Postblogging Technology, June 1951, II: Dies and Transistors

R_. C_.,
Arcadia,
Santa Clara,
California

Dear Father:

Reggie is back in Formosa, as he wrote last time, so I have taken over the letter again. I know that you're going to worry, but honestly this is just exactly as much work as this young mother wants, and a good distraction not from my darling, but assorted hovering grandmothers. (Don't get me wrong, I am so grateful for the  help, it's just a bit too much sometimes.) I am just starting to believe that I will be back at Stanford in the fall. As for the places you've found, I have settled on the Camino Real place. And, again, thank you! 

You were asking about when you would see Fortune in these letters again. I honestly don't know, but I am not sure that I want to redirect the subscriptions to Macao when they are just going to have to be redirected to Palo Alto in a month. Especially if we have a Korean armistice next month, as it looks. Everything will go a bit nuts, and that especially includes the Pacific air mail! 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Newsweek, 16 July 1951

Letters 

A reader in Detroit likes the Windsor CBC station. The raging debate over the Foreign Legion, medals and saluting, rages! People in Idaho and Los Angeles are very worked up at the idea of Arizona getting some of their Colorado River water under the Central Arizona Project. For Your Information takes a victory lap over because its advance story about the MacArthur hearings from a source that the magazine can't identify (General MacArthur) turned out to be correct. Or almost correct, because the source told Newsweek that the "records of the Sorge spy ring" would be turned over to the Senate Committee and that these records would prove something. That hasn't happened yet, but supposedly the records are in the hands of HUAC and will soon be used to prove something. 

The Periscope reports that some kind of anti-Communist revolt is "stirring" in Poland, with Marshal Rokossovsky recently assassinated, that Tom Dewey is travelling in the Far East for political reasons and not in Europe for political reasons because John Foster Dulles told him to, that another Dixiecrat rebellion is definitely on for 1952, that Lyndon Johnson and Robert Taft are fighting over office space, that peace in Korea will probably kill the embargo bill, cut Selective Service call-ups and affect future defence appropriations, that it can now be officially admitted that the B-36 is a sitting duck for MiG-15s, that six different companies are looking at commercial atomic power, that three French Vampires scheduled to fly in the Bastille Day parade were sabotaged, that there are rumours that "Indo-China rebels" are using new automatic weapons which haven't even been released to the French army yet, that the Italians are upset that Washington might be selling them out over Trieste, that Charles Laughton is going to make a sequel to Mutiny on the Bounty for MGM, and that James Michener has another book in the works, this one about the Far East[?].

While I don't share my husband's interest in small arms, they are the  hot new thing as July winds down, and I do have his files, and if I talk about them, I get to talk about lazy French translators! So we are probably talking about the new French self-loading rifle, the MAS-49, which was first issued to French troops two years ago; but 40,000 of an earlier iteration went to the French Marine Nationale, which are not, as the said lazy translation would have it, the French Marines, but rather  colonial infantry under the relevant Ministere  du Marine, which also runs the navy. (Just to complete this epic of mistranslation, the Ministry has its offices on the Rue Royale, which is why the French Navy is sometimes called La Royale, and not because they are a bunch of monarchists.) So that's how they could have ended up in Viet Minh hands. As for the idea that John Foster Dulles is grooming Tom Dewey for a run in '52, even a new mother doesn't get that dazed. Washington Trends is even more idiotic. There's going to be an election next year! The President will be involved! Senator Taft will run. So will Eisenhower. Probably. He's a good Republican, you can tell, because he hates "bureaucrats." Everything will be different depending on how Korea turns out!

National Affairs

"Peace and the Problems of Peace" (And several stories following) With a ceasefire in Korea pretty much set, the President is telling the nation that there can't be any let-up in rearmament, because there might be some kind of new brush fire any minute now and also something about the principles of the American Revolution somehow. Congress is reasonably okay with rearmament but seems bound and determined to get rid of price controls, allocations and anything else that might hold back inflation. The Administration's plan for price rollbacks has the usual suspects on the warpath, and Senator Johnson is promising a national speaking tour in their defence. 

"Case of the Missing Eight" While Korea veterans pile up in Seattle, four convicted Communists decide not to turn up for their prison sentences and are declared "wanted." And their lawyer, Fred Vanderbilt Field, was sent to jail for contempt for refusing to disclose who guaranteed their bail. If  you're wondering about the "8," Newsweek is counting the four Communists who failed to turn themselves in two weeks ago. Newsweek figures that they probably haven't fled to Russia, but they might have gone to Guatemala to join the "Western Hemisphere Cominterm" that is forming there (Newsweek promises more details on the sinister developments in Central America later), or else they have joined the underground party and are now leading them in underground activities. Newsweek boxes an interview with the Attorney General that is heavy on Red-baiting language and short on Red-baiting specifics. The American justice system is based on individual guilt, so even though the Communist Party is effectively a criminal organisation, individual Communists and fellow travellers still have to be convicted individually. The "heat is on" Florida Governor Fuller Warren after Kefauver Committee revelations about his connections with organised crime. The President appointed Senator Humphrey's main rival for the Democratic nomination for governor of Minnesota a judge, so the fix is probably in. 

Ernest K. Lindley's Washington Tides explains the "pitfalls of peace." Congress would cancel rearmament and America might have to explain its torrid affair with Chiang and the Koumintang to skeptical foreigners, unlike that one Midwestern voter who gets to dictate our  entire foreign policy by virtue of being completely nuts. 

The Korean War section has multiple stories from the Kaesong peace talks, which don't really add very much to what is already in the daily papers.

International

There are already a confusingly large number of organisations and provisional boards and what-have-you dedicated to uniting Europe and also having a European army, but it  isn't enough, says General Eisenhower, in a big speech chastising "lagging nations," which mainly seems to mean Britain, which isn't nearly enthusiastic enough about the United States of Europe. Also, talks about the new West German army continue. 

"The Oil Flow Ebbs' In Newsweek's interpretation, the British decision to evacuate the personnel of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company from the Persian Gulf is intended to "bring the Iranians to their knees" by exposing their inability to operate the oil fields without British technicians. There is no oil flowing out of Abidjan, but the technicians have not left because the Iranians and, evidently, the Americans are stalling, and also because it is not really practical, since a skeleton staff has to be kept on to keep the rigs, pumps and  pipelines operating. Not only can they not be evacuated, but they cannot be protected by a "few Marines" if they are evacuated, because they are spread all over the countryside. Pessimists say that we're all doomed. The Iranian Communist Party will win in the end, no engineer will work for an Iranian if he can get another job, Britain will run out of aviation gasoline soon and will have to come crawling back and run the Iranian oilfields for the Communists, and America will get very upset. 

Shorter news from Europe include a Soviet air review of 500 new planes including new jets by Yakovlev and Lavochkin, "ominous improvements on the MiG-15," which was already a bit much to handle. Princess Elizabeth will tour Canada and the United States next year, Japanese peace treaty negotiations are wrapping up, and America's European summer vacation of 1951 is going to be hot, hot, hot!

In this hemisphere, Newsweek checks in with the "failure" of Guatemala's new President, Jacobo Arbenz. When elected, he was supposed to be an anti-Communist, and was expected to put a stop to all the Communist goings. So that's the failure. Actually, the red flag is on the march in Guatemala! The "commie aim" is to "organise labour and use it to destroy foreign companies." President Arbenz is too weak to stop them. Well, that's it, I'm convinced.

Business

The Business Periscope has basically two stories this week. The first is that defence is not going to be allowed to cut into production for the civilian market, expressed in a number of separate notes covering everything from production control to employment. Defence will have to find its employees "locally," and not from layoffs from the durable goods industry. I  have no idea what "locally" means, as apart from specifically mentioning women and relaxing age limits, the big story is that Government mobilisers are worried about the lack of housing around aircraft plants. The second story is raw materials. The cotton crop is coming in strong, just like everyone else already told us, but copper is not, and American firms are finding themselves in a bidding war with German firms over Chilean copper.

 

("Progress: But We Dare Not Falter" Bullet point for me is that the biggest bottleneck holding back production is the lack of engineers.) The next story covers the initial round of production controls under CMP, which "pinches," followed by the end of the Kaiser-Frazier versus Otis story, in which Uncle Henry is still somehow not the scoundrel of the piece, although Otis says it is going to appeal, so who knows. 

"Roll Your Own Attic" The number of unfinished, "finished attics" around the nation is a bit of a joke. It turns out that turning your attic into a room, or a granny apartment is hard! Well, Harry Feder of Barclay Manufacturing of New York has a solution, a "roll your own" attic which I am imagining as a big roll of  magic cigarette paper (no, not those magic cigarettes) that you spool out through that cavern of lost dreams and, voila, Nana is moving in at the end of the week. (But what about the stairs!?) It's actually a boring mass-produced "kit" of plastic tiling, baked enamel and such to hang on lumber. Business Notes note that defence industries are making record profits, and commodities are up. This is news? Newsweek celebrates Northwest's glorious twenty-five year history of commercial flying, noting way down at the bottom that  it has signed a deal to sell all its Martin 2-0-2s, getting rid of a plane "with which it has had little luck." Yes, that's one way of putting it! 

What's New reports that Reeves and Mitchell has a plastic-backed container that is a "silver saver," John Ortiz of New York City is advertising "hand dryers," consisting of palm sized pieces of chalk for soaking up excess perspiration, Charles Schantz of Minneapolis has a multipurpose garden tool. Kendall Mills of Massachusetts has a diaper with fastening instructions and patterns printed right on it, and Tinnot Watches of Switzerland has an "Automatic Navigator" that shows the time in all the world's time zones. 

