Disney Cartoons and Some Thoughts About Computing in 1955: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1955

 

Lady and the Tramp is that movie with the spaghetti. Per the proffered selection of Youtube shorts, people also remember the Siamese cats. According to the Wikipedia summary, they're the villains. Also, the movie's plot sounds like everything wrong with Disney in the Fifties, but that can't be news to anyone who hasn't been catatonic since before Steamboat Willie. (Ooh, bed sores!) It turns out that it was a technical achievement, though, the first animated movie made with CinemaScope, which is a significant part of why the movie is so well loved today. The plot might be insensitive, sentimental, and shallow, but the whole thing is gorgeous. Gorgeous is what CinemaScope is all about!

Apart from the Varian brothers and Philo Farmsworth,
Hewlett-Packard started in a garage in Palo Alto in 1939, and 
its first sale was recording equipment for Disney's Fantasia.
By Dicklyon at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to
Commons by tetromino., Public Domain,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3801857

As it turns out, Disney had already filmed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in CinemaScope, which was well received, and in several short animations, so Lady and the Tramp wasn't such a leap.

No-one would call Fourier Optics pretty, but June of 1955 is also the month that Aviation Week ran Ian Munro Ross's explanation of why the field effect transistor might be the solution to applying transistors to more avionics electronics applications where vacuum tubes were still indispensable. It is a surprisingly low key evaluation of the technology that is sometimes seen as the kickstarter of the information age, and I am sure there is a reason for this. In spite of his exuberantly Scottish name, Ross was a Liverpool man. Born in 1927, he was the leading edge of my father (and uncles') generation, just barely too young for WWII. He marched through Cambridge in parade time, taking a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering in 1948, and his MA and PhD in 1952, also from Cambridge, which isn't academic incest when it's Cambridge. His biography says that he was promptly hired away by William Shockley, whose group had just lost Bardeen and Brattain over Shockley being a big jerk. Bell then lost Shockley, who was at this very moment recruiting at Bell Labs for his own "Silicon Valley" startup. Shockley was emphatically not the first start-up, that tradition being as old as the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and Bell would then have been in the early stages of creating its own in-house FET team exclusive of Shockley and whoever Shockley managed to recruit away. Ross, who would be the sixth and last President of Bell Labs (1979--91), was clearly a player in a way that Shockley was not. Indeed, one gets the impression that Shockley spent most of his post-Nobel career finding ways of avoiding being accountable for his billable hours as a certified super-genius, much of it in ways that are both repulsive and deeply saddening considering the way that Silicon Valley culture has gone since. 

So the FET is in the wind, and a major studio has just decided to go in for CinemaScope om an application that could not be as far away from what CinemaScope was invented for (better panoramic shots) as could be imagined. Fourier Optics might not be pretty, but they were clearly (I'm hilarious) sexy. Fourier Optics is what you get when you use the Fourier Transform to turn waves into pulses, and unsolvable partial differential equations into arithmetically soluble approximations, although the physicists try to make it confusing by explaining why it works in great detail. The significance here is that you can use Fourier Optics to design a cylindrical lens that works, and you can use a cylindrical lens to get rid of the edge effects that annoyed the cinematographers of the Fifties so much. You just have to do lots of repetitive numerical calculations. You need a computer to build the lens that "computes" the transformation of the object plane into the image!

Perhaps less prominent in the story than his contributions 
warranted because he died of lung cancer at 58.

 This is a fun, and paradoxical way to put it, and I love the way that Fourier optics problematises our simple concept of what a "computer" might be. All lenses are "computers!" Computing is an outcome of a huge range of industries and activities. For example, the original CinemaScope lenses were made under contract by Bausch & Lomb, but that company's lack of mass production facilities, and flaws in the lenses, opened up an opportunity for a Woodland Hills, California startup, Panavision, and it didn't have a giant lens factory, either. It simply repurposed tank (Army tanks, that is) periscopes made by  Goerz's American subsidiary, C. P. Goerz. Tank periscope lenses, ut turns out, go back to French work in WWI that gave rise to the CinemaScope technology by another line of development, while C. P. Goerz continued to make camera lenses in New York City that mainly just aimed to reduce lens distortion.  It switched to military equipment from 1942, and vanished into corporate consolidation many years ago.

 When Panavision-manufactured lenses mass production lense were first delivered, they were the Panatar prismatic lenses designed by Walter Wallin.
 

Ben Hur is the best known early Panatar production. The lens series is famous enough to have its own Wikipedia article, but the math is definitely inside-the-black-box stuff as far as the film industry goes. Wallin came directly out of war work with the Navy, having come west to be the head of the Optics branch at the Naval Ordinance Test Station at China Lake, where he worked on the infrared lens of the Sidewinder missile and the linkages that ultimately steered the missile towards the lens' object image. Operational security issues might be why so much of the technical discussion tapers off so quickly, but just in case anyone --most definitely including me!-- thought I was gaslighting here, I tracked down the abstracts of some of Wallin's early work, and here he is talking about using a Fourier series to describe a light chopper, most likely that in the Sidewinder, where a mechanical view blocker turns the lens object image into a "simusoidal impulse" that can be used as an error signal to guide the aircraft  steering motor. However, the Pantar's shutter, the key bit in all movie cameras that "chops" up the image into  discrete frames so as to make the moving picture a moving picture, would also have needed some work. 

So there you go: A bit more about mathematical optics, computing, the  military industrial complex, and Disney, four things that went, and still go, together.