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.
Popular Posts
- Gathering the Bones, 18: Hew Down the Bridge!
- Postblogging Technology, October, I: Forest for the Trees
- The Bishop's Sea, III: The Real Presence
- Postblogging Technology, November, 1943: Caesar's New Clothes
- Postblogging Technology, November 1950, II: Platypus Time
- Postblogging Technology, December 1950, II: Christmas Corps
- Postblogging Technology, March 1944, I: Pulling In the Horns
- I Would Run Away to the Air: The British Economy, Montgolfier to 727, Part 1
- A Techno-Pastoral Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1950: The Chestnut Plague
- Gathering the Bones, XXIII: Wyandotte Days
Sunday, July 6, 2025
U-Bomb: A Technical Prologue to Postblogging Technology, March 1955, II
Sunday, June 29, 2025
UB.109T: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, March 1955
Sunday, June 22, 2025
Postblogging Technology, March 1954, I: Hard Money, Hard Plastics, Hard Men
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
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Thais have discreetly pointed out how insulting the dinky American exhibit at the recent Bangkok Trades Fair was. |
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
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The memorial to the IDF paratrooper losses in the 28 February 1955 OPERATION BLACK ARROW is sited between Kibbutz Mefsalim and the fortified border of the Gaza Strip. Mefsalim's armed security was successful in holding off attackers on 9 October. |
Sunday, June 15, 2025
Fireflash and Sparrow: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1955
This post is about the contemporary British Fireflash and American Sparrow beam-riding air-to-air missiles, so of course there is a perfectly good reason that I picked this old picture of a Vought F7U Crusader for thumbnail. A very good reason. I'm certainly not picking on Vought, Westinghouse, and the United States Navy. No sir!
Saturday, June 7, 2025
Gathering the Bones, XXXII: Get Your Kicks on Route . . . Er, 40, It Turns Out
At least if your musical tastes are as lowbrow as mine (it's a brain chemistry thing, I swear!), the "suggested next video" that appear in the personal playlist feature was an exercise in self-abnegation. I would play the Silencer' version of "Wild Mountain Thyme," which does speak to me, and after a few choices out of my frequently-viewed list, there's Ella Roberts' "Loch Lomond." The self disgust came from thinking, "OMG, the AI thinks I like this shite!" The despair it provoked about the way the world was going came from the fact that the AI couldn't learn, no matter how many times I stopped and refreshed at the first note of Ella Roberts' overblown Gaelic kitsch, it just could not learn. Nowadays it gives me this, which is still not the version of "Northwest Passage" I ever search for, but is at least in the first place not bad, and in the second, one that leans into the moment. (Future readers: You may not believe that Donald Trump managed to shine up Canadian nationalism, but trust me. It happened.)
Sunday, June 1, 2025
Postblogging Technology, February, 1955, II: Diamonds in the Rough
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Monday, May 26, 2025
Postblogging Technology, February 1955, I: Adding Oxygen
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Saturday, May 17, 2025
The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXII: Tophets, Himera, Weird Digressions
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Major General Wilfred George Fryer, RE (1900--1993) |
Sunday, May 11, 2025
Postblogging Technology, January 1955: Phreaking Over Fallout
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Sunday, May 4, 2025
The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXI: The End of Migration?
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Oh no, demonetisation! |
So, anyway, it looks as though the problems at the UBC Libraries automated retrieval hub are now confined to email alerts, and I probably had my recalls waiting for me for a week the last two times I tried to get at Aviation Week, Flight, and The Engineer. I suspect this because this time around I also recalled Fortune, The Economist, and Newsweek from the PARC offsite storage facility, and got an alert for The Economist only. The upshot is that I have now all of same and might blame the need to process Aviation Week and The Engineer for being late with postblogging this week, whereas in fact it was the 31 January number of Newsweek that bogged me down yesterday. We get to hear about fallout next week!
The saving grace here is that I would be remiss in not covering something of a blockbuster development in the history of the Iron Age Mediterranean, notwithstanding that I heard about it on a political blog, and they heard about it from The Economist. (Otherwise I could talk about Forbes' Road and the Duke of Cumberland.)