Henry Hazlitt's Business Tides has "Price Fixing as Red Herring." Hazlitt proves to his own satisfaction that price fixing is impossible and anyway inflation is caused by all that government spending and easy money. (No, I didn't explain to my husband what a "red herring" is. It's not the kind of conversation you get into with an engineer, unless you want to find him trying to cook a herring some AM. No, really. Your son would!)

Science, Education, Medicine

"Forest Giant" Carl Alwin Schenck, a giant amongst American foresters, gets a very long profile. He seems to have been mainly a professor of forestry at a special forestry school. Okay, I am going to confess straight up. I skimmed the article really, really quickly, and hope that if you're interested and don't know all about him, you can look him up in your library. You used to do forestry things for a living. You know this stuff!

"Skyrocket Record Breaker" The Navy claims that the latest Douglas Skyrocket test flight broke all existing speed and altitude records but won't give any details. That is not how it is done, but it also doesn't matter because the existing record is limited to planes that can take off under their own power, and the Skyrocket gets dropped out of a B-50. 

"Seven Fat Years" This year marks the end of the "seven fat years" in which 5.5 million veterans went to school under the GI Bill, racking up a total four-billion-dollar bill for tuition. Some 400,000 went back to high school, 2.1 million went to trade schools, and 2.2 million went to college. Overall college enrollment at the peak was 2.5 million, down to 1.5 million today. Overall, the programme was a success, and there is talk of bringing it back for Korean War veterans. This means that we need to look at the abuses, from embalming schools to the GI Bill paying for courses at the Arthur Murray School of Dance. Some of the stranger schools turn out to have been set up by VA employees. It is not clear how much money was lost this way, and on the other hand the Bill did a great job of smoothing out the postwar employment picture, plus all of that education was probably good for something.

After that, Newsweek went to the annual convention of the National Education Association looking for stereotypical schoolmarms to say things like, "The country spends three times as much money gambling as on education," and, of course, "I'm not angry, just very disappointed." And finds them! I don't know how many actual schoolmarms can afford an annual convention in San Francisco, but all of next year's board members seem to be "Miss This," and "Miss That," so at least they know how to act the part. Excuse me. Stanford girl here, should probably have shut up two sentences ago. 

"Synthetic Cortisone: And From Yams" As you've heard, the steroid hormone cortisone has the potential to be the latest wonder drug if it weren't only available from Merck in very limited supplies due to it being synthesised in an incredibly expensive and rarified sixty-step process from cow bile ducts. Earlier this spring, it was announced that Robert Burns Woodward, the Harvard chemist who synthesised quinine in 1944, had synthesised another steroid hormone from coal tar, a complete synthesis of hormone class for the first time. Woodward pointed out that it  had no industrial application, being just a laboratory synthesis, but that didn't stop a race to extract cortisone from coal tar, water, air, or, more plausibly, from some exotic plant or animal somewhere in the world. Unexpectedly, says Newsweek, even though they sound like the most obvious candidates, Syntex of Mexico City, already the largest producer of steroid hormones in the world, announced this week a viable synthesis from yams, which doesn't sound exotic until  you hear that it is a wild dark yam from the far forests of darkest Chiapa state. Newsweek goes into the details of the synthesis a bit more than your average reader, or me, will follow, but there you have it. Cortisone for the masses. 

"Open Air Burn Cure" The Department of Plastic Surgery at the University of Texas  School of Medicine, Galveston, has been having good success reviving the "open air" treatment of severe burn cases, in which burns aren't dressed, but are just left to heal under the scab of injured tissue, or "coagulum." The open air treatment fell out of favour after 1925 because infections would start underneath the scab, but in the University of Texas' method, the coagulum is mechanically or chemically removed in the third week if it is not spontaneously shed by that point. (Second degree burns shed, third degree burns don't.) Medical Notes covers prenatal care for pregnant women with heart disease (it works), and benemid, a potential treatment for gout, which might interest you. I know it interests Uncle George! The section ends with a very brief profile of a woman who "died" on the operating table during heart surgery and was kept alive for twelve minutes by surgeons massaging her naked heart. 

Press, Radio-Television, People

The Press is full of fighting newspaper stories. The Los Angeles Mirror went all in covering the department store price war in New York, and got the Mays Department Stores account pulled as a result, but The Mirror isn't backing down, and now, apparently Mays' is. The Lake Charles American Press played a big role in bringing the Kefauver Committee down to Louisiana to look into gambling down there, and William Oatis is a martyr for press freedom, which which I don't agree, but I think the story could have done without the sneering tone in its description of the American bureau of TASS. It's true that there are Communist journalists in America, but there are still some American journalists behind the Iron Curtain, and it can certainly sound like they're following the party line sometimes. Also, the next story is about Bernie Kelly of The Denver Post, who went down to Colorado Springs to find out what ordinary GIs think of the Army's ban on the use of the word, "GI," and got slapped in the brig for it. We finish with some silly stories from the files of The New York Times, which bought a tall tale about a 105 year-old Polish woman and her 56-year-old son, and made fun fn some of Don Iddon's stories about silly American ways only to have him point out that they were drawn from The Times. Embarrassing!

Newsweek checks in with the UN's radio and television staff, 90 strong, who will miss Jakob Malik (who seems to have a very circumspect fan club in the American press), but will keep on keeping on. It then drops into RCA to see how all-electronic scanning colour works, then pays set visits to the Chesterfield Show and The Three Johns, a purportedly different kind of variety show and a giveaway show, respectively. 

Virginia Hill, Dorothy Kirsten, and especially Vice-President Barkley's stepdaughters are very pretty women. Red Army tailors aren't very good. Heddy Lamour, William Haaken, the University of Utah (for some reason), the Under-Secretary of the Army, Admiral Edward Smith, Martin Dies, Uncle Henry, and the Reverend Martin Aylesworth make the page. The Barkley girls are going on European vacation!

Clyde Beatty is married, Robert Nathan is divorced, Lord Inverchapel, J. L. Luckenbach, James Norman Hall, Francis Adams Truslow and Harry Edward Hellman are dead. 

Movies

Oliver Twist, the super-big giant British export is the big movie of the week. Everybody loves it but Jewish people! Dear Brat is the third Wilkins Family movie since 1944 and is just as funny as the first two. (Deadpan beat.) Kind Lady is the latest movie adaptation of the Chodorov play, a "sedate thriller," says Newsweek. Newsweek being Newsweek, that might not be an intentional dig (the review ends positively), but I'm taking it as one. Take Care of My Little Girl is an adaptation of Petty Goodin's 1950 anti-sorority novel. Oh, goodie. Just the thing for a Stanford girl who doesn't feel superior enough already. (That's me. Count how many times I drop "Stanford" into my conversation!) 

Books

Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us is a popular science work on, yes, oceanography. It is quite a favourable review, hypnotised by Carson's prose, which reminds the reviewer of Conrad. Definitely recommending this one to Reggie. Jerry Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is a problem novel about a problem boy by a problem author. Newsweek liked it a lot. The Kefauver Committee has a report. Who doesn't like true crime? Henry Beethe Hough has a book about Martha's Vineyard that will be just the thing for everyone who summers on Martha's Vineyard. 

Raymond Moley's Perspectives checks in with Japan after the cease fire. Japan was awful lucky that the time was right for a ceasefire, he concludes, because the country has a "high cost structure" and is suffering under the weight of the excessive anti-business controls imposed under the American occupation and its own stultifying bureaucracy as well. It obviously can't import raw materials from China because of Communism, and doesn't have any ships (Moley doesn't read Engineering or even The Economist)  and the future is bleak although America could help by selling the Japanese some Liberty ships. 

Aviation Week, 16 July 1951

Sidelights reports that no more XC-99s or XF-91s are to be built. The Navy denies that it is flying AJ-1s from underground runways in North Africa. Port Lyautey is our only base, and it does not have a vast underground complex. It sure would be fun if it did! Convair has a new Air Force contract to upgrade the B-36 again. The Navy has lost 236 planes in Korea so far. The USAF has run out of service factory inspectors and is hiring civilians in a number of cities. There has been a shakeup on the editorial board of Western Flying after the publisher's death

News Digest reports that Ryan has the subcontract to produce rocket motors for Douglas. LA Airways has had three helicopter crashes in three weeks and is grounding its helicopters to investigate. An Air Force aircraft maintenance deport will be established at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. CAB  is fighting a Washington, DC circuit court ruling throwing out its restrictions on nonsked departures from individual destinations. Uncle George's beloved G. Geoffrey Smith has died at home at the age of 67. 

Industry Observer reports that a Chase XC-123 has crashed on takeoff from Elgin AFB during recent long-range competition trials when the engine, a Pratt and Whitney R-2800, failed on takeoff. Despite this, the Pentagon has "crystalised" its plans for air transport for the next few years, with the Chase as assault transport, the Fairchild C-119 for medium, DC-6A and Super Connie for long range and personnel, Douglas C-124 for strategic and heavy, Boeing KC-97 for tanker, and Lockheed L-206 for "all purpose." Which seems like a lot of planes to me, especially the special extra "all purpose" Lockheed. Rotax has bought a factory in Toronto for making precision instruments. North American's digital differential analyser is a million times better than Boeings' horrible, terrible analog electrical differential analyser. The Swedish air force is starting to receive quantity deliveries of their Saab-29 fighter, which has begun to replace their Vampires. First pictures of the Red Air Force's T-10 light jet bomber show wing tip fuel tanks. Curtiss-Wright is bidding for Buffalo Stainless Steel Casting Corporation, which has a new method for making turbine blades. The Douglas X-3, YB-47C and Convair Jetliner prototype are getting ever closer to being real planes.

"Truce May Slow, But Not Halt Production" Because we need strength for diplomacy! 95 wings soon, 120 wings later. Deliveries are up about two-thirds over a  year ago and will triple over the next twelve months, in spite of no prospect for further increases in the size of the defence budget. 

