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.
Postblogging Technology, December 1955: A Heart-Warming Christmas Time
R_. C._, Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
Hopefully this, and the Christmas post accompanying, will reach you before you leave for Santa Clara, where I will see you for our a dinner which I'm sure will be as jolly as the Geneva Conference. (If I can b be Molotov, Grace has to be Dulles!)
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
The Economist, 3 December 1955
Leaders
"At the Lowest Level" Khrushchev was very rude to Britain in a speech in Bombay this week. The Economist spends a page-and-a-half working itself almost to the point of demanding that his upcoming visit to Britain be cancelled in retaliation. (Presumably this is being said somewhere else on Fleet Street and that's just too blunt for the magazine.) An almost equally lengthy Leader follows to point out that the Eden government is governing very well compared to the Churchill and even Attlee governments. An even longer Leader is upset that delegates to the General Assembly make long speeches. The final Leader, "Too Big for Their Bounds," is a bit more substantial. In the good old days of socialism and planning, the Board of Trade restricted factory licenses around London and Birmingham in favour of the distressed areas. Now, perhaps because the employment problem in the distressed areas has gone away, the Board is licensing more factories around London. However, all the Ministry of Housing's restrictions on greenbelt development and so on are still in place, so housing is not keeping pace. The Economist thinks that the two ministries should be on the same page.
Notes
Labour isn't using its current internal peace to move right fast enough. Members of Parliament have very strong opinions about television broadcasts of Commons debates. A. J. P. Taylor is involved in ways that don't even need explaining, they are so obvious. Something about tax reform. Things keep getting worse in Cyprus. In Germany, there are frictions between the Western powers and Soviets in Berlin over its divided status and a cabinet crisis in Bonn, while in Britain all eyes are on the Greenock byelection, national assistance rates are to be increased, potato growers are protesting potato imports but their arguments are "flagrant nonsense." People aren't sure what the "Commonwealth" is, which is news because Malaya and Singapore are fussing over it. There have been some political troubles in Hungary, although I confess that my eyes would not focus on the marching text. Hungarians are poor, and there is some debate over whether one is to be more upset at a person named Nagy, or one named Rakosi, which might be more helpful if those weren't the names of roughly every second Hungarian. [A year of this to go.] Just a reminder that people in the subcontinent are upset about Kashmir, which is why it is of some moment that Khrushchev made a provocative speech about it.
The story of how local authorities extract discount prices for school milk is a parable about the virtues of free bargaining, The Economist concludes. Universities aren't expanding their buildings enough to accommodate the coming increase in enrollment; but this is just a "bulge" that will begin to subside after about 1970, so Sir James Montford suggests either raising enrollment standards, or starting to build for the bulge quickly. The point about having too many buildings after about 1970 or so isn't addressed, but I suppose they will be ready to come down by then, and be replaced by whatever we need by then. Personal heliports? Politicians in the Gold Coast are squabbling about the terms of independence. Germans are taking deflationary measures, just like the British, and bankers in the two countries are talking. Politicians in Buganda are fighting, etc. Politicians in South Africa . . . I'm not even sure that The Economist realises that it is essentially just running "sports teams are playing games" stories here. At least a real sports reporter tells you the names of the teams and who won! (The Economist settles for telling you why these stories mean that Britain is right.) The Home Office has noticed that the civil defence corps barely exists and is seeking to find a "realistic middle course between inertia and hysteria." The services' difficulties keeping track of their stores is either terrible or no big deal, or, a wiser head calmy concludes, both! This seems like another of those bits in the magazine that respond to controversies in the lesser press without explaining them. If I were still in London, I probably could explain, but I'm not, so I can't. Aylmer Vallance has died. The Economist remembers him as stimulating company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_of_Corsica
From The Economist of 1855 comes "Talks With the Russians." Some people say that Our Editor's lovely war seems to be ending. They are stupid and wrong. This war can never end until Russia is rendered "permanently" unable to make trouble!
Letters
Edward Copely of the Federation of Calico Printers explains the Federation's position on winding up of the industry, which differs from that of the Board of Trade. D. E. W. Gibb explains that some doctors oppose the ban on heroin because they consider it a good drug for pain management. "Industrialist" is pretty sure that the "additional allowance" paid to civil servants on retirement is excessive. Ronald Gould of the National Union of Teachers explains why teacher pensions are not excessive. R. C. M. Collard explains that there is more money in branch airlines than international and that it is finally time for a DC3 replacement.
Books
John Evelyn Wrench finally gives us a biography of Geoffrey Dawson. It turns out that the arch-appeasing long-time editor of The Times was a toffee-nosed twat! Burnham Putnam Beckwith (which is a real name!) explains Marginal-Cost Price-Output Control. The reviewer really didn't like it, even if the subject badly needed a treatment. "In an imperfectly competitive economy where a high proportion of industries work in a condition of decreasing cost, prices set to cover total outlay must largely exceed the cost of marginal item produced; since these prices cut off a demand capable, by hypothesis, of being satisfied by a lesser expenditure of real resources than that which they indicate, there ensues an irrational under-use of fixed equipment and a distortion of the economy." Francesca Wilson has edited Strange Island: Britain Through Foreign Eyes, 1395--1940," which sounds like, and apparently is, a fun book. J. F. C. Horsfall's Australia explains the desert continent of convicts and kangaroos. Horsfall is an economist, and is mainly devoted to explaining why Australia isn't the United States, even though they are both big. It's the desert and the sheep (which are bad), but also it has too much government and not enough capital. F. G. Walton and Henry Chapin team up for The Sun, The Sea, and Tomorrow, which is about the vast wealth that modern science is poised to win from the sea, but unfortunately was written by two vulgar Americans. Peter Rudland's Scribble to Script is an entire book about improving handwriting.
American Survey
"Democratic Manager" A look at Lyndon Johnson's approach to making the Democratic Party "a progressive party without being radical, a prudent party without being reactionary," to set up its platform for '56 and also maybe get immigration reform and more public housing through Congress this session. He also wants money for land reclamation and flood control, which might get through now that it is the backyards of influential New England senators and not a "giveaway" to the South, and he's on the decontrolling-natural-gas side of the divide from Senator Douglas and others who can portray it as a giveaway to private interests.
"Controversy Goes to School" The Economist explains how the conference to discuss school funding is actually a conspiracy by the Federal government to take over local schooling and how the President is going to sidestep the conspiracy by just giving the money to local authorities. And not a single word about segregation!
"Tax Experts" The Economist summarises the Joint Committee on the Economic Report's recent compendium of expert views on American taxation and tax policy. The consensus of the experts is that while local and state taxes are still moderately regressive and a burden on the economy, the Federal government is heavily dependent on income taxes, and its present structure is good for the economy, while the total tax intake of 30% is entirely bearable, and, if anything, good for the economy. In other economic news, United Steel has reported record profits and steel production and demand is up, so now a total expansion of 3m tons productive capacity is under way. The recent finding that British sewer pipes being imported into California by Californian builders (shippers don't like pipes as cargoes, so it is up to the buyers to ensure that the cargo sells) is still somehow dumping is very alarming. American politics get in the way of free trade!
"War on the Columbia" The state of play is that the first third of the Columbia, and about a third of its outlet flow, are Canadian, and that Uncle Henry has Victoria's permission for a storage dam on the Arrow Lakes to regulate flow and increase the power available to his aluminum plants, but the matter when up to Ottawa, and now General McNaughton has proposed a tunnel from the Columbia to the North Thompson to divert a quarter of its outlet flow at the border into the Thompson and Fraser. American representatives on the International Joint Commission are understandably concerned, and the upshot would seem to be a compensation payment by the United States to Canada, for the water. Nice work if you can get it! Shorter Notes includes one about rising suspicions that allegations of inside dealing in the Dixon-Yates contract were valid, the President shifting from beef to pork bacon as Secretary Benson tries to hold the line on pork prices with emergency buying programs, and news of the end of the cake mix price war that had embroiled the nation's housewives.
The World Overseas
Something about a political crisis in France, with dissolution and Communist disorder threatened and elections on 8 January likely. The Soviet German National Front "Red blueprint for Germany" features a neutral country and various highly suspicious political reforms, and also a blunt demand that East German workers work harder and better and stop producing shoddy goods, and that something be done about all the young people and scientists leaving the East for the West. Something about the Colombo Plan. What is good for the Colombo Plan is good for the Commonwealth and foreign investment in places suspected of not being sufficiently grateful for same.
"The Big Whale Hunt" Nineteen expeditions are headed to the Antarctic to hunt whales in spite of a cut in their quota from 15,500 to 15,000 whales, "the lowest level that will be tolerated." The intolerably low level is because people say they're killing all the whales. You would think would be bad for a business, and perhaps the petulant tone is because "Much capital is sunk into this lucrative business," particularly in the Netherlands, which this year launched a new factory ship that will support eighteen catcher boats. At this point The Economist admits that the size, range, and power of operating boats has increased so quickly far that the open season has shrunk and the fleet is inactive "for the greater part of the year." This makes for a lot of competition during the short open season, especially since everyone thinks that Onassis' fleet is cheating. But, overall, everyone is conforming the rules pretty well compared with the cutthroat prewar years, which shows the value of international cooperation. Speaking of which, a very long piece about the FAO concludes --I don't know, it probably concludes something. That there's too much wheat in the world suddenly, and that the FAO isn't doing enough to help by dumping the surplus on Africa and Asia, where people aren't eating enough, so dumping is good, and it's all the Americans' fault for their support policy.
"The Sudanese and the High Dam" If flood and irrigation control on the Nile isn't going to be achieved by a basin-wide plan with storage in the Great Lakes and Lake Tana and dams from Uganda down to Egypt, then it will be achieved, for Egypt, by the High Aswan Dam, which is a terrible idea for various reasons, but which has lots of benefits for Sudan, so the Sudanese will probably support it and here are reasons they shouldn't.
The Business World
We check in with how the credit squeeze is going (it's too soon to tell) and with steel production east of the Iron Curtain, which seems broadly comparable in costs to Britain, so that if Russia exported steel, it would be serious competition. But they don't, instead they want to export steel plant and technicians, and gain the influence that goes with it, and they seem competitive there, too.
Business Notes
Credit, finance, tariffs, also Britain's work force is 24,014,000, up only 0.7% over last year, while output is up 5%, but the credit squeeze may affect this trend by reducing home demand. Coal exporters want the Coal Board to be free to set prices "economically" so that more coal will be available for export, and that this won't be bad because too much coal is being wasted due to the low price. The Economist predicts that no such thing will happen. The Conservatives might be for free enterprise in general, but as far as coal for domestic consumption goes, it is all for "price rigging and planning." British Celanese has had a bad year due to high costs and not because rayon is yesterday's news.
Bombers, Apollo, Comet. The rest of it is money for Bristol and Weir
"Cancelling the V. 1000" Critics of the decision say that it leaves Britain with no transatlantic liner comparable to the American ones coming on, in reply to which the Minister "was fairly able" to point out the Britannia. The Economist concludes that the cancellation should have happened sooner because the V. 1000 is deficient in various ways, and suggests that Transport Command has switched its order for V.1000s to Britannias because of delays in the V. 1000 program and quotes statistics suggesting how much money the government has lost on various kinds of planes and therefore why not cancel the V. 1000 and everyone who is saying that this is bad for the British aviation industry is wrong. Also, the Committee on National Expenditure is concerned about the rising cost of drugs bought by NHS, especially proprietary drugs, where far too much of the price increase is going to promotion. The Economist suspects that the Committee is exaggerating. Leave business alone! Cortisone will be free to prescribe next week thanks to the success of the method for extracting it from sisal leaves by research sponsored by the National Research Development Corporation, which will now make some dollars by licensing it in the United States. The brief attempt ot replace "Charlie" with "Coca" in the International Phonetic Alphabet in deference to Spanish sensitivities, is over. Silver prices are down, iron casting deliveries to automakers are up, plastic production is up a lot, and lead and zinc prices are rising.
Flight, 2 December 1955
Leaders
"The Big Boats" An American journal recently claimed that the British are working on a new flying boat. Flight denies this, which warrants a Leader because it wants to wax nostalgic about flying boats and suggest that the Tradewind and SeaMaster might be the first of a new generation of flying boats, and not a reckless waste of taxpayer money. The other Leader is concerned with a High Court ruling pertaining to the insurance liabilities of private plane owners.
From All Quarters reports that there is going to be a royal tour of Nigeria by air, that the U.S. Navy is testing a P2V Neptune taking off on skis at 40t, that the Comet 3 is doing proving flights. German industry figures think that there is no prospect of the German government getting into the expensive game of aircraft development in the near future. The Minister of Supply was raked over the coals in the Commons on the matter of the V.1000 cancellation. The Meteorological Office's annual report discussed the development of short-range weather forecasts by electronic computers. There are many data series that need to be numerically analysed. Work is also continuing clear-air turbulence for guidance for civil aviation.
The Italian Chief of the Air Staff is visiting Britain, Fairey is holding its fortieth anniversary annual general meeting, during which Richard Fairey reported that the Ministry had slowed the rate of Gannet deliveries, although not cancelling any. The Minister of Supply told the Light Metal Founders' Association that he is worried about the rising cost of modern weapons. (Although he also told the Comons that the V.1000 cancellation had nothing to do with Cabinet direction to cut Ministry spending.)
Here and There reports that Lockheed is hinting on having a supersonic transport under development. France's mixed-power SNCASO Trident mixed-power fighter is the sweetest thing. Lt. Colonel Klingenhagen, a member of the research and development department at DoD told a conference of 200 VTOL aircraft designers that the Department was moving away from VTOL gadgets to potential STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) aircraft. J. F. "Skeets" Coleman, the test pilot who has done 400 VTOL takeoffs and landings in the Convair XFY-1, also spoke, and was disappointed. It is necessary to report that Japan is building various American jets under license. Flight was invited to the Admiralty Underwaters Hydrodynamic Laboratory to see the brand new £1.1 million facility. Besides impressive testing equipment, it heard about underwater-to-air missiles. BOAC and Qantas are having a party or festival or something celebrating the wenty-first anniversary of the "Kangaroo Route," which is a fancy way of saying that you've been able to book an air ticket from London to Sydney since 1934. This isn't actually a Here and There bit, and neither is a story about flight tests for the AOP9 Auster, and we get another story about the supersonic bale-out in San Francisco.
By Mike Freer - Touchdown-aviation - Gallery page http://www.airliners.net/photo/UK---Air/ English-Electric-Lightning/2260192/LPhoto http://cdn-www.airliners .net/aviation-photos/photos/2/9/1/2260192.jpg, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26949478
Aircraft Intelligence reports that Douglas aerodynamicists think that the DC7would be 50mph slower if it had the same streamlining as the DC3. Various small French private planes and a helicopter are coming along. Professor Zborowski is working on a coleopter drone using the Rolls-Royce Soar. The Swift 5 is quite the ship.
"More Thoughts on the P.1 with Reference to True Supersonic Efficiency" The anonymous author refutes the notion that because the P.1 is not area ruled, it will be inefficient compared with other supersonic fighters, finding that it will, in fact, be pretty good.
Avro Canada's Malton factory is having its tenth anniversary.
The Aeronautical Bookshelf has William Simpson's I Burned My Fingers, and John W. R. Taylor, A Picture History of Flight. Simpson's book is the memoir of an RAF plastic surgery recipient, and Taylor has nice pictures. A long historical article about "The Felixstowe Flying Boats" follows. It is hard to believe that this was the state of the art just thirty-five years ago!
Let's see, ancient history down, it must be time for an advertorial, this one from Solar (actually, a talk by a Solar engineer, Wendell Reed, to an SAE session in LA) which wants to tell us about a new pneumatic control for turbojets and ramjets. Jets produce high pressure air, so the technologies are a good fit, and here is a discussion of the way that sampling that air can allow for automatic control of fuel mixture.
Correspondence
J. C. Slessor writes to point out that his maybe the idea that he was saying that in the future the entire front line air strength will be unmanned is exaggerated since he only said that, and didn't mean it. Roger Baker points out that Americans have ejected at supersonic speeds, too, which goes back to last month, when Flight confined its reporting to British examples. F. H. Robertson is on at length about helicopter rotors, and the way that they attach to the hub, which is admittedly key to how helicopters work, but very, very boring.
The Industry reports that Cossor has more than £1 million in orders for its Mk VI airfield control radar in a column otherwise devoted to executive moves and apprenticeship schemes. Civil Aviation reports that New Zealand and TCA is buying (or buying more) Viscounts, Lockheed may be buying Rolls Royce turboprops, and otherwise it is all 707 news. There is more helicopter news, but it seems a bit inconsequential.
The Economist, 10 December 1955
Leaders
The Economist looks back with satisfaction at Clement Attlee's long career of preventing Labour from being Labour, and thereby saving the country from the evils of socialism.
