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.
Twenty-five hundred years after the invention of the Chinese abacus, this abacus-like device has turned up on the frontiers of electronics. Its similar purpose: to help businessmen with their arithmetic. The network of black magnetic beads smaller than a postage stamp, is one of a number of input-output "memory" units in the new "702" electronic calculator built by International Business Machines. The 702 was designed for the world of commerce to help handle the vast quantities of sums involved in figuring business payrolls, inventories, production schedules.
Nakusp,
Canada
Dear Father:
And just like that, our business trip-slash-family vacation to Toronto in August is over, and we are back in blessedly cool Toronto. As far as I can tell the Super-Viscount will not be high-winged. On the one hand I'm not surprised since I think of high-wing airliners as a British affectation. On the other hand, the Lockheed C-130 is the closest plane to the Super-Viscount, and it is high winged. This is admittedly because the Air Force actually needs high wing cargo planes, but the C-130 could have been competition, and now it's not. The Super-Viscount is not going to enjoy the same kind of clear field that is giving the Viscount its enormous sales, but there doesn't seem to be any American competition in sight. It is, essentially, just the Britannia.
James is unfortunately not with us, as he flew out of Toronto on Navy business bound for an undisclosed location that is certainly not Hong Kong, where he is certainly not going to be interpreting in a very urgent meeting about Koumintang pirates.
I'm sorry that we weren't able to meet during our trip, but look forward to seeing you at Christmas.
So, and as will come as no surprise, I've had the experience of a short work week pulled out from under my feet at something like the last minute. It was perhaps not impossible for me to write Postblogging Technology, August 1954, I: I Know Eyewash When I See It, and I'm honestly not sure who besides me to blame for my taking a day off on the 11th and yesterday, but I'll settle for Larian Studios, for making Baldur's Gate III so seductive. That, of course, means that instead of something long, with a lot to chew over, you're getting a bit of a dive into semi-random thoughts I had this week.
In this case, and as a development of "smokeless powder is just another textiles industry development, therefore the modern rifle, and modern war, comes out of industrial cotton," I am wondering about how normal early telegraphy was. (Is the rifle, or telegraphy, more important to the transformation of war before 1914?) So
let's forget about all that "information industry" stuff, and look at the telegraph as it came in, and try to understand why people might take the first steps to improve on semaphore and heliographs and pony expresses, and see where we are.
This morning I am thinking about Raven the trickster, creator and king. but I also travelled on the weekend and visited my world-travelling doctor brother and his wife, who in conversation chanced to mention how much better the Pacific Northwest art held at the British Museum is than that shown here in its homeland.
"Raven and the First Men" is a Haida creation myth, here truncated. The second image is a rattle, used in shaman and healing dances. The specific meaning belongs to the owner who commissioned it, but the general theme is the transfer of power, which is another way to understand the creation myth. Deprived of its context by the decision to sell it to an outsider, it remains an eerie symbol of the relationship between Raven and one man, no doubt privileged. I would be stretching nonexistent wings in a ludicrous play at exegesis to go any further (Raven would approve!), but we can reasonably ask how it was made around here.
Because Betty Boop cartoonist Ving Fuller is in a What's New segment. Deep cut, I know.
R_., C., Nakusp, Canada
Dear Father:
Well, I left my current numbers of Aviation Week and The Engineer on the train when I dashed to catch a connection to Weybridge. So if this letter isn't to your liking, blame the clowns at Handley Page for not putting the tail of the Victor on firmly enough to balance flying without the "weapon system"-y radar that's supposed to go in the nose. (James thinks, anyway. He was right about the Comet, though!) This led to an all-hands-on-deck sales meeting over the Viscount replacement, from which I had to turn around for my flight to Montreal, upon which I am writing these words, far away from replacement copies, and there you go.
As for the meeting, the super-Viscount, or whatever they're going to call it, might be completely different from the Victor, but that isn't stopping the American industry, as you can see from the Newsweek coverage. to be fair, it is good news for them that the Victor won't be out setting high publicity speed records while there is a Vickers team still touring the States. I know I would have loved some British Pathe footage of the Victor prototype landing in Montreal, not that it was even vaguely close to ready for a trans-Atlantic flight, but a girl can dream.
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!)
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.
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."
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.
The soundtrack of my childhood has some odd entries
R_.C_., Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
You can hardly miss the story of my labours in the press this month. You will hear about James soon, long since hijacked from the propagation of sound underwater to the propagation of cracks through thin aluminum alloy shells at some point soon. You have pictures of your grandchildren, sent through the regular mail, and I'm not going to repeat the anecdotes in the accompanying letter here. Suffice it to say that we are still "happy wanderers" in the streets of London, and that I'm growing hoarse singing the chorus with James-James doing the saxophone bits. It is not very serious, but it is a distraction from export credits and controlled currency exchanges!
This is actually going back a bit, but Mossad has done a naughty telephone thing this week, and while Teleanswerphone was operating a pager system in New York in 1954, we're still six years away from the Motorola transistorised pager that made the technology ubiquitous. It's not interesting or significant, so how do I jump on that bandwagon? With something momentous that is also happening this spring, which is TAT-1, the first coaxial transatlantic telephone cable, which I've admittedly talked about around here in connection with the first announcement last December. I believe I've noticed the cablelaying vessel Monarchand also the technical details of the cable involved, and, no, I'm not going to hit my head on the Blogspot search function to find the entry, even if it is good for the blog's statistics.
Scraped from an ad: https://snapklik.com/en-ca/product/tinkertoy-30-model-200-piece-super-building-set-preschool-learning-educational-toy- for-girls-and-boys-3/05DL4PL73XTV5
I've been assiduously avoiding talking about "Project Tinkertoy" since the Bureau of Standards/Industrial Planning Division, USN/Kaiser Electronics Division, Wilys Motor Company pilot factory in Arlington, Virginia, hit the news, well before September of 1953, where Blogspot search turns up my earliest reference to it. The thing is that Project Tinkertoy's press people are most impressed by the ceramic wafers that the Project Tinkertoy modular components are mounted on, and that is the part of the technology that most obviously has no future. Integrated circuits most definitely do, but that's a story that doesn't really get going until 1957, and apparently we're still one cycle of abortive precursors away from that, with the Army's 1957 Micromodule programme. On the other hand, the actual technology of the integrated circuit has a prehistory which is not well integrated into that of the various abortive precursors. So I'm going to take a rainy laundry day Saturday to look at that!
We are finally caught up with the news from the Empire Games. Roger Bannister has run a four minute mile! Do you realise that he ran the last quarter, some 400 yards, in 56 seconds? 10 seconds is a good sprint time for 100 meters! It tires me out just thinking about it. And while British sportsmen do the country proud, John Foster Dulles keeps up the American side in Geneva by showing how to stick your head where the sun doesn't shine! I understand that he is trying to avoid having America take over from France in the role of "hapless colonial master getting beaten up by the Viet Minh," but I don't think that it is working. At least his efforts in the Middle East seem to be bearing fruit. At least so I think. But what do I know? Apart from that Capital Airlines is going to buy 60(!) Viscounts. I wish I got a commission instead of a paycheque!
I am just back from a cycling vacation in which I finally rode the Okanagan Rail Trail from Kelowna to Vernon. This turns out to be a trick, because between the exquisitely appointed section in Kelowna and the somewhat rougher but eminently ridable section between Lake Country and Vernon that passes through my childhood summer camping grounds, there is an "unimproved" section that was very rough riding, and quasi-trespassing, as the landholder objects to the transformation of the CN rail right of what through their property into a recreational/highway bypass rail trail.