Beech is showing off an armed version of the T-34 trainer, and there have been changes in procurement rules to help small firms bidding for contracts. As we're hearing everywhere, the Douglas Skyrocket is the best and fastest, and Cornell wants us to know that its lab, which was previously drinking coffee and doing the crossword, now "steps up" research work. (It is all classified, but they can tell us that it has about doubled due to Korea.)

Ross Hazeltine's dispatches from the Nineteenth International Air Salon in Paris, continue. The French have lots of nice lightplanes now, plus those five prop transports they've been flogging since the day after D-Day. Kaman has a Navy contract to develop jet turbine engines for helicopters, and the last four of nine private flying schools for USAF basic pilot training have been chosen.

Thomas Self, "Industry Views, Approves Optical Tooling" All the other companies like what Republic has been doing with  Taylor-Hobson and other British optical instruments. Optical tooling is very economical and has a bright future. Lockheed thinks it has come up with some neat improvements using mirrors and prisms, which are also cheaper than precision collimators. Except North American and Douglas, which seem to think it's just a bunch of gadgets. On the other hand, Boeing wants to use it for production, and not just set up. However, everyone agreed that there should be no one system of optical tooling, so all the companies can improvise and wing it. 

Avionics couldn't find a correspondent who could stay awake through an entire article about "Design Trends in Buried Antennaes," so it typed up some notes from a talk given at the recent airborne electronics conference of the Institute of Radio Engineers. Antenna can be used for communications, navigation or radar. They can be all frequencies from low to high. It is really hard to find a place to "bury" them, so we're going to discuss putting plastic bits on the edges and tops of wings and ailerons and noses now. At the end of this talk you'll be allowed to go have a drink. 

"Fault-Finder Spots Electrical Defects" Avro Canada, not heard from since they stopped trying to flog the jetliner, is checking in with a gadget they built for finding faults in aircraft ac systems. It's the best!

Remember that agricultural light  plane that the editor's buddy was building out behind some Texas college? Remember how we were kept up on progress with it in endless short bits? Well, now it's flying, so of course it gets its own story in Aeronautical Engineering. It is exactly as sad as you would expect. 

Oops, spoke too soon on the "we'll never have to  hear about the Avro Jetliner again" front, as Avro checks in with an article about its icing trials. 

NACA Reports has heard about Ansull's progress with baking soda extinguishers and has decided to throw some work their way by sponsoring an investigation of "Magnesium-Cerium Forged Alloys for Elevated Temperature Service." The only thing more fun than a magnesium fire is a magnesium-cerium alloy fire! Someone let Dean Chapman at the differential analyser, and the result was "Airfoil Profiles for Minimum Pressure Drag at Supersonic Velocities: General Analysis with Application to Linearised Supersonic Flow."

The college newspaper gets a chance to contribute, as from Berkeley comes "New Way to Study Altitude Flow." It is "superaerodynamics," and uses a "windtunnel"! In spite of the quotation marks, it is an actual windtunnel, just quite small. It is evacuated to near vacuum to simulate air flows at 100 miles, and measures the flow of jets of gas, I think, although the article says "molecules," because at thesee densities they use mathematics developed to model the movement of individual molecules. 

AirResearch also wants to be a published author, so it tells the torrid love story of an air turbine starter kit and the Air Force. They went cycling together, and if I'm not mistaken, that's the sound of wedding bells! In unrelated news, the Navy wants you to know about an unparalleled opportunity to get in on the GROUND FLOOR of a new hydraulic fluid, H-2, from Hollingshead. It can EASILY replace AN-O-366 fluid, and I don't need to tell you what that means! (U-4 is more difficult.) It costs about $4/gallon.

Braniff is looking for a cover artist for a nice, lurid frontispiece for "Tank Stripping," which is about --stripping fuel tanks, which Braniff does in house. That's not how stripteases are supposed to work!  

New Aviation Products has the "Non-Jamming Stop When Limit Switch Fails" from Overload Control. It is a "simple mechanical device for actuators" that causes the thing to come apart where one bit is suppposed to spin another bit so if the spinning is too much and would ordinarily go on until the other bit breaks, instead it will come apart and then one part will spin harmlessly while the part that would be harmed, doesn't. All clear?

The news is good for Nonskeds this week, and the US Attorney is filing charges against Sigmund Janas for stealing all that money, which is wrong now. Pratt and Whitney (actually, contractor Kelvinator), says that there might be a shortage of R-2800s next year. US Airlines is having a board shakeup, the CAB has set new air mail fees, and its new report lists almost 4000 official airports. A CAB report lists pilot error as the cause of 7 fatal accidents last year. 23 of 34 total incidents last year were pilot error. CAB has also reopened a complaint from Eastern Airlines alleging that National Airlines is owned by W. R. Grace, which would be bad.

Letters has a nice note from Admiral Land, who is still alive, from Major Pauley of the Ordnance, taking time out from spending Olin Industries money, and from many other readers who loved articles in this wonderful magazine. Fearless criticism at its finest! 

 

 

I look at the cover of this issue of Newsweek and I have to remind myself that General Eisenhower is only 61! I think his country may have asked too much of him.

Letters

A rancher out west writes to criticise slaughtering quotas and the press for misrepresenting them. DiSalle's office replies that actually it's the rancher who is misrepresenting the quotas. The question, if you were interested, is whether the quotas prevent ranchers from slaughtering all their head, or whether they just mean that the meat can't be diverted to the black market. An assortment of Daughters of the American Revolution write in about who is, or isn't in the pictures of signers of the Declaration of Independence in the 2 July issue. Dick Taplinger of New York has a long and funny letter about Army food I don't think I can do justice to. Doctor Alfred Pinkerton of Lima, Ohio, is concerned about the article about a potential polio vaccine. It is hard enough to persuade people to get inoculations at the best of times, he points out. Suggesting that the polio vaccine might cause polio in some recipients is just going to promote resistance to inoculations under the mistaken impression that the parent is protecting their child against polio. That doesn't make any sense!For Your Information has charity addresses for readers who want to donate to help Korean war orphans, and checks in with the cover story, which is about General Eisenhower. Who, it says here, might run for President in '52. You heard it here first!

The Periscope has a bit more meat on its bones this week. It starts off, embarrassingly enough, by being absolutely the last optical tool in Washington to hear that the Air Force recovered part of a MiG-15 in April. Then it reports that the French have launched a peace offensive in Indo-China. Talk is that the Kremlin will try to expand the Korean armistice talks into a Four Power conference to settle outstanding issues in East Asia, which will embarrass America for some reason. (Specifically, because it will have to invite the Koumintang to the party and everyone will point and talk behind their backs.) The Ambassadors to Moscow and London want to quit because being an ambassador is hard work. The thinking in Teheran is that they have enough Iranian technicians to keep the oilfields producing at 30%, which would give them higher revenues than the current royalties. Senator Herman Welker might "take over the gavel" from Joe McCarthy because he's a careful lawyer and not a nasty drunk. Which kind of misses the whole point of Joe McCarthy, I think. The Navy says that if it can get its first atomic submarine to sea on schedule in two years, the next step will be an atomic carrier. Meanwhile, Newsweek hasn't heard that Forrestal will have an island, but does check in with the controversy from another angle. There is so much electronics to go into an aircraft carrier and so little room for it that it will probably be hived off to the supporting cruisers and destroyers. The Air Force has managed to cut jet fuel consumption by 20% by being more careful with it in Korea. New gas heating equipment in Midwestern cities joins pipelines in New England and turnpikes in New York as the latest "slowdown" victims of mobilisation. The FBI ought to have egg on its face after it lost touch with those fugitive Communists after boasting that it had the Communist Party all locked down. But it doesn't, because it is the "sacred bureau." The Periscope just noticed Bevan, has heard that John O'Hara's new book is out in November, is looking forward to Robert Rigg's Red China's Fighting Hordes and to Charles Thayer's book about Yugoslavia. It has heard that Rita Hayworth's return to Hollywood will be a movie version of Tennessee Williams' The Rose Tattoo with Burt Lancaster, that Russell Nype will take a five week break from Broadway to star in MGM's The Family Man, and that Louella Parsons wants to establish herself on TV before the New York coaxial cable makes it to California. 

Washington Trends is last week's The Periscope. Peace in Korea might have drawbacks! Controls are  hard! Congress will try to save some  money by cutting foreign aid!

"Talks Abroad and Troubles at Home" While peace talks begin at Kaesong, floods ravage the Midwest and a race riot shakes Chicago. About the Cicero riot there's not much to say. About the flooding along the Missouri and its major tributaries, there's a lot to say, with half a million people displaced, 17 dead, at least, 100 blocks of Grand Rapids underwater, along with much of the industrial and stockyard districts of the Kansas Cities. North Lawrence and much of Manhattan. Dead livestock float through the streets, the President is coming to town, and the President of The Kansas City Star reminds everyone that it could all have been avoided with a timely start to the flood control plan, otherwise known as the "Missouri Valley Plan." The very detailed coverage of the Kaesong talks, with a long digression on a press column that was turned away from the talks by a road blockade, comes later in the Korean War and Press sections.

The State Department has sent Edmund Chubbs and John P. Davies home from work while they do the millionth "security check" on them to find out if they might really be evil Communists after all. Congress hears that there is a shortage of housing around Army bases, so families have to live in bad housing and pay too much in rent. Ernest K. Lindley's Washington Tides is devoted this month to taking John Foster Dulles out to the alley behind the massage parlour and giving him the five-dollar job, not that I know anything about that. 

 A Newsweek Special Report is devoted to "Ike: Forging an Army on Faith." To summarise, Eisenhower is just the best, he's done a great job of organising a European army and convinced all the Europeans to go along with it. Except the French, who don't want American bases on their soil, and the British, who really don't want to "lead" Europe, and the Germans, who don't want to form an army unless they're allowed to raise twelve German divisions in German corps. (That's in a separate story that gets down into the weeds a bit to distinguish the French plan for a "European army" and the German plan for a German army, as in both cases the Germans are part of a larger European army, the difference being the level of organisation at which they're integrated.)

International checks in with the British, who are eccentric, the Russians, who are eccentric in a menacingly Communist way, and offers a long story on the Iran situation that, if it weren't mostly summary of what we already know, would be pretty helpful, since it isn't mainly devoted to anti-Communist panic or racist jibes at the Iranians like some other magazines I could name. Newsweek is also late to the story that the Indian government has discovered the perils of overpopulation and the panacea of family planning, and follows up Ernest K. Lindley's high-class job on John Foster Dulles with some actual reporting on the Japanese peace treaty, all details of which, again, already heard from. 

In this hemisphere, Newsweek is thrilled to pieces by some anti-Communist rioting in the capital city of Guatemala. President Arbenz says that it was a religious disturbance and not really political at all, but he would say that, because he is a secret Communist who is plotting to take over the Western Hemisphere starting with some pineapple plantations in the Guatemalan flats.  Speaking of the insidious threat of Communist revolution that might start amongst the poorest of the poor for no reason at all because they are doing just fine, really, Mexico is raising objections to renewing the Bracero programme that brings seventy thousand Mexican farm workers to California, Texas and the states between. While the Braceros earn Mexico many American dollars and are good for Mexico, a much larger number of "wetbacks" cross the border illegally and do sweated labour at low wages for American farmers, which drives down the earnings of the Braceros. Mexico City wants America to penalise the farmers who employ them, and not just deport the workers, which is what we do now. Not surprisingly (check out Moley's column this week!), Washington has no stomach for it.

Business

Business Trends reports that priorities and allocations are hard to figure out and are creating a sort of floor on production by encouraging companies to buy and process their minimum allocations. One thing that is definitely in short supply is nickel, which is leading to the substitution of chrome steel for stainless (stainless having nickel as well as chrome), but this is going to cause corrosion and wear problems in the future. A shortage of nickel for jet turbine blades is going to be a problem, too. Another substitution is titanium for columbium, tightest of the "light metals." Overseas hoarding of lead is suspected as prices rise, and there is talk of an agreement on Bolivian tin. 

"Outlook Cheery in Spite of Weak Spots" With mass layoffs in the auto industry, there is talk that we might be about to enter a recession, except thanks to Korea we aren't. Miraculously, the Allies have a raw materials allocation plan worked out internationally, Congress is upset that CAB can't do a better job of sorting out route subsidies from air mail contracts and tell the taxpayer how much American airlines are subsidised, if at all. There are rumblings that the book publishing industry is making sweetheart deals with the book of the month clubs while bookstores are trying to market stationary to stay in the black as book sales decline. 

What's New reports that Hallmark of Kansas City is marketing greeting cards with the sentiments of Winston Churchill printed on them, since the last line of greeting cards featuring his paintings did so well. The Leader of the Opposition and potential next prime minister of Britain, everyone! The Toy Centre of Brookline, Massachusetts, is making a toy theodolite for the  junior surveyor, Meyercord's "Deathless Decals" for home bars and rumpus rooms features the lyrics of old saloon room ballads with heartwarming engravings of rummies singing just before Carry Nation bursts in the door. Johnson and Johnson's new Bakelite first aid kid is the best thing since sliced bread. Newsweek has heard tell of this "bumper crop of cotton" that The Economist was on a month ago. The American Economic Foundation is upset that some educational films about free enterprise don't hit you over the head hard enough, which is surprising when the average American worker is very conservative and loves profit-taking bosses and hates socialism. It has some guidelines for more, harder head-hitting. Meanwhile, in Russia, everybody follows the party line propaganda. The CAB has granted a license for a helicopter air line in LA. Federated Department Stores has bought out Sangers, The Long Island has paid out $4 million in damages for assorted accidents this year, Johnson and Johnson is suing a New York druggist for charging too little for drugs. 

Henry Hazlitt's Business Tides responds to the Federal budget surplus in the only way that a reasonable business columnist possibly could; by being beside himself with volcanic rage that the Feds are not doing a better job of forecasting the size of the deficit and surplus, which goes to show that they are very unbusinesslike and bad. 

Science, Medicine

"Radar Made Simple" Newsweek checks in with the Cossor display at the Festival of Britain and is very impressed with its Air Surface Movement Indicator, which is a sort of television crossed with radar that makes it much easier to see the picture of the world that radar is trying to communicate. It figures that everyone will have one soon, and radar will start doing a lot of the good that you would think that it would already be doing if radar operators could just make head or tail of it. 

"Atomic Eye Opener" Dr. Ralph Lapp has been fighting for a mocked-up city at Frenchman's Flats for two years now, thinking that if the AEC just had a fake city to bomb and for civil defence officials to tour, it would show the world that there's nothing to be afraid of from the atom bomb and all that hysteria would go away. 

Radio Moscow keeps claiming that Russians invented this or that. It would be funny if it weren't sad. 

The medical profession is worried that 1951 will be an even bigger epidemic year for polio, while a book about Lucy Freeman's psychoanalysis demystifies the process and highlights its medical benefits for treating psychosomatic cases of acne, fallen arches, and athlete's foot. I'm sorry if I sound a bit skeptical, because I am completely convinced. Medical Notes highlights a potential vaccine for mumps, reported by Dr. Werner Henle and his wife, Dr. Gertrude, of the Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and neomycin, an antibiotic that is very promising for skin infections.

 

Art, Radio-Television, Press, People

The Art section checks in with Canadian art. It turns out that the liveliest scene up there in the Great White North is Eskimo handicrafts sold to Hudson's Bay trading posts? Is that true? Nothing else going on up there?

"Narcotics Binge" Newsweek highlights how the scourge of narcotics makes for easy radio and television before checking in with the NAACP's decision to call for a boycott of the televisioin version of Amos 'n Andy and a reorganisation at Columbia that includes some moves around colour television that I guess someone is going to read as meaning something. Newsweek doesn't offer any guidance to the perplexed. I've already covered the big story in Press very briefly, but Kirk Douglas' new picture, Ace in the Hole, in which he plays a "journalistic heel," might have had all the papers, so Paramount sponsored an "Ace News Tip" contest to take the sting off it. It seems to have mainly proved that movie fans can chase ambulances as well as the next reporter. 

Ingrid Bergman's daughter Pia is going to be allowed to visit her mother. Marge Meredith is out of jail, Margaret Truman is back from European vacation, Billy Graham is trying to save Micky Cohen's soul, Katherine Lenroot is retiring, people are stealing trash bins in New York, a florist and a house painter make the news, and that's it. 

Omar Bradley's daughter has given him a granddaughter with the able assistance of Captain Henry Shaw Beukema, who knows what it takes to get a promotion, Dolores Costello is divorced and will go by Barrymore again, Ashton Stevens, Robert Ingalls and Arnold Schonberg have died. 

 Movies liked Bright Victory except the part where love and anti-racism triumphed in the end are a bit light for such a somber movie about the sufferings of war-blind veterans. As Young As You Feel wastes the talents of comic actors like Monty Woolley and Thelma Ritter, which at least makes a statement about the "dignity of men over 65." Ezio Pinzo's Strictly Dishonourable is a so-so comedy with good music that will make or break his career. That's My Boy is better than most Lewis and Martin movies because it keeps Jerry Lewis on a tighter leash.

 

Books

This week, middlebrows like true-life Western adventure, with Powell of the Colorado, by William Culp Darrah (which is a real name) and real life swashbuckling, with Lawrence East's The Yangtse Incident. Sadly down in "other books" are Vilhelm Moberg's The Emigrants, first in an intended three-volume sprawling saga of some Norwegian emigrants to Minnesota, voted 35th most exciting state of the Union recently ahead of Wisconsin. George Baker's The Dead Seagull is a poetic novel about "love" and a "temptress" and "savagery," if you see where I am going with this. 

Raymond Mosley's Perspectives column, "Texas Omen," is about a faction of conservative Texas Democrats, the Regulars, last heard from in 1944, who hope to use the new laws that are opening up the Texas primary system to promote a conservative Texan Congressional delegation in pace of the current Fair Deal establishment. They think that predominantly conservative Texans deserve a conservative delegation. Who said anything about civil rights? No-one mentioned civil rights. No-one is even thinking about civil rights! In fact, we are not thinking about civil rights that are faces are shrivelling up like angry old prunes from the effort of not thinking about civil rights!

Aviation Week, 23 July 1951

News Digest reports that personal pilots must have their CAA identification cards by 1 September or face grounding. An explosion at the Allison division of GM Plant 3's outdoor engine test cells cause $7.5 million damages and killed eight. The Percival P. 56 trainer has been officially named the Provost. 

Sidelights reports that the Air Force is training its general officers in man management and writing, because better late than never. 

Industry Observer reports that the Air Force is preparing a proposal for a new heavy lift h elicopter that can carry 28,000lbs for 350 miles to replace the Hughes XH-17, which has a disappointingly small range. Percival is going to be a new British helicopter production group. Convair Turboliner blah! BEA will resume its experimental Mamba-DC3 cargo flights to get more experience in turboprop operations. Italy got a present of 200 US WWII-era aircraft and the Air Force is experimenting with wingtip refuelling for jet fighters that already  have wingtip tanks.

Katherine Johnsen's Washington Roundup reports that the latest push for a 150 wing air force has started up in Congress. Senator Lodge is leading the push against a countervailing "economy" drive, and with the knowledge that, if it succeeds, the Air Force will be getting all the defence money.  The Navy continues to appoint more air admirals, and the friends of CAB rally around to point out that most attempts to influence CAB come from Congress, not industry. 

"Separation Brings Praise and Problems" Separating out route subsidies from air mail fees is still the biggest news in American aviation, and still the most controversial due to "new problems."

Alcoa, which supplies up to 75% of the country's aircraft forging requirements, is out on strike, and Aviation Week checks in with David Behnke, who is fighting his bumping from head of the ALPA, and with TWA, which lost its maintenance base in Fairfax, near Kansas City, to the waters. The Army's new, parachutable 9 1/2 ton bulldozer has, well, parachuted from a C-119, showing that the Army will in the future be able to build an airstrip in an established airhead, while the CAB says that the TWA Constellation crash at Cairo on 31 August of last year was caused by the failure of its rear row master rod bearing in the number 3 engine. R3350 master rod bearings have failed several times since in flight, largely due to sludge in the oil, and the CAB recommends that a R3350 be feathered if oil temperature reaches a certain point until Wright completes redesign of the pin sludge plug.

Production Engineering has Irving Stone, "Martin Speeds Plans for B-57 Production" Martin has determined the real reason that the Canberra is a better bomber than its American rivals. It's government regulations! Yes, that's what it says here. Seems the government makes the industry put all this government-furnished equipment and gadgets aboard, and they make the planes too heavy and too complicated. Further, the fact that the British can deliver a light and uncomplicated aircraft, and American industry cannot, may lead to a "[N]ew design and procurement concept for military craft --new from the point of view of this country, but not new to the British. All the foregoing is the conclusion of this reporter. Martin officials do not agree . . ." Martin says that this is wrong, that the Canberra is not the start of a trend, and that the Air Force just wanted it because it is long ranged, manoeuvrable, and a good night intruder. 

Stone points out that the Canberra eliminates wing fillets, uses wood rubbing strips wherever possible, has bomb bay doors hung from two spring-loaded pins, uses torque tubes to eliminate cable problems, has no anti or de-icing system, uses a synthetic rubber paint rather than tailored joints to maintain cockpit pressurisation. 

American-produced Canberras retain the four man crew the British adopted when they shifted from high-level to midlevel bombing, with a bombardier instead of the original bombing radar, which will come in the Mk. 2, also to be produced by Martin. Martin is adding a tail chute, rearranging the bomb bay, and using standard American night lighting in the cockpit. The Avon will be minimally modified to burn JP-3 instead of kerosene, and will break down the long piece of top aft skin that is being hand riveted in Britain so that it can be done in an automatic riveter in the States, adding a bit more weight. The spar is also manufactured in a labour-intense way, but there is currently no alternative at Martin, which lacks the forging tonnage capacity. Taken together, the B-57 will weight 15% more than the Canberra, but this will be compensated by the increased thrust of the J-65 engine. The Navy, and not the Air Force, will oversee the production, because the Navy already has men in the Martin plant(!!!!) About 200 Martin engineers, rising to 350 in late fall, will take care of adapting the design to American production. Plant tooling will come partly from government surplus, partly from new production, at a cost of perhaps $10 million. About 8000 people will work on the B-57, and Martin is thinking about using optical tooling for alignment of the fuselage centre section and will recommend optical tooling to subcontractors to reduce or eliminate master gages. 

Douglas wants us to know that it is using a hot spray finish to speed up the painting of the AD-4 Skyraider, "according to aq report received by Hercules Powder Co.," which makes the nitrocellulose lacquers used. Thomas L. Self checks in with Vic Patushin Industries of Los Angeles for "Expanding Rubber Forms Parts," which is an article about their use of expanding rubber to form dies for making jettisonable fuel tanks. Charles Demarest, the engineer who developed the process for Patushin, is very excited about other possibilities for putting simple barrels in dies, filling them with a bag, and then squeezing hydraulic fluid into the bag until the barrel conforms with the die.  

Equipment has "Airlines Expand Automatic Pilot Programme" 557 Bendix and Sperry automatic pilots are on order, with Bendix having a slight lead in the field of best robot service. McGraw Hill World News Serevice goes to Mullard Electronics of London to find out about "Ultra-Sonic Solder Bath Aids Tinning." It is a tinning bath constantly agitated by a magnetostriction device to break up films. Also, Wakefield is excited by the completion of its contract to install swingeing tables for compass setting at Naval Air Stations around the country. I still can't quite believe that the state of the art approach to setting compass bearings is to put them on a turntable! 

Boy, is General Controls excited about its new motor valve, which is almost as neat as Sprague Engineering's new hydraulic power unit. Even they can't hold a candle to the "Liliputan" bearings made by Miniature Precision Bearings, which are very, very small. The Romec division of Lear wants everyone to know that its new fuel pump for the B-47 will pump ALL the fuel at 150gph at 17000ft when turned at 3500rpm  by a 27v dc motor. That's more gas than my Lincoln burned! (Almost as much as it used, counting leaks.) R. N. Wades has pipeline quick couplers. There's a picture! They will allow a man to lay a fifth of a mile of pipe in an hour, which is more laying of pipe than ever! (es, R. N. Wade, we caught that.)

Air Transport notices that there hasn't been an article about helicopter passenger service in pages, and catches us up with LAA's plans to start up next week, or next summer, or, you know, some time. TWA has its first 4-0-4, people are sad that the government-subsidised local feeder plane "to replace the obsolescent DC-3" has been dropped from the President's supplemental 1952 appropriation. 

Captain Robson's Cockpit Viewpoint points the finger of blame for the delay in all-weather flying directly where it belongs. On the Weather Bureau! What's New couldn't find a chart about part specifications or a book about tank stripping, so it read Frank Taylor's High Horizons instead. 

Robert Wood's Editorial points out that rail passenger service is dying anyway, so there's no point in handicapping the airlines to save it. He is worried about the recent spate of mid-air collisions and hopes that there is regulation before something serious happens, and he urges the nonsked industry to organise and fight for its future. 

Letters

Sergeant Fetting, who has time on his hands, and writes from Tokyo General, has a bizarre note about how "GI" never meant "GI," only people decided that it did, but because it didn't, they're all wrong. 

The last Andrews Sisters hit? Still trying to figure out "Winston Johnnie."

UN Radio thanks Newsweek for its nice note and gently corrects an error: Mr. Aylen is Canadian, not American. A tailor has unsolicited advice for the President. whose suits really do look horrible. The Seventh Day Adventists liked the article about what the Adventists are going to do about Universal Military Training, and Taylor Briggs of Buffalo writes to explain that MiG pilots have to be members of the Party in good standing, which goes to show that Communist totalitarianism is bad. For Your Information reviews the week's stories and I mention here the story about how America went crazy for yachting this summer because it is in Sports and I won't be getting to it there; and the reporter out West, who, tramping after stories for Newsweek, flew in a DC-3 and rode in a 70-year-old steam locomotive, raising the question of whether there will be tramp DC-3s in seventy years. I don't know. Interesting question!

The Periscope reports that without Admiral Sherman to ride herd, the Pentagon is probably going to collapse into Army-Navy-Air Force civil war. Just so we don't think that that's all Admiral Sherman will be remembered for, we're reminded that he was a strong proponent of the Spanish alliance that now seems a done deal, because he and his family were such close friends of Franco. I feel a bit sick to my stomach, but The Periscope assures us that no-one is Fascist here in any way. The Navy just needs those Spanish bases! The assassination of King Abdullah (the third political assassination in the Middle East in as many months) has raised fears for the safety of Averill Harriman. The Pentagon promises that it won't unleash the atom bomb on the world, but it might just unleash it on Communist forces in North Korea if they don't get this armistice done up, double time! When 2nd Armoured Division left for Europe, it only had half its tanks, because the Detroit Tank Arsenal is behind on hull castings and electrical wiring. The Cominterm might move its head offices from Bucharest to Vienna because Bucharest is such a dump. I mean, "isn't centrally located." "Former Wehrmacht plane-makers" figure that the MiG-15 was designed by Siegfried Guenther, formerly of Heinkel, on account of Russians being subhuman Asiatics --er, I mean, Communists. That's it. "Communists." Also in weird rumours out of Russia, it is being officially denied that three recent "'volcanic eruptions'" in the south of Sinkiang province  (so the Taklamakan Desert) were atomic tests. American sources say that no volcanoes were recorded there. Churchill and Eden will both be making speaking tours of America in coming months, more Americans travelled by air between two major cities than by rail or bus combined for the first time this month(Los Angeles--San Francisco), there is increasing talk of inflation being scotched by a short recession; A. J Cronin, and William Faulkner have novels coming out, while GOP Representative Hugh Scott has an article in the press on how Eisenhower should run in '52. Twentieth Century Fox is planning a musical version of Uncle Tom's Cabin starring Betty Grable, MGM is adapting Garson Kanin-Ruth Gordon play, Pat and Mike for Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Orwell's 1984 is being adapted as a movie by an independent company in Britain, Eleanor Parker will replace Ava Gardner in MGM's Scaramouche, and Tony Zale will act in Detective Story in Chicago summer theatre.

"I told him they were doing Uncle Tom's Cabin and he didn't blink. So then I said it was a musical, and he just sat there. Then I said it would star Betty Grable and he pulled out his notebook. I give up."

 

Washington Trends reports that the Administration figures it can't lose on the Spanish deal since Fair Dealers will fall in line and Administration critics wanted it to start with. Prices and wages will probably stabilise at their current high levels. Flood control projects in the Midwest will probably get past "pork barrel" critics now that the industrial neighbourhoods of Kansas City are flooded, choked with corpses and in flames from 17 burning oil tanks. (The latest updates have 41 dead, 2 million arable acres flooded, and 15 of 17 rail trunklines through the flooded area, washed out. However, the flood crest was below the top of the dikes in St. Louis and it poses no threat further downstream. With a 'sacrificial zone that big, let's hope so!!! Washington will probably transfer Voice of America to the Psychological Warfare Board because Radio Moscow doesn't have enough new material yet, and the Douglas Committee will probably have something to report on ethics and that stuff in August. 

