R_.C_.,
The Lake House,
Nakusp, B.C.
Canada
Dear Father:
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Letters
Allen Klein is happy with Walter Reuther and guaranteed annual income because it is a "victory against Communist propaganda," while John Kellogg is very disgruntled about "labour monopolists." Fifty-six year old recently-dismissed white collar employee Carl Braun of San Francisco wonders where his guaranteed annual income is, Luigi Lugli of Rome is happy to hear that the Memphis downtown is being revived. The article about Shakespeare (and, implicitly, all the people who deny that Shakespeare was Shakespeare) produces the usual run of jokes about Homeric poems being written by another person named Homer. John Foster of the Indiana Geological Survey and the Lima Association of Commerce write to point out that there is no "water problem" around them, and Lima, in particular, is open for business. The Reverend Adiel Moncrief, Virgil Krebs, and J. G. Moore liked the article and editorial about desegregation in Virginia while Myron Resnick thinks that desegregation will be great at some distant point in the future when we are ready. Bella Berkner liked the article about Gwen Verdon, and W. W. Gould and the Reverend Peter Mommersteeg write from the Canal Zone and 's-Hertogenbosch to tell us how much they didn't.
1955 was the stage play.
The Saudi Arabian Embassy is very upset about the recent article saying rude things about Saudi Arabia. The readers are not impressed with the press over the Lou Nova trial, nor with what they see as the tragedy of Barbara Graham. The Publisher's Letter points out that everyone who is anyone is vacationing in Europe this summer. Middle-aged men, in particular, are gawking at pretty girls in Rome and "playing at being matadors" at Madrid's new bullfighting cafe. My country, tis of thee . . .
National Affairs
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| Jesus Fucking Christ they actually built it. |
"The Return of Confidence" Americans are confident now because everything is going great, the President is great, and, most importantly, the first term of a Republican Presidency only led to a recession and not a depression like the nay sayers were predicting. Forward to the future! The President has also signed a three-year extensin of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Bill, allowing him to cut tariffs 5% each year in which reciprocating countries do the same thing. Joe McCarthy was humiliated in the Senate this week when he proposed a resolution demanding that the Secretary of State set an agenda for the upcoming Big Four conference, which would torpedo the conference since no-one wants an agenda to "hamstr[i]ng the anti-Communist leaders," and Lyndon Johnson forced through a vote to show that McCarthy had been abandoned by his supporters in the Senate, with Knowland, Hickenlooper, and Capehart all voting with the 77 to 4 majority. That being said, Langer, Jenner, and Malone all voted with McCarthy. The price support and supported acreage of wheat has been cut again, with an expected harvest next year of less than this year's 839 million bushels, down from 1300 million in 1952. In response to the "spring formation flights over Moscow of Russian intercontinental jet bombers," the Air Force is accelerating F-100 production, scheduling F-101 production as an "all around fighter" instead of for its intended role as a bomber escort, dropping the F-103, stepping up production of the F-104, continuing to develop the F-105,and finally producing the F-102, but will not accelerate its production, since the Air Force now prefers the F-101. The proposed Air Force summer uniform looks daft.
The U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that "the Government may not arbitrarily deprive Americans of a fundamental freedom, the right to travel," amd in so many words give Paul Robeson, Arthur Miller, and, more precisely the plaintiff, Max Schachtman, their passports back. The judges were not impressed by the argument that the Secretary of State should have "plenary, complete, and unreviewable authority" to issue and refuse passports. Bob Anderson, another of the Texas "Democrats for Eisenhower," is leaving with Ovetta Culp Hobby, and so is Secretary of the Army Robert Ten Broeck Stevens, who needs to spend more time with his money.
"Through the Looking Phone?" On the occasion of the dedication of its new Minneapolis office this week, Prudential Insurance got 14 prominent Midwesterners on the record for their predictions for 1975, when we will have automobiles on superhighways driven by electronic "automatic pilots," with humans taking over at the exists and entrances, television phones, atom-powered locomotives, an unmanned Earth satellite, atomic planes, portable two-way personal radios with television screens, and, according to Dow Chemical President Leland Doan, a "virtual revolution" in the social sphere with business taking over responsibility for the "health, insurance, estate planning, and general welfare of its employees." Dr. Charles Mayo thinks that we might cure the common cold, and the chairman of General Mills predicts a 35 hour work week and family income topping $10,000/year, home electric ovens that cook meals in minutes (primarily from frozen, canned, and irradiated food), but that people will be no happier because it won't change human nature.
Foreign News
Nehru's state visit to Russia is the lead story because nothing happened, which is a relief to Time, which presumably was worried that Nehru might declare a global crusade against the Capitalist West. We catch up with the fall of one Italian cabinet and the rise of another that fortunately rejected some people's notion that the government might secure the Communists' vote on internal reforms, as that would obviously lead towards Communism. (Well, that's not actually wrong!) Our departure from Southampton is third-page Foreign News news! It's even ahead of the latest study to study doing something about the House of Lords not doing anything!
"Dolorous Situation" The situation in North Africa is, Faure told the Assembly this week, "dolorous." The murder of Jacques Lemaigre-Debrueil has some people wondering just exactly how much "savage repression" should be allowed to go on over there. No change is to be allowed in France's position in Morocco, he explained, but the French administration there will be completely changed. In Algeria, fighter-bombers, parachutists, and motorised infantry were used in the countryside, and mass roundups in the cities were used to help Algerians advance towards peace, security, liberty, and prosperity. Raymond Aron gets a box story on one page and a typographical monstrosity of a single column on the opposite page to obliquely concede that France is giving up on Tunisia and will give up on Morocco, but is definitely not giving up on a "Franco-Algerian state." Alexandre Vexliard has discovered that the bums of Paris, les clochards, are mostly head cases. Time has an interesting piece about the drive for a Sikh state in the Indian Punjab. Pakistan, Time notices, seems to be sliding towards dictatorship. The Philippines continue to push for war reparations from Japan, which has rejected the latest draft of a Soviet-Japanese peace treaty. Some kind of scandalous affair (involving shooting rather than the tender passions) seems to be consuming the tight-knit ruling class of Liberia. The Malayan Communists are suing for peace, and a box story reports press reactions to the UN's ten-year anniversary, which don't really seem worth an attempt to summarise. In this hemisphere, Peron's entire Cabinet has resigned, but he's still there. Venezuela has lots of European immigrant labour. The latest CP liner, The Empress of Britain, launched this week.
Business
Construction is doing even better than optimistic predictions, but there might be too many cars on the market. INdustry is worried that the guaranteed annual wage will spread. Foreign-owned Mexican public utilities are starting to show better returns now that the Mexican government is giving them money.
Time Clock reports that steel negotiations are at a critical phase, National and American have ordered the first American jet transports, with verbal orders for 4 DC-8s from National and "possibly as many as" 25 from American. US industry will need $215 billion in capital to reach "projected economic levels" in 1965, and can only raise $215 billion from earnings. Walt Disney and Davy Crockett Enterprises have settled their lawsuit over the rights to use the name. The Hoover Commission has recommended that the Federal government get out of public power as soon as possible, and in the mean time raise Bonneville and TVA rates to those charged by public utilities and make everyone pay more for irrigation, flood-control and such as they are benefitting from creeping socialism. Furniture prices are "way up" due to the rising price of wood. Chance Vought's XF8U-1 is a hot ship, serves United Aircraft right for cutting them loose. The Justice Department has settled out of court with the Kulukundis clan over their (I guess we say "alleged" now?) freighter ownership-related mischief making.
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| It's about tractors mostly. Pictures are great, though. |
The Next Twelve Months predicts that defence spending will remain stable, that the federal budget will remain in slight surplus with $6 billion for tax cuts in 1957, capital outlay will taper off by mid-56, inventories will grow by $5 billion through next spring with growth then tapering off, construction will stabilise, prices will rise 2%, wages by 6%, income by $15 billion, personal savings by $7 billion, consumer spending will rise by value, fall by volume, credit will tighten, and exports rise somewhat. ($1 billion/year on a base of $12 billion in 1954.)
"Sun Electricity" Bell's silicon solar battery has fired up "science fictionists" and left the solar system abuzz with solar-powered space ships, "[t]rimming their silicon sails to catch the sunlight," while more practical minds turn to, well, practical things like those remote phone relays. The current solar batteries require a great deal of highly purified and carefully grown silicon, and the chief practical use for them right now seems to be for powering relays, electronic instruments, and small radio transmitters. In the future they will be rugged and cheap, and perhaps even be sprayable, and a house coated with a crystalline silicon varnish might generate all the electricity it needed when the sun was shining.
"Vaccine Safety" Should inoculation with the Salk vaccine continue? A committee of 26 polio and public-health experts agree with the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis that they should. But when Tennessee's James Percy Priest called "15 topflight vaccine experts" before the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Subcommittee on Health and Science, he got some very different answers. Albert Sabine continues to criticise vaccines made with the inactivated virus, believing that they cannot currently be made safe. So do John F. Enders and William McD. Hammon. The witnesses polled 8-3 in favour of the Salk vaccine. The open question is whether the vaccine can be made safely. The Canadians evidently can make it safely, by producing small batches in laboratories following "rigid university standards," specifically the University of Toronto's Connaught Medical Research Laboratory, which was set to work by the Canadian government last fall and so has been able to meet the requirement for 900,000 doses without hurrying. The Canadian vaccines are also injected subcutaneously, which seems safer. 
"The Regenerating Bladder" Bladders regenerate, it says here, but only to some extent, and Drs. Arthur Waite Bohne, Paul Jackson Hettle, and Robert Wallace Osborne, have found a surgical intervention that will replace chronically infected bladders with newly-regenerated ones by inserting a thing which is explained at length lest one mistake it for a mold, but effectively for the regenerating bladder to grow around. Doctors are not sure how this happens, or they would do it all the time. 
Capsules reports that 1.5 million U.S. smokers have quit in the last eighteen months, that one in every ten soldiers and airmen have the wrong blood type on their dog tags, that parents should stop worrying about eye strain, that two doctors are appealing in the Journal of the AMA for identical twin leukemia cases to research its genetic factors.
The Cold Spring Institute seems like a good place for giving retirees a chance to go back to school. The Public Education Association may disband and wind up its affairs because it has no members any more. The New York City School Board has told the Regents that a 27% pass rate on the history exam means that there is something wrong with the exam, not their students. Much laughter and derision. Who doesn't know the details of the Maximilian Affair? Meanwhile Gallup is for some reason surveying the geographical knowledge of U.S. college graduate and finding it wanting.
Art, Press, Radio and Television, People
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| The Staircase Group is his most technically accomplished painting. |
"Censorship at the Pentagon" Yes. The question is whether there should be more of it, or less of it. The answer to this is also "yes." Karl Honaman, who was brought in from Bell Labs to accomplish this, and who must be trustworthy considering that he wears a bow tie, is in increasing trouble with the press for not doing it. Or doing it! Either way. The Fort Worth Star Telegram gets a profile story.
Molotov won't be on Face the Nation after all, after negotiations on the interview format broke down. Time's TV critic thinks that I Love Lucy is running out of gas, but See It Now's Ralph Bunche interview was good and the 3 for Tonight special was pretty refreshing, and had Harry Belafonte. So was the U.S. Steel-sponsored drama, Red Gulch, and Alexander Korda's Richard III. MGM is going to have a clip show, the $64,000 Question sure is something,
Richard Nixon, various royals, Sir Winston Churchill, U Nu, and Westbrook Pegler are in the column for the usual reasons. Sheikh Ahmed Salem is in it for being Egypt's shortest man, Minot Jelke for being what would be news if we weren't tired of him, and Joan Diener for standing next to U Nu in quite the outfit for a picture that does not do her justice. Ann Clark Rockefeller, Adlai Stevenson III, Richard S. Aldrich, and George Jean Nathan(!) are married. James Roosevelt is divorced. Borrah Minevitch, Silliman Evans, Lloyd Paul Stryker, Alexander Antonovich Troyanovsky, and Amon G. Carter have died.
(Mainly a Broadway figure, she was in Man of La Mancha, which doesn't seem to be clipped on Youtube.)
After a breezy article about the state of the Western, The New Pictures covers Stanley Kramer's two hour drama about doctors, Not As a Stranger at three column length, as it is Time's kind of picture. If you know what I mean!
Books
Time, 7 July 1955
Letters
Two correspondents think that if there's one thing the don't criticise Peron for, it's fighting the Argentinian Church, but one, actually in Argentina, reports that Time's reporting is pretty popular in Argentina! David Eggenberger points out that no-one knows who designed the Stars & Stripes, although Fred Breitzke of Little Rock reports that it is the old Washington coat of arms, based on a stained-glass window in Windermere. Of the four letters about the profile of Walter Reuther, I note Yeoman First Class James M. Noble for suggesting that if Walter Reuther's assailant had taken better aim, "America would not now be headed straight down the drain." Marilynn Young writes in support of leash laws. Felix Hirsch and the Editor get into an argument about an old German song. David B. Jackson of Evanston is upset at Senator Johnson for involving himself in air traffic control. The authors of a book about Patillo Higgins write to celebrate the memory of Patillo Higgins. Three of four correspondents writing about the article about Cutter Laboratories think that it does a great job. Raymond Thorpe of Los Angeles writes that considering the King of Iraq wants a Bowie knife, here's a story about years ago, before the war. Our Publisher underlines just how cozy Time's Dallas bureau chief is with the Busch family.
National Affairs
Utah just executed its thirty-fifth death row inmate since territorial status, including Joe Hill, by firing squad, as is the usual but not invariable practice. Some people say that it's a barbaric practice! The Steelworkers have a new contract after a twelve hour strike.
Foreign News
Let's talk about the Big Four Conference some more! Nehru is in Yugoslavia. Something's up with that guy! Portugal's Air Force just celebrated its new F-84s by flying eight of them into the ground and wiping out 20% of its air force.
Business
Per the Publisher's Letter, here's the profile of the Busch family, which has a major brewery, a big beer brand, and a baseball team. Time Clock reports that Ford and GM are considering stock purchase plans, North American Airlines, the President's atoms for peace, and fair trade laws are in trouble. Royal Little is still bidding for control of Textron. Plastic prices are falling as Union Carbide production increases, the paper industry is merging in all directions, and the US Agriculture Department is finding more evidence of potato price fixing.
Science, Medicine, Education
"Diggers" The excavations at the capital of the Bronze Age Hittite Empire are old news, but since they turned up a giant collection of clay tablets, there was an even bigger backlog of reading to be done than the night before the California Bar Exam. (I KID, I KID!) One mystery that came up in the readings was the location of the Kingdom of Arzawa, the Hittite's rival. Archaeologist James Mellaart now believes he has found it. Astronomers William Miller and Fred Hoyle have decided that a pictogram in the Arizona desert could show Arizona Indians' response to the supernova of 1054AD. Max Renner and his bees catch some more coverage. Fritz Zwicky of Aerojet has had his security clearance taken away because he is not an American citizen.
Dr. Robert Harrington of Los Angeles Orthopaedic Hospital is having some success treating cerebral palsy patients with respirators, which relieve the anxiety the patients feel when trying to talk and draw breath at the same time. Lung cancer has been advancing so quickly in the fifteen countries where records are kept that it is fair to call lit an epidemic. Experts point out that this is because tobacco use is increasing, but the WHO's head statistician points out that the statistical basis of the records is so different between countries that you can't actually prove that right now, so smoke 'em if you got 'em! The Federal Government has taken responsibility for Indian health care away from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and given it the U.S. Public Health Service because the Bureau was doing a terrible job. (But there are excuses to be made, and here they are.) Capsules reports new tissue culture methods for diagnosing paralytic polio, progress in growing polio viri in cultured human cells, a relationship between aspirin use and severe ulcer symptoms, more progress in treating mental illness with chlorpromazine and reserpine, and the discovery that a surprisingly high proportion of female infertility is due to malnutrition, including vitamin intake deficiencies.
There hasn't been a story about Berea College for far too long. Let's fix that! A Japanese prince of the blood is teaching history at Tokyo Women's Christian College, leading us to remind us that Japan is a very peculiar country! Youthful hoodlums vandalised a Buffalo high school last week, the twelfth Buffalo school to be attacked since last February. New York City is "gradually abandon[ing]" automatic promotion. University of Wisconsin PR man Clarence Schoenfeld thinks that university PR men aren't doing a good job these days because no-one hears anything from the universities, which is obviously not because professors have been intimidated into silence, but rather that university PR men are stifling them. Hmm! The University of Birmingham has been told that it has to admit Coloured people because that's what the Fourteenth Amendment says.
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| Pierre Auguste Renoir, En Travestie (1875/6) |
Art, Press, Radio and Television, People
Renoir is the best kind of artist. He's dead, and collectors love him. He's having a retrospective show at the LA County Museum this month. Time is almost moved to get the title of his paintings right. Japan is still a peculiar country because a flower arranger, specifically Teshigahara Sofu, is a famous artist there.
Confidential is quite the magazine, what with all the "smut, innuendo and speculation." The American Newspaper Guild has decided not to defend the employment rights of members who are "admitted or proven" Communist Party members.
NBC Radio's Biographies ran a great installment about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, which is as good a reason as any to run a capsule profile of the Fitzgeralds. Time likes NBC's new documentary series, Wide, Wide World, hosted by David Garroway.
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| I don't want to get into Royal Family coverage, but Time's tone has been on the condescending side, which has maybe dropped out of the Zeitgeist. |
GRIGORY Alexandrovich Gamburtsev invented some kind of seismometer, I read.
The New Pictures
After some Cinema reporting about Disneyland's gigantic amusement park that will open next month in Anaheim, we hear about Universal's This Island Earth, Parmount's The Seven Little Foys, and Walt Disney's Lady and the Tramp. The science fiction movie takes too long to get going before the space battles and mutant attacks begin, the new Bob Hope film features Hope and James Cagney dancing, and after that who needs a movie, and we've already heard about the Walt Disney animated movie that Time didn't like any more than Newsweek. 
Books
Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen gets the column title "Knighthood Deflowered," because he seems to be losing his edge and getting too political. Anthony Glyn's biography of his grandmother, Elinor Glyn explains that she was actually just a nice Victorian lady. Well, I mean, everybody's grandmother turns into a nice old lady eventually. BUT! It's a really long review, because people are in danger of forgetting the "Original 'It' Girl." Fuchida Mitsuo and Okumiya Masatake have Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan which Time takes rather more at face value than Uncle George.
Fortune's Wheel reports that Fortune's production team works very hard because Fortune is a very expensive magazine to produce and it is getting a new gravure press tht can do colour on both sides of the page. You know what this means? The cover price is going up!
Letters
Leaders
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| The mid-Fifties idea of chief executive luxury is pretty modest. |
Duncan Norton-Taylor reports on "How Top Executives Live" Quite well, thank you. Aren't you jealous? You should be! Actually it isn't nearly as nice as during the Gilded Age. Forty-thousand dollar houses are not multi-million dollar mansions. Except in San Francisco.
Robert E. Sherwood, "There Is No Alternative To Peace" Don't you miss the days when Fortune was a general interest magazine printing high-minded articles by famous playwrights and highbrow book reviews? At least we got rid of the book reviews! Disarmament is good, by the way. Especially when it means tax cuts!
Gilbert Burck, "The American Genius for Productivity: The New Economy, VII" Etc, etc. It's the American Way!
Major General William Donovan, "Our Stake in Thailand" Are the Communists advancing? The Communists are advancing! Those people who say that the Thai government is a bunch of authoritarian thugs cruising for trouble? They're probably communists, too.
"Box Score of American Business" Are American companies big? They're so big! Also, William Harris of Tecumseh (a refrigerator compressor maker) gets a profile, and another friend of Henry's provides a luscious portfolio of artistically shot tools. Seriously: A full page spread of a crescent wrench. I don't have a sweet deal like Uncle George used to arrange. I pay for my subscription now!
Francis Bello, "Lightweight Trains: At Last" ACF's Talgo passenger trains are neat. Several American firms, including the C.&O., the Pennsylvania, Budd, GE, and the Santa Fe are working on competitors after ACF's first two American sales. But the airlines are going to win this one, looks like.
The Engineer, 1 and 8 July 1955
(Not the Seven Day-) Journal reports for the 1st on the launch of the Empress of Britain, adding to the Time coverage some technical details about its 380,00 cubic feet of uncontrolled and 46,000 cubic feet of refrigerated hold. (This is, incidentally, the first fully air-conditioned liner), and uses double-reduction turbine gears with 650lb/850 degree Foster Wheeler boilers and full reheat. Details of the newly announced LMR modernisation include modern carriage cleaning depots at Kirkdale and Birkenhead, £275,000 for a new signal box at Pancras Station with 220 route functions and thirty-three point functions, and colour light signalling, power-operated points and track circuiting. The DSIR Forest Products Research 1954 Report has some interesting details about boards made by chips of various tropical hardwoods as well as on things like nailing Doulas firs that reminds us about how fundamental questions still need answering. The British Transport Commission has announced £500,000 in internal waterways improvements and is looking at about as much more in proposals. Babcock and Wilcox, English Electric, and Taylor Woodrow are forming a group to complete gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors.
On the 8th, we note the 1954 report of the Fuel Research Board, which has been working on coal-fired turbines, the emulsification of oil in seawater, nd the room-heating efficiencies of various methods, among other things. Lloyd's Register's new Register Book is out this week, and from now on will have a monthly supplement. A historical exhibit of transportation in Northern Ireland is on in Belfast, with dugout canoes, safety bicycles, locomotives, that sort of thing. A technical committee has been formed by the Ministry of Housing to look at the disposal of storm water via sewers. London Transport is building another subway.
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| One of the first plants to the Pametrada standard of design |
On the 8th, The Engineer goes to look at models at the Institution of Civil Engineers Conversazione and summarises the annual report for 1954 of the Mechanical Engineering Research Board. It has been particularly interested in fatigue, creep, lubrication, wear, and the performance of oil-hydraulic systems. This does not quite make up a page, so Sheppard and Sons of Brighton are invited to describe their machinery for continuous casting of zinc ingots, and in particular polished slab-type ingots. A neat little contraption for surveying mine shafts optically, developed for the NCB by J. E. Bellis, is described in two paragraphs to fill out the page.
Below the fold, on the 1st, Harry Railing's presidential address to the British Electrical Power Convention is extracted. Sir Harry points out that for the British standard of living to double in the next twenty years, as seems in prospect. A naive assessment is that electrical power generation must double, although Sir Harry thinks that various trends mean that a 50% increase is more in line. Does that mean that the amount of coal lifted in Britain must increase to 350 million tons in 1975? No, there is oil firing, although that requires importing oil, nuclear fission, which is not as economical as some suggest, nuclear fusion, which is not very realistic due to the enormous temperatures at which it occurs and the lack of any means to contain the reactions, and, most excitingly solar power. Electrical transmission has a ways to go, and the transformation of Britain's economic geography by means of the National Grid is ongoing. (In other words, the North is going to get poorer.)
Below the fold on the 8th is a survey "Study of Engineering History," by Professor Aubrey Burstall of King's College, Newcastle, which is a curriculum for such a course rather than a page-and-a-half summary of the subject as one might think. For history we have a lecture on a de Havilland "aerial torpedo" that tackled the problem of guided-missile control gear years ago, before the war.
Spindle moulding machines, water-activated batteries, and a "cross-country vehicle" are described in advertorials from Robinson and Sons, Chloride Industries, and Nicholas Strausser. 
Continental Engineering News reports on the 8th from a new German-Austrian hydroelectric power station on the Danube and a conference on European inland waterways mainly concerned with pollution and international licensing.
R. S. Mariner, "Performance Tests on Indentors for Rockwell Hardness Testing" appears below the fold on the 8th.
The American Scene inquires into the possibility of more dams on the Colorado, specifically the Upper Colorado Project, which is opposed both for conservation reasons, and because Federal dams are socialism, and because the irrigation water is too expensive. We also visit Babcock & Wilcox to see them extruding stainless and hot alloy steel tubing, observe the overland movement of the steamer Ticonderoga, which is being towed on specially laid railway tracks from the shores of Lake Champlain to a museum in Burlington. Maryland is laying a trench tunnel in Baltimore harbour, with the actual tunnel to be carried in stainless steel tube sections fabricated on land and then dropped into the tunnel, and as part of the celebrations of the Big Four meeting, there is to be an exhibit of a working American nuclear reactor in Geneva. Pelton has a very impressive dynamic balancing machine at its San Francisco works, and in Texas, ,because of course Texas, there is now a pedestrian overhead walkway with a moving pavement made by Link Belt of Chicago. On the 8th, American Section is mainly interested in the proposed Indian Point atomic power station for New York. The National Bureau of Standards has built a high speed, automatic coin weighing machine for the Treasury.
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| Smuggler Mine, near Telluride, Colorado |
Leaders
On the 1st, The Engineer considers the National Coal Board's annual report. We are back to worrying about coal due to a slight fall in production last year resulting in the need to import 6 million tons. There are signs that hiring is improving, on the bright side, but then one acknowledges that boys shouldn't be going into coal mining, and that there are plenty of better jobs needing doing, and it is back to gloom, although new pits are finally being dug, and here and there there are other improvements in coal washing and so on, and, of course, there is economy. The Commons debated labour disputes and what to do with them and got nowhere. On the 8th, The Engineer turns to railway development and the "Survival of the Paddle," or, in other words, not to be cute, the paddle steamer. the former is actually a summary of an article by Colonel S. H. Bingham of the New York City Transit Authority which calls American attention to the British Transport Commission's plans for development in Britain as an example for Americans to follow. The Engineer points out that this seems unlikely given how different American conditions. In particular, using fewer, longer, trains with diesel-electric and cutting the number of tracks in use just doesn't seem practical in Europe.
Letters
On the 1st, C. J. Potts writes in with some measured caution about the extent to which automation will actually relieve work and raise wages; and Cedric Marsh has some technical opinions about tall stacks swaying in the wind. On the 8th, B. B. Overy offers a technical letter commenting on some recent papers on creep, while R. Abbott corrects and expands his historical article about vertical boiler locomotives. 
Industrial and Labour Notes for the 1st discusses discussions of labour relations, looks into scientific management and labour unions, finds that U.K. engineering exports are buoyant, that capital investment is good, and that effective use of the small gains in coal mining labour might secure another 2.5 million tons, but the main hope must be more ton per miner. On the 8th we worry about coal some more, note that even though Britain is doing well on wages and cost of living impacts on export prices, its competitors are doing even better. The end of the docks strike is noticed, and there are some short notes on wage rates and a review of trade disputes in May, when there were 257 stoppages. No less than twelve Launches and Trial Trips on the 1st, although this includes French yards. nine motor ships and boats, three steam ships and boats. Two tankers, two cargo liners, one cargo ship, one gas carrier, one ore carrier, one trawler, two tugs. One minesweeper and one patrol boat, six British, six French. Not surprisingly after that spree, there are no Launches and Trial Trips on the 8th.
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