Postblogging Technology, December 1954, II: The Big Gamble

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada


Dear Father:

As is by now my tradition of many years, I am writing a "letter" that I will be leaving on my pillow at the knock on the door. And because it is a tradition, I don't even have to apologise any more! I should probably put something embarrassing in here that you can read when I am already halfway to Kelowna, and if I can think of anything embarrassing, it will certainly go in!

Your Loving Daughter,


Ronnie

PS: Please call Bill Radford and tell him not to start WWIII, since for some reason we seem to have decided that the chain of command runs from the senior senator from California to the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and apparently only Matt Ridgeway stands in the way, President be damned.  It's not that World War III won't be terrible. It's that it will be so embarrassing to explain how it happened to the children of a future generation. 

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?

This is a map that does a terrible job of showing why I have a neighbourly and proprietary interest in the settlement that gives Quatsino Sound its name. In  my childhood it was linked to the rest of the world by a water taxi service from Port Alice, and we used to do weekend school trips there on the taxi to give the old day school and its aging staff of Catholic priests some purpose in their latter days, long story short. The actual Quatsino community was mostly Kwakiutl (not Kwakwaka'wakw per the band) associated by default with the Fort Rupert community in Port Hardy, and probably descended from the community that ran the Newhitty port of trade that used to compete with the old Hudson's Bay Company in the maritime fur trade. 

The perhaps under-reported implications of the genetic difference studies is the collapse of migrationist explanations of the spread of the Iron Age. We're seeing something like that occur in real time on Northern Vancouver Island as the European settler populations basically give up and leave the region. This post is another exercise in reading backwards, inspired by a recent trip (my first, at the age of 60! It was a family thing) to UBC's Museum of Anthropology. 

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

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. 

The Comet Inquiry: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1954

 

On 2 March 1954, Tudor I G-AGRI, belonging to a young Freddie Laker's Air Charter, Ltd, was flying 9500ft near Paris on a freight trip from London to Bahrein when it entered cloud. Slight icing was experienced, and the de-icing and anti-icing systems were deployed, due to which the Indicated Air Speed fell from 155 to 135 kt. The captain maintained altitude via electronic control. This capability, built into the Tudor's SEP4 by its now forgotten manufacturer, Smith's Instruments, was developed from the military requirement a bomber's bombsight be able to fly the plane in the targeting run. It was enormously convenient to be able to correct course and altitude via a single knob, or "joystick," as we would say now, but it was also fuel efficient. Taking the plane off autopilot would inevitably lead to course and engine power adjustments, and gas is money. This might, in fact, be why Captain J. M. Carreras did not increase engine power, although the final report notes that "He did not again consult the airspeed indicator." (It is likely that there was no stall warning indicator, as these were facing resistance from the aviation community. At this point, "[n]oticing that the autopilot was applying large aileron corrections and that the directional gyro indicated a turn to port," the captain disengaged the autopilot, with the disruptive results noted, and "the aircraft made a rapid descent in a spiral manoeuvre." The fact that, contrary to regulations, neither pilot was strapped in at the time might explain much of this if we had any clarity about what was going on in the cabin at the time.    

Later in the report, we learn that "[t]his resulted in an increase in the angle of attack until flying speed was lost." Saying things without wasting sentences is why we invent new words, and in this case I am lost as to why the word isn't "stall." The upshot is that Carreras regained control and pulled out at 2500ft and the plane continued on its merry way to its refuelling stop in Malta, a flight distance of 2000km, at which point the airframe was "found to be severely overstressed." The airframe dossier says that it was scrapped "circa October 1956."

The relevance of this anecdote is that the Tudor was originally ordered as an interim long range large airliner for the "charters," that is, BOAC and the short-lived British South American Airlines that was for some reason, probably related to possible dollar earnings, created alongside BOAC. The Tudor I, with grossly inadequate seating, was followed by the stretched Tudor II, of which BOAC ordered 79 before returning it to the shop for poor "hot and high" capability, which, for the British aviation historian, will trigger memories of the VC10, or the Ensign, for us antiquarians. The Tudor IIs were on their way to becoming something like the Tudor IVs improvised out of some of the initial Tudor Is for BSAA when BSAA began losing scheduled services for never-explained reasons over the Atlantic: Star Tiger and Star Ariel in January of 1948 and 1949 respectively, with a total of 51 people on board. The plane was withdrawn from service, BSAA closed up shop, and the remaining Tudor Is/IVs sold off for freight or occasionally chartered passenger service. 

If at this point you're thinking about tapping the screen where the title says "Comet Inquiry," you're just going to have to wait for the break, because all this talk about air disasters is a great excuse to post

 

Postblogging Technology, November 1954, II: Flying in the Grass

Because of boundary layer control

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

The cat is truly out of the bag after Senator Knowland's floor speech, of which I am glad that someone had the consideration to give us all of five minutes warning so that we could get well clear of our apartment before anyone was curious enough to look in at us. We are now in transit to Hong Kong with the understanding that we are not wanted in London until January. Which means last minute Christmas plans, if you haven't let James' room to a lodger yet.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, November 1954: Buy Now, Pay Later!

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada



Dear Father:

Since James and I are a bit worried about our letters being intercepted, I will answer a possibly sensitive question here instead of by post. We do not know when we might be going back to London. We expect we will. We have seen no reason to think that the holdup on cooling down the Qemoy crisis was anything but politics, and that a Democratic victory won't mean a prompt cooling of the Straits crisis. At the same time, those poor Russian sailors are not going to be released soon. They've become an issue in internal Koumintang politics. Whether the crisis will be sorted out, therefore, depends on whether Moscow is willing to swallow the insult. I'd like to say that I have a line on Russia's man in Taipei, but I have no idea how much to credit him. He might be some kind of confidence man, so I am being very cautious. The Koumintang is more than ordinarily enthusiastic about shooting each other down by the water at the moment, so everyone is being understandably close lipped except the people being inexplicably garrulous. So all I can say is that if I know anything, Moscow will. If I don't, all I can say is read the papers for yourself.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Aswan and Wittfogel: A Technological and History of Technology Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1954

Britannica. Which lifted it from Shutterstock, how the mighty have fallen, etc. 

The Aswan high dam is one of the biggest dams in the world, which is understandable, since it controls one of the world's most important rivers, although one with perhaps a bit less volume at the outlet than I expected. 

So, yeah, thought I'd start with negging the Nile. I'll let you all know if it decides to date me. The numbers, per Wikipedia, if you're a dam fan, which no-one is except when they're visiting them because civil engineering is boring unless you're there to see it is that it is 111m high and 3,830m long, and because it is an earth embankment dam, it is a kilometer wide at its base. It has an installed generating capacity of 2100 MW, which isn't actually that much by a jaded BCer's perspective. The Revelstoke Dam generates more current, and even the Keenleyside flood control dam at Castlegar that plays an important role in the tech blogging "story" such as it is by flooding beachfront Nakusp on its 1968 completion, still has a 185MW capacity.  This is because its main purpose is to regulate the flooding of the Nile, for which reason it impounds a 5250 square kilometer, entirely within the boundaries of Egypt, and it is the most historically consequential dam on the world's most historically consequential river.

The introduction to the Wikipedia article notes that it exists in large part for political reasons. The British had a plan to manage the Nile with sacrificial zones in Sudan and Ethiopia, to which Nasser and his colleagues said, "Thanks, but no thanks," which, given the historical reluctance of upstream authorities to sacrifice sacrifice zones when sacrificing is called for, seems like it was a wise choice notwithstanding the high evaporation rate off the Aswan reservoir.

In terms of its political history, there is a lot of meat on the High Aswan Dam bone. Were I to write about that, there are many satisfactory blog-sized conclusions that could be drawn, such as that John Foster Dulles was preposterously unqualified for his role; that the China Lobby is enough to have you rethinking the Great Terror (We could use a man like Robespierre today!); that, er, something about the post-Six Days War territorial settlement in the Middle East (Erik looks around, cringing pathetically); that imperialism is bad.

I do want to talk about politics, but not those politics, even if I come around to the margins of my cringe, because civil engineering is boring, and so people just can't help talking around it, and if it isn't geology and geography, it is . . .well, it's something that hopefully some scholar of science fiction has put a name to and received tenure for, because it's goldarned important, the usurpation of reality by a story that scratches the science fiction itch, and that's as felicitously as I can think to put this insight.

Postblogging Technology, October 1954, II: The Miracle of Transistors

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

We have had an exciting few weeks as various European diplomatic efforts and one American one have inserted themselves in our little Crisis. We got to show the French the Tuapse detainees, which drew some looks from one fellow, who seems to have been a China hand who  has talked to people who perhaps do not have the family's best interests at heart, but there is some urgency to the action, as the Europeans do not have a feel for American politics and find it hard to believe that a single mid-term election could end the McCarthy era at a stroke. WE can hardly argue the point without raising questions about just who we are, so hopefully someone else has. I wish I could coach them. While Lindley is a nepotism hire at Newsweek, he's perfectly right that any prediction based on historical that Eisenhower will lose in '56 if the Democrats take the Senate is stuff and nonsense. It is hard to see the way that the Democrats are falling in line behind Stevenson as anything as conceding in advance. The idea is that if Kefauver really wants to be President, he needs to be thinking about beating Nixon in '60. But what I want to ask is how likely it is that Ike will even run in '56 given his health. He really doesn't seem to be enjoying being President right now. Sherman Adams might be able to carry the load when the GOP holds Congress,but he is not going to enjoy tussling with the Democratic leadership in the back half of his term, so why try for another? 

Anyway, that's my thought. Hopefully this Crisis wraps up before Christmas.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

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.

Postblogging Technology, October 1954, I: Brain Child in Long Pants

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

It seems as though I will be writing a fairly short note this week with very little to say about exciting family news or world events. I would like to blame the press of very important business, but in fact everything has screeched to a halt as we wait for the results of the Congressional elections. If Knowland isn't the Senate Majority Leader this time next month, we can start winding things down. If he is, you probably need to buy a bomb shelter and a Geiger counter. (Or just move house to Nakusp or Campbell River. That works, too!)

Oh? My excuse! I was doing very important things that didn't involve dandling around the house, sleeping in and then playing with my children. Very important things indeed! 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

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.

This is a "Garden pavilion celebrating the origins of Classical architecture, designed by Gervase Jackson-Stops with Ian Kerby" www.follies.uk, July 2008." I'd like to give credit where credit is due, but the link has been redirected to some nice service offering body paint. The source from which I scraped the photo is Philip Steadman's Cabinet of Curiosities (as of date of access, https://www.philipsteadman.com/blog/greek-temples-made-of-wood/). Steadman explains that Jackson-Stops actually started work on two architectural follies in the gardens of the former Horton House, Northamptonshire, upon his 1973 purchase of the property, but does not date or otherwise attribute this very striking photograph of what a timber/wattle-and-daub precursor to a Classical Greek temple might have looked like. The columns, considering that they are made of untrimmed tree trunks, are especially striking. (And seem abundantly supported by the evidence.) Wiki gives Jackson-Stops' dates as 1947--1995, but the look of the photo, to my eye, is closer to the 1970s than the 1990s. 

Steadman blogs on architectural history and this entry covers the Classical evidence that the first generation of Greek sanctuaries were made of timber (Classical authors say so!) and more specifically that the forms, and in particular many decorative elements are skueomorphs of elements of the timber construction. This was the point at which architectural historians of the "late 19th Century" found an opportunity to stand up for the honour of Classical Antiquity and deny the legacy of an age of primitive construction methods preceding the Classical Age of Marble. Exactly how far one might want to push this is a question for someone who wants to push. I mention because it might explain why the modern conversation occasionally sounds a bit tentative. 

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. 

I have it on the good authority of Carolina Lopez-Ruiz that in the early Antique period, Gadir (Cadiz) issued coins with tuna emblems. But then I said to myself, "That's what Google Image Search is for!"

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.

Postblogging Technology, September 1954, II: Teenagers Out of Control!

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada

Dear Father:

So, here we are in Taipei carrying out OPERATION FAN OUT AND TALK EVERYONE OUT OF STARTING WWIII. (It's in capitals because it's official! In a completely unofficial "Everyone is cashiered if this gets to the press" kind of way. The dead hand of the Administration lies heavily on Taipei; there is no-one to take the reins because the President is sulking, Dulles and Knowland are idiots on collision courses, and Radford is an idiot. That leaves Felix, and even Ambassador  Rankin out on a limb. Felix has Ray Spruance's ear, and Spruance out of the public eye in Manila now that the Seato Conference is over, and has been meeting with Frank Gibbs. So, to make a long story short, we might be agents of perfidious Albion.  And everyone of any sense, really. 

We've been to Keelung, doing our best to pass as Koumintang worthies in front of the internees. My impression is that the propaganda line that the Tuapse internees have been abused, is justified. Karl is talking about sending us out to the Soviet blockade flotilla, for lack of anyone who can make an official approach. I don't know what we're supposed to do there. Knowing the Red Navy, I'm sure everyone is eager to be back in Vladivostok. It might not be much, but it's better than an extended cruise on a Soviet destroyer! But the Reds going to need one hell of an excuse to leave, and right now I have no idea what it would be. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

PS Of course all of this activity is a most excellent excuse for not bringing back Engineering and Aviation Week.