"Peace Offensive That Means No Peace" and "Blunted Attack" The latest Communist bid for "peace" is an offensive to lull the West into disarmament before they STRIKE, and the Dixiecrat/Republican coalition fighting for this and that in the wage and price controls legislation were turned back after the Adminstration managed to convince enough people that they were asking for too much. 

Admiral Forrest Sherman, who died this week at the age of 52 after two heart attacks, gets an obituary in the main paper and another in Ernest Lindley's Washington Tides. He had a reputation as the intellectual of the navy and was promoted to be the youngest CNO in history over plenty of older flag officers because he was the one who was actually smart, and because he was Nimitz's man. I'll skip ahead to coverage of the bases deal with Spain, which features a tentative agreement to extend the runways of a number of Spanish air bases to accommodate American atomic bombers, which are otherwise not exactly welcome in Europe due to the cost of supporting a B-36, ill-will over "American occupation," and, also, atomic bombs. 

"Washington Waltz" Newsweek checks in with confidence man Sam Mussman, up before Senator Clyde Hoey (no, really)'s special investigative sub-Committee. Mussman sold 99 year leases to prime properties in downtown Washington and New York for a dollar apiece on the claim that the government was about to build nuclear-proof underground cities and needed caretakers for all of the abandoned buildings. He made hundreds of thousands of dollars from some easily confused people including a pair of Greek Catholic priests who scrounged up a lot of money in their communities, but claims that most of it went to his supposed partner and brains of the operation, "Mr. Eungart." The Committee couldn't catch him out on perjury, so they sent the case over to Federal Court. The President has had it up to here with Paul Douglas, whom he considers an unstable show off, and has lowered the boom by appointing a bunch of Illinois judges who weren't on Douglas' list, to show the Senator who is boss. 

Carl Spaatz is back from Europe and writes a long column about how Europe can be free if it really wants to be, of which the highlight is probably a picture of a big French artillery piece. (Although his picture of a Korean-style war in Germany the moment that American, and, I guess, Soviet troops withdraw, is quite the thing to think about.) Korean War is full to brim with Kaesong news, including word that journalists are taking pictures of each other because there's nothing else to do. Newsweek interviews a Communist North Korean officer who is clearly some kind of fanatic because he thinks America has rearmed Japan, when in reality it is just rearming Japan. His complaint that he was tortured for a year in South Korean jail on suspicion of being a Communist is even more effectively refuted by the observation that Communist jails torture people, too. 

International notices an alarming shortage of articles about the East Bloc peace offensive, which means that it is time for another one. The key questions are whether Attlee can win an election with a "peace party" to his left, and an expected balance of payments deficit and coal shortage coming in the winter, and whether Europe can afford rearmament, especially if Congress cuts foreign aid, and even more especially if the cuts target non-military aid. 

"Assassination Powder Keg" An obituary of King Abdullah of Transjordan, and some hand wringining over Transjordan's prospects in the near future, along with a brief summary of the other assassinations of "pro-British" leaders in the last few months.  

"Science and Security" The big story is that after British nuclear physicist, Dr. Bruno Pontecorvo disappeared, there was a crackdown, and this week, E. H. S. Burcop's passport was cancelled just before he was to board a Sabena airliner for Moscow as part of a tour group with nineteen other British leftists.  It is also now revealed that "an unidentified Foreign Official official, under investigation since the Burgess-MacLean case broke last month, has been suspended from work and asked to surrender his passport." Petain has died, and has been buried in the isolated island where he was first imprisoned, and later exiled, as much by ill-health as anything else. The French Army is to be issued with dehydrated wine in rugged plastic bags that is as good as the wine they normally drink, and the talks in Teheran are not getting anywhere, with demonstrations in Teheran showing that Mossadegh is popular as long as he sticks with expropriation, even though he is aware that Iran can' run the oilfields without British help. Elsewhere it is suggested that Iran is fishing for Shell to come in to replace Anglo-Iranian. 

In Canada, Newsweek notices that the current leader of the Ontario Liberal Party is quite the wild man and might endanger the party's chances of regaining power in the province. Canadians are concerned about the brain drain of the country's best and brightest to the United States, recently. A net loss of about 18,000 Canadians to the US each year isn't really balanced by 7000 emigrants from the United States, because they tend to be Canadians retiring home.

Business

Business Trends reports that the Midwest floods are going to throw a spanner in the mobilisation works due to all the delivery delays and the amount of material needed to rebuild trunk lines. There is likely to be another strike in the Chilean copper mines, which might have finally provoked the War Mobilisation Board to relax copper stockpiling, the government is going to toughen tax amortisation rules, the petrochemical industry is steeling itself (get it?) for major cuts in steel allocations, an "unofficial" freeze on  new car models will continue into next year, and the vacuum cleaner industry is replacing steel with plastic-reinforced Fiberglas. 

"More Arms and an Inflation Lull?" Both stories covered elsewhere.  Inflation is down because consumer demand is falling as arms deliveries rise. Total output is up 5% mainly due to a 2 million person increase in the labour force and longer working hours. Productivity is expected to continue to increase at the 6% rate seen since the end of WWII. (Which I believe is low by the standards of the 1930s.) Below, "Fewer Cars, Fewer Jobs" covers the specifics of the layoffs and production cancellations in Detroit, caused as much by lack of steel as lack of demand. Not good news for Uncle Henry! 

The fight between NAM and Charlie Wilson over price controls and rollbacks, prefigured by Henry Hazlitt of all people, is on full swing this week while Interior Secretary Oscar Chapman warns of an oil and gas shortage in eighteen months due to the cutback in steel for the oil industry and Manly Fleischbaum of the National Production Authority is setting up a special working group to deal with the shortage of new machine tools. 

"Strike in the Mountain States" Shell has announced an oil find in the northeastern corner of Montana where people have been expecting to find oil for some time. There's a bit of a rush developing out there on the High Plains since the find in North Dakota a few months ago, and this news has warmed things up, even though Shell is being very cagy about what, exactly, its Williston Basin strike amounts to. 

David Bencke is out at the Airline Pilots Association, the Navy's first guided missile plant, to be run by Convair, is breaking ground. Mack Trucks has a $77 million contract from the Army, and various companies report swinging profits. 

"Eastern's New Fleet" Famous skinflint Eddie Rickenbacker has sprung for 30 Super-Constellations and 60 Martin 4-0-4s to reequip his "high density" fleet with 300mph+ aircraft that can be converted to turboprops or jets in good time. I can't believe that Rickenbacker actually believes that last part, but he had to put on a show and dance to get $30 million out of the banks to fund the re-equipment, which might push Eastern to a $160 million gross by 1953. 

What's New is taken with Mahoning Gifts of New York's "large bag" of building blocks for children, a glowing night dial for telephone dials from Glo-Dile Corporation, Revell Toy's "Horse Game," which includes plastic horse pieces driven ahead by random hops from Mexican jumping beans embedded in their stand. Did you know that "Mexican jumping beans" are actually insects? It seems vaguely like animal cruelty when I put it that way. Dasco's Dashide is a colourless plastic fluid for waterproofing exterior walls. Sylvania's new televisions have a "Halovision" border that surrounds the cathode tube with a rim of lit tubing that reduces the contrast between screen and surrounding, "increasing visuality." GE has a "swivel top" vacuum cleaner that can be set up in the middle of the room and used to clean all around without moving the canister.

Henry Hazlitt's Business Tides takes time out from American politics to to bash the Iranian government for reneging on its sixty year lease to Anglo-Iranian for most of the column. Then he gets back to what's important, namely Washington, pointing out that Point Four assumes that what the poor regions of the world need is technical advice, when what they actually need is political stability. Foreign aid, by insulating governments from the effects of foolish decisions like Iran's expropriation, actually hinders development. 

Science, Medicine, Education

"Language in Evolution" Professor Joshua Whatmough has caused quite the stir in the science of linguistics by applying a mathematical theory inspired by cybernetics to language change, with scientific results like a prediction that English "strong verbs" will go extinct by 3000AD and that people are going to go on coining new words and phrases like "mouth-watering." 

A productive line of thought, at least for science fiction and high theory

"One-Eyed Perspective" Inspired by the fact that some one-eyed pilots don't crash and die, Luftwaffe flight doctor, Heinrich Rose, began to study them, and continued his work at Randolph Field in Texas, where he had access to American flight cadets. He has concluded that while normal human depth perception depends on the parallax between two eyes, there are other mechanisms for depth perception, including the ability to use a single eye to detect depth in rapidly moving objects, which is what one-eyed pilots use to not crash. His work promises to prevent unnecessary washouts due to apparent poor depth perception in clinical tests, which, why? He suggests that the Air Force should plant parallel lines of shrubs along runway margins to give visual checks for one-eyed depth perception. 

What about lights? They seem a lot more practical than topiary. 

Science has Notes this week, including a spectrographic study by Professor Max S. Dunn of UCLA proving that canning doesn't destroy the  nutrients in food, J. N. Aldington of Siemens Lamp's discovery that human colour perception varies with posture, the National Geographic Society's review of the 1951 whaling season, which was the most successful ever, yielding 358,000 tons of edible fats from 32,000 whales, and also meat for fertiliser and even steaks in some  hungry countries.

"Delafield Defies Cancer" Newsweek checks in with the Delafield Cancer Hospital of Columbia University, which supports its specialist function with a giant x-ray for radiation therapy and a biochemistry laboratory where Simon Graff continues his search for viral causes of cancer. 

British doctors might come on strike if the NHS doesn't give them more money, and Professor Roger Williams of the University of Texas's biochemical institute has proven that schizophrenics are metabolically distinguishable by measuring, among other indicators, consistent differences in the amount of magnesium in their  urine. While this vaguely points to a metabolic difference, it is not proof that schizophrenia is caused by diet, but it does hold out hope that it can be treated with diet. This mental disease has physical correlations, and it might be attacked through these avenues, Williams thinks. 

Berlin's Free University isn't really free any more, because of Communism. 

Radio-Television, Press, People

Twentieth Century Fox reports progress with the Eidopher Process for putting TV pictures into movie houses, which it is now coupling with CBS colour television to put colour Broadway productions onto Wichita movie screens this summer. Newsweek checks in with "television novels" like Hawkins Falls, which seem a lot like radio soap operas, but aren't, because they are sponsored by beer companies, not soap companies. And the NCAA has pretty much given up on its television ban.

Newsweek checks in with Liberty magazine, which is in financial trouble again and is dragging down the stable of girlie magazines at the publisher that bought it, along with it. Then it's off to Kaesong for the promised story about  bored journalists.

Barbara Hutton is divorcing her third husband, Bob Hope was nearly drowned while fishing in Colorado, the Diligenti quintuplets celebrated their eighth birthdays together in Buenos Aires, Serge Rubinstein has been acquitted of his latest misadventure (alleged misadventure?), a Louisiana sheriff hauled before the Kefauver Committee is a changed man, honest. A farmer in Texas is suing rainmakers because they are stealing his rain, Leo Durocher is in the news for some reason. Dorothy Mae Stephens, Chicago's "Deep Freeze Woman," is out on the town, in a wheelchair because her legs were amputated. John Barrymore is in some kind of trouble after getting stage fright (a Barrymore?) in a recent play. 

Lucille Ball has had a daughter, Senator Charles Tobey is recovering at home from "a state of physical exhaustion brought on by overwork," and General Quesada is retiring. Cardinal Sapieha and Crown Prince William have died, as well as Petain, Admiral Sherman and King Abdullah, all covered elsewhere. 

New Films

No Place for Jennifer is an effective British tear-jerker about the effects of divorce on children. Rich, Young and Pretty is an MGM musical comedy about Texans in Paris that manages to avoid the easy targets, while The Law and the Lady is a parlour comedy burglary heist story that an Edwardian British author can sort of make work, but MGM can't, even with Greer Garson as the lady. 

Books

Two biographies of outrageous men this week, Paul J. Wellman's The Iron Mistress, about Jim Bowie, and Jerome Carcopino's Cicero: The Secrets of His Correspondence. Wellman presents Bowie as a battle-mad maniac and general erratic, while Carcopino hates Cicero largely on the basis of how his correspondence strikes Carcopino, and goes through Cicero's letters to prove that they were obviously first published by his enemies to blacken Cicero's reputation with his own words. Newsweek is not convinced. Mickey Spillane's latest Mike Hammer novel is like a Mike Hammer novel, only good. (Better. I should try not to be so snobbish.) Peter Bourne's The Golden Road is a historical novel set against the California Gold Rush. 

Raymond Moley's Perspective column, "Is Stassen Fading Away?" posits that the President's move to secure Humphrey's nomination for Governor in '52 has had another victim, and now Stassen can't hope to win the Wisconsin primary against Taft. 

From The Economist during the back end of the month, some interesting articles:.

The 24 July leading Leader lays out the logic of "arms in proportion." The latest British assessment of Red Army pushes its estimated strength up from 175 to 215 divisions including artillery and antiaircraft divisions. These are each only about 60% of the strength of a NATO division, but 18 to 20 NATO divisions is still pitifully adequate. The West does not have to match the Russians, but it does have to be strong enough for its higher national income to be brought to bear after full mobilisation. And that's where that helpful chart of nation incomes is from. 

A Shorter Note from the 18 July Issue, "No More Clerks?" looks at the "electronic calculating  machine using electrical impulses," because God forbid that you call it a computer, which is a "tool for the research worker." In the near future, The Economist concludes, they will be factory produced for wider use. They can be used, The Economist points out, for complicated calculations and can be used to store information. This is why people call them "electronic brains," but actually, it goes on to explain, they have to be programmed, but not in so many words, because that's not how The Economist talks, to repeat myself. We light on the obvious conclusion that they can be used to calculate income tax PAYE, or could if t hey were to be used to do a small number of calculations on a large import of data, and not a large number of calculations on a small import, which is how they are used today. If they were to be so used, they would get rid of clerks as such, but there would be quite the fuss with all that data "importing." People are experimenting with the idea, with "one of the largest catering companies in the country" recently ordering such an electronic calculator. The Economist is looking forward to seeing what happens, and I thought that this was an interesting perspective on computers that I would share. 

Another note from the same issue looks at "Aero Engines." Back in WWII, Britain had four aero-engine makers, or rather two large and two small. Right now, the only builders with an ongoing jet engine are a new builder, De Havilland, and Rolls Royce. De Havilland is expanding its capacity in order to make more of its older Ghost/Goblin line of centrifugal compressor engines, while Rolls Royce already has several factories working on the Avon, the first mass-produced axial compressor jet turbine, and another factory in Glasgow building. Small orders for the Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire are being met from within the larger Hawker Siddeley group's surplus capacity. 

For further expansion from the small current jet engine production, bearing in mind that jet engines take about three times the machine tools and labour as a piston engine, will be hard. The industry as a whole has a workforce of 158,000, which cannot be much increased. Much of the work is being done by small contractors which can only do rough forgings and castings that must be machined at a few plants. There need to be more plants able to machine jet engine parts. Jet engine parts require much higher machining tolerances than piston engine parts. Much of the current work is being done by hand, and that kind of working cannot be increased. Moreover, as we move from centrifugal compressors to axial, we go from compressors that are basically discs with vanes on their face, which can be made with automatic profilers in about 130 hours of machining, to alternating stationary and rotating rows of 100 small blades, about 1500 to 2000 for each Avon engine. These seem likely to be the greatest bottleneck in a mass jet engine production plan. Tolls Royce and some American manufacturers still use light alloy blades, but other manufacturers are moving to stainless steel. At 100 engines a month, we would need to machine 200,000 blades for compressors and turbines, with ultimate British demand perhaps reaching a million a month. American demand is already at 500,000. The blades have a complicated aerofoil shape. Light alloy blades can be die stamped at high speed, but even then the dies only last for 1500 to 1800 blades, so that die-making, which requires hours of hand filing, is another bottleneck. Or, rather, it seems in conceivable that this is how we will proceed. 

A revolution in diemaking is  needed, as long as we proceed with light alloy blades. As we go to steel blades, where dies last for only 300 blades, and the blades also (instead?) require hours of machining to reduce the rough forging. Machinery to automate diemaking and cut steel blades automatically has been designed, but hasn't yet worked in practice. Right now, no-one is grappling with these problems because they have devolved on subcontractors. We could also resort to lower tolerances, which would reduce lifetimes, but that is  probably only feasible under war conditions. 

Now, the Note ends with a pious invocation of the advantages of the easy-to-manufacture centrifugal compressor, and right now De Havilland is riding the centrifugal jet turbine down to the bitter end, so this whole thing might be special  pleading from a De Havilland source, but it certainly gives us something to think about! 

From the July 24th issue, "New Machinery for Radio Orders" does not cover the Ministry of Supply's change of heart over the Mullard mass-produced valve factory, but rather new organisational principles to mobilise the civilian industry to produce for military uses as and when needed. 

Lacking The Engineer, we have The Economist covering ship building. Britain's share is up 41,600 tons this quarter to 2,115,000, but this is not enough to keep Britain's proportional share of world building, now at 5,330,000 tons. The largest increases sin building is from Germany, while Japan produced almost half a million tons in the last quarter. Britain still dominates world production of tankers and liners.  

Aviation Week, 30 July 1951

News Digest reports that the Hiller Hornjet, their ramjet helicopter, has "established an unofficial altitude record for its category." 7500ft, if you were wondering. Napier is going to build a plant to make Rolls Royce Avons near Bootle, Lancashire, which is a real place. There are rumours that Rolls-Royce will build three more Avon factories in Scotland. Debris from the missing Canadian-Pacific DC-4 bound Anchorage to Tokyo, may have been spotted by airborne searchers. 

Sidelights reports that the British are dragging their feet on their aviation commitments to NATO, which is editorial, not news, and still the most newsworthy bit  in the entire column. (Unless you follow industry gossip and want to know who has resigned and who is in hospital.)

Industry Observer Between the US, Canada and Australia, the F-86 will have three different engines: The J47, Avon and Orenda. The first American-made J65, which will probably be ready in September, will include "a considerable number of British parts." Westland might make its licensed Sikorsky S-55 8--10 passenger helicopter with two Alvis Leonides instead of a single Wasp. It is also considering a giant 32-passenter W-81 powered by two Darts or Mambas. The Air Rescue Service has dropped an Edo A-3 airborne motor lifeboat in the Kansas floods. The first flight of the Douglas X-5 with adjustable sweepback was a success, and Boeing's latest version of the Stratofreighter, the KC-97E, will be available convertible into cargo, troop carrier, and airborne tanker versions. 

Katherine Johnsen's Washington Roundup says that the US is putting the military buildup on "wait and see" for the next few months. That is, the Administration is going to dig in on the 95 versus 150 wings ground and see if Wherry, Taft and Lodge can push them off it when the bills for 95 start to come in. The notion that the Europeans are lagging in rearmament is an argument against the strategic air power crowd who want to put most American money into (atom-)bombing the Russians. Tactical air power is key to "holding the continent" On the other hand, the strategic gang can argue that the US doesn't need bases in Central Europe as much now that it has them in Spain, Greece and Turkey. 

