle at stake, which, to be fair, The Economist would swear there is. And probably Stafford Cripps, too, which goes to show he's an asshole. Hugh Dalton, where are you now?
F. H. Branwell, "Mechanical Engineering in the Chemical Industry" More history, and holy mackerel, what history! Did you know that the British heavy chemical industry is said to have got its start when James Musphratt built a Leblanc process plant in 1823 to produce alkalis to meet the burgeoning British middle class appetite for soap and bleached clothes? If the date brings "dark, Satanic mills" to mind (never you worry that Ronnie says that's a misquote), than congratulations, that makes two of us. So then if you wonder what heavy chemical processing means in a dark and Satanic age, well, I'm amazed after reading this that anyone in England survived chemical poisoning through to 1850. I'd go into detail but it's all a bit kaleidoscopic and scattered. At one point there's a description of the small steam engines that used to be scattered around the factory floor, all fed by wet steam from small boilers that were also scattered around the floor, which is pretty interesting considering that it explains those old factories that puff steam into the air everywhere, but what does it have to do with chemicals in particular you ask, and damned if I know. There's plenty here that's actually about chemicals. Did you know that there used to be such a thing as "home chlorine stills?" I guess for putting-out piece workers. I'm pretty sure they weren't in actual homes, but they were certainly in small factories that just dumped their "effluent" in the local river.
So,yes, that was the old days for you.
Letters
Many people liked the article in Religion about the Presbyterian Church in America, but one writer is miffed because she thought that the Lutheran Chruch is bigger.C. J. Babby of Washington and John Kerr of Brooklyn had strong reactions to the article about the Bernstein Plan to introduce straight seam stockings into lady's fashion. I think I know why, too. Rowrr! Also provoking strong reactions from many readers is the article about novelist Frank Roberts, who collects eagles' talons. Edna Blue, of the Foster Parents' Plan for War, writes to point out that if China's children grow up to hate America, it won't be the Foster Parents' Plan for War's fault! On the other hand, Ward McCabe of Wellesley, Massachusetts, points out that the Chinese children he met do hate America, because of the "general and damaging misbehaviour of GIs in China." A. J. Liebling writes to complain that Ralph de Toledano misrepresented him in a recent article in Newsweek, which stands by its reporter. Without actually contradicting Liebling. The Publisher wants us to know that its special Summer Vacation Books section was researched by a people watcher in Grand Central Station and the literary magazines, for extra accuracy. In other research news, Newsweek was also able to track down the bar where a picture was taken by visiting 54 bars between the beginning of composition and deadline. That's pretty fast drinking!
The Periscope reports that Senator Hickenlooper will be in big trouble when the AEC turns up before the Senate Appropriations Committee, because Senator McKellar is out to get him, and Hickenlooper has been handing him ammunition nonstop. The RNC is likely to oust chair Hugh D. Scott in favour of Arthur Summerfield of Michigan. Speaking of, Everett Dirksen is the new Republican flavour of the month for '52, since Taft, Stassen and Dewey have
"been to the well too often." James Byrne may run for Governor of Virginia in '50, Judge Kaufman is in trouble in the Senate over being too nice to Alger Hiss, Murray Lincoln might run against Taft, also in 1950. Rumours that Hoover might resign over criticism of the FBI confidential informants' leak are probably coming from Hoover, who is trying to put pressure on Attorney Gerneral Clark. Senator Humphreys is in trouble with his colleagues because he talks too much. The Army has backed down on a ban on cadets marrying within three years of graduating West Point because everyone hates the idea and it can't actually do that.
The Librarian of Congress has once again had his proposal for background music in the Library's card sorting division shot down, in spite of studies that show that it improves efficiency in routine jobs. De Gaulle's movement is running short of funds as French business shifts its support to the government. US recognition of the new Chinese government will be delayed while the US pouts for a bit. Some delegates to the Paris Conference want east bloc countries to get some US aid, which will drive a wedge between them and Moscow. Filipinos will vote for the most anti-American candidate they can field in the upcoming Presidential election, because they're hoping that Washington finally gets the message, because "Not tonight, I have to wash my hair" wasn't getting through. The British are sending heavy reinforcements to Hong Kong in case the Communists attack. The target for US tourism in Europe this year has been reduced to $1 billion from $2 billion because total transatlantic passenger facilities are still only 60% of prewar, and because of the recession. It is thought that Congress won't be able to take enough acreage out of production next year to make a dint in the colossal American grain and cotton surplusses. The White House may reinstate Federal control over coal production and prices since, six years after the New Deal regulations were killed, the industry is a problem again, and it doesn't want John L. Lewis to be the man stabilising it. (Which he is right now, because John Lewis is a great American patriot, not that anyone will admit it.)
Talk from the aviation front is that the Air Force's new strategy revolves around refuelling in flight, that Howard Hughes is building a "flying crane" helicopter, that Fairchild is working on a "revolutionary ten-engine jet bomber" with a jettisonable biplane wing to give 10,000 mile range. On the movie front, Cecil B. DeMille wants to make a lavish Technicolor about the Barnum and Bailey, and Corinne Calvet is the "It girl" of the summer of '49.
Washington Trends reports that Senator Murray's economic-expansion bill is gaining ground, with endorsements from the President and Leo Keyserling, but Nourse thinks it is too soon to know if it will be necessary. Whatever plan does pass will have a package of tax cuts, government buying of distressed commodities, and an implicit endorsement of an eventual Federal budget deficit. Murray also wants loans to distressed industries, easy leases for war surplus factories, and backing for state and local government public works. Hoffman has gained an argument for not cutting the ECA, since most of its money will be spent in the States, on agricultural goods and guns, next year. (This point is so obvious that it needs its own separate story in National Affairs.) Related is the continuing horse trading over the new farm legislation and a compromise bill to expand social security to cover more workers,although farmers and farm workers will probably not be covered.
National Affairs
"Economy? It's a Word, Not a Deed" The House is trying to cut Fair Deal spending to cover an expected $1.5 billion deficit, but the Senate keeps adding to it. The one thing both can agree on is higher pay for the military. In case you're wondering how close we Progressive are to total victory, Jesse Wolcott of Massachusetts says that if an economy spends 35% on government, capitalism is doomed, and if we add 7% for the Housing Bill, it will be all-out socialism. Sinister laughter!
"Electoral College Dent" Senator Lodge is still touting his plan to reform the Electoral College and prevent any further elections in which the winner has a minority of the popular vote, which used to happen long ago in the old days. It would, just so incidentally, allow Republicans to win electors in the South.
In Congress this week, Representative Herbert Eberharter of Pennsylvania, up for a federal judgeship, had to deny that he had beaten his wife, taken bribes, or "frequently been loud and disorderly." He admitted to drinking more than he should. The Senate Judicial Committee made him promise to do better in the future, but reserved judgement on his judgeship. They did not reserve judgement on various poison-pen amendments to Taft-Hartley repeal, or an agreement that foreign nations would buy 170 million bushels of US wheat each year for four years. Also, staffers at Boston City Hall denied responsibility for its telephone lines being busy all the time. It's the fault of all the people calling in. Almost as important, the Alger Hiss lynching --I mean, show trial. Whittaker Chambers is still a liar with rotten breath, and all the testimony that Hiss was basically guilty of passing on boilerplate to the Soviets if he was guilty of anything was just so boring that who cares get on to the Pumpkin Papers!
Well, that was fun. Let's do it again with Judith Coplon! This is the one where we get to drag in an atomic scientist who crossed Groves and Lawrence. (So I've heard, anyway. About Lawrence, that is. He definitely crossed Groves!)
"Have Some Hysteria" Time to get on to the minor news, like the President making a statement about how all of this spy hysteria is hysteria. Wrong! Says Newsweek. Why, the President was wearing a brown suit. With a white pocket handkerchief! That kind of thing might go down on Palm Beach, but not when you're up at the podium refusing to declare your undying allegiance to J. Edgar Hoover by sweeping the informant scandal under the rug! Aso, J. Robert Oppenheimer's brother was a communist, which just goes to show.
There's a long story about the Pennsylvania State Police enforcing the state sales tax by stopping people at the New York border and making them show receipts. It's no way to run a country.
"Neurotic with a Rifle" A detailed story about Ruth Steinhagen,the women who shot Eddie Waitkus of the Philadelphia Phillies. Apparently the reason that she shot a man she'd never even talked to in a hotel room with a carbine was that she's crazy. Go figure.
Washington Tides with Ernest K. Lindsey, "Communism and 'Hysteria'" Lindley points out that it is not hysteria if there is communism, and the informants scandal and HUAC's grandstanding aren't really so bad when you squint at them just right, while the whole thing over the AEC is just Hickenlooper being Hickenlooper. Why, who doesn't have that fun but slightly crazy old uncle trying to get you arrested for spying? It's all in fun and, besides, Lilienthal really did "defend the use of public money to educate an avowed Communist," which I'm pretty sure is against the Ten Commandments. In the end, we should all just trust Senator McKellar to do the right thing, and at least now we know the difference between a liberal and a Communist.
Foreign Affairs
"Behind the Soviet Enigma" The Four Powers minsters' meeting was requested by the Russians, but failed to lead to any results. Newsweek concludes that Moscow is waiting for the American depression to cause the collapse of capitalism. No point in negotiating over Germany when the world communist revolution is at hand! And as this story was so much fun, Newsweek does it again with "Progress at Paris," which is about how the Big Four came up with a working solution for Berlin and Germany, and laid the groundwork for an Austrian peace treaty. And that was so much fun that there's room for a third story, "Flea Through a Camel's Eye," which is about how Dean Acheson is throwing fighting words at Vyshinsky, who is too much the coward to ask the Secretary to step outside, because he is a Communist.
"Upsurge in Five Lands" There are more strikes lately in Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Japan. Inconveniently, the Berlin police strike and British railway strike have been settled, while the Italian strike was actually only a demonstration, and the French and Japanese strikes were one-day walkouts. But it could get worse! After all, Communists are behind them. (Except the Berlin police strike.)
"Czechs vs. The Church" The battle between the Czech Communist Party and the Czech Catholic Church is so interesting that it has to be in all the papers forever. Also, Hungary and Bulgaria. Except in Bulgaria, it's not the Catholic Church, but the "Titoists." Pretty much the same thing, really.
In France, a former army officer and Communist named Albert Reinberg is on trial for turning an escaped Berlin mental patient over to the Russians. She was then shot for being crazy in an anti-Communist way, while Reinberg, who was unpopular with his fellow officers, left the army and opened a lingerie shop in Paris. He is now being tried for treason. Another French criminal is a 65 year-old woman named Adelaid LePage, who has been sneaking out at night and pasting new street names over ones she disagrees with. Hit recently are Avenue Georges-Mandel and Avenue Franklin-D.-Roosevelt. Also, the Gaullists are in trouble for trying to change the name of the Rue Orleans into Rue Leclerc, because Marshal Leclerc is good and De Gaulle is bad, or something.
"Punctured Gold Bubble" The story of Free State Gold Area's supposed strike at Erfdeel Farm is winding down. Free State claimed that it had found ore with 529 ounces of gold per ton, 6000ft below ground. Its stock climbed from $2 to $10 and assorted speculators joined in, but it is now clear that police assays don't show the same amount of gold, and various Johannesburg Stock Exchange brokers are ruined.
"The Slump Across the Sea" "In comfortable by slightly shabby club lounges," American visitors hear that informed British observers are afraid that the American recession will turn into a depression, resulting in falling exports, rising unemployment and Soviet adventures. Britain seems to be doing fine, with new paint and crowds everywhere, looking for something to buy, but falling commodity prices mean doom, doom! In an attempt to find an alternative to exports, British industrialists have even launched a "Buy British" campaign turning on "refused exports."
"U.S. Eyebrows Lifted"The Palestine Conciliation Commission has heard that Israel cannot allow the half million displaced Arab refugees to return, because they would be an intolerable economic burden and a fifth column. The United States has threatened firm action, such as withholding the unused portion of the Import-Export Bank loan and lifting the embargo on arms shipments to Arab states unless Israel complies with the UN resolution of 11 December 1948 by accepting an international regime in Jerusalem, repatriating Arab refugees and settling boundary questions under the Commission. Diplomats are skeptical, as some believe that America will have no alternative by to take Israel as America's "chosen instrument" in the Middle East.
"Bao Dai Boom Boom" The French have finally managed to move Emperor Bao Dai from his Riviera exile back to Hue, where he has taken up his office long enough to enjoy a 21 gun salute, release 1000 political prisoners and promise free elections that will determine whether Vietnam will be a monarchy or a republic, so he can go home. Everyone Newsweek has talked to says that he should go home, elections or not, because it is way too late for this crap.
"Business with the Reds" The Koumintang Air Force leafleted Shanghai, Nanking, Tientsin, Tsingtao and Ningpo this week, threatening to bomb everyone and everything. Meanwhile, the Western Powers are talking to the Communists, because what's the realistic alternative?
In Canada, the federal election hasn't even started yet, and the Conservatives are trying to make a scandal out of the premier of Newfoundland, while I don't need to tell you about the election in British Columbia, only that Newsweek approves of Byron Johnson's victory. Also, excavators may have found the skeleton of Jacques Cartier at the cathedral in St. Malo, and Canada wants his skeleton sent to Canada.
Business
"Question-mark Market?" Up, down or sideways, no-one knows where the market is going. Also questioned-marked are consumers, who might not want to buy various things, or might be waiting to see if prices come down further. Except for houses. They all want houses. Another story puts some specifics to the general impression that there are fewer strikes lately.
What's New reports that Tele-Cide Chemical of Brooklyn has a plastic stocking coating to reduce runs and snags. Crosley Motors has adopted disc hydraulic brakes in all Crosley cars. Freydberg Strauss of New York has an adhesive-backed satin tape for packages, available in fifteen colours. B. L. Marble Chairs offers plastic scuff guards for the bases of revolving chairs that cement to the base, are chip-proof, and easily cleaned. Doerr Products, of Los Angeles, has the most elaborate baby carry-all yet, which includes dry-ice compartments and a heated compartment that plugs into the cigarette lighter. A separate story covers the Guinness Brewing Company's decision to build a brewery in New York brewery to better compete in the United States. John Lewis has a new opponent across the bargaining table as the soft-coal business tries to find a way to keep the market balanced. (I'm surprised to hear that Southern coal owners think that Northern mines and union men are working together to keep the South down. Probably make their sons marry Coloured women next.
Trends and Changes reports that housewives have been told that food prices will be down 4--6% next year,that Long Island Rail commuters will be "mugged" and get badge-style tickets with their pictures next year. Frigidaire's eleven millionth unit rolled off the Dayton assembly line last week. The American Society of Heating and Ventilation Engineers heard about the heat pump last week. That is, the "heat pump" that extracts heat from well water and other environmental heat reservoirs, and not the one in forced-air heating furnaces. Professor McNair of Harvard Business says that the recession still has momentum behind it and will continue for another six months or so. Wilson Sporting Goods is using an X-ray machine for sales-promotion. They put one of their golf balls in it along with a competitor, shoot it with a million volts of electricity, and show that their golf ball is better(!) Isn't there a law against causing cancer to sell golf balls? Because it there isn't, it might be something Congress could look into. Consumer sales down, unemployment up, the Russians stopped shipping chrome and manganese to the United States in April, causing industry to dip into its reserves.
Henry Hazlitt's column this week is "Private Enterprise Regained," and is a reprint of a newspaper column reprinting an entry in William Bradford's journal. In case you're asking sophisticated, analytical questions like "Who? Where? Why? What?", Bradford was the Governor of Boston back in the Pilgrim days, and one year the Puritans decided that instead of farming all their land collectively, they'd round it up and give it out as private property, and this caused their famine to go away through the magic of the free market. Or so some lady who actually read the journal says, and since Henry has nothing better to do this week, he quotes the lady quoting Bradford.
. . And then for some reason Business gets its own International section for an article about a new American push to reinvigorate the International Chamber of Commerce so that it can lobby the United Nations for lower taxes, more generous depreciation, labour law reform and deregulation just as soon as the General Assembly starts having power over those things. In the mean time, it will agitate for getting rid of fixed exchange rates and maybe overthrow a few Latin American governments.
Joseph Phillips must have been at the same poker game as Henry Hazlitt, because he doesn't have a column either. So he whips out the one he wrote about the Quebec Conference back in '43 and adds a paragraph about the Marshall Plan.
Science, Medicine, Education
"Sweat in Texas" Newsweek is off to Texas, where the Mexico-United States Commission for the Eradication of Foot-and-Mouth Disease warns that a lack of American research might lead to the disease crossing the border. No American laboratory wants to handle the virus and produce the short-lived vaccine, because of the risk it might escape. Senator Magnuson is offering Ketron Island in Puget Sound as the site for a thirty million dollar laboratory recommended by the Department of Agriculture, but as usual, the Senate has so far proposed what the House won't dispose. Agriculture's solution is complete fencing along the Mexican border and shooting every infected animal in either country, although so far that just means Mexico. Various experts deem this far too ruthless and impractical, and also too expensive and vulnerable to corruption when American money is spent shooting Mexican animals.
"Giving Tongue" At the end of the annual AMA convention, doctors attended an exhibit sponsored by the National Society for Crippled Children and Adults and the American Speech and Hearing Association, devoted to the cause of getting the estimated 10 million Americans with speech handicaps proper speech therapy. The Society and Association believe that most minor articulatory disorders, aphasia, stuttering, cleft palate, cerebral palsy and laryngectomy related speech disorders can be helped in various ways.
"Social Drinking: it Now Has the Limited Approval of Physicians, Investigators and Oliver Wendell Holmes" Of 61 million drinkers in the United States, it is estimated that 3,250,000 are problem drinkers and 750,000 alcoholics. Drinking has been in decline throughout the world for the last fifty years. Alcohol affects different people at different rates in different ways under different conditions, and various myths about alcohol, such as that it causes cirrhosis, are dispelled.
"Quiet Ouster" The Presbyterian Church is in hot water after forcing Herbert Case, Jr., to resign as president of Washington and Jefferson College and putting it on a "provisional" list, which I don't know what that means although I'm sure money is involved. The college can get out of trouble if it agrees to "establish certain Bible course and teach Christianity as the highest philosophy."
"Cheater Meter" Professor Howard Wilson, an assistant in economics at Loyola and a professor of finance at Illinois Tech, has done a survey of cheaters through college newspapers and established that most cheaters do it to get higher grades, though a few do it for the challenge. Most professors who were asked about the survey blamed small exam rooms.
Press,Radio-Television, People
"Cake Walk" The story is that a housewife wrote away for the Waldorf-Astoria's chocolate cake recipe, received it, baked a cake, and then received a bill for a hundred dollars! Everyone has a version of the story, and none of them are true. The Waldorf, hurt by the story, has published its recipe, which just added to the heat, because various people have had a field day criticising it for folding the eggs wrong or something like that.
"Midnight Earl" Earl Wilson publishes a social column in the New York Post, and has his third book out, which Newsweek has to give a sparkling review-and-mini-biography in the Press section or Wilson will write a column about that blonde it saw Newsweek with that wasn't Newsweek's wife.
"It Ain't the Heat" The recent heatwave has been ruining people's television reception, they say. It turns out that it is actually summer foliage, which wasn't there when the televisions were installed, a way back last winter.
In Addition reports that McGraw-Hill is folding its three-year-old slick, Science Illustrated for losing $4 million, either on publishing costs or because it couldn't make up its mind whether to be popular or thorough. New York journalists have received a mail questionnaire from the "Red-led" International Organisation of Journalists, and are suspicious that it's a commie plot.
"The Schlackmeisters" There are currently 32 network and countless local radio shows offering prizes that might add up to $210,000 a week in supposed value. You get to that number by adding up frozen brook trout and all-expense paid treasure hunt vacations in the Barbados islands, but you get there. All of those frozen trout, encyclopedia sets and Hamilton Fluff Dri dryers are rounded by by "schlackmeisters" who might handle $7 million a year in merchandise. No one knows who the first "schlackmeister" was, but the rest of this article is mostly about Adolphe Wenland, who is one of the big ones, and who has a very nice mustache. Good enough for news!
Adolf Hitler's former yacht, the Grille, now owned by George Arida, is in New York for showing off purposes. Betty Grable was the best paid woman in America this year, at $208,000. Milton Berle has remarried his ex-wife. It's usually only one! A recent Trans-ocean airliner taking off from Germany with pilot Captain Walter Kyse with nineteen expectant DP mothers had two go into labour at the Point of No Return. Both deliveries were held until after landing. Italian scientist Giuseppe Imbo has climbed to the bottom of the crater of Mount Vesuvius and found nothing particularly special. The Tri-State Association of Coloured Elks have bought the John Brown farm near Harper's Ferry and will convert it into a chidren's camp, old folk home and memorial. Esther Williams is volunteering at a school for the blind in Santa Monica, teaching blind children to swim. Gregory Peck has had a child, and so has a "Hearstling," which would make baby William Randolph III a Hearstlingling? Paul Robeson, Jr.'s wedding turned into a bit of a circus when the press mobbed his father. Governor Comstock and Russell Doubleday have died.
Movies
"Nyoka's Perils" The British film industry's latest venture into dollar-making is British-made serials about "bosomy heroines who will make Pauline look like a good insurance risk." Look for Jungle Girl and The Perils of Nyoka at the next Oscar ceremony! I think this is a revival of the Nyoka name? Saraband is a British flick about lecherous princes, lovelorn duchesses and daring soldies of fortune. In Technicolor. Newsweek didn't like it. It also didn't like Roughshod, although it "commends" the script for trying to get away from the typical oater cliches by featuring three dancehall entertainers as the tenderfeet that the cowboy has to protect from the bandits. On the other hand, if the bandit is played by Joel McCrea, he's a good guy, see Colorado Territory, which Newsweek thinks could have been a better movie if not for Eric Johnston, since if not for him, Joel and Virginia could have got away to Mexico and lived in sin. I guess I've spoiled the ending? Everyone is spoiling the ending! Also, Howard Duff is Ex-War Pilot of the I-Men in Illegal Entry, which is about some bad, bad men (hombres?) who smuggle people across the border in airplanes, dumping the ones who won't sit still in turbulence and harass the stewardesses out through the floor hatch on the way. If only.
