A Technological Appendix to Postblogging August 1953: Aspheric Lenses

 

Nothing particularly complicated here: Aspherical lenses. What's up with that? And how about Lawrence of Arabia for a pop-culture reference?

It's the music that seems old-fashioned. 

Gathering the Bones, XXIX: Nose to Tail

 

So while I ordinarily don't work very much Christmas week because my contract guarantees me two stat days and my work place is closed on Christmas Day, it has not often been the case that my schedule is written to allow me to enjoy my holiday with holiday visits, and I have plenty of well-spaced time to write during the holiday week. That is not the case this year, and I am off to Vancouver Island tomorrow morning, back on Wednesday. Happy holidays to everybody! However, to satisfy my OCD and discuss an interesting thing which  has come up, here is a somewhat culinary, somewhat technological/economic thing which has come up. 

A Somewhat Technological and Completely Bananas Appendix to Postblogging Technology, August 1953: Fire!

 

Of course Celtic Women covered it. 

Someone once said that J. H. Hexter would have been a better known historian if he hadn't been like the horse that only ran when it had a burr under its saddle, in his case  this being historians with an excessive bent for synthesis, particularly Marxists. I understand, Jack, I understand. For me, it's Correlli Barnett. Audit of War comes out of an era of intense British self-loathing, building on Fordism, with all its Fascist tendencies. Practically everything American is better, and there's a neat convergence between supporter and critic, where the American factory is better for Barnett, while his critics defend laggard British per-person productivity by pointing to the vast floor space possible for American factories.

  Of course the factory is big. It's America! 

Here's another big factory:

Postblogging Technology, August 1953, II: One, Two, Many Bombs

 

R_.C_.,

Oriental Club,

London,

England

Dear Father:

Here we are, coming down to the end of summer and preparing for our trip to London. By which I mean, finally making our bookings. I would love to fly, and have a bit more time in Nakusp, but it seems quite impractical with a baby and a toddler in hand, and so we are embarking in Montreal on the 1st of September and so leaving Nakusp on the 26th, which means that I will be finishing this letter on the train, probably in the boring bits. There's only so much Saskatchewan scenery you can take!  

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, August 1953, I: Snack-bars, Milk Bars, Baby Booms

R_.C_.,

The Oriental Club,
London,
England




Dear Father:

This letter finds you from a delightful summer vacation with Reggie and Uncle George's arrival on the Minto last week to enjoy August before we leave for London from Revelstoke on the 3rd. We've now made housing arrangements. We'll be rooming with  Nat McKitterick! It's very strange to think that we will be living across the hall from the man I've quoted in these letters so many times, but he finds he has space to spare and the dollar is starting to go a little less distance in London these days. He says, anyway. I hope we won't arrive and find that he's gone to booze and seed  like the dissipate journalist I hope he is! However, the connection was made through one of Uncle George's Glenn Martin friends, who has not steered  him wrong before. It certainly won't be the kind of palatial quarters we've been enjoying here in Nakusp, and I do wonder about the food, but we're to be in London for two years as Reggie does his vaguely defined liaison duties which are absolutely not cover for developing the "carcinotron" and flying it into Russian radar stations to see what's up over there. I'm not sure what I think of poking the bear when the bear has atomic bombs, but at least they're not hydrogen bombs, and I am told that Lockheed and the CIA have a swell trick that the Communists can't beat in a month of Sundays. 

Sure. Absolutely. Anything the Dulles brothers touch is sure to turn into something. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1953: The Columbia River Treaty

 

Hugh Keenleyside (High Arrow) Dam, Castlegar, British Columbia

Renata, British Columbia, is a lost town on the right bank of the Columbia River in the 232km stretch from Revelstoke to Castlegar, where it forms the Arrow Lake, or Lakes, in dry years. It might seem like cheating to call a river a lake, but the Okanagan River runs through Okanagan Lake, and Nakusp is the next Kelowna. (That's a joke for all you BCers out there.) Most of Renata (there's a bed and breakfast or two still operating in the upper reaches of the former townsite) was quickly flooded out by the rising waters of the Lake after the Keenleyside Dam was completed on 10/10/68. As an isolated farming community still mainly populated by the Mennonite farmers the railway originally suckered into settling there fifty years before, Renata wasn't much missed, any more than the other small communities similarly affected. Although when Nakusp real estate goes for as much as Kelowna's that lost waterfront property will be the subject of much speculation. (Doubling down on the joke.)

Since we're currently visiting old Renata and witnessing the Eisenhower Administration's bumbling approach to hydroelectric and related hydraulic control issues, I thought this might be a good time to talk about the Columbia River Treaty, so the reader will know what the heck I am talking about. 

Also, considering how insane the Eisenhower Administration has turned out to be so far, on this issue and so many others, I wanted to poke around the Internet and find out, "Why now?" Well, now I know, and the answer is pretty typical of the actual record of the Infrastructure President, in that he didn't actually do fuck all except get in the way. 