It turns out that that the landowner is the Westbank First Nation; the parcel is remediated wetland, and I imagine was classified as reserve land because of seasonal bird hunting, which was ruined by the CN's railbed. The contrast between the all-but unpopulated Okanagan-owned parcel and the stretch approaching Oyama just north of it, in which one lakefront property after another evidently had its own private access across the tracks (at least my family settled for a culvert underpass, never used for its intended purpose of watering livestock) is striking. The Salishan-speaking Okanagans left a clear imprint on the geography that their descendants still occupy, but that doesn't make them any less of a marginalised group. You can draw all the property lines on a map that you want; if you don't have the social power to make them work, they are just lines.
I shall be brief here as I am finding myself excitingly indispensable at work as the aviation world scrambles to find replacements for Comet 1s now and Comet 2s soon. I was not completely convinced by my professors' talk about learning to "think like a lawyer," but I find myself called upon to read a great many contracts. In fact, to make all the jokes about my useless schooling as completely obsolete as a Handley Page Halifax, some of them are in French! (I'd volunteer to read the ones in Chinese, too, but, first of all, there aren't any; and, second, it might raise suspicions.) It is nice to have help at home, but I am missing my ambles with James-James already! Your son, by the way, has been dragooned to Farnborough to give his perspective on a water tank they are building big enough to take an entire Comet fuselage so that they can prove that fatigue happens to Geoff De Havilland and other suspects.
And if you think I've gone a bit mad with the accompanying illustrations, we have splurged on a copying machine that makes producing them a breeze, and I might have gotten a bit carried away.
Maybe Newsweek has it garbled, as it often does? Or perhaps this is the TX-16 "Emergency" cryogenic bomb that was never test detonated, and the 40 megaton yield is a post BRAVO revised yield estimate. Or someone at Lawrence Livermore (oh, who am I kidding, it's Teller) is talking up their first designs, "highly innovative" devices that fizzled. Anyway, 40 megatons!
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
As some have predicted, the Comet has fallen, this time, think, for good. I have no idea how long it will take for everyone to accept that it was too flimsy to fly, but it is all embarrassing enough that it may take a while, and no-one is going to want a Comet 2 or 3 until it is all settled. Whether anyone will want a Comet 3 at all is another question. No doubt champagne corks are popping at Weybridge right now!
Spring is coming to our fair city, and I have to say that James-James has the legs of a trooper. I have conceived a notion of seeing this city, and he seems willing to walk as far as my own legs will go! He is a very charming young man, too! I hope that that continues into adulthood and he does not become another engineer with his head in the clouds!
Or a cloud of radioactive ash, as seems to be he fashion of the day.
First, a housekeeping note: There was a hitch in my techblogging process at terms' end in April, resulting in my having to return all my materials and recall them, which I have done this week. Or, rather, two hitches, as my summer holidays and stat days were all heaped up and pushed to the end of August, leaving me off from the 14th to the 31st, or possibly the 2nd of September, although I am not counting on having the first Sunday of September off work. I currently intend to get caught up on the postblogging from the 14th to the 21st and then leave for my summer road trip, unless the province is on fire by then.
Meanwhile, the icy hand of mortality, in the form of knee pain that started on my trip to Kamloops and which was exacerbated by having to run around the store for days on end covering for other peoples' vacations has reminded me that I Would Run Away to the Air, Plantation of the Atlantic, and Sacred Spring aren't writing themselves. Of the three I have no manuscript material for Sacred Spring apart from blog posts, and while I am hardly satisfied by the first two projects, Plantation is steadily progressing in my off-blog writing time and I have decades of investment in I Would Run Away, so Sacred Spring deserves a bit more attention here.