Books
Someone must have sat Raymond Moley down and told him that he wasn't pulling his weight even by Hazlitt/Phillips standards, because he's started a Newsweek Bookshelf review series with a review of Marguerite Clark's The March of Medicine. He really liked it, although the review takes the stand that it is for the "hypochondriac" in all of us, which might not be the best review Clark has ever got.
As for the promised "vacation book" column, it turns out to be a mention sometimes one-sentence review of a bunch of books we've already heard about.
Raymond Moley's column this week is "Youth in Bifocals," and summarises Herbert Hoover's "wise and amusing speech," that is, commencement address, to "a college graduating class." That's some research right there, Ray. Couldn't be bothered to look at this week's Fortune? No, that's not it, because the rest of the column summarises it. The Class of '49 wants security, and Hoover warns against it because it will just lead to socialism in the form of old age pensions. Also, not enough people are taking liberal education these days.
Flight, 30 June 1949
Leaders
Healthy Exercise" Flight is pleased that Dutch and American units participated in the Air Exercise this week, even though it can't say anything else about it. Even less useful is the next Leader, which explains that building model aircraft is a useful hobby.
"Exercise 'Fowl:' Combined Forces Test of the Air Defences of Great Britain: Western Union Participation'" B-29s in the attacking force, fighters controlled by Air Marshal Embry at 11 Group in the defending force. Attackers included Lancasters and Wellingtons(!) as well as Lincolns and Mosquitos, defenders included Spitfires, Vampires and Meteors. The Superforts proved very hard to intercept, even by Dutch Vampires, as often predicted. Also, Lord Tedder went to see a model aircraft contest. Also, Flight announces the results of the National Air Races.
Here and There
Shell House is showing the How an Aircraft Flies. Bring a date! Eleven million pounds in British aircraft were exported, which is slightly below the level needed to hit the £35,000,000. The fighter boys continue to insist that the F2H2 Banshee could catch a B-36 just fine if they were only given a crack. The magnetic survey device has been invente/used for the first time ever again, this time by Canada's Aeromagnetic Survey group, which belongs to the Hunting Group, which should know better than to waste our time with this kind of blither by now.
Civil Aviation News
ICAO has approved ILS and GCA. This is like the magnetometer news. Didn't this happen years ago? It has also approved the VHF omnirange, just in time for the Air Force to trash it. First word of a KLM Constellation loss in the water off Bari is in. The pilot was the son of the company's president. The Baltic Exchange hasn't been in the news for a week, so here's a tiny story about it. It is admitted that attempts to improve the Ambassador's wing to hit an increased all up weight target of 52,000lbs have failed. It is said that attempts will be made to do a proper job of it. Passive voice is used a great deal in this news release. BSAA will start flying Convair liners soon. ICAO's budget for next year is almost three million Canadian. BOAC Yorks operating in the Middle East have been converted to take 21 seats, as opposed to being scrapped years ago.
"Meteoric Progress" The Meteor has been pushed up to Mach 0.85, as opposed to being scrapped, years ago. Harold King went to the Netherlands to watch the Dutch and Belgian pilots who are stuck with them, doing their best.
Michael Townsend, "North Pacific Navigation In a Light Aircraft: Lessons of a Long-Distance Flight"Townsend recently flew "Mrs. R. Morrow-Tait" from Japan to Alaska in spite of being a very green pilot. Flight neither approves nor disapproves. I think they're both nuts. At least he has a nice discussion of the weather of Japan, which is particularly insane, so he knew what he was getting in for. He is quite pleased by the success of the method he used to reel in the southwesternmost Aleutian island, but if he hadn't been able to fix the location and fly into visual range of it, he wouldn't be here to write this article. There he refuelled, before making his way up the archipelago under very low temperatures for the season, but much lower than in September, when the flight was originally planned. He crossed the border ranges under very favourable weather conditions after waiting a week in Fairbanks via Sheep Mt. Pass, but had to make a forced landing on the Alaska Highway. Hmm. I wonder if you could set a Neptune down on --- The important thing is he managed to not die.
"Rotor Testing: Design and Development of the Bristol Tower" For something so unimportant, there sure are a lot of articles about that spinning tower Bristol built to test propeller blades!
"Research Enterprise, Public and Private: new Home for the RAE Instrument Department: Developments at GEC Laboratories" RAE has a new shop, so Flight tells us about its previous successes in the field of sextants, radio controlled AA decoys and the Larynx, "equivalent of the German V-1," which is a dirty lie, and also that it has nice windows, since they're not allowed to say what RAE is working on now. GEC's new laboratories are enormous, but the only thing Flight is allowed to tell us is that it is working on powder metallurgy. I guess we know the one thing that won't help the Communists develop the bomb!
A short note describes how the Theseus-Lincoln has recently passed a 600 hour flight mark, and is being modified for a long range testing flight.
Correspondence Already? That was a short issue!
D. G. Hall remembers the Beaufighter, a fine plane. Dennis Powell defends says that the Short Sandringham wasn't the world's first double decker airliner, since the Empire boats were doubles, and so was the Dornier Do X of twenty years past. "Ex-832 Type" accepts the invitation to argue that one or the other method of deck landing is better. (The British one, if you were wondering.) Whatever: It's still jet age kamikaze work. Robin Grant likes going up in balloons.
"HMS Gamecock Entertains: Navy Day at Royal Naval Air Station Bramcole" The Navy had an aerial display, or, as we say in a country where we talk English like we mean it, an air show. Also, Liverpool had an air show. In Surrey, some air force reservists showed off their hats.
Civil Aviation News
The Helmore Committee recommends that members of the Air Registration Board should be a appointed by the Ministry on a three year basis. The Government is introducing new regulations on registering chartered airline flights, and this is bad. Dr. D. F. Stedman, of the National Research Council's Chemistry Division in Ottawa has a new windscreen water repellent coating, FC-10. It's swell. BOAC has named its 22 Canadairs the "Argonaut." class. TWA is buying another 22 Constellations. KLM and the Netherlands Indies Civil Aviation authorities have combined to start the first weather ship in the Indian Ocean. I'm not sure that the crew should get too comfy with their jew jobs! (Where would an Indian Ocean weather ship even be? My globe has all sorts of exotic islands way down south near Antarctica, but planes don't go near there! The big weather problem in the tropics is typhoons, and weather ships won't stay out for those. Tracking them is more of a job ofr us intrepid aviators.)
Ian H. Driscoll, "South Pacific Travel: Personal Impressions of Some Important Routes and Their Equipment" Speaking of! New Zealand's civil aviation authorities have come down firmly that only Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch should get international airports. My vague understanding of New Zealand is that Aunt Grace really loves her sheep jokes, and that it is another of those countries where most of the population is crowded into one part of the country, in this case the northern island. That offers the usual sticky problem that the only practical way of getting to the remote southern island is by plane, and you can't get the planes to fly there. On bothering to look it up, it turns out that Christchurch is the biggest city on the southern island, although that still isn't very big, so New Zealand is facing the problem head on, by, I guess, subsidising one international airport on the South Island, which is its very imaginative official name. Wellington happens to be a daft place for an airport, so it might get a seaplane base instead, speaking of daft. The New Zealanders are also backing another international airport for Fiji. The author took a swing through Australia while writing this article, although not to research it, I would think, considering how much Flight probably pays. He thinks that Mascot (Sydney) and Essenden (Melbourne) is on the swing, and he really liked the Convair he flew in. Someone has to! At that point he took the "regular BCPA Skymaster" bound Sydney to Fiji. There's a three-times-every-two-weeks Sydney-Australia service, and a once-every-two-weeks Vancouver-Auckland flight that I guess he couldn't catch. With the introduction of the DC-6, the frequency will probably be about doubled. Flight leaves Sydney at 2 AM, because civil aviation hates everyone, arrives Fiji at 0800 Sydney time the following morning. Fiji's current international airport is way down on the south side of the island, so if you want to visit the capital (Suva), you are faced with a 146 mile taxi drive and a £5 bill. There are small plane and flying boat services between Nadi and Suva, and elsewhere in Polynesia, which are briefly mentioned before it is off to Pago Pago in American Samoa, where "visitors are not encouraged." The author then flew off to the Cook Islands and Rarotonga before returning to Fiji and catching a BCPA DC-6 on its way from San Francisco to New Zealand with a full load of British settlers.
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| Despite Reggie, the Dove/Devon was actually fairly well liked |
"Deck Landing: A Comparison Between British and American Methods" The Americans and British have quite different approaches to landing jets on aircraft carriers without Oh My God You Killed Everyone. Neither one actually works, but depending on which country you're trying to upset, you can say that one or the other is better. Before the jet hits the tower and sets the gas alight and everyone dies.
"Portrait of a Pioneer: How "H.P." Founded the Fortunes of the Handley Page Company Forty Years Ago" According to Uncle George, this isn't at all how Frederick Handley-Page "founded the fortunes" of Handley-Page. But it is a fun story about the days before WWI that Flight won't shut up about.
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| Speaking of Flight articles about flying boats . . . |
C. G. Collins, "Revolutionary Refuelling: Will Be Demanded for Ultra-large Aircraft: The Principal Problems Reviewed" A 285,000lb Brabazon will carry 11,500 gallons of fuel, which means that a 2000 gallon tender delivering 120 gallons per minute will take 96 minutes pumping time, and that complete refuelling would take five tenders and five hours! (But using six tankers at the same time would only take a quarter of an hour. My mind boggles.) This makes rapid airfield turnaround a bit of a challenge. New American airfields have pipe runs and connection hydrants, and it is hoped that future airliners will feature underwing or fuselage refuelling points. The author has seen an underwing refuelling attachment that will take 200 gallons/minute, but internal pipes probably won't take any more than that. There have been experiments with a 300 gallon/minute delivery, but apart from bursting an aircraft from the inside out, there's the problem of putting that through a hose (visualise the way that a fire hose whips at 60 gallons/minute!) and, when all that is said and done, you are exhausting a tender in six minutes, which is ridiculous, and leads to the thought of a gas station for airliners, which may be on the way.
Correspondence
Geoffrey Dorman reminds everyone that the Royal Aero Club is going to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of its founding "in a balloon" next year. J. D. Browning thinks that a national aeronautical museum would be super keen. "Flying Boat Instructor" explains how that Sunderland that rescued the wounded off Amethyst got off the step in spite of taking off down-tide. The reason is that higher water speed and lower water friction cancel out more or less. Christopher Hook writes to take issue with the 11 November letter from K. J. G. Bartlett that said that hydrofoils have been tried and don't work. This was in connection to an article about his "hydrofin," which is sure to work, I. J. Chantler,a senior assistant at the Reading Technical College, writes to slightly correct the story about how how, now that local authorities have taken over the former Miles Technical School, it no longer teaches aeronautical subjects. (Or stock fraud, either.) Actually, it still offers those courses to the students who were first enrolled at the Miles school, and will until the graduates, two of whom recently won a prize for their examination papers, graduate.
Engineering, 17 June 1949
R. J. Wilkins, "Experimental Method for Research Into Reinforced Concrete" Electrical strain gauges such as the standard ones made for industry by the British Thermostat Company have potential for assessing the strength of pieces of reinforced concrete. Wilkins used them on some standard laboratory pieces and then used other methods to determine the strength properties of the concrete over time.