A Medico-Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1953: Heart-Lung Machines and Autopilots

 

I guess it won't surprise anyone that Port Alice didn't have a movie theatre, so I saw most of the movies that shaped us Gen Xers (more-or-less; technically I belong to the last gasp of the Baby Boom) on TV at a later date. Star Wars IV and 1982's Young Doctors in Love are exceptions, and, of  the two, A New Hope was the better movie. Does Young Doctors in Love even have a life support/heart-lung machine scene? I guess it also won't surprise anyone that I am not going to rewatch it to find out! It's probably not nearly as hilarious as I remember, from the look of the Youtube extracts I watched looking for a heart-and-lunch machine scene. This one's got the surgical theatre-blinking-lights machines, so it will do, and I will preserve my nostalgia for a time just slightly past. 

Postblogging Technology, July 1953, II: Purge

 

R_.C_.,
Oriental Club,
London,
England




Dear Father:

We're not completely out of the news around here. We have shortwave. What we've heard makes the Soviet purge sound pretty anticlimactic, and we're beginning to think that there won't be an atom war this summer, after all. So we took the cable ferry over to Renata to see the sights, which involved hiking up a substantial hill, which was certainly good for the appetite. Renata is a bit sad, a town of old people. A Mennonite colony of old times, most of the young folk have long since  moved away. Just like we're going to do in not very long now, although bless those Soviet plotters for a wonderful summer getaway! 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIX: Lazy Sunday Outline with Premonitions of Mortality

 Two things, first, a very late change of schedule; second, a scary moment at the Silver Kettle Lodge as my 92-year-old father seemed to be failing after his vaccination. These mean that I do not have Sunday to work on my postblogging, although I am covering a mid-shift on time change day, and do have some extra writing time. And I am reminded that we do not live forever and I should get my intellectual life in order. 

So here's a summary of work to date on Sacred Spring: The Early Iron Age Revival of the State  and a brief outline.

Postblogging Technology, July 1953, I: Calm Morning

R_.C_.,
Oriental Club,
London,
England




Dear Father:

I feel like one of those insufferable country correspondents prattling on about the seasonal delights of some place with an insufferably English name, except that "Nakusp" is insufferably Canadian, instead. Oh, right! My point! Stuffed fresh rainbow trout. With green beans. And a sour cherry confit. I'm in Heaven. And "eating for two." 

Is it just me, or has Fortune finally discovered the "Baby Boom?" At some point in the near future, if we're not to have an atom war after all, and perhaps no war at all, perhaps we could have some advertisements directed at the people doing the booming? 

Uncle George now tells Reggie that there is no chance of the Korean War dragging on. The famine in China is real, and Party and collectivisation aside, it's the war, he says, or my husband says he says. The idea of Chinese troops intervening in Indo China right now is out, says Uncle George, but so is the idea of Ho settling for anything short of complete independence. I know you've already heard this from the same sources, and if you could supply me some assurance that my husband won't be fighting a war in Indo China next, that would be great. Thanks! 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

 

A Technological and Political Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1953 With No Public Engagement Whatsoever: Willow Run and Dien Bien Phu

 Well, I might well be on strike next week, and I certainly have split single days off this week. And that can only mean one thing. A Technological Appendix with absolutely no reference to modern day events. Instead, I'll talk about a long deadlock in the French National Assembly requiring multiple votes for multiple candidates to select a new premier, and a devastating military setback for colonialism. People, it's the Fifties! It was a different time. 

GM's lease at Willow Run, signed in August of 1953, and the fall of the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu in the Sip Song Chau Tai, on 7 May 1954 stand as two signal failures of  high modernism. 

They are also drawn together as threads in the June 1953 news, while I am writing less than a month ahead of the 70th anniversary of the creation of the fort at Dien Bien Phu, threaded through by a technological story, if not a very exciting one, that of the Fairchild C-119, and the month-long series of votes in the French National Assembly that was required to finally find a premier who could command the confidence of the house. 

The first candidate for the premiership was, pictured, Pierre Mendes-France, who gave The Economist the vapours, as reported in the issue for 6 June, with his neutralism (he was cool to the European Army), his socialism, and his openness to an outcome in Southeast Asia that didn't involve the final crushing of Communism.   The final, and successful one, was Joseph Laniel. I've joked several times in alt text that the Assembly was choosing the man to throw under the bus of Dien Bien Phu, a hair-brained strategic scheme that is already cooking, inspired by dubious success of a small airlift of troops into Vientiane, in which C-119s played a non-trivial role. Mendes-France will negotiate France's disengagement from Indo China in the course of 1954, when the Assembly grudgingly accepted that he had been right all along, and liberated Tunisia in the bargain before the diehards expelled him in order to make the Algerian situation as difficult as possible. 

There's not necessarily anything funny-ha-ha about this. The Fourth Republic did fall, and not long after the deadlock of 1953. It's the only modern democratic state to do so in the post-WWII international order, and evidence that it can happen. On the other hand, in retrospect it seems like it mostly came about because of obdurate resistance to social democracy, and, anyway, the Fifth Republic might not be perfect, but it is better than the Fourth, and one has to wonder if some of the other modern democratic states of the post-WWII international order could do with a one-and-done revolution and a new constitution. Maybe if they're having difficulty selecting a head of government, that's a sign? Of course, it's hard to think of a perfect modern parallel, given that we're well past the days of colonialism. 

