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Canada
Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
In 1950's No Way Out, Sidney Poitier and Mildred Joanne Smith play nice Black hospital people who have to deal with a White racist criminal patient. Smith's promising career was cut short on 11 February, 1952, when she was aboard National Airlines Flight 101, a DC-6 departing Newark Airport, when, it suddenly began to veer left while losing altitude. Two minutes later, it clipped an apartment building and plunged into the ground, "narrowly missing an orphanage," says Wikipedia, and bursting into flames. Twenty-nine of 63 people aboard perished, along with another four from the apartment building. Smith survived, but with severe injuries, including a broken back.
The CAB determined that the cause of the accident was the accidental reversal of the propeller of the No. 3 engine. Coupled with the crew's mistaken decision to feather the No. 4 engine, Flight 101 was pretty much a brick. This was three weeks after the crash of an American Airlines Convair 240, with the loss of all onboard and two girls associated with the girl's school near which it crashed, and two months after the crash of a Miami Airlines Curtiss C-46 with the loss of all onboard, again with additional losses on the ground in spite of managing to crash into a warehouse district. Neither of the earlier two accidents go to the subject of this post, which overworked postwar airscrews, turbines, rotors and closely associated spinning things, but they are a pretty good reminder of just how dangerous postwar civil aviation actually was. Having the propellers of a major airliner be subject to three separate Airworthiness Directives in four years, warning of separation of neoprene layers in the propeller core, overspeeding, and engine overheating issues doesn't help. (That's the Stratocruiser, if you were wondering. The poor British taxpayer just can't catch a break.)
Early jets tended to lack a bit of oomph coming off the runway. |
I've covered the outline of the early passenger jet here before. The De Havilland Comet seemed to have the market to itself at first, but then was pinched out by the Boeing 707, which was developed from a jet-powered tanker that the USAF eventually decided it needed to support its B-47 fleet. The Comet plays an important part in the British narrative that says that Britain's postwar aviation subsidy programme was a big waste of money. Meanwhile, the USAF order for 250 KC-135 Stratotankers cushioned Boeing's 707 project and suggests that Cold War military spending played an important role in the transition to jet transports.
But is there more to say about this? In a quiet week before, hopefully, the UBC Library reopens, I take my inspiration where I find it, and Brad DeLong has posted a lecture online suggesting that the historic expansion of the British economy through 1870 might have run up against a renewed Malthusian world but for a bunch of exogenous factors that accelerated "innovation."
It's modern economics latest surrender to the implacable grasp of the "free lunch" school of technological progress, according to which "innovation" comes from outside the economic process, and that the human species is forever vulnerable to a return to a Malthusian world of subsistence economics at any arbitrary level of technological achievement if we ever fail in our continuing propitiation of the mad gods of invention.
As, away back in May of 1950, the American aviation industry plays with the idea that a transition to jets is impossible, barring some kind of "socialist" intervention to pay the costs of developing a jetliner out of the taxpayers' pocket, I'm inclined to stop and meditate on exogeneity.