Literature
James Pellaton's Watch Escapement is a very important work in horological circles, because it is by an instructor at the Swiss School of Horology in Lausanne, and the Swiss know clockworks. Engineering wants you to know that it read the book very, very, very closely, so when it says that, while a very good book on horology, it is not the best book on horology that can be written, you should trust Engineering. Or, more exactly, the reviewer Engineering chose, who is not at all an expert on horology who has a book out next year. T. D. Walshaw's Diesel Engine Design is topnotch. "Praiseworthy," "authoritative," "My favourite drinking buddy," etc.
W. J. Duncan, "A Review of Dimensional Analysis" I don't know if they did this in your Stone Age day --heck, did you even have dimensions back then?-- but at the Institute we were analysis-happy with the cancelling of a foot-pound here and the multiplication by a Hertz there. It seemed like a neat way of checking that our algebra hadn't gone astray. Trust a mathematician to spoil our fun by showing that it is much more complicated than that, although I should have suspected after tensor calculus. On the bright side, if you do make it more complicated, you can get even more interesting results. Duncan uses a simple matrix to derive Poiseuille's Law, which isn't the most earthshaking scientific result ever, but which is super neat and shows just how useful this stuff could be in, for example, aerodynamics, which isn't exactly afloat in solid dimensional analysis to begin with. (Who knows what dimensions coefficient of lift is in? I do! But not "Favonius," that's for sure.)
Austen J. Smith, "Problems in Bronze Foundry Practice" People have been casting in bronze since before the day of the Duke of Chou, and they've always had problems with the bronze "freezing" in the thin bits of the mold. Well, here's some science about that. A lot of science, and it's just the start, since there are other aspects of the problem, such as the tendency for tin to come out of solution that aren't considered here.
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| Eye rest time. |
Somewhat related, so that I will get to it out of turn here, is another talk to the same convention by Lord Citrine, "The Position of the British Electrical Supply Industry" Many of the future demand figures I used above actually come from this talk. Citrine points out that the industry has huge financing capability and intends to spend 400 million in the next five years. It is shortages of men and material, especially turbines, that is the main problem at the moment. However, there are also problems with siting power stations, with many locals getting all upset about giant smokestacks and the like.
There's a lot of catalogue-worthy "articles" about special purpose machine tools. The first one is a blurb about W. H. Marley and Company's automatic keyway-cutting broaches.
"50 kW Turbogenerator for Instructional Purposes" Speaking of catalogue articles, here's one about a set of turbogenerators that C. A. Parsons is making for engineering schools. They would be installed on university campusses to provide power, and the engineering students would come by and ooh and awe and say, "That's how a small turbogenerator with many interesting features works!" I'm not sure I see the point.
Launches and Trial Trips Four steamships (Orca, Jason, Persic and Flatholm) include a freighter, two freight liners and a trawler. Two diesels (Vikingen, Steiningham Stange) are both single-screw oil tankers.
Regional Notes Strike a consistent note of heavier steel production to meet massive domestic backlogs and an overseas order catalogue in spite of disappointing coal returns. In Scotland, the South Yorkshire and the Northwest this is because of labour shortages which are being slightly improved by coal miners returning from other industries, while in the Southwest it is due to labour troubles. At the back end of the month, Scotland worries about weakening American demand. The Scottish numbers suggest record steel production this year, and the Northeast reports shortages of specialised steel, particularly high carbon. South Yorkshire reports a heavy backlog of dragline equipment for opencast coal mining and increasing interest in drift mining as an alternative.
Leaders
"The Founding of Thermodynamics" It is the centennary of Joules' "On the Mechanical Equivalent of Heat," so Engineering writes about it at length. June is going to be history month at Engineering
so it is just as well that the second leader makes a case for history being important by reviewing the legal history of the recovery of damages for delay in the delivery of machinery. You can't recover for delay unless the contract specifies it unless the firm or individuals responsible for the delay reasonably ought to have known it was urgent. In Britain, anyway.
The Honours List takes up a big chunk of space. Lots of engineers get into the Order of the British Empire. Some nice events include a London Science Museum exhibit for the blind and a talk about Joseph Bramah at the Royal Society for the Arts.
Letters
Several correspondents for and against the metric system, and A. J. K. Honeyman continuing his argument against A. C. Vivian's proposal to include "effective ductility" of steel in the British Standards.
E. Crowther, "The Institution of Gas Engineers: Presidential Address" People say that the producer gas industry is on the way out due to electricity and the latest threat, district heating. They're wrong. The industry will grow and become ever stronger as the engineering of carbonisation advances.
J. Lenaghan, "Aluminum Alloys for Shipbuilding" Aluminum has its advantages, but a great deal has to be learned about extrusion and the production of sufficiently stiff sections for shipbuilding use. Aluminum may have good strength for weight, but being less dense than iron, sections of similar use to steel are bulkier. The author doesn't say that, and in fact much of the piece seems devoted to the various issues of rapid strain hardening in aluminum alloys, which comes up in extrusion but also rivetting. Aluminum needs to be cold-riveted with aluminum rivets alongside steel plates being hot-rivetted, which honestly seems more complication than is worth in shipyard practice.Labour Notes has three main drifts. First is increasing unemployment (but also increasing total employment!) in the United States, second is the problem of standardising wages in the electrical supply industry, and third is some unfortunate work stoppages on the docks mainly due to sympathy strikes spilling over from a Canadian dispute.
"Early Railways in Derbyshire" I know you can't invest in history, but this is actually pretty fascinating. It's slow going from the point of view that it helps a lot to know the geography of Derbyshire, which I obviously don't, but it is about railways in a shire in England that's right in the middle of the Midlands before locomotives! Starting in the 1790s and alongside the canals, people built "tramroads" and "woodenways" on which heavy coal wagons were pulled by horses and sometimes winding engines like in the coal mines. (Remember our Oregon vacation when you took me to see the place where you and Uncle George were with a wagon that was let down the side of a mountain by a pulley and winch back in the old days? Like that, but with a steam engine for lifting.) One of these old tramways was still in use in 1946!Notes on New Books looks at F. Johnson's Metal Working and Heat-Treatment Manual, P. S. Houghton, The Milling Machine, The Machinery Publishing Company, Die-casting Machinery and Samuel Field, The Principles of Electrodynamics. Apart from being skeptical that we need another electrodynamics textbook, they are bland, short notices, except for Houghton, who is torpedoed on score of serious errors and unnecessary material.
Time, 20 June 1949
Letters
George Reteille of Detroit thinks that if we don't talk about air crashes, they'll go away --Sorry, Time, not Flight. If we don't talk about recessions, they'll go away. Novelist Charles Yale Harrison is free to flaunt his return to cigarette smoking after a heavy heart attack at 49. But, Doctor Clarence Mills of the University of Ohio points out, he needs to be aware that it's what is killing him. Mills points to his own study showing that smoking is clearly linked to fatal heart attacks, especially in the young(ish). Four letters about horse racing. Bill Huie defends his book, Case Against the Admirals, ghost written for an Air Force general, and vindicates himself against accusations that an article he wrote about college football was sloppy (Colliers retracted the story), that Readers' Digest apologised for errors in Case (Time mistook a letter from Admiral Denfield for a letter from the editor), and points out that everyone does accept the AEC's explanation for the missing piece of uranium. Time apologises for all of its mistakes. Man of the Half Century will not go to President Truman. FDR and Churchill both get two votes from seven offered. Milo Brooks is upset that "increasingly skimpy bathing suits" are exposing vaccination scars, and someone else tells him that foot injections are an option. The Publisher's Letter is pleased as punch that Time's article about Salvator Giuliano is being used for teaching in Norfolk, Connecticut, and that students and teachers are writing in to learn more.
National Affairs
"The Other 99.4%" Most Americans are boring people who live worthy lives, and not Hollywood stars atomic scientists or communist spies. Sometimes, however, they do exciting things, like the crew of the Sinco and people from the Rocky Mountain states who were rained on, and people near Wilmington, Delaware, who were stunk out of their homes by the rotting corpse of a dead whale that washed ashore. Bache and Co. is selling canned gold dust at $3,9445 a 100oz can, which is a loss on resale to the Treasury, but popular because for some reason it is the only kind of gold it is legal to hoard. That's not boring! I'm also a little surprised that Uncle George and the Earl haven't got us involved in this, as it sounds like the sort of thing they relish. Maybe it's not illegal enough?
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| Gordon Gray's career of serial failures in public service, including a single year at Army, gets a long Wikipedia article. Dr. Clarence Mills and Gordon Clapp are unpersons on Google. |
"Nincompoops At Work" Last week, the Army leaked that it had investigated TVA chairman Gordon R. Clapp and found him unsuitable for a temporary occupation job in Germany. The anonymous source asked how he could be deemed a fit chairman of the TVA if he wasn't up to even a temporary job in Germany. Another anonymous Army source in Washington broadly implied that it was because he was a Red, and that further comment should come from Clapp. Who accordingly replied that he had never applied for or been considered for an Army job. The Army then went to its files, found that they hadn't done any such thing, and sent the new Under-Secretary out to apologise and lay all the blame on "some damn fool of a nincompoop" at G-2 who took it on himself to send some press clippings from Senator McKellar's grandstanding at Clapp's confirmation hearings to Frankfurt for reasons that still don't make a lick of sense. Unless you assume, with Estes Kefauver, that someone at War wanted to get one in at Clapp and the TVA, which really isn't the Army's job, but might be Gordon Gray's. It's very confusing that they're both named "Gordon."
"Hot Words" Taking time out from attacking the TVA, Senator McKellar was cross-examining Paul Hoffman about the ECA being a big waste of money that he was wasting corruptly.
"It's on the House" Time, and everyone else, has discovered that Joe Martin is sending Representative Earl Wilson to Switzerland to attend a meeting of "Frank Buchanan's bleating, pacifist Moral Re-armament Movement," along with four other Congressmen, at a cost of five grand. Time, and everyone else, is appalled.
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| Chambers' buddies are committing suicide left, right and centre, for obvious reasons, but Time chooses to insinuate that they're all communists. |
"One-Way Ticket" Puerto Ricans are a bit upset that the chartered planes flying out of San Juan for New York have had four crashes in two years costing 116 lives in spite of having full CAA clearance. The latest was a Commando that made a forced landing at sea off the island due to engine failure with 81 on board, with 28 deaths.
Americana reports that the Harvard Lampoon is offering a prize to the student with the lowest grade who doesn't get expelled, that Henry Newman of Stanford has determined that humans can take a quart of whiskey a day by topnotch science involving getting dogs drunk. Couldn't wait to tell Ronnie about this, but it turns out that there were already a million campus jokes about it. Diamond Match Company is closing down its Oswego plant for ten weeks because of competition from cigarette lighters and paper matches.
"A Call from the Neighbours" The Alabama Ku Klux Klan is in the news for a series of raids against suspected speakeasies and non-segregated restaurants around Birmingham.
International
"Under the Sun" General MacArthur recently published a letter defending himself from Soviet accusations that he is undermining Japanese democracy. Things seem to be getting under the "American Shogun's" skin lately.
"No Camels, No Gnats" Ronnie explained that the title of this boring article about the foreign ministers' meeting in Paris is from the Bible. It is important to the development of English poetry, she said. Three times as boring!
"We Know the Russians" Berlin's railway association is striking over being forced to take a quarter of their pay in East Marks, and the Russians have no idea what to do about it, because they have no experience breaking strikes the democratic way. I'd write an ironic sentence, but the irony would have to go in all directions at once, and that's unhealthy. I could explode.Commissioner McCloy is the subject of this week's cover story. You might remember him as the guy who was born to an impoverished mom on the wrong side of the railway tracks who somehow went to an exclusive private school and was hired out of Yale into one of those exclusive New York law firms.
"Fed Up" Two Americans and one Russian have abandoned their countries by renouncing their citizenship or defecting to Sweden. More entertainingly, Delbert Eugene Hill, "America's Only Lady Magician," who went over to Britain as a Special Services Division entertainer, and who deserted on receiving a reclassification to "latrine duties," was finked out by his girlfriend while living as a woman and touring as a magician. I honestly don't know what to say. I wonder if he knew "Husky, 26-year-old Elphinstone Forest Gilmour," an entomologist working for the Natural History Museum who abused his privilege of unlimited access to its beetle collection to . . . sell beetle collections to . . . private collectors . . . I can't go on.It being Time, stories about the Labour conference and the Czech Communist party's recent synod with the Czech Catholic church are piled on top of a picture roll of Stalin taking a salute,looking very old. At 69, he is known to have heart trouble, has a puffy face, and his hair has gone white.
"Temporary Roof" Korea is between Japan (going democratic) and China, which is going Communist. Korea, compromising, is going in both directions. The Truman administration wants to give Korea $150 million in ECA money, arguing that the Communists will take over the south if they don't. Congress wants to know why Korea should get money he won't give "South China." In South Korea, the country is under modified martial law enforced by police originally recruited by the Japanese, who use "Japanese methods," which involve plenty of broken rib cages and punctured ear drums. Rhee isn't just under pressure over his police's inability to handle strikers without guns. He also has 200,000 refugees from the north that he can't feed, and an army that is too small to defend against North Korean raids.In Latin America, the congressional election has led to instability in Colombia, while Sears has opened up a store in Rio, and it is very exciting. A Brazilian Air Force C-47 has crashed, which is news (C-47s crash all the time) because it is the biggest air disaster in Brazilian history. Mexico City's Lake Xochimilco barely has any water in it any more.
Science, Medicine, Education
"Schmidt's Eye View" Cal Tech's Palomar Observatory is going to use its 72" Schmidt telescope to photographically map the entire sky over the next four years. It is an expensive project jointly funded by Cal Tech and the National Geographical Society, and gives Time an excuse to explain how the Schmidt telescope works. It has a concave rather than a parabolic mirror, with a correcting plate at the focus. This eliminates spherical aberration, because the edges of the photograph aren't distorted relative to the centre. It doesn't have the same resolution, which Time translates as having less range ("only" 300 million light years). But we'll get the stars out to 15 billion light years in the next pass! Seriously. That's how big they're saying the universe is now.
"Happy Ending" Louis Crook, a professor of aeronautics at Washington' s Catholic University, has been awarded a trillion million dollars of Air Force and Navy money for being the only inventor ever of the spark plug shield. He now plans to sue everyone else over everything. Apparently his patent also invented the coaxial cable?
The big news is that Morris Fishbein is out at the AMA and, in particular, the Journal. Sounds like real "Et tu, Brute" stuff, right on the floor during the opening session of the AMA annual convention. Time says it is because the AMA thinks he is doing more harm than good with his fight against "socialised medicine." That is, the AMA will be able to fight "socialised medicine" much more effectively once they've sent Fishbein to Siberia. Or the capitalist equivalent. Palm Springs?
"Windfalls and Weather" Most US colleges think that financial disaster is just around the corner without great heaps of the public money, which makes the Institute's $5 million haul from the alumni, Cornell and Harvard receiving millions from Walter Teagle (Cornell) and a Rockefeller(!); and Yale getting a cool 2 million for psychiatric studies just a bit embarrassing.
"Anti-Party Line" The National Educational Association has decided that members of the Communist Party shouldn't be allowed to work as teachers, which the New York Post thinks is a bit much, since it's not hard to see this ending up with FBI informers working the campus to find secret Commies who are trying hard not to look like Commies by, say, teaching partial differential equations with secret Communist propaganda. A blind student, Boniface Yturbide, has graduated from the University of Nevada at the head of his class. Also, various commencement speeches were either too boring or too controversial. Hoover did his part for the cause at Ohio Wesleyan, where he denounced students for caring more about their old-age pension than the stuff they should be caring about, like there being too much Government these days. John Marquand, on the other hand, told Governor Dummer Academy that there's all sorts of things that you shouldn't be contented by, like mosquitoes and poison ivy, and he wants the Class of '49 to fix them for him, which Time somehow turns into the "ample supply of discontent in the US and the rest of the world at graduation time, 1949." Because we just saw the first Soong of spring, I'll bet.
"War Babies" Everyone knows there's lots of war babies. Now, Oscar Ewing, head of the Federal Security Agency, which is in charge of worrying about these things, I guess, is warning that Amerci\\ica needs 30,000 more classrooms for a million more students.
Business
"Caught Short" Speculators who sold wheat short on the Chicago Exchange have taken a bath as the farmers get their bumper crop into the silos after all.
"Torpedo's Wake" A federal grand jury indicted Preston Tucker for faud, conspiracy and violation of securities laws this week. Trading in Tucker stock, most recently quoted at 40 cents, issued at $5, was suspended. Harold Karsten, alias Abraham Karatz and Flloyd Cerf were indicted with him, along with five former directors. The grand jury charges that Tucker raised $28 million through stocks and franchise sales on false pretenses, and no-one is sure where the money went. Tucker responded by calling the indictment "the biggest rape of free enterprise ever perpetrated in this country." We will see how this turns out. More importantly, Uncle Henry will see how this turns out!
If it weren't for Tucker's language, I wouldn't be suggesting that popular culture is servicing free enterprise like a five dollar whore.
There's an article about J. C. Penney's next, which Ronnie might be able to tell you more about., and another about the Pennsylvania Central. Both are more interested in financing than new products.
"Things to Come" GE has delivered its first gas turbine-electric locomotive to Union Pacific for testing. It has twice the horsepower of a diesel of the same size, and GE hopes that it will eventually have three time the life between overhauls of a modern diesel electric.
"Flying Tours" Lewis C. Burwell's Resort Airlines non-scheduled airline is not at all an airline in disguise that makes extra money because it is allowed to ignore CAB rules, because it is only for holiday travellers. All year round.
"The Top Ten" The US Treasury's annual list of 1947's highest salaries has only one Hollywood name on it, Preston Sturges, at $810,000 in salary and bonusses before taxes. The rest are business men, with American Tobacco's Vincent Riggio leading the list at $484,202, Randolph Hearst in the middle at $300,000, and G. A. Bryant, of the Cleveland building firm, Austin, is the poorest of the Big Ten at a mere $270,780 per year. To help us understand the people who lost money on Tucker franchises, it helps to know that ten automobile dealers made more than $75,000 in 1948. "As usual, no dividends, royalties or capital gains" were included.
Not really a business story, but I usually skip the Cinema section, is "All This and Movies Too," which is about the rapid growth of the drive-in movie business, which is branching into "barbecues and bingos," and building more elaborate windscreens and the like to attract custom.
Press, Radio and Television, Art, People
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| He created Seth Parker and Gang Busters and publicised Thomas Dewey. |
"Gag Removed" Back in 1939, the Baltimore courts imposed a rule forbidding the press from reporting suspect's confessions or past criminal record before they appeared in court. Last July, most radio stations chose to break this "Rule 904" over a particularly awful murder, and were fined. This month, the fines, and rule, were overturned by the Maryland Court of Appeals on free speech grounds.
"Together Again" Collier's published a hit on Walter Winchell last year. Winchell struck back in his columns with, as Time puts it, "the shrill insistence of a dentist's drill." This month, the two kissed and made up with Collier's printing a Winchell story (for which it paid $12,500, says Winchell) on the interservice fight over at the Pentagon. Time wants everyone to know that this is a sad turn of events because Winchell is a bad, bad man.
On the other hand, the guy at London Mystery Magazine who answers mail to Sherlock Holmes addressed to 221B Baker Street is a very nice person and everyone should buy the London Mystery Magazine. Speaking of mysteries, the Chicago Sun-Times is paying for tips about unsolved muirders.
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| Burra is more interesting artistically, but this 1949 Hurd-Air Force-Roswell connection needs some emphasis. |
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| Purpose of trip: To visit our money |
The Art pages start with a painter who is dead, because Leonardo da Vinci's Beatrice D'Este is on tour, and one who is still breathing, because Peter Hurd has a new museum in Roswell, New Mexico, which is where he used to live. It gives people a reason to visit Roswell. Also, Edward John Burra is odd, and is having his fifth one man show.
Bernard Shaw and Paul Robeson are both terrible people who like communism and Oscar Hammerstein is a nice composer who scolds Paul Robeson. Elizabeth Taylor's mother has announced her seventeen year old daughter's engagement all around rich kid, William Pawley, and not all around West Point football star, Glenn Davis. General Arnold's son has graduated 450th from West Point and married a girl who didn't date him for his brains. The son of Mr. Helen Hayes and, uhm, actual Helen Hayes is setting the stage on fire at the age of eleven and will surely go on to be a big star. T. V. Soong and the missus have arrived in the United States to visit their three daughters, all going to school in America. Sonja Henie has been burgled, Joe Louis is being sued. Milton Berle is feuding with Dorothy Kirsten Leland. Frederick Ogilvie has died, as has Sigrid Undset, Louis Haines, Louis Jean Malvy, John McCutcheon and William Robert Timken.
The New Pictures
Haven't we heard about Joel McCrea's new oater already? I thought we had. Anyway, it's Colorado Territory and also has Virginia Mayo as a "dingily blonde half-breed." Time didn't like it, but liked the mountain climbing.
Books
After a pan and a paen, Time ends in the middle, as a middlebrow must, with John Gunther's Behind the Curtain, which is a fun read but "little more than a recapitulation" of recent events in eastern Europe.
Flight, 23 June 1949
Leaders
"Give and Take" Americans are very jealous and ungrateful and awful for not saying "thank you for the jets" more.
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| Reggie didn't translate his dig at Britishisms, which is why he doesn't apologise for it. |
"Viscount Developments: Second Prototype to be Tay-powered" Stop me if you've heard this one, but the Brits are going to take the second prototype Viscount, which it turns out there's no use for as the test pilots haven't crashed the first one, and put jet engines on it. Specifically, the Tay, which is an up-powered Nene that Pratt and Whitney and Hispano-Suiza are both eager to build. Also, maybe this will lead to a jet Viscount airliner, even though everybody says that it won't and everybody says that this is a bad idea. Because Flight can't stop saying this for some reason.
"Insular Event" Cowe, which is on the Isle of Wright, is having an Entertaining Air Display and also Rally. Meanwhile, the RAF is putting on an All-Day Reunion Programme at Aldershot, which involves dropping some Territorial Army paratroopers.
"Unique Anniversary: Ministers and Manufacturers Honour a Pioneer Firm" There was a party for Handley Page at Grosvenor House. Speeches were had by all. Mr. Handley Page looks like a white whale in his evening dress. There's also a history/antiques collectibles article about all the planes that Handley Page ever built after Civil Aviation News. Did you know that Handley Page built a prototype bomber that looked like a cross between the Battle and the Skua? Or a plane named the "Gugnunc?"
"Nene Production in Australia" The Australians are going to make the Nene, and the time between overhauls for the latest Hercules has been raised to 750 hours.
"Technical Majority: D. H. Technical College Comes of Age and Gets a New Home" The De Havilland Aeronautical Technical College is 21 this year. It is celebrating by moving into Astwick Manor at the north end of Hatfield aerodrome. Hurrah! Someone still says "aerodrome!"
Civil Aviation News
Flight is upset about the reorganisation of the Air Registration Board. The Argonaut-Northstar-Canadair Four-D.C. 4 is going to do some proving flights. More proving flights. But for BOAC this time. The first day of the new QBI procedures under the new Metropolitan Control Zone was a complete SNAFU at Northolt. Various people have various opinions about how it shouldn't have happened. ICAO is having a Third Assembly, the MCA is having a Fire School, and Alitalia has had two very good years. Ernest Charles Geary, of KLM, has died at 41 of a heart attack. Adelaide is getting a new airport on reclaimed swamp and marsh. That's not how I imagine Australia.
Flight scolds Australia for flying so many American planes, what with the dollar and all. BOAC is offering a £468 round-the-world ticket in conjunction with all the Australian and Canadian airlines you'd need to actually use it. Passengers will be allowed to take a break in Sydney, Auckland, Fiji, Canton Island and Honolulu. Air Ceylon's Skymaster service to London has been cut to "39 hours 30 minutes." Less than 40 hours! Some airlines are still boycotting Idlewild.
Here and There
The Australians are aiming at holding a round-the-world air race during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.
At first I thought that this was the "Last Great Air Race," but it turns out that was something completely different,, also related to this week's post.
The Air Registration Board has certified the Double Centaurus, clearing the way for someone to use it for something. It was embarrassing at Evere when a Tiger Moth towing a Union Jack couldn't keep up with the other planes towing other flags. The explanation turns out to be that the Union Jack used had five more seams than the other flags, and a souped up Tiger Moth was substituted in the next flyby. In America, we'd just use a Sabre, but that's because we actually have fast airplanes. SBAC is pitting all the British jets against each other in a Challenge Cup soon. The USN's new sonar-ranging bomb for lifeboats is a "lifesaving bomb." Noel Wood, engineer and general manager of the Sheffield Corporation, suggests that since all reservoirs ought to be roofed in, it would make sense to build the roofs strong enough to support helicopter landings.
"Anglo-U.S. Conference: Viewpoints on Materials: Operating Influence on Design" A. E. Russell's talk on "Materials and the Designer" gets an extended precis. He first briefly described the solution of the key problem of providing an efficient box structure for wings, and showed that the most efficient solution involved using the skinning to provide torsional stiffness. Stiffness is a function of strength and depth, so he looked at various standard Alclad sheets (which give up some stiffness to have a soft and corrosion-proof outer covering) to discover torsional stiffness with depth, and found a very high range of scatter around manufacturer-specified strength. He offers a nice chart of the stress-strain curve from his lab, and moves on to recent work on adhesives, which is promising. Is metal-metal bonding ready for everyday use? Not yet, as the characteristics of the adhesive bonding level through the vertical cross section isn't known. The middle might be gooey, I translate. Moving on to the question of dimensional tolerance, he shows that excessive thickness as little as a hundredth of an inch can add 5% to the structural weight of an aircraft, and that some skin samples seen in his lab have a thickness of up to 7% above specified. Major P. Litherland Teed reinforces Russell's about alclad and is skeptical that it has any value in war production. He is quite fond of aluminum-magnesium alloy, and while he admits that improvements in steel production are continuing, steel's rapid loss of tensile strength at low temperatures rules out its use in stratospheric aircraft. Moving on to fatigue, he points out that studies have shown that up to 75% of structural failures in Britain are due to fatigue. Some metals, notably steel, have unlimited fatigue life as long as they do not exceed maximum stresses, while some metals have no maximum stress limits (apart from the level where they tear!). An example of this is 17ST aluminum.
Christopher Dyke's "Operating Factors and Design" shows that it is not always possible to cram in more flights per day per plane by increasing the speed, so that speed increases can't always be sold on this basis. For example, going from three to four London-Paris flights requires increasing cruising speed from 235mph to 420mph. He further shows that "sleeper" flights between London and New York become uneconomical at 325mph, and that the next major step in improving the returns for a trans-Atlantic airliner occurs at 500mph. Turbine powered aircraft will need cloud-warning radar to avoid turbulence. As flights increase, stacking will become worse, and he suggests increasing from for to six or even eight engines so that some can be shut down in the stack. Automatic first-circuit landing will be essential. Better runways are more important than lighter planes. Piston engines that can operate economically at 50% maximum rpm are necessary (you can get down there more easily if you just blow gas through the cylinders to cool them, but that's not economical), as are turboprops with a wider rpm range, and better air traffic control to allow turbojets to run optimum schedules. There's the usual blah-blah about better automatic controls, power eggs and so on.
Correspondence
D. S. Griffin is happy that everyone likes his national aeronautical museum idea. J. E. T. Tennant, R. A. Fry and Roger Tennant explain how ramjets work to D. Smith, whom I slandered last week by suggesting that he didn't understand turbojets. He actually doesn't understand ramjets.
Engineering, 24 June 1949
O. Bordy, "The Bailey Suspension Bridge" You've heard about the Bailey Bridge. Everyone has. Well, did you know that there was a suspension bridge designed by the Experimental Bridging Establishment? Given just how different the use cases between a simple truss structure and a suspension structure are, you'd have to wonder if you could even use any of the same materials, but that's what Donald Bailey's group eventually did. Also, you would wonder if there would be a use for it! Dr. Miller, who gave a talk on it at MIT in '47, described it as "a solution looking for a problem." And while you may say, "Oh, that's an American getting back at the sting over 'heavy American materials,'" the fact is that there was all of one actual Bailey suspension bridge built, down in Burma, and it really does seem to be a case of "We need to use it somewhere." The Corps (and the Red Army) got just as much use out of long girders, because they're as modular as the whole thing needs to be, and they have the stiffness in compression and torsion that a suspension bridge needs, and which the Bailey set designs out at first principle. Whatever. Given enough ingenuity and money, you can make a suspension bridge out of deliberately short components meant to lock together under gravity, and foist it on some hapless Burmese peasants. So there. Not Dr. Bailey's finest hour, but if you're in a hurry to get through a precis of an issue of Engineering, it's heaven sent.Literature
R. W. James, The Optical Principles of Diffraction of X-Rays X-ray diffraction is an important way of studying materials, and since it is an electromagnetic wave, it has "optical" properties, although since these are being traced through solid materials of radically different dielectric properties from crystal to crystal, they are much more complicated than simple ray tracing in air. James apparently offers another demonstration of the use of Fourier analysis to optics, which must make things even more complicated. And that's before taking into account quantum mechanical effects! Engineering finds the treatment very fresh and interesting, but too brief.
Le General de Fontagnes, Topographie Here is the state of the art according to the Director of the Topographical Section of the Geographical Service of the French Army. No-one beats the topographical engineers of the French Army at anything, as the vaunted Prussian General Staff learned to its dismay. (See what happens when you put cavalry men up against engineers? Why the French forgot that in 1940 I will never know.) So this is the book to get to learn about the current state of topographical affairs, at least if you read French.
J. L. Kent, "The Causes and Prevention of Slamming in Ships" Uncle George likes to say that slamming lost us more ships in the Battle of the Atlantic than torpedoes. I don't know if that's true, but Kent, reporting on work at Haslar, explains why. Slamming is associated with high speeds, steaming in ballast and shorter ships (there's a relationship between the length of wave and ship's length). All of this is well known. What is more important is the cause. In a sense, the ballast issue, which was so pressing when ships had to cross the Atlantic westbound empty due to lack of exports, has led to a great deal of "intuitive" blither-blather that boils down to keeping the ship loaded so that it will be stiff against bending, which is thought to cause the slamming. A bit of thought about ship's structure will show that that is the wrong tree to be barking up, and the tank studies reveal what is going on, which has to do with air cavities forming beneath the ship, faster or slower depending on momentum of the ship, thus weight and distribution of weight. This leads to the conclusion that the right hull form will greatly reduce slamming, although so will building --perhaps-- uneconomically large ships. The long story made short is that there is a solution and we should look into it.
"Research Work on Tin" The Tin Research Institute is mainly interested in tin-alloy materials for bearings, electro-plate coatings tin-plate and hot-tinning. Tin is a greasy and slippery material and ideal for that kind of thing. I think.
"Testing Tower for Helicopter Rotors" In defence of the Bristol Aeroplane Company, helicopter rotors are longer and (slightly) more complicated than propeller blades, so an outside tower for spinning helicopter rotors around very fast to see what happens to them has to be bigger, and have a bigger safety net, and some machinery for making the blade pitch whilst spinning round. I have no idea what else to say about them.
Leaders
"An Electrical Stocktaking" As I said above, Haldane's talk on the "national busbar" set the electrical supply industry abuzz last week, and this leader is Engineering's noncommittal, mamby-pamby review of an idea whose time has come. But that's Engineering for you, and the fact that the second Leader is about the local authority's "Road Plan for Lancashire" tells you all you need to know about Engineering. Where should that exchange go? Near Maldon or near that other town that's near it? Gosh gee whiz I think I'll worry about that all day!
"The Education and Training of Technologist" Okay, I'll admit that learning up a bunch of smart-mouthed young engineers must be serious work, but it can also be boring work about worthy institutions and coordinating coordination and all of that Economist stuff. Here's an example.
The Whitworth Society and the Society of Heating and Ventilation Engineers are having summer meetings, or had them. So is the British Society of Civil Engineers. Of the three, I'd go to that one, because they are hearing about bulldozers. Vroom vroom! The Ministry of Supply's Radiochemical Centre is accepting orders of capsules of radium and radon as gamma ray sources for industrial radiography of ship's welds and golf balls.
Obituary Mr. Charles Day was born in 1868, and after various youthful employments joined Mirless Watson, the British licensees of the Diesel engine in 1898 when they overrspent and were eaten alive by vultures. Ever since until he was asked to volunteer to retire, Day was in charge of "heavy oil engine" development and did a very good job of that and being the stereotypical "blunt, hard charging businessman." Engineering reminds us that he actually had friends who enjoyed his company, so there.
Follows yet more response to Mr. Haldane, if you were wondering, than a short and relevant catalogue bit about "Power Transformers for 200 kV Systems" and a not at all relevant one about the Lodge and Shipley Company's "Centre Lathe with Copying Attachment" The attachment that copies the curve off a template is particularly neat, and so is the transmission that lifts the cutting tool when the tracing stylus goes off the template. It's fun to hear about the difficulties of designing, building and exporting 500 ton transformers through congested British rail and road systems, but all the details of this copying-and-control apparatus and that blends together in my head. I pity the poor mechanical engineer, who has to learn one eccentric trick after another just to get production up and running.
"Photo-electric Control of Furnace Flames" Remember the gas engineers predicting that their industry is upwards bound and ever onwards? Well, here's one about the epidemic of explosions in British boilers due to gas temperature dropping too low to sustain a live flame, leading to flammable gas puddling and then exploding when it does take light. There's plenty of reasons for this besides poor quality gas, but a useful solution is a photoelectric eye that catches the flame as it dulls and shuts the supply valve.
Labour Notes is about Labour (the Party) trying to persuade Labour (the Movement) to shut up about pay increases in an election year. Dressed up fancy-like to make it seem like there's a principle at stake, which, to be fair, The Economist would swear there is. And probably Stafford Cripps, too, which goes to show he's an asshole. Hugh Dalton, where are you now?
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| A little chlorine gas never hurt anyone. |
So,yes, that was the old days for you.
Letters
Many people liked the article in Religion about the Presbyterian Church in America, but one writer is miffed because she thought that the Lutheran Chruch is bigger.C. J. Babby of Washington and John Kerr of Brooklyn had strong reactions to the article about the Bernstein Plan to introduce straight seam stockings into lady's fashion. I think I know why, too. Rowrr! Also provoking strong reactions from many readers is the article about novelist Frank Roberts, who collects eagles' talons. Edna Blue, of the Foster Parents' Plan for War, writes to point out that if China's children grow up to hate America, it won't be the Foster Parents' Plan for War's fault! On the other hand, Ward McCabe of Wellesley, Massachusetts, points out that the Chinese children he met do hate America, because of the "general and damaging misbehaviour of GIs in China." A. J. Liebling writes to complain that Ralph de Toledano misrepresented him in a recent article in Newsweek, which stands by its reporter. Without actually contradicting Liebling. The Publisher wants us to know that its special Summer Vacation Books section was researched by a people watcher in Grand Central Station and the literary magazines, for extra accuracy. In other research news, Newsweek was also able to track down the bar where a picture was taken by visiting 54 bars between the beginning of composition and deadline. That's pretty fast drinking!
The Periscope reports that Senator Hickenlooper will be in big trouble when the AEC turns up before the Senate Appropriations Committee, because Senator McKellar is out to get him, and Hickenlooper has been handing him ammunition nonstop. The RNC is likely to oust chair Hugh D. Scott in favour of Arthur Summerfield of Michigan. Speaking of, Everett Dirksen is the new Republican flavour of the month for '52, since Taft, Stassen and Dewey have
The Librarian of Congress has once again had his proposal for background music in the Library's card sorting division shot down, in spite of studies that show that it improves efficiency in routine jobs. De Gaulle's movement is running short of funds as French business shifts its support to the government. US recognition of the new Chinese government will be delayed while the US pouts for a bit. Some delegates to the Paris Conference want east bloc countries to get some US aid, which will drive a wedge between them and Moscow. Filipinos will vote for the most anti-American candidate they can field in the upcoming Presidential election, because they're hoping that Washington finally gets the message, because "Not tonight, I have to wash my hair" wasn't getting through. The British are sending heavy reinforcements to Hong Kong in case the Communists attack. The target for US tourism in Europe this year has been reduced to $1 billion from $2 billion because total transatlantic passenger facilities are still only 60% of prewar, and because of the recession. It is thought that Congress won't be able to take enough acreage out of production next year to make a dint in the colossal American grain and cotton surplusses. The White House may reinstate Federal control over coal production and prices since, six years after the New Deal regulations were killed, the industry is a problem again, and it doesn't want John L. Lewis to be the man stabilising it. (Which he is right now, because John Lewis is a great American patriot, not that anyone will admit it.)
Talk from the aviation front is that the Air Force's new strategy revolves around refuelling in flight, that Howard Hughes is building a "flying crane" helicopter, that Fairchild is working on a "revolutionary ten-engine jet bomber" with a jettisonable biplane wing to give 10,000 mile range. On the movie front, Cecil B. DeMille wants to make a lavish Technicolor about the Barnum and Bailey, and Corinne Calvet is the "It girl" of the summer of '49.
Washington Trends reports that Senator Murray's economic-expansion bill is gaining ground, with endorsements from the President and Leo Keyserling, but Nourse thinks it is too soon to know if it will be necessary. Whatever plan does pass will have a package of tax cuts, government buying of distressed commodities, and an implicit endorsement of an eventual Federal budget deficit. Murray also wants loans to distressed industries, easy leases for war surplus factories, and backing for state and local government public works. Hoffman has gained an argument for not cutting the ECA, since most of its money will be spent in the States, on agricultural goods and guns, next year. (This point is so obvious that it needs its own separate story in National Affairs.) Related is the continuing horse trading over the new farm legislation and a compromise bill to expand social security to cover more workers,although farmers and farm workers will probably not be covered.
National Affairs
"Economy? It's a Word, Not a Deed" The House is trying to cut Fair Deal spending to cover an expected $1.5 billion deficit, but the Senate keeps adding to it. The one thing both can agree on is higher pay for the military. In case you're wondering how close we Progressive are to total victory, Jesse Wolcott of Massachusetts says that if an economy spends 35% on government, capitalism is doomed, and if we add 7% for the Housing Bill, it will be all-out socialism. Sinister laughter!"Electoral College Dent" Senator Lodge is still touting his plan to reform the Electoral College and prevent any further elections in which the winner has a minority of the popular vote, which used to happen long ago in the old days. It would, just so incidentally, allow Republicans to win electors in the South.
In Congress this week, Representative Herbert Eberharter of Pennsylvania, up for a federal judgeship, had to deny that he had beaten his wife, taken bribes, or "frequently been loud and disorderly." He admitted to drinking more than he should. The Senate Judicial Committee made him promise to do better in the future, but reserved judgement on his judgeship. They did not reserve judgement on various poison-pen amendments to Taft-Hartley repeal, or an agreement that foreign nations would buy 170 million bushels of US wheat each year for four years. Also, staffers at Boston City Hall denied responsibility for its telephone lines being busy all the time. It's the fault of all the people calling in. Almost as important, the Alger Hiss lynching --I mean, show trial. Whittaker Chambers is still a liar with rotten breath, and all the testimony that Hiss was basically guilty of passing on boilerplate to the Soviets if he was guilty of anything was just so boring that who cares get on to the Pumpkin Papers!Well, that was fun. Let's do it again with Judith Coplon! This is the one where we get to drag in an atomic scientist who crossed Groves and Lawrence. (So I've heard, anyway. About Lawrence, that is. He definitely crossed Groves!)
"Have Some Hysteria" Time to get on to the minor news, like the President making a statement about how all of this spy hysteria is hysteria. Wrong! Says Newsweek. Why, the President was wearing a brown suit. With a white pocket handkerchief! That kind of thing might go down on Palm Beach, but not when you're up at the podium refusing to declare your undying allegiance to J. Edgar Hoover by sweeping the informant scandal under the rug! Aso, J. Robert Oppenheimer's brother was a communist, which just goes to show.
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| Reggie evidently didn't trust himself to say something about this that wouldn't anger up Ronnie's fighting blood. |
"Neurotic with a Rifle" A detailed story about Ruth Steinhagen,the women who shot Eddie Waitkus of the Philadelphia Phillies. Apparently the reason that she shot a man she'd never even talked to in a hotel room with a carbine was that she's crazy. Go figure.
Washington Tides with Ernest K. Lindsey, "Communism and 'Hysteria'" Lindley points out that it is not hysteria if there is communism, and the informants scandal and HUAC's grandstanding aren't really so bad when you squint at them just right, while the whole thing over the AEC is just Hickenlooper being Hickenlooper. Why, who doesn't have that fun but slightly crazy old uncle trying to get you arrested for spying? It's all in fun and, besides, Lilienthal really did "defend the use of public money to educate an avowed Communist," which I'm pretty sure is against the Ten Commandments. In the end, we should all just trust Senator McKellar to do the right thing, and at least now we know the difference between a liberal and a Communist.
Foreign Affairs
"Behind the Soviet Enigma" The Four Powers minsters' meeting was requested by the Russians, but failed to lead to any results. Newsweek concludes that Moscow is waiting for the American depression to cause the collapse of capitalism. No point in negotiating over Germany when the world communist revolution is at hand! And as this story was so much fun, Newsweek does it again with "Progress at Paris," which is about how the Big Four came up with a working solution for Berlin and Germany, and laid the groundwork for an Austrian peace treaty. And that was so much fun that there's room for a third story, "Flea Through a Camel's Eye," which is about how Dean Acheson is throwing fighting words at Vyshinsky, who is too much the coward to ask the Secretary to step outside, because he is a Communist.
"Upsurge in Five Lands" There are more strikes lately in Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Japan. Inconveniently, the Berlin police strike and British railway strike have been settled, while the Italian strike was actually only a demonstration, and the French and Japanese strikes were one-day walkouts. But it could get worse! After all, Communists are behind them. (Except the Berlin police strike.)
"Czechs vs. The Church" The battle between the Czech Communist Party and the Czech Catholic Church is so interesting that it has to be in all the papers forever. Also, Hungary and Bulgaria. Except in Bulgaria, it's not the Catholic Church, but the "Titoists." Pretty much the same thing, really.
In France, a former army officer and Communist named Albert Reinberg is on trial for turning an escaped Berlin mental patient over to the Russians. She was then shot for being crazy in an anti-Communist way, while Reinberg, who was unpopular with his fellow officers, left the army and opened a lingerie shop in Paris. He is now being tried for treason. Another French criminal is a 65 year-old woman named Adelaid LePage, who has been sneaking out at night and pasting new street names over ones she disagrees with. Hit recently are Avenue Georges-Mandel and Avenue Franklin-D.-Roosevelt. Also, the Gaullists are in trouble for trying to change the name of the Rue Orleans into Rue Leclerc, because Marshal Leclerc is good and De Gaulle is bad, or something."Punctured Gold Bubble" The story of Free State Gold Area's supposed strike at Erfdeel Farm is winding down. Free State claimed that it had found ore with 529 ounces of gold per ton, 6000ft below ground. Its stock climbed from $2 to $10 and assorted speculators joined in, but it is now clear that police assays don't show the same amount of gold, and various Johannesburg Stock Exchange brokers are ruined.
"The Slump Across the Sea" "In comfortable by slightly shabby club lounges," American visitors hear that informed British observers are afraid that the American recession will turn into a depression, resulting in falling exports, rising unemployment and Soviet adventures. Britain seems to be doing fine, with new paint and crowds everywhere, looking for something to buy, but falling commodity prices mean doom, doom! In an attempt to find an alternative to exports, British industrialists have even launched a "Buy British" campaign turning on "refused exports."
"U.S. Eyebrows Lifted"The Palestine Conciliation Commission has heard that Israel cannot allow the half million displaced Arab refugees to return, because they would be an intolerable economic burden and a fifth column. The United States has threatened firm action, such as withholding the unused portion of the Import-Export Bank loan and lifting the embargo on arms shipments to Arab states unless Israel complies with the UN resolution of 11 December 1948 by accepting an international regime in Jerusalem, repatriating Arab refugees and settling boundary questions under the Commission. Diplomats are skeptical, as some believe that America will have no alternative by to take Israel as America's "chosen instrument" in the Middle East.
"Bao Dai Boom Boom" The French have finally managed to move Emperor Bao Dai from his Riviera exile back to Hue, where he has taken up his office long enough to enjoy a 21 gun salute, release 1000 political prisoners and promise free elections that will determine whether Vietnam will be a monarchy or a republic, so he can go home. Everyone Newsweek has talked to says that he should go home, elections or not, because it is way too late for this crap.
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| Reality is overrated |
In Canada, the federal election hasn't even started yet, and the Conservatives are trying to make a scandal out of the premier of Newfoundland, while I don't need to tell you about the election in British Columbia, only that Newsweek approves of Byron Johnson's victory. Also, excavators may have found the skeleton of Jacques Cartier at the cathedral in St. Malo, and Canada wants his skeleton sent to Canada.
Business
"Question-mark Market?" Up, down or sideways, no-one knows where the market is going. Also questioned-marked are consumers, who might not want to buy various things, or might be waiting to see if prices come down further. Except for houses. They all want houses. Another story puts some specifics to the general impression that there are fewer strikes lately.What's New reports that Tele-Cide Chemical of Brooklyn has a plastic stocking coating to reduce runs and snags. Crosley Motors has adopted disc hydraulic brakes in all Crosley cars. Freydberg Strauss of New York has an adhesive-backed satin tape for packages, available in fifteen colours. B. L. Marble Chairs offers plastic scuff guards for the bases of revolving chairs that cement to the base, are chip-proof, and easily cleaned. Doerr Products, of Los Angeles, has the most elaborate baby carry-all yet, which includes dry-ice compartments and a heated compartment that plugs into the cigarette lighter. A separate story covers the Guinness Brewing Company's decision to build a brewery in New York brewery to better compete in the United States. John Lewis has a new opponent across the bargaining table as the soft-coal business tries to find a way to keep the market balanced. (I'm surprised to hear that Southern coal owners think that Northern mines and union men are working together to keep the South down. Probably make their sons marry Coloured women next.
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Henry Hazlitt's column this week is "Private Enterprise Regained," and is a reprint of a newspaper column reprinting an entry in William Bradford's journal. In case you're asking sophisticated, analytical questions like "Who? Where? Why? What?", Bradford was the Governor of Boston back in the Pilgrim days, and one year the Puritans decided that instead of farming all their land collectively, they'd round it up and give it out as private property, and this caused their famine to go away through the magic of the free market. Or so some lady who actually read the journal says, and since Henry has nothing better to do this week, he quotes the lady quoting Bradford.
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| Ronnie must have nodded off while proofing this part. She knew the difference between Plymouth and Massachusetts. |
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| Pile o'something. |
Joseph Phillips must have been at the same poker game as Henry Hazlitt, because he doesn't have a column either. So he whips out the one he wrote about the Quebec Conference back in '43 and adds a paragraph about the Marshall Plan.
Science, Medicine, Education
"Sweat in Texas" Newsweek is off to Texas, where the Mexico-United States Commission for the Eradication of Foot-and-Mouth Disease warns that a lack of American research might lead to the disease crossing the border. No American laboratory wants to handle the virus and produce the short-lived vaccine, because of the risk it might escape. Senator Magnuson is offering Ketron Island in Puget Sound as the site for a thirty million dollar laboratory recommended by the Department of Agriculture, but as usual, the Senate has so far proposed what the House won't dispose. Agriculture's solution is complete fencing along the Mexican border and shooting every infected animal in either country, although so far that just means Mexico. Various experts deem this far too ruthless and impractical, and also too expensive and vulnerable to corruption when American money is spent shooting Mexican animals.
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| For various personal reasons, Reggie cuts his summary of this extended advertorial short. No correlation with cirrhosis indeed. |
"Social Drinking: it Now Has the Limited Approval of Physicians, Investigators and Oliver Wendell Holmes" Of 61 million drinkers in the United States, it is estimated that 3,250,000 are problem drinkers and 750,000 alcoholics. Drinking has been in decline throughout the world for the last fifty years. Alcohol affects different people at different rates in different ways under different conditions, and various myths about alcohol, such as that it causes cirrhosis, are dispelled.
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"Quiet Ouster" The Presbyterian Church is in hot water after forcing Herbert Case, Jr., to resign as president of Washington and Jefferson College and putting it on a "provisional" list, which I don't know what that means although I'm sure money is involved. The college can get out of trouble if it agrees to "establish certain Bible course and teach Christianity as the highest philosophy."
"Cheater Meter" Professor Howard Wilson, an assistant in economics at Loyola and a professor of finance at Illinois Tech, has done a survey of cheaters through college newspapers and established that most cheaters do it to get higher grades, though a few do it for the challenge. Most professors who were asked about the survey blamed small exam rooms.
Press,Radio-Television, People
"Cake Walk" The story is that a housewife wrote away for the Waldorf-Astoria's chocolate cake recipe, received it, baked a cake, and then received a bill for a hundred dollars! Everyone has a version of the story, and none of them are true. The Waldorf, hurt by the story, has published its recipe, which just added to the heat, because various people have had a field day criticising it for folding the eggs wrong or something like that.
"Midnight Earl" Earl Wilson publishes a social column in the New York Post, and has his third book out, which Newsweek has to give a sparkling review-and-mini-biography in the Press section or Wilson will write a column about that blonde it saw Newsweek with that wasn't Newsweek's wife.
"It Ain't the Heat" The recent heatwave has been ruining people's television reception, they say. It turns out that it is actually summer foliage, which wasn't there when the televisions were installed, a way back last winter.
In Addition reports that McGraw-Hill is folding its three-year-old slick, Science Illustrated for losing $4 million, either on publishing costs or because it couldn't make up its mind whether to be popular or thorough. New York journalists have received a mail questionnaire from the "Red-led" International Organisation of Journalists, and are suspicious that it's a commie plot.
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| Newsweek says schlackmeister," Time says "schlock-". |
Adolf Hitler's former yacht, the Grille, now owned by George Arida, is in New York for showing off purposes. Betty Grable was the best paid woman in America this year, at $208,000. Milton Berle has remarried his ex-wife. It's usually only one! A recent Trans-ocean airliner taking off from Germany with pilot Captain Walter Kyse with nineteen expectant DP mothers had two go into labour at the Point of No Return. Both deliveries were held until after landing. Italian scientist Giuseppe Imbo has climbed to the bottom of the crater of Mount Vesuvius and found nothing particularly special. The Tri-State Association of Coloured Elks have bought the John Brown farm near Harper's Ferry and will convert it into a chidren's camp, old folk home and memorial. Esther Williams is volunteering at a school for the blind in Santa Monica, teaching blind children to swim. Gregory Peck has had a child, and so has a "Hearstling," which would make baby William Randolph III a Hearstlingling? Paul Robeson, Jr.'s wedding turned into a bit of a circus when the press mobbed his father. Governor Comstock and Russell Doubleday have died.
Movies
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| Marta Toren. The British Nyoka seems to be Fake News. |
Books
Someone must have sat Raymond Moley down and told him that he wasn't pulling his weight even by Hazlitt/Phillips standards, because he's started a Newsweek Bookshelf review series with a review of Marguerite Clark's The March of Medicine. He really liked it, although the review takes the stand that it is for the "hypochondriac" in all of us, which might not be the best review Clark has ever got.
As for the promised "vacation book" column, it turns out to be a mention sometimes one-sentence review of a bunch of books we've already heard about.
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| While reading through the cartons in 1994 (and throwing out a fifty year run of some magazines that might have actually been valuable, sigh), Grace was astonished to learn that there was, in 1949, a humourist named Ethel Rosenberg writing zany stories about her Uncle Julius. |
Raymond Moley's column this week is "Youth in Bifocals," and summarises Herbert Hoover's "wise and amusing speech," that is, commencement address, to "a college graduating class." That's some research right there, Ray. Couldn't be bothered to look at this week's Fortune? No, that's not it, because the rest of the column summarises it. The Class of '49 wants security, and Hoover warns against it because it will just lead to socialism in the form of old age pensions. Also, not enough people are taking liberal education these days.
Flight, 30 June 1949
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| It's from next month, so it's cheating, but don't worry, I won't run out of material in October. You won't believe who "Favonius" turns out to be. |
Leaders
Healthy Exercise" Flight is pleased that Dutch and American units participated in the Air Exercise this week, even though it can't say anything else about it. Even less useful is the next Leader, which explains that building model aircraft is a useful hobby.
"Exercise 'Fowl:' Combined Forces Test of the Air Defences of Great Britain: Western Union Participation'" B-29s in the attacking force, fighters controlled by Air Marshal Embry at 11 Group in the defending force. Attackers included Lancasters and Wellingtons(!) as well as Lincolns and Mosquitos, defenders included Spitfires, Vampires and Meteors. The Superforts proved very hard to intercept, even by Dutch Vampires, as often predicted. Also, Lord Tedder went to see a model aircraft contest. Also, Flight announces the results of the National Air Races.
Here and There
Shell House is showing the How an Aircraft Flies. Bring a date! Eleven million pounds in British aircraft were exported, which is slightly below the level needed to hit the £35,000,000. The fighter boys continue to insist that the F2H2 Banshee could catch a B-36 just fine if they were only given a crack. The magnetic survey device has been invente/used for the first time ever again, this time by Canada's Aeromagnetic Survey group, which belongs to the Hunting Group, which should know better than to waste our time with this kind of blither by now.
Civil Aviation News
ICAO has approved ILS and GCA. This is like the magnetometer news. Didn't this happen years ago? It has also approved the VHF omnirange, just in time for the Air Force to trash it. First word of a KLM Constellation loss in the water off Bari is in. The pilot was the son of the company's president. The Baltic Exchange hasn't been in the news for a week, so here's a tiny story about it. It is admitted that attempts to improve the Ambassador's wing to hit an increased all up weight target of 52,000lbs have failed. It is said that attempts will be made to do a proper job of it. Passive voice is used a great deal in this news release. BSAA will start flying Convair liners soon. ICAO's budget for next year is almost three million Canadian. BOAC Yorks operating in the Middle East have been converted to take 21 seats, as opposed to being scrapped years ago.
"Meteoric Progress" The Meteor has been pushed up to Mach 0.85, as opposed to being scrapped, years ago. Harold King went to the Netherlands to watch the Dutch and Belgian pilots who are stuck with them, doing their best.
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| It has a webcam, so you can check the weather before you die. |
"Rotor Testing: Design and Development of the Bristol Tower" For something so unimportant, there sure are a lot of articles about that spinning tower Bristol built to test propeller blades!
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A short note describes how the Theseus-Lincoln has recently passed a 600 hour flight mark, and is being modified for a long range testing flight.
Correspondence Already? That was a short issue!
From your link on Corinne Calvet: "In 1967, her boyfriend of six years, millionaire Donald Scott, sued Calvet to recover $878,000 in assets that Scott had put under her name in an effort to hide them from his wife in a divorce battle. A two week trial resulted in which Scott claimed Calvet had used voodoo to control him. She and Scott settled and she was awarded with $200,000"
ReplyDeleteI had to look this up. At one point she studied voodoo hypnotherapy at something called the Africa Institute.
ReplyDeleteStill not the wackiest person to show up in old People columns. . .