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.
Popular Posts
- Gathering the Bones, 18: Hew Down the Bridge!
- Postblogging Technology, October, I: Forest for the Trees
- The Bishop's Sea, III: The Real Presence
- Postblogging Technology, November, 1943: Caesar's New Clothes
- Postblogging Technology, November 1950, II: Platypus Time
- Postblogging Technology, March 1944, I: Pulling In the Horns
- Postblogging Technology, December 1950, II: Christmas Corps
- I Would Run Away to the Air: The British Economy, Montgolfier to 727, Part 1
- A Techno-Pastoral Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1950: The Chestnut Plague
- Gathering the Bones, XXIII: Wyandotte Days
Tuesday, November 29, 2022
Postblogging Technology, August 1952, II: The Twentieth Century Belongs to Canada!
Saturday, November 26, 2022
A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, August 1952, I: The Jersey Turnpike
So the original plan was to write Postblogging Technology, August 1952, II: Clever Subtitle, I Wish, this weekend. But then two things happened. First, my final week of holidays for 2022, reappeared after getting itself mysteriously lost last month. (Just kidding, I know exactly what happened to it, but I don't see that there's much reason to press one schedule writer's screw-up if he's not inclined to own up to it.)
I don't know about you guys, but I'm not at my best planning around weeks off that appear on my work schedule with four hours' notice. Second, my flu shot is scheduled for tonight, which might or might not wipe me out tomorrow.
The upshot is that I'm going to write the postblog starting tomorrow and then head off to Vancouver Island for the weekend to meet up with my Mom and my godlike sister-in-law and my bigshot brother who is a doctor and also my bigshot nephew who is also now a doctor. (And getting married! Whoo-hooh, M.!) And also maybe the other nephews and nieces on that side, depending.
So instead here's some technological appendixing, about what might be, depending on how this whole "global warming" thing plays out, the most historically significant single highway in all of human history. (If we do, it's the Royal Road.)
Sunday, November 20, 2022
Postblogging Technology, August 1952, I: Attack of the Saucers in 3D!
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Saturday, November 12, 2022
The Bishops' Sea: Marine Ecology, Industry Fundamentals, and Ethnogenesis
So, yeah, not finding it, although I'm pretty sure it's out there and I've just not landed on it. But what I did find is some fine scholarship posted to the web here, here, and here, and a historiographic recommendation to Jeffrey Bolster's Mortal Sea, which turns out to be a book which I've bounced off before, so now I've got two copies counting a Kindle edition. Oops. (It seems I wanted Peter Pope's Fish Into Wine, at $57 for a paperback delivered next month. Fuck!) Anyway, I am presented with a thesis which, after reading about early Scottish lawsuits and Kim Stanley Robinson's New York, 2140AD, of all things, I now have something to say.
Friday, November 4, 2022
A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1952: Sites, Science, Consequences
There is something romantically fascinating about the Independence I and II Cultures which flourished in the very far north of Greenland intermittently between 2400BC and 80BC, and it turns out that they're not completely out of line with the postblogging project, as Danish Arctic explorer/archaeologist Egil Knuth only discovered the main site of Deltaterasserne in 1948, and would not publish the excavations until 1954. The British North Greenland Expedition thus arrived in the prepublication phase, and these Paleo-Eskimo musk ox hunters surely occupied some of the expedition's attention as guests of Knuth's more established research site. The Independence peoples, perhaps as few as six families in the "II" phase, were just about the last humans to use north Greenland, whalers aside. Knuth and Simpson, and Peary before them, pretty much established the region as a site of scientific production.
The Commander of the North Greenland Expedition, interestingly enough, was an active-duty Royal Navy officer who took a detour out of the navy at the age of 25 to study electrical engineering at London, returning in 1939 as "an electrical officer, serving as an anti-submarine specialist." Neither Wikipedia nor the fuller obituary in the Daily Telegraph offer any details on Simpson's postwar activities in the Navy apart from his enthusiasm for polar exploration. Today, North Greenland is all about the production of knowledge and persuasion about climate change. Simpson catches the eye for giving an early warning about the consequences of global warming in Newsweek, but I have a sneaking suspicion that his presence on the expedition, and especially its ice floe outstation, "North Ice," had something to do with acoustics and antisubmarine warfare. Today, however, Cold War geophysics have given way to climate research.
I however, am going to make a bit of a distancing move and try to talk about two scientific sites in the news in the summer of 1952 as places of technological innovation. That means talking about LOBUND and the Forest Products Laboratory.