Dien Bien Phu also has a more unusual hook on my imagination, because I cannot escape memories of Tactics of Mistake, an entry in Gordon Dickson's Childe cycle. Tactics is a late novel, but strikes me as marinated in the contemporary reaction to Dien Bien Phu, which might be because it is a fix-up, like Soldier, Ask Not, but of unpublished stories from Dickson's first decade as a professional science fiction writer.  Or he just read Bernard Falls. If the first theory is true, though, we can thank Nguyen Van Giap for the boomlet in military/mercenary/war-world science fiction that continues to this day.

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1953: A New Era of Strategic Bombing?

 

My first niece-in-law chose this for her wedding processional. For relevance see note!

The reader will probably be tired of my half-assed explanations of the carcinotron, but there have been a series of heavily publicised bombing exercises so far in the spring of 1953, and we are closing in on the decision, trivial at the time but gradually snowballing, to cancel the Valiant B2 (while in the United States the B-47 programme was sharply curtailed), the so-called "pathfinder" variant, leading to the cancellation of the "V1000" military transport variant, the VC7 derived from it, and in general the failure to field a British turbofan airliner prior to the VC10, which is more-or-less the "blowing the lead" that everyone was warning everyone else might happen in 1953. 

By wallycacsabre - sv3, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.
wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59596203

So what happened? In the spring of 1953, bombing raids were still being led by "Pathfinders," and 199 Squadron, at least, was flying Canberras modified for ECM operations with the other "pathfinder" Canberras. At some point in the mi-1950s, offensive carcinotrons went into the electronic warfare suite of the V-bombers. It seems like reasonable speculation that bomber penetration tactics were significantly modified by the introduction of the carcinotron*, that this happened in about 1953 (the first manufactured carcinotron tubes show up as antiquities on Internet sites devoted to such things with a 1952 date) , and that the carcinotron was defeated by monopulse radar, which might have first flown on the English Electric Lightning in the form of the AI23 (AIRPASS) in prototype form in 1958. The picture I am getting here is a window in the mid -Fifties from roughly 1953 to 1958 or so when strategic bombers gained a substantial advantage over radar defences. Given all the fuss made about decision processes amongst the historians of nculear deterrence, and their often formidable technical expertise, you might wish that someone would take this in hand and confirm or discount such speculation.

Oh, well, you're not here to have me repeat myself and I'm not going to do it, because, bereft of other obvious routes into the kind of general aviation history that might bear some rough fruit, I finally read the Wikipedia article on the De Havilland Sea Vixen, an aircraft that I'd been ignoring out of a general sense of disappointment that attaches to the Fleet Air Arm aircraft of the Fifties. 

And it turns out to be a bit gonzo! 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVIII, With Lazy Public Engagement And Some Reference to the Fifties: Tin and the Resource Curse

 

This was the view east down Copper Street from the slight height of land that marks central downtown Greenwood, BC in 1906. The mountain slopes up to the right, but Copper Street takes a hard left turn just behind the photographer and descends to the terrace above the creek on which the road down to the Kettle River at Midway follows. 

Cross the street and move forward 117 years, and the view changes in two ways:

First, some of the older buildings are gone. Second, Copper Street has turned into Highway 3, because a major interprovincial highway has been run right through the downtown. You would probably see a crosswalk here somewhere if it weren't so easy to jaywalk across the highway. When I made the first of my annual bike trips through Greenwood to Gand Forks in 2017, I watched a family of deer do the same, but the city has picked up a bit in the interim. Oh, yeah, right, "city," because Greenwood's "biggest hockey stick in the world" claim to fame is that it is Canada's smallest city. 

The reason for that is that, unlike most of the instant towns of the first copper boom, before WWI, it had a revival. In 1941, a calculating and humane mayor grabbed the one opportunity that the war had so far presented and offered the town as a resettlement location for the Japanese Canadians then being ethnically cleansed from the Coast, and in 1956 the combination of a local workforce and the postwar revival of the international commodities market proved just barely enough to justify reopening the smelter on nearby Phoenix mountain. The ore at Phoenix is, Wikipedia says, "self-fluxing," meaning that whatever fluxing agent is added to the ore at the Trail Smelter, isn't necessary at Phoenix. (The veins have numerous intrusions of "calc-silicate alteration of limestone;" Maybe that's it?) This tidbit led me to Google around for something a bit more serious about the nature of the ores in "the Greenwood camp," which is apparently the technical term for the 400 square kilometer zone of 25 mines centred about half the way up Highway 3 to Eholt summit. Apparently, way back when the entire region was under volcanic hot springs which have produced an estimated 32 million tons of ore including 38 tonnes of gold, 183 tonnes of (native) silver, 270,000 tonnes of copper, 966 tonnes of lead, and 329 tonnes of zinc. The ores are "copper-gold porphyry," which is great, because it's an excuse to say "porphyry." 

I regret to report no evidence of more exotic metals, your germanium, your tantalum, or, of course, tin. All I can report is that the smelter  closed in 1976, just four years after its last upgrade, relatively painlessly inasmuch as it seems as though most of the workforce took early retirement, being children of the era of the last metal boom, which may or may not be a coincidence, and Greenwood gradually dropped back into its Depression-era sleep. The post-WWII commodities boom was not quite yet obviously dead, and the mills and mines would keep on closing for years yet until British Columbia's former high pressure labour market was decisively over, and my employer could ram through a two-tier contract that basically condemned the next generation to work at near minimum wage for, as it turns out, their entire career. (Unless they took advantage of an escape clause dangled before us in the years around the Olympics. Yay!) 

So. Was the Late Bronze Age Collapse a working out of the resource curse? By the way, can we have a round for Investopedia's formulation? 

The term resource curse refers to a paradoxical situation in which a country underperforms economically, despite being home to valuable natural resources. A resource curse is generally caused by too much of the country’s capital and labor force concentrated in just a few resource-dependent industries. By failing to make adequate investments in other sectors, countries can become vulnerable to declines in commodity prices, leading to long-run economic underperformance.

Oh, those feckless resource-rich countries, with their "failure" to "make adequate investments in other sectors." The picture, by the way, is from a press release about an event at the Aspers' prize Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg.  I can't even. 

Postblogging Technology, Jun 1953, II: The Rosenbergs, Everest, the 707, and Transistors. Wow.

R_.C_,
The Oriental Club,

London,
England

Dear Father:

At your very strong suggestion, we have decided to go away from the major port city for the summer and the duration of all the emergencies,but we  haven't ended up in Campbell River, as for various reasons the house in Nakusp was in need of a tenant. So here we are, gorging on cherries and trout, waiting on corn and enjoying the difference between fresh turnips and onions and the ones from the grocery. The house has not had a tenant in two years, and one gets the sense that Nils is too old to do proper caretaking, so we have a contractor up from Nelson to put a new roof on and central heating and air conditioning while he is on it. Which makes for a much-interrupted summer idyll far from the madding crowds and atom bombs, but what do I know, I have two babies in tow! 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

So you see, Ethel Rosenberg had to die to protect VENONA and not because she was Jewish and public opinion was screaming for blood

A Technological But Also Inevitably Political and Medical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1953, I: Diagnosing Presidents

 

Leaving aside the unintentional, dark irony of an ad exalting modern diagnostic practice and focussing on peptic ulcers,  this post was only secondarily inspired by this ad. It actually mainly has to do with my nephew, C.'s, enrollment in a doctoral programme in medical physics. No, that's a lie. It has mainly to do with my company put roasting chickens on two for one last week. I spent entirely too much time on Tuesday and Friday cooking them, so Postblogging June, II is stuck two-thirds of the way through 15 June. 

And that is why my attention is very much focussed on the already reported 10 June 1953 press conference in which Senator Robert Alphonso Taft announced that he was ill and would be temporarily resigning as Leader of the Senate, with William F. Knowland as his interim replacement. "The Senator from Formosa" would end up remaining as Majority and Minority Leader, until 1959. 

Taft had first sought treatment at Walter Reed in May after a round of gold with the President was interrupted by the increasing severity of hip pains which the Senator had been suffering for some time. At the time the pains were dismissed as arthritis. It was not until a late May visit to Holmes Hospital in Cincinnati that nodules were removed from his neck and abdomen and biopsied, coming back malignant. It was for some reason found necessary to hospitalise Taft again in New York on 7 June to finally confirm the cancer diagnosis, and a final diagnosis of metastatised cancer of unknown origin was made on the basis of exploratory surgery on 4 July. As The Periscope will report next week (around here), by 15 June, there were rumours that Taft's condition was life-threatening, but he was only officially put on palliative care in July, and died of a brain hemorrhage on 31 July some hours after a final visit from his wife, a detail that I assume Wikipedia offers in a spirit of "Do I have to paint you a picture"? 

The man who almost won the Republican nominations in 1948 and 1942 was dead, within months of beginning his first or second term, depending on which alternative history you prefer. This is something that has struck me as somehow significant ever since I read the grief-stricken Time obituary of 1940 Republican candidate Wendell Willkie in October of 1944. At the time and since it has been my lively suspicion that one of the problems with Willkie is that Henry Luce had such a massive crush on the man, but I think we can all agree that it is a bigger problem that in some alternate history he would have dropped dead at the climax of WWII, just a month away from contesting the 1944 Presidential election. In other words, pick your alternate timeline carefully, and you'll get three Republican Presidents dying in office in thirty years.   

Postblogging Technology, June 1953, I: Boom, Baby, Boom!

Speaking of The Organisation Man, I'd do "Little Boxes," but I've already done it, and I kind of agree with Tom Lehrer that it's the most sanctimonious song ever.

R_C_.,
The Oriental Club,
London,

England




Dear Father:

I hope you're enjoying the Coronation. Not only am I jealous as can be, but just thinking about it has my mind turning to the madness of moving with two babies, even if it's almost two months away. In the mean time, you're missing a beautiful month in Vancouver.

I kid. Rain. Okay, it's not so bad. Somehow I've volunteered to stroll Maggie to sleep so that I can enjoy the gardens in the rain, which I am about to do as soon as I finish this. Not many young mothers do that sort of thing in this neighbourhood! Which reminds me that I am dying to ask Grace what she thinks of the birth rate numbers out of the US Census. It turns out that the wartime "baby boom" never ended. I wonder if that explains all the Park Forest-style conformity and social group think that Fortune is so upset about. Too many babies! 

Just wait until they all get to college, I say. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, May 1953, II: Astin, Hell's Gate, and John Foster Dulles, Or, How To Be the 34th Ranked President

R_.C_.,
The Mayflower,
Washington, DC

Dear Father:

In the week you have been gone, I have gone from mopy to tired to ready to spend such time as Jim-Jim and little Margaret have left me to get back on the horse. Okay, yes, I am a bit bored. I am also short my usual copyediting assistance, although I  hope to do something about that by my next letter. Here is wishing you the best of underhanded luck in getting the most out of the Snake River. I might not approve of the decision (we might need that power, and people certainly need the fish), but at least we'll make some money. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Great Siege, I: Attlee Was Right

 

I added "The Great Siege" tag early in the life of this blog to organise the idea that Germany's strategic campaign against the British Empire was effectively a siege of Great Britain with consequences extending well beyond the end of the war. One could say, I thought to myself in 2013, that it was ultimately a success, inasmuch as the British Empire no longer exists. That is because, by situating the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic into an overarching effort including mining and, most easily missed, the V-weapon campaign, one could extend the long range consequences of the campaign well beyond the end of the war, and, in particular, say that the attrition of British housing stocks during the war was an important factor in What Came Next.

Well, this is a travel installment, with me currently struggling to touchtype with reasonable speed on a very nice ASUS laptop with a keyboard that is just too small for my fat fingers, which doesn't encourage me to be loquacious, but which on the other hand leaves me thirsty to share pointless vaction pictures and experiences. 

The overall idea with which I started this tag was, I now see, hopelessly naive, which is why I have decided that the right time to call an end to the Great Siege is with The Economist's disgraceful surrender to permanent deficit financing of the British economy with the 1953 budget introduced by RAB Butler for the Churchill government, because what's more important, "economy" or higher interest rates, lower taxes, and a tacit turn away from  full employment? Without either agreeing or disagreeing with the  traditional Liberal "peace, retrenchment, and reform," so blatantly giving the game away is the 1953 equivalent of the French "rearming in 1938" to the tune of "What about the rentier?" It's capitulation, is what it is. Here's the keys to the city, Herr Grossadmiral, on the sole condition that you let us march out with our consols shouldered. 

The town of Keremeos lies on the junction of the Similkameen River with Keremeos Creek on Highway 3 and Highway 5C in the south centre of the province, in one of two regions that loves to attach itself to the Okanagan Valley as an extension of BC's "summerland," to borrow the actual name of an Okanagan Valley town between Penticton and Peachland, across the lake from Naramata. Keremeos, like the rest of the "Similkameen" part of the "Okanagan-Similkameen," has no lake suitable for summer fun. It is a farming and crossroads town in the midst of endless orchards and vegetable farms with a good run to Vancouver since the Hope-Princeton opened in 1953, although the housing stock you see in these pictures is earlier than that, dating to a previous era of prosperity based on loading fruit cars onto an extension of the Great Northern Railway. The town has a population of a bit over 1700, which explains why the drugstore in town is open 12--4 on Sundays. 

A walking tour of the town might seem very familiar if you have seen Beaverdell, Greenwood, Olalla, Hedley, or similar towns laid out before WWII which have since not enjoyed very much growth. It is a four--to-six blocks by four block street grid, readily walkable, with a solid downtown area with enough vacant space for more businesses if you're in the mood to move and invest, and enough room for far more houses than are there,  overwhelmed by the size of their lots, and even a few apartment buildings, mostly comically undersized, as if the builder lacked a certain conviction. Around this core area is an area of new building from the postwar era, where such new houses  as have been built over the subsequent eighty years are located, abstracted from the town core in every case, and in that of Keremeos, dramatically overlooking it from an Okanagan bench --meaning that although they are very close to the city physically, you have to drive down to a draw that gives access to the Upper Bench of the Keremeos in the far northeast corner of the town. 

Now let's talk about one reason that Clement Attlee was right. 

A Technological But Also Economic and Engaged Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1953, II: The Bee Problem

 

I hope there's some of the bee scenes I remember from my slightly traumatised junior high viewing of this documentary based on Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive, because the "problem" here is the old saw about how science doesn't know how bees fly. The joke being that of course science knows how bees can fly. The airliner business, on the other hand . . . ? See? I knew there was a reason to read Fortune! 

Postblogging Technology, May 1953, I: Happy Times Are Here Again

The Hon. A.