Like many other cities of Classical Greece, Argos was a synoecism of nearby towns, overshadowed by the older sites of Mycenae and Tiryns. The construction of a temple of Hera on a massive artificial terrace, deliberately built in the "Cyclopean" style of the Before Times, and convenient to the earlier cities, amidst a group of "Mycenaean" monumental graves, may be seen as a way of appropriating the prestige of the earlier foundations. I talked about it very briefly as an example of a sanctuary of a city (polis) goddess that wasn't Athena. What did not appear last time was a gruesome story out of Herodotus, which I embed in about as much of the Father of Lies as the reader is likely to tolerate since the whole thing is so evocative:
This is the Athenian story of the matter; but the Aeginetans say that the Athenians came not in one ship only; "for," they say, "even if we had had no ships of our own, we could right easily have defended ourselves against one ship, or a few more; but the truth is that they descended upon our coasts with many ships, and we yielded to them and made no fight of it at sea." But they can never show with exact plainness whether it was because they confessed themselves to be the weaker at sea‑fighting that they yielded, or because they purposed to do somewhat such as in the event they did. The Athenians then (say the Aeginetans), when no man came out to fight with them, disembarked from their ships and set about dealing with the images; and not being able to drag them from the bases they did there and then fasten them about with cords and drag them, till as they were dragged both the images together (and this I myself do not believe, yet others may) fell with the selfsame motion on their knees, and have remained so from that day. Thus, then, did the Athenians; but as for themselves, the Aeginetans say that they learnt that the Athenians p97 were about to make war upon them, and therefore they assured themselves of help from the Argives. So when the Athenians disembarked on the land of Aegina, the Argives came to aid the Aeginetans, crossing over from Epidaurus to the island privily, and then falling upon the Athenians unawares and cutting them off from their ships; and it was at this moment that the thunderstorm came upon them, and the earthquake withal.
87 This, then, is the story told by the Argives and Aeginetans, and the Athenians too acknowledge that it was only one man of them who came safe back to Attica; but the Argives say that it was they, and the Athenians say that it was divine power, that destroyed the Attic army when this one man was saved alive; albeit even this one (say the Athenians) was not saved alive but perished as here related. It would seem that he made his way to Athens and told of the mishap; and when this was known (it is said) to the wives of the men who had gone to attack Aegina, they were very wroth that he alone should be safe out of all, and they gathered round him and stabbed him with the brooch-pins of their garments, each asking him "where her man was."
88Rawlinson p294Thus was this man done to death; and this deed of their women seemed to the Athenians to be yet more dreadful than their misfortune. They could find, it is said, no other way to punish the women; but they changed their dress to the Ionian fashion; for till then the Athenian women had worn Dorian dress, very like to the Corinthian; it was changed, therefore, to the linen tunic, that so they might have no brooch-pins to use. But if the truth be told, this dress is not in its origin p99 Ionian, but Carian; for in Hellas itself all the women's dress in ancient times was the same as that which we now call Dorian. As for the Argives and Aeginetans, this was the reason of their even making a law for each of their nations that their brooch pins should be made half as long again as the measure then customary, and that brooch-pins in especial should be dedicated by their women in the temple of those goddesses; and that neither aught else Attic should be brought to the temple, nor earthenware, but that it be the law to drink there from vessels of the country.
89H & WSo then the women of Argolis and Aegina ever since that day wore brooch-pins longer than before, by reason of the feud with the Athenians, and so they did even to my time; and the enmity of the Athenians against the Aeginetans began as I have told. And now at the Thebans' call the Aeginetans came readily to the aid of the Boeotians, remembering the business of the images. The Aeginetans laying waste the seaboard of Attica, the Athenians were setting out to march against them; but there came to them an oracle from Delphi bidding them to hold their hands for thirty years after the wrong-doing of the Aeginetans, and in the thirty-first to mark out a precinct for Aeacus and begin the war with Aegina; thus should their purpose prosper; but if they sent an army against their enemies forthwith, they should indeed subdue them at the last, but in the meanwhile many should be their sufferings and many too their doings. When the Athenians heard this reported to them, they marked out for Aeacus that precinct which is p101 now set in their market-place; but they could not stomach the message that they must hold their hand for thirty years, after the foul blow dealt them by the Aeginetans.
I swear Herodotus privately identified as Carian. Anyway, we hear about Athens' long and strange conflict with Aegina, about the obsession with symbolic acts of war like the seizure of images leading to real human tragedies; another intimation that the Athenian identification with Ionia was deliberate self-fashioning; and some mythical references.
Greetings over there in drab and depressed America from swinging London! Rab couldn't find anything in the kitty for us, but at least there is money for machines, and that is the main thing. It appears that all of our old wars in Malaya and Kenya are ending, and the new one will involve Greeks, and so will be quite merry and sunsoaked. Or possibly radiation-soaked, as that is how we are doing wars these days. At least I have another four years before I turn 32 and have to retire!
I am now exhausted by all the topical references and I haven't even got on to McCarthy, so I shall close with kindly greetings and head off to another day of calculating import duties on turboprop airliners in sterling zone economies.
For me, there's something infinitely cosy about the first generation of professors at western Canadian universities. I've lived more than half my life near the campus of UBC, and routinely bike by the old neighbourhoods where these gentlemen built their homes, way back in the Twenties, and there lived reasonably comfortable lives during the upheavals of the Thirties. My case example is usually UBC's Garnet Sedgewick, an English professor for whom the kernel of the modern Koerner library is named, which gives me an excuse to insert the video below, filmed in front of it, with two-for-one Grace Park. This week, however, we're on about Robert Boyle (1883--1955) of the University of Alberta, born in Carbonear, Newfoundland, just in case anyone ever asks you what happened to the Beothuk. Boyle headed the physics department at UofA from 1912 to 1919, and was dean of Applied Science from 1919 to 1929, after which he went to the NRC in Ottawa, retiring in 1948. No family is mentioned, so my "cozy" image of a Boyle family settling into a quiet neighbourhood in Edmonton and growing happily old is completely off-base.
Oh! And he invented sonar. Like a lot of other people, sure, but I wanted to share that photo and talk about cycling by old houses up near campus.
The story here is that the United Kingdom is a rich, first world country and a Great Power. It fought the Second World War in alliance with the United States, now a superpower. At the time the metropolitan British Isles had 34% the population of the continental United States, compared with 20% today. It is fashionable to compare and contrast the technological achievements of the two states across a wide range of warmaking capabilities in WWII, and after, and to attempt to draw larger conclusions. It is particularly interesting to ask whether the steady decline in creditable comparisons over this period (or longer ones going back into the Nineteenth Century) is consequence or, perhaps to some extent, cause of the increasing disparity in national power (and, of increasing relevance, population). One such comparison is between the first nuclear submarine launched by the United States, Nautilus, commissioned on 30 September 1954, and the first British nuclear submarine, Dreadnought, commissioned 17 April 1963.
Sea power is submarine power now
I looked at Dreadnought back in 2021, when the decision to build Nautilus (and the less-celebrated Seawolf) was first publicised. In the interest of pushing back against some of the cross-cultural comparisons referred to in the previous paragraph, I focussed on one of the more celebrated British contributions to American power, the "raft" that isolates the relatively noisy atomic machinery of modern submarines. I discussed developments in steam machinery in the 1950s, and even got into the hydrodynamic experimental submarine, USS Albacore, and its influence on the development of the nuclear submarine.
What I didn't have was a contemporary view in the form of a leading article in The Engineer explaining what a mid-century British technocrat would deem important research questions needing to be worked out before the nuclear submarine could take the sea as the lynchpin of modern strategic power. So in this short week, I am going to take another dive.
It has been a very busy week here in London. I had to throw some cold water on people over the CAB action against American Airlines (they of the "No Old Maid Stewardesses" policy) over their claim to be able to run Los Angeles to New York in less than eight hours. No, DC-7s cannot make that time, non-stop or not, and, yes, that means that, strictly speaking, they are in violation of labour laws that say that you can't have a pilot at the controls for more than eight hours, and, no, that doesn't meann that anything will be done about it, much less something as drastic as buying British. They'll just keep pretending until they get the 707, I explained. They're for sure not going to buy Comets, even if they could get one!
Besides, considering that we're going to have an atom war with Communist France and Communist Italy next month, why worry about airliners? If America is as Communist as Senator McCarthy says, shouldn't we bomb us, while we're at it?) Yes, I'm being silly.
With a month on the job I can tell you that exporting Vickers Viscounts and Rolls Royce Darts is not quite the thrill ride that wading in the "B-movie" pool was. On the other hand, I get to feel like someone who has been to law school, and I had a meeting with an unbelievably rude Australian who warmed up when I pretended to be Canadian. (It's almost true!) I hope we don't lose the sale when he learns the truth, but honestly I couldn't take any more stories about how MacArthur personally shot his kangaroo. I have also been invited to Weybridge to see the prototype Super-Viscount so I can sell that. The hubby can't come because he's playing with a Nomad.
Well, here it is the end of February and no Comets have fallen from the sky, so I guess all is forgiven. I see that Vickers has a newer and bigger Viscount in the works. Do you suppose that TCA will buy it too, with the way that the Viscount is stirring things up?
It's what I'm assuming, if you're wondering about that big buy of Vickers stock. There is no point standing on the sidelines worrying that the dividends that the London Stock Exchange is splashing around will be the death of Britain if you're not in the middle taking your profits! We can always reinvest them in Hawaii, which is sure to be a state any day now. Although, as Newsweek points out, it might be getting less reliably Republican, which could stick a spoke in the wheels.
Hmm. Giant modern airliners, Hawaiian investment. Two things that do go together. How are your friends at Canadian Pacific doing?
We are finally and securely back in London. It is February, James' appointment is a quarter done, and I am pleased to report, as you've no doubt heard, that I have found part-time work to keep my hand in. Since, unlike some magazines, I can read between the lines, I thought that Aviation Finance would be fun, because if there is a place in Britain where we might have the next "Affair of the Poisons," it will be here. (Don't look it up in the Encyclopedia; read a novel if you're inclined to learn more, and notice that I didn't say "know.")
Around the old lodgings, the children are flourishing, our host not so much, as he has been taking quite a ribbing for suggesting that the Comet crashed because it is a hunk of junk, and not because dastardly saboteurs blew it up. I have tried not to have an argument with him, and have prevailed on James to do the same, because there is some reason to think that de Havilland has not delivered the soundest of planes, and I guess time will tell, which seems to be the theme around here right now. And also because it is hard to get a place in London right now! Anyway it's probably the it's-not-going-to-be-a-real-recession getting us all down in the dumps about the future.
At least we'll have tupperware parties to make fun of! (I would make fun of Howard Hughes, but frankly he sounds ill, not eccentric.)
John Byrne, "Goblin Queen" (From a story by Chris Claremont)
Good news! My employer has been persuaded that "But I don't wanna!" is not an adequate argument against the labour code requirement that I get an extra day off to celebrate the birthday of our undying Queen-Empress.That's next week; this week I celebrated it with lots of overtime instead, so I am going to pluck another low-hanging fruit before engaging with postblogging next week.
So the story here is that the Indo-European languages emerge into the light with The Proclamation of Anittas, a unique document on Old Hittite extant in an early as well as late-Kingdom copies, anchoring the use of the Hittite tongue to a c. 1600BC central Anatolian context. And I am engaged here in the fun and low-stakes enterprise of arguing that this is not only the oldest Indo-European, but the source of the language family. Today we're going to go a bit further and single out an individual: Puduhepa, the Queen of the Night.
This one originally qualified as a response to something I read online: not here, of course: Over at Quora, where the best of the resident historical geneticists, Ygor Coelho, accepts the final collapse of the "Yamnaya expansion" thesis as far as it concerns ancient Anatolia --and then reconstructs it.
It could also qualify as a book review, in that I took the decision to spend a lazy Saturday working this material over as an invitation to read Eric Cline's After 1177: The Survival of Civilisations. Also, Narendra Modi is going to win re-election in India on his "Sure would be a shame if an ethnic cleansing were to just happen around here" platform, and if I can't do anything about that, at least I can direct some impotent aggression towards his Hindutva loons.
So, first, Professor Cline. I read 1177 BC: The Year Civilisation Collapsed as a somewhat less than passionately felt book, and that is even more true of Survival. That's not to say that it is a bad read, much less bad scholarship. I see omissions and neglect in the literature, But Cline has a professional expertise in the field so that is much more likely to be my misperception than reality, except insofar as I was hyperfocussed on his treatment of the brilliant Saro Wallace, and found his use of her work shallow. To be fair, Travellers in Timecame out too late to be considered; but Cline's whole monograph is permeated with the idea of a "successful collapse," and Wallace offers a mechanism for it that would explain what Cline finds so mysterious about the Phoenician anti-collapse and which might have come into his treatment of Israel if he had taken Finkelstein more to heart. (A redistribution of everyday economic activity across elevations enriches the "Phoenician" city states and makes the Kingdom of Judah possible).
Oh, well, maybe I'm just white knighting it But, you know, Cline only catches fire when it ambles off the reservation to talk about climate change. I'm totally on board with worrying abot climate change, but the presumed "mega-drought" plays an important, if not quite starring role in Collapsed, and is central to Survival, is rooted in archaeobotanical studies, and drawing universal conclusions from localised archaeobotanical sites is a fraught activity, as witness repeated revisions of claims about forest cover changes based on revised understandings of the environmental history of specific sites. I get that Cline would like to use the enormous amount of money he has made for his publisher and turn into public intellectual clout in the service of something more important, but there are fine young scholars out there failing to get tenure-track jobs, and I'd like Cline to back off them if he can.
Back to Ygor, who, as an Internet warrior still has his bones to make, and can get down into it. Ancient Anatolians do not have Steppe ancestry, and that's that. The Indo-European language family was not spread into Anatolia by a wave of demic advance. "Migration." So then he fixed it by finding a mutual ancestral group in the southern Caucasus in the right timeframe for Proto-Indo-European (4000BC, according to him.
No disrespect to Ygor, but this is crazy. It's like, "I read some historical linguistics stuff on the Internet, and now I'm going to do a genetic study of the recovered DNA of more than 200 Neolithic individuals and unleash enough statistical analysis software on them to take a Lunar lander to the Sea of Tranquility and back."
See? This is why linguistics is secretly the hardest historical science. We all take it for granted that we're not going to understand what the historical linguists are talking about, so we just nod along. It's like the Grand Unified Theory. Or it would be if we were using the contradictions between General Relativity and quantum mechanics to justify some light genocide.
Did anyone else reading this frequent Young and Bloor in the early Nineties? Remember the giant poster of Pamela Anderson as Barbed Wire? There's something about comic book movies about girl characters where a dyke director (I assume) gets hold of the property and makes a movie with an aesthetic that says, "Hey, straight guys, we're just not going to apologise for not being for you," and then the straight guys don't go to see it and everybody looks at the box office and is, like, "What happened?' I mean, I don't want to be the culture warrior here. I liked Birds of Prey well enough. But "we're going to shoot Ella Jay Bosco like she's chunky (she's not!) because you should be ashamed of your male gaze" is quite a message to swallow to enjoy me some movie. While I am determined to validate the artistic choice, I am wondering how you get to spend eight figures on a movie when your head is that far up your ass. It's not like you got the MoD (MoS) to pay for it!
By MigMigXII - Animated from CAD drawing, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24337752
Speaking of which, this cool animation adorns the Wikipedia article about the Napier Deltic, an 18-cylinder opposed-piston diesel engine consisting of six layers of cylinders arranged in a stack of equilateral triangles. Beginning as Napier's visionary submission to an Admiralty requirement for a diesel engine suitable for Coastal Forces, as of January of 1954 it has been at sea in a proving boat for almost two years, and is about to go into service on 18 "Dark" class 50t patrol boat, as noted in The Engineer for 5 January 1954, which covers the current state of the Royal Navy (which absolutely needs 60 cruisers and its battleships, but which can afford to cut the size of its new aircraft carriers from the excessive 37,000t displacement of Eagle and Ark Royal.) The article also notes that the Deltic has "been covered fully in these pages." But in the first half of whatever month the article ran in, damn it! Apart from the "Darks," Deltics went into a number of subsequent large coastal classes and several classes of British railways locomotives, Especially the Class 55, which made an indelible impression on the trainspotting public running 100mph services and hitting 125mph descending Stoke Bank with its distinctive noise. (Did I mention that this high speed, high power diesel was noisy? And smoky? I know. Next thing I'll be saying that it rattled!) Boring and conventional engines rule the diesel engine world today since given the costs involved in high speed rail infrastructure they might as well be electrified. The Deltic isn't precisely forgotten, but it is a curiosity of a bygone age, and not the only one in this post.
We're back in London, fully settled in, and back on the edge of the Comet investigation. It will probably be flying again, although James is pessimistic, mainly because he has lost confidence in De Havilland. The children are settling in, with Jim-Jim very cutely looking forward to nursery school, which we've discussed.
Thank you again for your hospitality, which I am sorry I am so late, but things in London have been hectic. You may have noticed from the calendar that we flew out of Montreal the day of the Comet grounding, and London was an absolute zoo when we got there. On the other hand the Azores are BEAUTIFUL, which is just as well because renting a car and touring made up for spending a week there. Or almost did, because why did there have to be an entire class of children aboard that plane? Why?
All this bad enough before the Britannia accident. And, yes, this should have been in the mail long before the first week of February, but what can I say? I've been touring James around because we've only the one car and I've had business in the counties, too trying to get the business of assorted people who were trying to move sterling into dollars ahead of the Crash of '54 and don't hold with old-fashioned surface shipping any more.
There was something about "Delta Dawn," an earworm of my childhood (written by Larry Collins and Alex Harvey, as performed byTanya Tucker, Bette Midler, and Helen Reddy) that bothered me as a young man. That's not surprising given its disturbing lyrics, but I did not then pick up that it was written about Alex Harvey's survivor's guilt over his mother's apparent suicide. So there's that, even before the Wikipedia article has to disambiguate the song from an even sadder story, which is definitely not the kind of competition that people should be having.
The Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, on the other hand, just didn't go as fast as it was supposed to. Not much of a story, but jeez, the subtext.
By Anynobody - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18445244
Titanium is, we keep hearing, going to be one of the major structural elements in the North American XF-108 Rapier supersonic interceptor. We hear a great deal about how much of it is being used in the DC-7; and while the XF-108 will be cancelled, fifteen A-12s, 3 YF-12s and 34 SR-71s will fill some of the gap.
Another thing we here today is that a shortage of American titanium led to the surreptitious import of Russian titanium during the 1960s, so that the Soviet Union was spied upon by planes made with the Motherland's titanium. And as if that weren't enough to make for a story about oopsy-themed metals instead of planes, we have the sour suggestion that the real reason America is dragging its feet over titanium is that all that newly-built magnesium infrastructure would go to waste, and this finally makes the story of "Mag-Thor," or magnesium-thorium alloy, the slightly radioactive structural metal so widely used in the early years of the Space Race, but mostly on "New Look" weapon systems like the Bomarc missile, one of the great cringing embarrassments of Canadian industrial and political history of the last century, make sense. For Dow-Corning to make adequate excuses for the titanium shortage, there had to be a competitive magnesium product.
I guess the day had to come when I wasn't done writing one of these until after I was snug in my room and waiting for whoever it comes on the Twenty-Eighth. The ghost of the Park Royal Boxing Day Sale? Anyway, I'm going to drop this in the courier box so that everyone else can see it. Now this is the part where I mention a winsome event in my life and that of your grandchildren. So did I mention that I saw Field-Marshal Montgomery on the plane? I did? In giddy tones when I got here a week ago? Drat. I've got nothing else.
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