Postblogging Technology, November 1953, I: Kulturkampf

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

An update from London, where yours truly continues to look for something to do that isn't swanning around film studios like a crazy investment-minded great aunt. Maybe I'll write a science fiction novel. It doesn't look that hard! Your son has not had any more chances to indulge his particular passions, because he has been attending one meeting after another in London about making sure that British radars play politely with American radars. Which, he says, "If I was interested in all this stuff I would be in television and making ten times as much money." SIGH.  

Your grandchildren are fine, not neglected in any way. It's just that I have plenty of help. The only reason Nat is cooking for us is that there isn't room to turn around in the kitchen due to the way that the building got a wall kicked in courtesy of Herr Goering, so the help doesn't eat here. Don't worry, though, Harry MacMillan has promised to pop over and fix it personally, so the place will be back at its full Edwardian grandeur by the time we leave next summer.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1953: Transducer Days

 

With the very low key add for the IBM 650,  "the first mass--produced computer in the world,"we take another big step in the direction of home computing. With the bizarre use of a Mark 14 bombsight as a frame to describe the workings of the bellows in a modern pneumatic system points us towards AIRPASS. With all that going on, Aviation Week has a pictorial for us showing how transistors are made, and everyone in avionics seems to have a transducer on ad this month. And something strange is going on. By this I do not mean the Wikipedia article illustration.

According to the Wikipedia Commons credit, is from the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, and I am guessing that it is from the early Sixties. The obvious sociological question I have here is why the two operators in our retrospective view of early computing are male, while at the time operators of complex technological systems consistently code as female. It's a very striking change that I've worn out the electrons commenting on, because I want some smart person who isn't me to do all the hard work of coming up with an analysis of it. 

What I mean, rather, is the default assumption that a "transistor" is made of germanium, in a month in which piezoelectric transducers are being pushed heavily in the advertising space. Only 40 tons of germanium were mined "by the end of the Fifties," per Wikipedia. (Or, in 1998, germanium cost $800/kg, silicon, $10/kg. We are not getting to the Information Age using the 50th most abundant element in missile guidance systems.Crystals of various germanium do appear to have piezoelectric properties, but I'm not sure anyone knew that in 1954, and in any event quartz is a satisfactory piezoelectric material and is as common as dirt, so that would be what we would use here.  

But first, before the jump, something for 1954 from the Paul/Ford studio, although not obviously electronica, which word I apparently can't use because "electronica" is a 1990s music genre and holy shit look at this Wikipedia listicle. 

Postblogging Technology, October 1953, II: The Warren Court and the Idiots

R_.C_.,

Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

Greetings from London, where we only talk about the important things, such as Anthony Eden's digestion and Winston Churchill's weight! Oh, and whether we can have a nonaggression treaty with Russia before we're ready to throw H-bombs capable of flattening New York around. In the meantime, the RAF is working on being as good as it possibly can be at dropping the dang things. If you've got five million tons of dynamite under the hood, you only have to hit "Moscow" to get Malenkov. (But should it be Khrushchev?) But at 600mph at 60,000ft, can you even do that? Somehow the earliest version of the RAF's latest bombsight is in the pages of The Engineer this week, and it is all part and parcel of this new trans-Atlantic cooperation on electronic controls and relays in Very Secret Airplanes that has Reggie visiting Hadlett this week. As for me, well, if you deigned to notice, there was a little television serial over the summer called The Quatermass Experiment. And it has been proposed that one is not done making money from it just yet.  

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, October 1953, I: Cheque or Cash, It's Easy Money

R_C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada


Dear Father:

Well, here we are in London. I am seeing the sights, although a year of this and I might go a bit stir-crazy if I didn't have family business to attend to. I was up to Bray to meet the cast of what looks like a positively awful science fiction movie and ask searching questions about where are money is going, but by the books they're making money even before we "wash" the silver nitrate movements. Which isn't bad for such cheesy movies! Reggie has also been travelling, flying to Stockport to see (you must shoot me after reading this) Britain's Great White Hope to upset the F-100 speed record. He is officially there to worry over cooling servos, mostly electronic ones (which has implications for air-to-air missiles, too), but Fairey is apparently hoping for fighter sales and wants to get the word out in the USN. I don't know if anyone up there has met Reggie, but he is at least susceptible to a nice machine, even if he does think that fighters are a waste of time. 

London, by the way, is much livelier than I expected from stories told by certain older male relatives recently here resident. Perhaps it is just the lack of glum foreboding and uncertainty about the Eisenhower Depression. Or maybe it is because the Prime Minister has already had his stroke, so  you don't have to wake up every morning and turn on the radio to find out if Richard Nixon is your new President. (Instead you get to put money down on whether it will be Eden or RAB. Which is fun in a appalling sort of way.)

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie