Nothing particularly complicated here: Aspherical lenses. What's up with that? And how about Lawrence of Arabia for a pop-culture reference?
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.
Nothing particularly complicated here: Aspherical lenses. What's up with that? And how about Lawrence of Arabia for a pop-culture reference?
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.
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
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.
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.
So here's a summary of work to date on Sacred Spring: The Early Iron Age Revival of the State and a brief outline.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
Who knew that I'd need the "Drug Humour" tag again the week after I created it?
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.
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
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-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.)