Lastly, and this is the payoff for all that boring stuff, new, delightfully crazy rumours that the Russians are building "major air bases" on the high plateaus of Tibet and acclimating personnel to high altitudes. Look out, Bolivia and Colorado! The Navy is in trouble in Congress, where some members have noticed that flying atom bombers off aircraft carriers is an "expensive, awkward move." These same members want to take money away from the Navy's carriers for the 150 wing programme. Meanwhile within the navy, seaplane admirals are revolting against carrier admirals. "A seaplane can be developed to match the B-36's performance, and wouldn't require costly take-off bases around the world." I am so glad we are going to have this argument again! None of this would be necessary, of course, if the Navy could just come up with a way to defend Bolivia and Colorado. Also, lots of information coming out about air mail that suggests --GASP!-- American airlines are getting sweetheart deals. Maybe the Administration should take airmail away from the airlines and fly it with the Air Force!

"Legal Manoeuvres  Mark ALPA Week" Have you heard enough about David Behncke and the Airline Pilots Association? No, you have not! Here's more! Also, UAL is still fighting with its pilots over work conditions on the new DC-6Bs, and CAB is still in the middle of the "Miami interchange" that determines who flies south and by what routes.  My eyes are spontaneously crossing at mention of Braniff, National, Panagra and Grace. 

Talk is that Pete Quesada is quitting because the Air Force and Administration aren't doing enough for tactical air. Fletcher Aircraft is trying to get into tactical air by arming a lightplane, the Air Coordinating Committee wants a guaranteed 3500 civilian planes in next year's production totals, rearmament notwithstanding. Convair wants everyone to know that its YB-60 will fly in November just in case anyone has forgotten that they are working on an eight-yet, swept-wing version of the B-36. Hopefully in next week's issue we'll hear that there is a turboprop version of the B-52 and a Douglas swept-wing intercontinental bomber. In a moment of sanity, Aviation Week pops into Air Force headquarters to ask about the YB-60. "No," they say, shaking their heads. There are only enough J-57s for the B-52. Curtiss-Wright says that its backlog order book has reached $1 billion.

Ben S. Lee, "USAF Buys Big-Wing Packet" That's the C-119H, which will be able to carry a 22,000lb payload. It is strictly a developmental contract in competition with the Lockheed turboprop "all-purpose" transport. The article goes on to discuss range, ceiling and load requirements at length, and sketches the necessary design changes that Fairchild is looking at. I don't see any mention of engines, though, and Lockheed has already won the competition, so this looks to me like another case of the Air Force having money to burn. 

Two minor mishaps with KLM and EAL Connies make the news. The minor EAL boo-boo involved a belly landing in a field, which I don't consider "minor."

Avionics has David A. Anderton, "Avionics Advances Revealed by Honeywell" Honeywell has a new aeronautical engineering building, and invited the press in for a look. Honeywell wants us to know that it has a new control wheel for its E6 autopilot that is suddenly a distant also-ran to the Sperry and Bendix autopilots. It also has various improvements to the  fuel gauge (takes different kinds of fuel into account in planes that use more than one kind), a centre of gravity control that takes better account of fuel tanks, a better attitude controller and flight recorder, and a better thermostat. It also has a bunch of research contracts for evaluating bomber performance, automating carrier landings, an all-weather automatic airplane, magnetic amplifiers and floating gyros. 

The RBM Division of Essex Wire has a midget relay that is so small and so cute you could just eat it up! 3 amps, 28 dc, 2 1/2 "micro-microfarads."   Speaking of which, Bell Labs also has a cute little midget gadget, a new type of transistor with "astonishing properties never before achieved in any amplifying device." It consists of a tiny rod of germanium encased in a  hard plastic bead. The germanium rod has been treated to consist of a thin, electrically positive layer sandwiched between two negative ones. There is point contact between the layers at the end. They use very small amounts of power compared with the cathode heater in a conventional vacuum tube, are very efficient, and are compact and rugged, producing almost no microphone noise in an audio frequency trial. Input and output impedances are always positive notwithstanding ground, allowing a wide range of impedances. At 1000hz, the noise figure is 10 to 20dB with power gains of 40 to 50dB per stage. Regular production and experimental applications will start at Western Electric next year. 

Professor Homer J. Diana, which is a real name, of the Engineering Experiment Station of the State College of Washington's Division of Industrial Research has a new static discharger. I'm not sure what makes it new, as the article is mainly about an automatic cutoff that turns off the aircraft radio just before the discharger discharges the aircraft's accumulated static charge. Maybe it is the cutoff that makes it new. 

Aeronautical Engineering has Irving Stone, "Fokker S. 14 Jet Trainer Takes to the Air." Did Aviation Week spring to send Irving Stone to Europe? No, it looks as though he is just summarising a press release from Fokker.

NACA Reports has more fun with fire extinguishers with "Some Properties of High-Purity Sintered Wrought Molybdenum Metal at Temperatures up to 2400F," and some math, "A Survey of Stability Analysis Techniques for Automatically Controlled Aircraft," and "Transonic Flow Past a Wedge Profile With Detached Bow-Wave: General Analytical Method and Final Calculated Results." Plus, "On Reflection of Shock Waves from Boundary Layers," which gets today's D-minus for the short title, "Approximate Calculation of Turbulent Boundary-Layer Development in Compressible Flow," --Approximate!!!?!!--- and "Resistance of a Delta Wing in Supersonic Flow." (Which is a translation of a 1947 Russian note by M. I. Gurevich of MiG.)

Production has "Library Stocks Sheet Metal 'Books'" Pratt and Whitney has so much sheet metal of so many kinds hanging around that it is starting to store it in "books" in "book cases." Meanwhile the USAF's machine tool storage sites at Marietta, Georgia and Omaha, Nebraska have adopted a "cafeteria" style arrangment where you can go look at the tools and order the ones you want instead of ordering from catalogues.  Republic is welding wingtip tanks now.

Equipment has Sean H. Reiniger, "CB System Slated for Convair 340" That's CB fire-extinguishing fluid, if you were wondering. Which is bromochloromethane's new name in American service now that the CAA is finally allowing American manufacturers to use the stuf they've been using in Germany for years, while not breaking the Kidde monopoly that was so not a monopoly and in fact just the CAA looking out for the safety of American passengers in case they got poisoned while burning to death. Kidde, you see, has the patent for CB, which is why the CAA is allowing it and not Graviner's methyl bromide, the British system, which is used by the services, which don't have a piece of the CAA's action. 

New Aviation Products has a compact wind velocity recorder from Hastings Instruments. Lear has a "quick-disconnect fitting designed to speed installation and servicing of aircraft accessories operating with flexible shafting." No further useful explanation, which is at least a change from mind numbing details like the lengthy explanation of the Hastings recorder's two-range arrangement where the instrument can be set to measure from 0--5mph or from 5--50mph. Boeing has a new fuel booster fuel tank pump that causes fewer fires. Parker Appliance has synthetic rubber O-ring Compound 41, which is 100% improved on Compound 40. 

Air Transport has Alexaner McSurely, "We Can Catch British Jets, Group Says" Britain has a 3 to 5 year advantage, of if America just gets to cutting metal, it can catch up. Among problems to be sorted out are the poor maintenance periods of American jet engines compared with the De Havilland Ghost and the rapid cabin pressurisation required for jet aircraft, which have to climb so quickly. 

Letters is a full page today. "G" thinks that airplanes should have backwards-facing seats and so does "an unnamed airline pilot." Our Editor thinks that passengers should also be shielded from the demoralising sight of the engines.  David Kuhn of ALPA explains why the union is right about the DC-6B. Monsanto and Douglas were very happy with the article about Skydrol hydraulic fluid. Several people, including one [name withheld] really like Aviation Week, while J. S. Smith of GE's advertising and promotions department agrees with Aviation Week about the plague of fishy press releases.

C. R. Robson's Cockpit Viewpoint is happy about the firing of David Behnke. What's New is reading Selig Altschul's A Study and Appraisal of Eastern Air Lines, Inc, which takes a look at "how 'Captain Eddie' does it." Walter Lord's Getting Military Work is a good guide to the same, while Augustin M. Prentiss' Civil Defence in Modern War is a working text for civil defence organisations, perfect for figuring out just how infected, blown up, or gassed your hometown will be, in the event, with some helpful hints on what to do afterwards that don't involve   running away, followed by voting the rascals out.   

Robert Wood's Editorial thinks that it was time for Behnke to go, that the government might finally be looking into mid-air collisions, that we shouldn't "undersell the copter," that the British really are ahead on jet transport. These are all pretty short notes for Wood, who usually can't fit more than two topics into a page, not that I'm complaining except that I can't bring myself to care about railway safety quite as much as he does. I'm just pointing it out because when he finally does get down to it, with "Russia, Facts and Fictions," it takes up just a bit over half the page. I don't know. Maybe it was supposed to be longer? 

Wood is reacting to Hanson Baldwin pointing out in New York Times on 24 July that some military officers "sharply challenge the 'facts' published about Soviet military airpower. Wood agrees! He points out that an illustration of a new Czech fighter that circulates widely in the American aviation press actually came from an April Fool's issue, and that the recent fuss over the performance of the  MiG-15's engine actually started as an Air Force assessment of what that engine will eventually be capable of, and not what it is doing now. "Some of the material published about Russian air power undoubtedly has some degree of authenticity," but a lot of it is "balderdash." Complacency would be disastrous, but so would criticising the American industry. (For our ad revenues for sure, but also because of the danger to the country from . . . something. Anyway, if the other guys get ahead, you can always do something about it.)