Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
I hope that you won't mind the lack of a personal touch this week as Reggie and I make our final arrangements for our August European trip where we will do our duty to the world trade balance by seeing the sights and throwing dollars at them. Catch, Louvre, catch! Also, finally a chance to cross the Atlantic in a giant steamship luxury liner, the way Nature intended. (All kidding aside, I am getting so excited I'm forgetting to breath!) Of course now that tickets are booked, I find that the only way that I am making it back to Palo Alto in time for classes is by flying from New York. Your poor daughter-in-law, doomed to be a high flyer!
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
PS: I also hope that you don't mind missing The Economist this month, due to my subscription lapsing by a record-keeping mistake. Up until the last minute I thought it was just a late delivery, so when I wired London I got a nice, quick replay, but it was still too late for me to get to the library, which is on summer hours. And don't ask me why the library is closed early when everyone is at the beach looking for something to read!
It was so good to see you last night! Uhm, okay, if you ever read this, it will be months from now, because this package is going to your house, and not to your hotel room. I am writing it, with the customary epistolary opening, in the name of completeness, so that my historical posterity (which there will surely be!) will have an entry for the summer of 1952. Who knows what historical insights there will be to be had in retrospect? And, of course, your own Ronnie will have picked out the gems, I am sure. Although when the biggest science and medicine story of the week are successful public vaccination drives and some crackpot worrying about flooding due to the Greenland ice caps melting, it is hard to see what kind of history is being made.
So how did I drive myself up this road, this wrong way cul-de-sac like the planners of your little neighbourhood so love? Because of the movie, of course. I couldn't stop thinking about it. Reggie couldn't stop thinking about it. I have my concerns about casting a 51 year-old as the love interest of a 23-year-old, but at the same time my woman's eye is pleased to rest upon Gary Cooper at the least excuse, so I suppose that means that I am part of the problem. BUT THE MOVIE! And I am so glad that I could see it with you and with Uncle George, and to be there with you talking about it afterwards at the Lotus. What a meditation on cowardice and service and the death of Admiral Ting, and to hear Uncle George talking about the kamikazes at last!
Last week, it was hard to avoid giving the impression of being prematurely bored of SAGE. Even as the postblogging approaches SAGE from the front-end back in 1952, my attitude is shaped by Annals of the History of Computing 42, 1 (October 1983), the SAGE special issue of the already-unbelievably old flagship journal of computing history. SAGE had only been discontinued three years before the special issue, which, to put it in further perspective, came out in my second year of undergraduate. SAGE led to SABRE, the "Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment," which had only rolled out to travel agents seven years earlier. SAGE made its smooth transition from working technology to academic history for understandable reasons. It's like the Protestant Reformation or the Eighteenth Century London underworld: an inherently good "site" for historical work.
Having been somewhat personally bruised by the idea that the Ruthenian borderlands are a better "site" for historical work than, say the entire Austrian Empire, I am probably too willing to forgive myself for being cynical about overworked historical sites, but SAGE's claim here is hard to dismiss. Besides being a major customer and driver in the first decade of the computing industry, it pioneered many of the technologies behind the Internet, whose importance I will reluctantly acknowledge, and as the ongoing Ukrainian conflict underlines, national air warning and defence networks have a lot more staying power in the modern era than most utopian Fifties-era national security initiatives. Indeed, between the last Nagorno-Karabakh war and the repulsion of the initial Russian Special Military Operation, they would appear to be right up there with aircraft, tanks, nuclear submarines and atom bombs in the list of things that international security cannot be without, a modern "queen of battle."
So, okay, yes. But SAGE is old hat, and boring. What about, I asked myself, the datalinks from telephone to computer? After all, analog lines are inherently noisy, and when you set out to conver analog input into digital data for processing, and then use the output data to create a graphical image for battle control, noise is a huge problem. The more data points to fit into your forced curve, the wilder the excursions which must be smoothed, to the point where the output data (the bomber track) might be nothing more than GIGO.
The importance of the telephone network, which, at its peak, received everything from VHF from the DEW lines and UHF data from AEW aircraft and forwarded it at 1200 baud on commercial toll lines, is underlined by the fact that the telephone switchboard stations, unlike the SAGE blockhouses, were underground and fortified. I did not find much about the telephone engineering of the network, however, and was quickly shoved in another direction. As with MIT redirecting its early work on WHIRLWIND to the SAGE project, so RCA sought a second life for its Selectron tube memory system in the nascent national defence computer engineering project. Ultimately, Jay Forrester passed on tube memory, whether RCA's or the more-developed Williams tube, in favour of magnetic core memory, and RCA "assigned their engineers to color television development, and put the Selectron in the hands of 'the mothers-in-law of two deserving employees (the Chairman of the Board and the President).'2]"
And this is kind of my objection to historical sites. (Silos?) We get locked into an academic historian's idea of what is important, and whole genealogies of advisors and students get bound up in them, and other subjects get missed entirely. What's more historically important to our modern, Internet-enabled world, SAGE, or colour television? It's not, I submit, a question with an obvious answer.
Wikipedia says that Kelly Johnson's current campaign for a "simple" fighter, inspired by "a series of interviews with Korean War fighter pilots," is going to lead directly to the F-104 Starfighter, which is going to gobble up a large proportion of American Mutual Defence aid at the expense of the Lightning, which was no big loss, and the Buccaneer, which was. In retrospect it seems absurd that the F-104 beat out the Blackburn product in the ground support role. Of course, it turns out that Lockheed edged out foreign orders in the fighter and turboprop transport sectors on the strength of massive bribes, and it is this overwrought demand for the Yankee dollar that the MSDAP was obliquely addressing in the first place.
The question here is what "complicated" looks like, and the answer is the Starfighter's predecessor, the F-94C Starfire, a "first generation . . . all-weather, day/night interceptor," which renders into the English as "Oops." And I say that as a Canadian with a patriotic attachment to the CF-100, but there's a reason the pilots nicknamed it "the Clunk."
319 Squadron USAF, flying F-94Cs, deployed to Suwon Japan in January, 1952, so Johnson would have had a chance to interview pilots and RIOs flying the latest Lockheed product.
He would have heard all about the basic problem with this generation of aircraft, which was their marginal uselessness. Instrument flying and radar interception require two crew, and extensive electronic impedimenta. This gave them marginal performance at interception altitude, particularly the F-94C, which was heavily dependent on an inefficient afterburner to get the necessary performance boost. This meant that they have only a very short window to gain a firing solution before the pilot has to wrestle the plane into a not-stalling trajectory. That meant a "fire control system," which was not a novel concept at the time, and worth developing in its own right from an industrial strategy point of view, but leading to carrying even more weight, and also Fifties-era electronics, into the air. The Hughes E-1, and later E-5, which combined a radar, a computing gunsight, and, as we heard in the first installment of June techblogging, a crude heads up display for targeting. Clearly none of this would be practical in a high performance single seater, and the MiG-15 was doing fine in the air defence role by depending on GCI. The F-104 ended up with a spartan set of avionics by the standards of its competition, notably the Lightning's AIRPASS. It never mattered in the least on account of operators declining to fight any major wars with F-104s, but one has to wonder if it was the right decision.
It also, of course, places a heavy reliance on the ground side of "ground controlled interception," about which I am going to talk today. No history of Twentieth Century technology can ignore SAGE.
All I can say is that Washington is a very strange town which has very strange people in it. Today, Reggie and I met no less a person than Senator McCarthy, in company with B. and a surprisingly circumspect Koumintang general, and I have to say, the company the Senator keeps! (Not even including B.!) I think the general quickly regretted it, as with friends like that, as it is said. B. has rather grandly flounced out of the CIA and into a journalism job, where he is saving the world at Mencken's old paper, although how long that is likely to last is anyone's guess.
And not a word about your son, your daughter, your grandson. All I can say is that, whatever his faults, B. is a lot more interesting than I could ever be! And you will be seeing us in August, although the last word is that, in spite of the shutdown, Reggie will be working, as the Navy wants him to fly some sub-hunting gadgets.
I hope that you won't mind the lack of a personal touch this week as Reggie and I make our final arrangements for our August European trip where we will do our duty to the world trade balance by seeing the sights and throwing dollars at them. Catch, Louvre, catch! Also, finally a chance to cross the Atlantic in a giant steamship luxury liner, the way Nature intended. (All kidding aside, I am getting so excited I'm forgetting to breath!) Of course now that tickets are booked, I find that the only way that I am making it back to Palo Alto in time for classes is by flying from New York. Your poor daughter-in-law, doomed to be a high flyer! 