,_. Hall,
_,

England

Dear Cousin:

I write in some hurry as Ronnie is gathering her things so that her husband can do his part in the delivery, a solid twenty minutes depending on the traffic on King Edward. Was that funny? Not? I can't tell. I'm a ball of nerves. It was so much easier off being a dashing aviator when Jim-Jim was born. I try to distract myself by thinking about other things, but I keep being dragged down to the fact that the Commerce Secretary tried to fire the chief of the National Bureau of Standards at the behest of a mail order con artist, and the Administration and its supporters at the newspapers are lining up behind him. This, this is why McCarthy is winning. It sometimes seems like I should seriously consider not going back to the States after my furlough. Or maybe that's "transferrence," or "displacement" in the new psychiatric jargon. I'm scared, cousin!

Your Cousin,

The Dash(ing) Pilot

Postblogging Technology, April 1952, II: Tired: Korea; Wired: Viet Nam

The Hon. A.,
_. Hall,

_,
England

Dear Cousin:

As Ronnie and I find ourselves together in Shaughnessy with my parents this month, niehter of us has reason to write one of these letters to him. But I do know that you have expressed your appreciation of them, and so I take the liberty --oh, gosh, you know that I don't talk like this, and, anyway, I know that it is you, P., and not your uncle, who is actually reading this. So I'm going to stop talking like I am writing to a peer of the realm and instead talk to you! Fair deal? Great! Do I sound a bit distracted and nervous! You know why! I found as I wrote that I was able to settle my nerves, but now that I'm doing the cover note I feel like that stewardess who was thrown free of the Miami Airlines DC-3 crash down in Washington State two weeks ago, which I am still digesting, since I have an inside account of the flight that makes me just sick to my stomach that they put our boys on those planes. 

Your Cousin,

The Dash(ing) Pilot

R.

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, April 1953, II: Cutlass to the NBS!

 

It will not have escaped the attention of the alert reader that this is a technological appendix to a postblogging installment which hasn't posted yet. Why? A difficult work schedule and my own stubborn refusal to face the reality that I wasn't reasonably going to finish the installment before Tuesday. 

Fortunately, we have a science-policy-politics story this week which deserves its prominence at every level, the "AD-X2 controversy," and another story, slowly rolling on to its 1958 denouement, the Chance-Vought F7U Cutlass, announced this month in an attack variant that Chance Vought expects to produce after completing its contract for 90 of the air superiority type. 

Our historical memory of the Eisenhower Administration has over the years veered between a roseate nostalgia for the President of interstates and Brown Vs. Board of Education and an increasing disquiet as the damage done by the Guatemalan and Iranian coups keeps on compounding. There is, therefore, something revelatory about descending from our 20,000ft historical view into the trenches to find incoming Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks receiving a well-deserved bayoneting from Drew Pearson and the 400 employees of the National Bureau of Standards who threatened this week to quit if their boss, Allen V. Astin, were fired.

Postblogging Technology, April 1951, I: Shoppers Showing Signs of Stress Fatigue

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

I feel a little silly handing this off to the courier so I can catch my flight to Vancouver, but we've decided we're going to do these, and you're not the only person who sees it, and I meant to have it done days ago, I swear. Please tell Ronnie to take her time, because TCA will, and I will see you when I arrive! Which will be long before you get this. In fact, I'm in the taxi from the airport right now, for all you know!

Your Loving Son,

Reggie

Gathering the Bones, XXIX: Sons and Daughters

 

A little something for a lazy Saturday afternoon, before we get back to exploring the dark and stagnant depths of the Eisenhower Administration. (I honestly had no idea! How that man must have been eaten by imposter's syndrome . . . ). The first image is of Bonnie Prince Charlie raising the standard before the Men of Mordaunt. The second, probably instantly recognisable to people just a bit older than me, is Tom Jones the singer, as opposed to Tom Jones the Foundling. 

It's about my theory that the novel is a comment on the whole "warming pan baby" scandal, and specifically a reference to a theory that people had at the time that the baby, the future Old Pretender, James III, father of Charles Edward, was actually the son of James II's younger daughter, Anne. It's a theory that explains a great deal that is anomalous about the 1688--1714 period, the only drawback being that I have yet to find a contemporary spelling it out in any more detail than knowing nods to Anne's whereabouts over the previous few months. (She was in seclusion in Bath for some time for health reasons, then went to assist her step-mother, Mary of Modena, in the birth. Then, of course, she went on to have multiple miscarriages with her husband, like an Rh-mismatched pair, a condition that contemporaries perhaps already understood required a successful pregnancy, even if they did not know that the reason was that the mother needs to develop antibodies by exposure to the baby's blood, which normally does not happen before delivery. See? See?) But I am only putting these two up here for the thumbnail, because this post is taking off from Samuel, Sieur de Champlain. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, March 1953: Cryptologic

 

Here's a simple question with a very frustrating lack of answer: When was the carcinotron deployed? Technically a carcinotron is a backward-wave oscilloscope in which an electron beam was passed through a strong radio frequency field. The upshot is a strong output radio frequency emission, which can be in the frequency range of a microwave rada. Altering the modifying rf field allows the output emission to be  rapidly "swept" across the entire emission band of a given radar, permitting what looks like universal jamming. 

I honestly don't know much about the subject, and I am very glad that radio engineering enthusiasts continue to update the relevant Wikipedia articles. We thus now know that one kind of backward wave oscilloscope, also called, or a variant, of the so-called travelling-wave tube, which was invented at and by, among other people and places (the patent wars are strong with this one), in 1943, by Austrian Jewish emigre Rudolf Kompfner, then working at the Admiralty Research Laboratory. Kompfner's patents were gazetted starting in 1957, while the first published work on the backward wave oscilloscope was published in 1953, and the Wiki article on the TWT points us at the Hughes Aircraft Electron Tube Laboratory, or Microwave Tube Division in Culver City, California, a research facility that is new to me as of right now, and which has been recently folded into Stellant Systems along with many other ancestors. All that institutional history, gone, like tears in the rain.

The upshot is that, in Britain or in America, the carcinotron specifically, the revolutionary airborne radar jamming device that, in the Thomson incarnation above, weighed no less than 25kg, went into production/service in "the 1950s." 

This is, I have to say, an unsatisfyingly vague dating for what seems to have been a very quite technological panic over the future of air defence radars. It seems like a reasonable guess that its appearance is linked to the very substantial "ECM suite" on the V-bombers, upon which so much faith was, apparently, justifiably placed. One assumes that it went into the Canberra, B-47, and B-52, as well. One infers that it might have been a problem for the SAGE rollout and for the upgrading of Britain's radar defences. One wonders what the implications of the new technology were for the radar station at CFS Holberg, up the road from my small hometown and something of a big deal in our sparsely populated region, in which every rationale for the existence of a community was to be celebrated. There's not much to be said about it beyond that except that evidently there's a crisis in air defence radar going on behind the scenes right now in  March of 1953, but shh, because it is a secret, wilderness of mirrors and all of that stuff. If you hide how flustered you are from the Reds, maybe  they won't notice the carcinotron before some counter-measures emerge!

Remember when Americans took the train? I don't, either. I'm only 58, and too  young for that stuff. The title's historic, too. No-one likes it hot any more. We've got enough heat, amiright? 

So, anyway, about that Fortune article about the year of the transistor . . . . 

Postblogging Technology, March 1953, II: Searching for Savvy

R_.C_.,

Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

Per precise and urgent  instructions I have completed arrangements to store our household effects, secured plane, not train, tickets for the 18th of April, and have buckled down to at least pretend to take my upper year exams seriously, which is hard since I am putting the California bar off for a year while we are in London. The lads seem to be jealous, or are perhaps are just being cautious of my mood and my current state, which all gossip to the contrary is as sunny and light as the day is long. Very long. And heavy. 

Also per request I have done my reading. Stay Away, Joe is a very strange book. I think I see what the author is trying to do, but it seems to me that it would come off better from an Indian writer. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, March 1953, I: Death of Stalin

R_.C_,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

What an exciting few weeks it has been. And what a terrible time to be a weekly news magazine with the slow turnaround of The Economist, which is now all the way to the middle of the March with no idea who might be running the Soviet Union. Not only has Stalin's tyranny run its course, but so, almost, as not only law school but one's own delicate condition. I know that you are all impatient to know my arrival date, but I am finalising plans for moving out of the house and putting the furniture in storage, and exactly how that goes will determine the train I finally catch. I look forward to seeing you all, and am grateful to have a familiar home to go to in this hour. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

PS: You may have noticed all the pink in the picture attached. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1953 with Bonus Old Man Ranting: Fuel Cells

 

In February of 1953, Engineering published on titanium, a swing-wing jet prototype, gas turbine locomotives, a proton synchrotron, and nuclear power; and in retrospect the most science-fictional material published in the course of the month (apart from speculation about a nuclear reactor that generated electricity directly from particle emissions rather than thermally) is a short summary of A. P. Paton's "Fuel Cells: A Non-Technical Outline of Their Development," published by the British Electrical and Allied Industries Research Association, Thorncroft Manor, Dorking Road. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1953: Sluice Gates

 

I'm sorry, Dutch people, "Watersnoosdramp" reminds me of Futurama. This is a picture of Oude Tonge, on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee, which has such a clumsy name because it is a relatively late formation, being carved out of the mainland of North Brabant and South Holland by flooding events in 1216 and 1421, per Wikipedia. Oude Tonge, first attested in 1420/1, is a village carved out of the "Old headland polder" in the manor of Grijsoord, which sounds like an exposed location, and proved to be so over the night of 31 January/1 February 1953 when a windstorm drove the spring high tides up over its embankments, killing 305 people in this village including 42 family members of poster-child survivor Jos de Boet. 

The reclamation history of these islands in the Meuse/Maass/Escaut/Scheldt/New Rhine estuary (I vote for bringing back "the Maze" as the geographic designator) is an interesting one for the historian of the Late Middle Ages/Early Modern Period, perhaps the clearest evidence that the economy and population of northwestern Europe was expanding during the "waning of the Middle Ages" and not contracting as the grand overarching "The Black Plague Kills Everyone Except One Person To Pass On The Message" theory of European history. But I'm never going to roll that rock up that hill, so let's not talk about it.  Let's talk about even older coastal defences, instead.

Gathering the Bones, XXVIII: Devil Take the Tobacco People

 Who knew that I'd need the "Drug Humour" tag again the week after I created it?

Tilsonburg is a town of 18,700 fifty kilometers southeast of London. (Where nephew M., who is getting married next Saturday, attended medical school. W00t! Go M.!). In the golden postwar days of the Canadian leaf, it may or may not have been synonymous with the Canadian tobacco industry before Stompin' Tom Connors recorded "Tilsonburg" in his golden years after the Centennial. Afterwards, Tilsonburg became synonymous with back breaking fieldwork in the "nicotine dew." This isn't exactly a trivial point. There wouldn't be a Virginia, or, quite possibly an America had John Rolfe not been able to establish the broadleaf Virginia tobacco industry in 1611. The received story is that Rolfe obtained Nicotiana tabacum seeds produced in Trinidad, the so-called "Orinoco" strain, and established it in Virginia in place of the tobacco then grown in Virginia, said to have been the rougher tasting and more psychoactive Nicotiana rustica.  

Apparently, some historians I've never met don't listen to Stompin' Tom and certainly a larger group have never seen the  1992 Sommersby movie, perhaps because they weren't dating way out of their league and thus weren't into seeing a later Richard Gere vehicle. 

(It's too bad that the extract doesn't include the later footage of the beds being covered.)

Since I, personally, have this rigorously scholarly background in the literature, it occurs to me to wonder whether, given that producing tobacco is evidently quite hard,  there isn't more to say.

Postblogging Technology, February 1953, II: Too Good To Be Forgotten

R_. C_.,
Shaugnhessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

I think I would be on and on about either feminine complaints or politics if I spent overlong with this, so best wishes, my love, and what a complete shambles the Eisenhower Administration has been! "Car dealers for New Dealers." 

Hah! Also, oops. Sorry. Like I said, better not to spend too long on this.  

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, February 1953, I: The Dyke Breaks

 R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

As February winds its way to the end, a long overdue installment in these letters. If I have any excuse at all, it is that the end (at long last)  of my school days, and other momentous events, are galloping ever closer, and an intimation has been given in certain quarters that next year will be in London!

As if that were not enough, much of the month has been spent around here in high emotion as the news, mainly of Holland but also of the east of England, comes in. Amidst all the fund raising and the tears, I get the feeling that something more might be going on. Iknow that it is slightly incredible to think that a flood might accomplish what WWII did not, but there seems to be a swell of sentiment in favour of letting a few refugees into the country! (Along with an unkind suggestion in other quarters that the Dutch are among the rare few white enough to qualify.)

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technnological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, January 1953: 488,000lb of Actor-Network Theory

 

So, anyway, from Wikipedia:

 B-52 strikes were an important part of Operation Desert Storm. . . . a flight of B-52Gs flew from Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, refueled in the air enroute, struck targets in Iraq, and returned home – a journey of 35 hours and 14,000 miles (23,000 km) round trip. It set a record for the longest-distance combat mission, breaking the record previously held by an RAF Vulcan bomber in 1982; however, this was achieved using forward refueling.^[9][194]  . . .  B-52Gs operating from the King Abdullah Air Base at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, RAF Fairford in the United Kingdom, Morón Air Base, Spain, and the island of Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean Territory flew bombing missions over Iraq . . . In August 2007, a B-52H ferrying AGM-129[s] . . . from Minot Air Force Base to Barksdale Air Force Base for dismantling was mistakenly loaded . . . ^[218][219] Four of 18 B-52Hs from Barksdale Air Force Base were retired  . .  at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.^[220]

B-52H "Ghost Rider" leaving the "bone yard".

 .  . . B-52s are periodically refurbished at USAF maintenance depots such as Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma.^[223]  On 9 April 2016, an undisclosed number of B-52s arrived at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, part of the military intervention against ISIL. T as a platform to test a Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) missile.^{[239] . . .}In late October 2022, ABC News reported that the USAF intended to deploy six B-52s at RAAF Tindal in Australia in the near future, which would include building provisions to handle the aircraft.^[240]

 I'm mainly familiar with Actor-Network Theory from Bruno Latour vanishing up his own butt in Aramis, or, The Love of Technology, and considering that I've never taken a serious crack at the book, that might be grossly unfair. The thing is, this 

"Actor–network theory (ANT) is a theoretical and methodological approach to social theory where everything in the social and natural worlds exists in constantly shifting networks of relationships. It posits that nothing exists outside those relationships. All the factors involved in a social situation are on the same level, and thus there are no external social forces beyond what and how the network participants interact at present. Thus, objects, ideas, processes, and any other relevant factors are seen as just as important in creating social situations as humans"

sounds like the kind of academic bafflegab too easily reduced to the kind of cynical nihilism that makes everything about politics. And then you realise that, never mind never-built new paradigms of subway transit being characters in their own sociological studies, the B-52 doesn't exist. (Except as the mediator of a network of relationships between the natural, technological, and social worlds.)