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 . . . . 

The first air defence "system" was the Lockheed F-94C, designed around the Hughes E-5, a short-ranged radar fire control system that would be directed to intercept by ground control radar, which was to have the ability to direct the autopilot, although it is  not clear to me how quickly that developed. The North American F-86D got in the papers first, apparently mainly thanks to its rocket armament, which exercises the same ungodly fascination for mid-century journalists here as the earlier generation of air-to-ground rockets of WWII. It does not have a "system" as elaborate as the F-94C, but it does have an "electronic brain" with 120 vacuum tubes and five miles of wire, and we're definitely getting into my generation when I make all my tired old jokes about electronics running on smoke, so you should avoid letting the smoke out. As the Fortune article makes clear, even in 1953 this was just obviously an unsustainable path. Little pockets of vacuum are not a sustainable model for aviation electronics, or, really, any kind of electronics. What is wanted is a "solid state" substitute. 

But back up here for a second, because Fortune of 1953 has some grasp of the historic context, which has been lost along the way. Its discussion begins, as that discussion must, with the germanium rectifiers of the so-called "crystal set" era of radio engineering in the Twenties. To run a speaker off a radio wave, it is necessary to convert an alternating frequency input into a direct current output, something that was beyond the  vacuum tubes of the day. Conveniently, it was recognised that between conducting and insulating materials there was a gray area of "semi-conducting" materials, including galena, which could do this (by not conducting one phase of the cycle). This used a diode device. However, no-one could come up with a way of using the input frequency to open the gates on a voltage supply, as it were, and allow an electrical current  of indefinite size to flow with the same periodicity as the input signal, which is the counter-intuitive way that the misleadingly  named "amplifier" works. Until a way could be found to implement this process in solid-state, vacuum tubes had much wider application in radio than germanium diodes, although galena diodes continued to find wide application in industry and germanium followed them during the war. 

The article ends with a roundup of other semi-conducting phenomena such as photoemission and photoconduction, ferromagnetism and ferroelectrics, with specific respect to the RCA Vidicon, used in portable television cameras, and to magnetic memory. This seems significant because it is a major missed opportunity to discuss piezoelectrics, key to wartime sonar and using silicon crystals, soon to overtake germanium. Missed one there, "Year of the Transistor!"

Given the project at this blog, I would hope that looking at the "year of the transistor" from the start line will produce some new insights, and perhaps it does. As Fortune points out, the largest producer of transistors in February of 1953 isn't Western Electric, Raytheon, GE, Sylvania, or any of the other 25 American and 10 NATO licensees, but rather a New York company, Germanium Products Company, which produced 250,000 junction amplifiers per month for the popular $200 (back when that was real money) Sonotone "tubeless hearing aid." As far as the Internet is concerned, no-one knows anything about Irving Weiss and his ramshackle operation, while Sonotone's factory disappeared after an early Seventies leveraged buyout. The company's roots seem to lie in wartime vibration conduction speakers, the "throat microphones" of Boys Own tank and airplane adventures, but evidently no-one knows anything about that, either. 

Weiss, it seems, will be remembered for telling Fortune that the big firms had "too many longhaired boys and not enough practical horse sense." Seventy years on, we remember the men who leveraged the transistor into a Nobel Prize enough, and Weiss is forgotten. I hope that he bought a nice house that his great-grandchildren live in! Or maybe there are papers, which might help establish that the roots of the "Year of the Transistor" lie not at Bell Labs, but in the pragmatic walk-up offices of New York-area radio manufacturers where the amount of Yiddish being spoken was not really conducive to, how shall we put it, polite society. That, if the labs had not come up with the theory and a viable junction transistor, it might never have got those licenses in the first place.