"Conscience and the Bomb"The Tories are being very squishy calling for the cessation of hydrogen bomb testing, although probably at some point too much radiation will have accumulated, so we should stop before then, but who is to say how much is too much, or when is when? It's a puzzler, and two things are sure sure, and that is that Communism is awful and that the common man has no standing in the discussion, because he is dumb, so who cares what he thinks about radioactivity. The strike at the Rolls Royce factories in Glasgow is so terrible that it deserves a Leader explaining how terrible it is. Very important things are happening in Indonesia, apart from Communist infiltration, thanks to a coalition of the anti-Communist parties to prevent further Communist inroads.
Notes of the Week
"How Cold is the Cold War" Medium. It's medium cold. The Economist offers this thought implicitly, since the point of the Note is to take a tour d'horizon in advance of Eden's meeting with Eisenhower, where Eden will offer Eisenhower some of his prescription, and the upshot will be the President and the Prime Minister driving around Washington at three in the morning looking for girls. Speaking of which, Khrushchev and Bulganin seem to have made quite the impression in Burma. The French will go to the polls in January, with the result likely to be that the "centre right" will be back in power thanks to a coalition with the Gaullist, that the Communists will gain, and that the Socialists will be marginalised because they won't form a popular front because Communism is bad. For a wonder, The Economist is against selling off at disposal rates the Road Transport Commission's lorry fleet to the hauling industry which has been steadfastly refusing to buy them at a market rate for a year and a half. The fleet is running at a profit, so private industry can go stuff itself. The teachers' pressure for better pensions is something that is happening and so are the negotiations over Cyprus' future. Everything got very sensitive a few months ago over the return of the last German prisoners of war from Russia because they are all convicted war criminals and the German government had to on the one hand give them pensions and a hero's welcome, and on the other hand steer clear of the neo-Nazis, and the Russians weren't too pleased, either. Now everything has been settled; the Germans will pay "a ransom" for them, and meanwhile the Russians are demanding a look in at the Ukrainian emigres still sheltering in Germany and there's been a fuss over that, too, and The Economist encourages the Germans to hold strong there. Rehabilitating Alfred Krupp, on the other hand, is a step too far. The debate over the decisin to ban the production of heroin in Britain continues. Ireland is going to crack down on the IRA. Argentina's new government is very nice and democratic. Talks over the handover of power and the status of Singapore and the Communist insurgency and everything like that continue in Malaya. Britain is, or might, fiddle with lottery rules. Everyone wants more, better roads in Britain than the government is willing to build. The push for a Euratom atomic pool is advancing, not retreating. The Turkish government appears to be in trouble. The House of Commons doesn't seem that interested in fighting noise pollution. Is it even real pollution, The Economist asks? Probably those annoying "mo-ped" bicycle motors, but putting mufflers on them would make that slow, and who wants that?
From The Economist of 1855, "The Song of Hiawatha" Eighteen Fifty-Five is so long ago that The Song of Hiawatha was the big new thing in poetry and not some hoary antiquity. People actually cared about it, and public opinion compared Tennyson and Longfellow, and, in The Economist's view, it is a distinctly second rate poem compared with what Tennyson is producing. It comes off even worse when compared with the kinds of things that Byron, "the greatest and most skilful of all rhymesters" could produce, but in defence of Longfellow, the magazine points out that there's a limit to how much rhyming you can do with the metre he has chosen.
Books
Nicholas Kaldor has an entire book out about how an expenditure tax would be better than the existing income tax. Edmund Wilson summarises The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, the Hebrew scrolls discovered in 1947 (and more since, I thought?) in caverns above the Dead Sea. More research, it appears, is needed. Paul Bloomfield's Uncommon People is not about the neighbour who has been going around with a funnel on his head and a cucumber up his nose since his unfortunate accident, which might be more entertaining than yet another book about assorted eminent Victorians, because there is no shortage of those, whereas no-one has reported on Mrs. Brown's reaction to the trousers-down incident. The common thread of Bloomfield's "people" is that they are among the 25,000 descendants of Sir George Villiers he has traced, following in the steps of at least two previous genealogists, including the father of eugenics, Francis Galton, himself. The Economist is not impressed. P. Zeuthen's Economic Theory and Methods is a very worthy book unless you are William Baumol and set out to crush it beneath your feet, which I only happen to know because someone at the firm asked me about "cost disease" and automation. Bernard Darwin's The World Fred Has Made is an autobiography that sounds like it is going to be a period piece in thirty years, because even someone who is alive right now in 1955 (ME!!!) isn't sure who "Bernard Darwin" is, although I am sure that he is a lovely fellow. (It turns out that he is a golfer, which fact is probably in the review somewhere.) Gordon Greenwood's Australia: A Social and Political History is the second academic explanation of the desert continent of convicts and kangaroos to appear in this space this month. It is actually an edited collection, so eight Australian historians take their turn. It's not very good.
Letters
I think W. D. Spencer writes to make fun of "Parkinson's Law," which is all the rage in the British press this month. I think, He might be being serious. E. T. Griffiths, of the Association of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Taxes (who must throw the best parties!) explains what is actually going on with the civil service's retirement gratuities that someone was complaining about last week. H. W. Heyman of Smith's Delivery Vehicles, Gateshead-upon-Tyne, explains that recent rent changes reinforce the point made last week about the way that the Board of Trade is relaxing the old restraints on industrial development in the south.
American Survey
"Praying for a good victory"
The big Leader brings us up to date with the CFL/AIO merger. It is followed by shorter ones about how the GOP is on tenterhooks waiting for the President to make up his mind about running in '56, and the upshot of the big school conference, which is that the President is going to address the "state's right" critique of Federal education spending by just giving the money to the states. With conditions, which defeats the whole point! At least The Economist's coverage notes that segregation is the central issue. Speaking of the President, it turns out that we don't need one because when he's laid up, the Cabinet can just run wild, although this has something to do with the Cabinet's loyalty to the president. Virginia's proposed solution to desegregating the schools is to allow communities in the "black belt" to not have public schools, and for boards of education to be allowed to assign students to schools on various bases that will be manipulated to ensure that "it would be possible to keep all but a small handful of Negro students out of white schools." It is only left to discover some kind of subterfuge by which public schools can be turned into nominally private ones. It looks like it will be a bang-up Christmas shopping season this year, and the Climax, Colorado molybdenum mine has been so successful that the U.S. government is thinking about dumping it on the international market.
The World Overseas
It turns out Brazil's history goes way back. It's quite bewildering.
"Atlantic Alliance At Work" It seems as though the full bill for expanding Nato armed forces with all the tactical atomic warheads, new airfields and warning systems, and "the better equipped, more mobile and self-sufficient divisions" that the generals want would be a doubling of defence budgets. The Nato ministers have met in a big conference and determined that that is not on, but at least there will be no cuts, and now the question is "reconciliation" of requirements and political realities. British observers visit Germany and determine that the key to its industrial success has been low wages and long working hours and not capital investment, word to the wise, and if there is a business contraction, unemployment will ravage the German economy. The Australian election is probably going to go badly for Labour, here is all the details everyone who cares about Australian politics will want. "No Change for Arab Refugees" is the headline explaining why UNRWA can sustain the camps but not dismantle them. The refugees don't want to be resettled, and no-one is prepared to re-settle them. Good that's explained, then! Brazil isn't having a civil war after its anti-coup. The moral of the story is that the army intervening in politics to support democracy is good because Brazil isn't ready for democracy. As far as I can tell. Switzerland is having a boom, too, and the world has marked a new milestone in its fight for free trade and against tariffs that -I hereby declare "talking about talking about tariffs" to be pressing matter in the world today.
The Business World
Steel and rubber are good money as well as good industry. "Voluntary" grocery chains, in which the store and the wholesaler that supply them are nominally independent, are on the rise.
Business Notes
Cities issue bonds, the Union-Castle merger is still dragging on, Shell share prices are up, Britain is back in dollar surplus territory, the details of repayments of U.S. and Canadian war loans to Britain are being discussed, Italian oil is worth a Note, as is the prospect of selling enriched uranium to German atomic reactors. Vickers-Armstrong launched a 47,000t oil tanker, the Spyros Niarchos this week, which is huge! British yards have been able to build them because of a decline in liner orders and the rise of prefabrication methods, although they still aren't as fast as deep water continental yards. The cotton textile business is up, hire purchase is "under pressure" just like the Chancellor meant for it to be, Bristol has licensed its entire engine range, but mostly the Orpheus, to Fiat, so that Fiat can make them for the G. 91. Britain needs more engineers, Singer Motors is being taken over by Rootes, and the cost of propping up the price of the free world's sugar is getting excessive, with suppliers like Cuba more interested in raising sales volumes than maintaining prices. EMI is entering into a patent/license pool with Cincinnati Machine Tool concerning electronic control of machine tools. Am I the only one who hears "EMI" and thinks music?
"The Ultimate Weapon?" Flight visited Santa Susana,which seems like a nice place, to see the Rocketdyne test grounds, where this division of North American Aviation is working on liquid-fueled ICBM missiles, which reminds Flight of the weather in Santa Susana, in that it is right out of Dante's Inferno. That is to say, rocket testing is hot and dirty, not that ICBMs are things of the devil! Why would you even think that? Sure, much of what we know about them is apocrypha, and the Apocalypse of St. John is apocrypha, but that is not what Flight is thinking about. It is thinking about the 5000 mile range of the USAF's ultimate weapon, the Atlas missile, and also the short-ranged Redstone, and the more speculative North American Navaho. "Ultimate?" No, we're not talking about the end of the world, here. No-one is talking about the end of the world. They're talking about how it would be nice if Britain had some of these, too!
Flight joins The Economist in commenting on the revised international phonetic alphabet, but by saying good-bye to "Able" and "Baker," rather than "Welcome back, "Charlie." Flight is not as reliably wholesome as it was in Poulsen's day, but it is still nicer than The Economist in not making a big deal over the pilot's revolt over accommodating Spanish speakers.
By Veedar at English Wikipedia - Own work - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons. , Public Domain, https://commons .wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=3296766
From All Quarters The Bristol/Fiat agreement really needs to be reported again. The Minister of Supply admits to a solid-fueled British research rocket, which will be 25ft long, 17" in diameter, and fired off at Woomera. Piasecki is showing off a turbine-engined version of its YH-16, which will for sure be the passenger helicopter we've all been waiting for. Warsaw Radio says that the Russians are working on atom planes too. An airborne reactor, it says, could be screened from the crew compartment by a mere two tons of lead, and an atom plane might fly forever at 600--800km/h. Everyone is watching the Rolls Royce Tyne because Rolls Royce makes turboprops that work in civil service, and no-one else does. If the Tyne is as good as the Dart, some people think, the day of the turboprop airliner is on us.
"Free-Flight High-speed Research: An R.Ae.S. Main Lecture Given at Boscombe Down, Part 1" The R.Ae.S is introducing a new lecture series, and the first one catches us up with all the work done with high speed models since we were making fun of the early trials eight years ago. Subsequently work turned to ground-launched models, of which there have been many, with many delightful problems of control and radar monitoring resolved along the way. The lecturer dwells lovingly on all the instruments loaded on to the models and used to monitor the flights.
Here and There reports that Australia is thinking about having its own salt lakebed testing centre like the one at Muroc because it has lots of desert. Some lighter-than-air enthusiasts are going to give a talk to the R.Ae.S about how dirigibles are the coming thing. The University of Southampton is giving a summer course on "Acoustics for Aeronautical Engineers." Experiments in Toronto suggest that traffic control helicopters might be just the way to deal with traffic snarls, with the Toronto police testing helicopters that hover over traffic and yell instructions over loudspeakers.
This is why no-one takes Toronto seriously.
Our Technical Editor, "Evolution of the Vanguard: An Outline of Design: Thought Behind Vickers-Armstrong's new Airliner" Having been involved in the attempt to sell it, I feel some sort of parochial pride at the Vanguard making the paper. My opinion hasn't changed, as it is my husband's, and he is a real engineer, and that is that speed counts for too much for a turboprop airliner to compete with jets, but if any airliner can do it, it is the Vickers and not the Britannia. The article is long, but general.
Aircraft Intelligence reports that the Bell XH-40, winner of the U.S. Army's utility helicopter competition, is out as a mockup, that everyone loves the B-57, that Fiat is delivering F-86Ks.
An anecdotal story about being a crop sprayer pilot in Sudan follows, then a technical article describing "The Bristol Olympus: The Western World's Most Powerful Production Turbojet" This is a very long and thorough technical history and description, going into detail about how one of the world's only two split-compressor, so-called "two spool" engines (the other being the J-57) evolved, and even discussing the metallurgy and metalworking, as you will recall how serious the question of whether enough axial turbine blades could be made to meet the aircraft building targets of the Korean emergency were. I am not sure that the Olympus can be mass produced in the way that it was hoped that the Avon could be, due to the sheer hardness of the alloys, but other aspects of the production work have been considered. It appears that an after-burning Olympus will be ordered for the proposed supersonic all-weather fighter development of the Javelin.
"Over the Pole to California" The USAF has a "Planetarium" trainer for student navigators at Mather Air Force Base, the Link D-2, a 22 ton spherical structure that rotates on two axes under the control of a "network of electronic computers." These rotate the sky according to the navigator's direction to really teach celestial navigation over the North Pole.
Correspondence
W. E. W. Petter and E. W. Percival write to remember Basil Henderson, I. Luke supposes that the Bristol 300 would be a good replacement for the cancelled VC7, a purely "Atlantic" airliner due to its runway strength demands. G. A. Simmons, an ROC ground observer, is offended that the producers of The Dam Busters would think people would miss a shot of a B-17 in the movie (which is historically inaccurate, apparently) because the exposure is so short.
the Industry reports that Polarizers (U.K.) are importing a nice American instrument camera, otherwise it is all personnel news.
Civil Aviation reports that Braniff is the latest airline to order 707s, that the first steps are being taken to order a new British airliner to be in service in the mid-Sixties, possibly a supersonic job, that the Fokker Friendship is being trialed, that Peter Masefield has told the Institute of Transport that supersonic airliners would be here by 1970 and VTOLs by 1970, but not helicopters. On the contrary, he would like to see airports connected with downtowns by high speed monorails. The Comet 3 is on show in Australia.
As a strictly business magazine that no longer has time for all that back pages culture stuff and politics, naturally the December 1955 issue of Fortune is mainly devoted to lavish photo spreads of the classics of international art, and a long article about the woes of the GOP in Michigan. Michigan isn't voting Republican! What's wrong with Michigan? Well, to start with, it is American business's assumption tht the business of America is business, which is to say, electing Republicans. In defence of Henry Luce, first, business bores him. Second, "Treasures of International Art" is actually titled "The Great International Art Market," and is nominally about the "business" of buying and selling gorgeous paintings.
"Work quotas." That's some glove though.
Fortune's Wheel points out that Fortune is twenty-five, that its series on the gloriously bright future of the American experiment continues, and that this month's instalment is Henry Luce telling us about how great 1980 will be. Fortune also wants us to know that it has a book out from McGraw-Hill, The Mighty Force of Research, with more to come, and that its research library just splurged on a deluxe edition of Wealth of Nations, sure to be just as useful as the copy of Who's Who that it at least uses more often than The Economist.
Letters hears from Du Pont and public relations executives about how great the articles about Du Pont and the PR business were. That's how you tell great journalism. The AFL liked the article about the AFL, and the Editor hopes that it will like the article about the AFL/CIO merger this month. Edmund Mansure, Administrator of the General Services Administration, writes to say that if Fortune wants to criticise his agency, it should at least get its facts right. Canadians, Northwestern power company executives, Finns, and architects write in pointing out other errors. Not good!
Business Roundup has further evidence that the business expansion is slowing (corporate profits levelling off, unemployment is up) although the upcoming year is expected to show record capital goods investment, and the levelling is explained as the result of tax policy. Global Business Roundup covers mostly good news of global booming, but notes the continuing fall of mid-range British auto export sales and concludes that British mass-market car designs are old and stodgy and need a revamp.
Leaders
After dealing with the AFL/CIO merger some more, Fortune goes on to note that banks might be putting too much credit out there, that business is trying to mend fences with offended educators, that J. Patrick Lannan is tired of corporate raiding, so he has launched Poetry with a PR blitz, that tariff advocates just won't go away, and echoes The Economist's warnings about Italy's attempt to regulate its petroleum industry.
There's a nice long article about economic theory's long battle to moderate the business cycle, complete with pocket biographies of prominent economists, notably not including Alvin Hansen.
Henry Luce, "A Speculation About 1980" We're half way to fifty years to the future as of the founding of Fortune in 1930, and it is time for Henry Luce to reflect, which he does in the most embarrassing "Look at all the very deep books I've read" way imaginable. The blurb at the top suggests that he discusses a trip to the Moon at one point, but I'm not reading all this "Tennyson this, Russell that, Nietzsche on the other hand, but then Marx but also Jesus" stuff to find it. We have a visit to GE, a celebration of the 1955 Lincoln Continental, the Michigan story, and a longer visit to North American's ICBM shop than Flight's, covering the same ground, and we are done with December! In the immortal words of Henry Luce, the business of America truly is --I'm bored, can we look at paintings now?
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