Monday, April 28, 2025
Postblogging Technology, January 1955, I: The Crash of '55
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Sunday, April 20, 2025
Under the Ice: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December 1954
There might be some people on the New Siberians mining ivory. Otherwise, God just made them to amuse himself. Which is also something you can say about the Lomonsov Ridge. It made a desperate play for relevance in the Cold War because the Americans and Soviets were playing at keeping the drift patterns in the Arctic Basin secret so that they couldn't find each others' Apocalypse Ice Station Zero airbase that no-one built because, come on, seriously. Though on the other hand "come on, seriously" was a scarce commodity in the Cold War and the Reverse Bungie Cord air pickup system, which is also relevant this month on account of it trying to start WWIII by getting two CIA operatives put on trial in for espionage in Beijing, appears in one story about those ice floe bases.
But that's not the story holding everything together this week. That would be the story about the Oklahoma oil field services company doing boat drills off New York.
Sunday, April 13, 2025
What Light? A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December 1954
He ran in the Republican primary in his home district in 1920, campaigning on his war record, term limits, and against "exempt profit taxes on corporations." Having won the nomination, he cruised to victory in the general, but lost in 1930 over what the biography characterises as TVA politics, even though the TVA was still two years away. (Hoover vetoed a precursor plan.) He recovered his safely Republican seat in the wipeout of 1932 notwithstanding accusations of voter fraud, retained it until 1948 when he resigned to run for a Senate seat, and recovered it in 1950, holding it until his death, still fighting for the TVA and against the New Deal.
A photogenic man and a longterm politician, it isn't surprising that there are a great many Google Images hits for "B. Carroll Reece," the one chosen here making his high colour (creepy affect, great performance) and homeboy shavecut particularly obvious. (One-sixteenth Cherokee, I'm sure, although to be fair he was consistently pro-civil rights.) So here I am, amplifying colour again. But that's only a part why he's in the introduction to this here "Technological Appendix." The rest is his ridiculous performance leading on from being slapped down in the 1952--54 United States House Select Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations. The chairman launched an attempt to discover how tax-exempt foundations were promoting "anti-American values" but gave up under pushback. leaving Reese to continue a lone campaign to prove that the Kinsey reports were promoting socialism and communism via sexual deviance in the form of an attempt to "reduce our meager knowledge of social phenomena to the level of an applied science." The mix of legitimate concerns --for example, the way that the foundations were promoting oligarchy-- with right wing craziness is fascinating, but, hey, what about R&D?
Sunday, April 6, 2025
Postblogging Technology, December 1954, II: The Big Gamble
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Friday, March 28, 2025
The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXX: In The House of the Sea Lion
The remarkable correlation between geographic and genetic difference in European populations (Callaway (2008) via Bintliff):
(Okay, so this is actually Ewen Callaway reporting in New Scientist on John Novembre, et al, "Genes Mirror Geography Within Europe," Nature 456 (2008): 98--101.)
Time to say goodbye to migration in history?
Sunday, March 23, 2025
Postblogging Technology, December 1954: Home for the Holidays
R_.C_.,
Nakusp,
Canada
Dear Father:
I have no idea whether we'll actually be able to make a family tradition of Christmas in Nakusp, but it does seem like a more agreeably rural and reliably snowy place to celebrate my children's childhood than Vancouver, so I'm willing to give it a try if the roof doesn't fall off. For that I suppose we should consider the lodge, but Campbell River is even less likely to have a white Christmas than Vancouver!
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Thursday, March 13, 2025
International Geophysical Year: A Scientific Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1954
Last seen around here playing Calamity James as an adorable autist, Doris Day sings "Que Sera, Sera," an incomprehensibly popular hit considering the other things people were listening to at the time, but certainly a compelling bit of music in its own right. For that reason I grant a full and free pardon to whoever named the Que Sera Sera, the that gave a name to the Dakota that flew in the Polar battalion of Seabees and the construction materials from which were erected, at the freaking South Pole in freaking 1957, Amundsen-Scott Station.
The International Geophysical Year of 1957 is pretty pivotal to the history of science and technology on account of Sputnik, but if I want to have material to Technological Appendix about in 2027/8, it might be best to leave Sputnik, and Vanguard, until they come up chronologically. But the point of my appendices is to follow up on things as they blow up in the postblogging, and, oh boy, the Antarctic has blown up this fall.
There's actually an International Geophysical Year reason for this, which is that people do everything backwards and upside down in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Antarctic exploration year runs from November to roughly May, so November 1954 is only two Antarctic exploration years before the Big Show starts with Que Sera Sera landing att he South Pole on 31 October 1956 in what is already the second year of OPERATION DEEP FREEZE.
Sunday, March 9, 2025
The Comet Inquiry: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1954
Sunday, March 2, 2025
Postblogging Technology, November 1954, II: Flying in the Grass
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Because of boundary layer control |
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Sunday, February 23, 2025
Postblogging Technology, November 1954: Buy Now, Pay Later!
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Saturday, February 15, 2025
Aswan and Wittfogel: A Technological and History of Technology Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1954
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Britannica. Which lifted it from Shutterstock, how the mighty have fallen, etc. |
Saturday, February 8, 2025
Postblogging Technology, October 1954, II: The Miracle of Transistors
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Saturday, February 1, 2025
A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1954: Microelectronics and Music
"Micro" indeed. The screencap is the first size comparison for the proximity fuze I've ever seen, which is why I took the screencap. If you're disappointed that it's not a video, here it is:
I'll start with some housekeeping. The ordering software for the holdings stored in the UBC Library's Automated Storage Retrieval System is working, and has been for several weeks now. The aisle that holds Engineering and Aviation Week is still only intermittently operational, and your requests will be available when the Library tells you so. I am not sure of the details of this, and the desk librarians are not forthcoming. My best guess is that they cycle the aisle every few weeks; and the moral of the story is that I probably didn't successfully place my request for them last fall, and so missed some retrieval windows. Or not. It's not like the library is inclined to explain!
Honestly, automated storage is such a fiasco, especially considering that it cam in just as physical acquisitions collapsed. I know that it could be worse. When I got back to Vancouver after my PhD, much of UBC's old technical journal collection was held off campus with no intention of ever making them accessible again. The intent was to destroy them and create a pdf library in the cloud, and there is going to be a history of the fiasco of Google Books one day, but the short summary is that this was, as usual, placing more faith in computers than warranted. (Seriously, check out this disaster!) Instead, it all went to PARC, which may or may not have automated retrieval, but, importantly, actually works. The building of PARC somewhere in the no visitor's part of UBC campus did lead to The Economist and Time being withdrawn from the open shelves, which is annoying, especially considering that the university used up the freed floor space for underutilised offices. But, on the other hand they didn't pulp Newsweek.
So will I have Aviation Week and The Engineer next week, when I have a long weekend to finish October postblogging? Who knows? The important thing is that I got in 40 hours in Baldur's Gate 3 during my (short) vacation.
Fortunately, there's a lot of "microelectronics" to catch up with, going back to the proximity fuze.
Sunday, January 26, 2025
Postblogging Technology, October 1954, I: Brain Child in Long Pants
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Friday, January 17, 2025
The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIX: Wood For Greeks
In the relatively small genre of modern scholarly syntheses of Classical literature and current (as of writing) archaeology on some specific subject, timber is actually pretty well treated, though it turns out there's a bit of a controversy behind this.
Friday, January 10, 2025
The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVIII: Quotidian Huelva
Let's round up this quotidian technology-reconstructed-from-debitage (and other garbage) thing.
Who's the cutest fishy fellow? Who? She also mentions its reputation as a prodigious exporter of ancient Roman fish sauce, but I don't know if I want to make anything of that because everyone talks about garum and it seems like maybe it was some kind of byproduct industry? It's not like oily fish are hard to preserve, at least within a reasonable timeframe, and we have plenty of evidence of the Phoenicians moving fish, in the form of storage amphorae recovered from shipwrecks. I feel like I might be accused of monomania, but let's talk about "Tartessia" and marine resources, and not purple dye.
Saturday, January 4, 2025
Postblogging Technology, September 1954, II: Teenagers Out of Control!
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie