Postblogging Technology, July 1954, I: Red Meat and Free Men

 

Nurses of the Experimental Civil Defence Mobile
Column like motorcycles. Do they get to ride 
motorcycles, or is just their despatch riders?

R_.C_.,

Nakusp,

Canada

Dear Father:

It is so wonderful that you will be living in the lakehouse this summer! I am sorry that we will not be able to visit, as James' leave for my trip to Montreal can't be extended to two weeks thanks to Farnborough preparations. (The Fairey "The F-102 Can Eat My Dust" is being talked up as a static display, but I don't think that it is going to be anywhere close to ready.) 

Around here, meat rationing ends this week, and while I'm not sure how much difference it is going to make in daily life, it seems like some kind of patriotic duty to go out (or in) for roast beef like a free and patriotic Englishman could never do under those socialists. Or, on the other hand, it's some kind of disgusting display of complete loss of self-control. But as that verges suspiciously on vegetarianism if not outright Bolshevism, the roast beefers are winning the day.  Just have a look at the latest edition of my beloved "Schweppsshire" ad series. If only poor Orwell were alive to see us now. (Except wasn't he a vegetarian? I should look that up. Doesn't seem like the healthiest of lifestyles if you're going to farm in the Outer Hebrides!) 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1954, II: Just You Wait

 

Surely I'm not the only person who hears "[Henry] Wiggin Works" and thinks of My Fair Lady, the 1964 film adaptation of the 1956 Broadway musical based on the 1913 George Bernard Shaw play. I don't even watch musicals, but that particular song, like the dreadful menace of Cobalt-60 Doomsday bombs, from another movie I've never seen, is, well, I guess that's why it's called popular culture. 

You know what's not popular culture? The Wiggin Works, and, for that matter, Nimonic, and Nineteenth Century businessman and Liberal Unionist Henry Wiggin, and finally, the actual operator of the works, Mond Nickel, which probably merged with Inco at some more recent  point. The trademarks for "Nimonic" and other nickel alloys like Brightray, and Inconel, are now held by Special Metals Corporation, and various grades of Nimonic continue to be used in aircraft engines among other specialty applications. I see no evidence that it is used in nuclear reactor fuel slugs these days, although Cobalt-60 continues to be produced in trace quantities by the nuclear transmutation of Fe-58 in steel components into Cobalt-59 and hence Cobalt-60. (I did not know that!)  There's a Wiki page on the cobalt bomb, but it doesn't really get into the isotope as a signifier of universal nuclear destruction, upon which subject I am sure I have seen websites if not scholarly articles over the years. 

Not that any of this really matters. I want to talk about the British steel industry today. It just happens that special alloy steels are an important part of that story. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1954: Gormenghast

 

Just kidding. Today I'm talking about the pioneering nuclear power plant, Calder Hall, not Mervyn Peake's weird 1950 novel about a giant estate that's a country sort-of-thing. (I'd offer a more insightful summary if I'd ever been able to get into the darn thing. Anyway, here's one of Eleanor Morton's bits. The Mervyn Peake reference is a running gag at the end.) I'm just making a witty (YMMV, as the kids say) literary reference. Somewhat surprisingly I find that I'm the first to do it, maybe because all that "Second Elizabethan Age" stuff is down the memory hole. (Hah! Witty literary reference!) 

Calder Hall actually gets its  debut in the 4 June 1954 issue of The Engineer, exactly a month before the Cabinet reluctantly agreed to go ahead with the British hydrogen bomb, in a not-at-all coincidental development. But we don't cover the first two weeks of the month at The Engineer, so we missed it, and also the ominous foreshadowing that is a picture of a Ruston gas turbine set up to burn methane. "The purpose of the demonstration is to show that natural gas, which is available in almost unlimited quantities on many oilfields, can be burnt with the same efficiency and controls as liquid fuels."

Postblogging Technology, June 1954, II: We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us

R_C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

And that's the end of my month. If I may dwell on the political for a moment (Moi? Never!), this really is Pierre Mendes France's moment, and I cannot help a smile on my face and a lift to my feet, even more than when the Capital deal went through. (We'll leave aside the question of whether they can pay for their planes.) He has a vision for Europe, and he is going to close out the Tunisian and Moroccan adventures as well as Indo China. Newsweek seems to have capitulated to him, describing him as a Dewey Republican or such. I hope he'll have a chance to apply his vision to France, although the times are running against his economics, with the Anglo Saxons catching up with the Fourth Republic's Government-by-rentiers. On the other hand, Ike seems too sick to run in '56, which means that Stevenson will have a good chance, and we might see the back of the odious Dulles brothers. (Not that the prospect of seeing McCarthy and Allen Dulles tussling doesn't do my heart good.) James is predictably disappointed that there aren't more signs of the party rallying to Kefauver, but I will take what I can get. 

On the other hand, London is a bit giddy right now, so maybe I'm just being infected by the optimistic mood. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie