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, January 1956, I-And-A-Half: A Peaceful Year to Come
1:39, though the talking heads do manage some explanation for why you're listening to this.
R_. C_., Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
I see as I put this in the packet that I have mixed up my notes and sent in the wrong issues. What can I say? It's been a busy week, with a flying trip to L.A. and back. In way of apology, all that I can say is that you're not paying for this, and you're not getting your news from me. I always like to read Uncle George's old letters, especially from the old days, before the war, and I'm always upset when he misses a month (or a year --what was going on in 1931?) and so by extension I am mad at me. There was quite a bit of news at the end of the month, and I will catch you up briefly next week.
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
Letters
Roger Milliken telegraphs to remind everyone that the Ford Foundation is the work of Henry Ford, J. G. Hage of California tries to catch out Newsweek on a botanical mistake (Michael Tood succeeds, on a casting mistake), lots of correspondents are happy to see America booming, although Al Perry reminds us that we need to give labour unions credit, too. Frank Winn of the UAW points out that Senator Goldwater likes to make stuff up, Gregor Platgorsky points out that old violins are pretty good, actually. No message from the Editor this week.
USS Long Beach
The Periscope reports that Kefauver might enter the Minnesota primary. The President snubbed Bill Knowland in public, and sources close to Clare Boothe Luce say that Clare Boothe Luce is likely to be the next ambassador to the United Kingdom. Tjhe House bill lowering women's qualifying age for social security from 65 to 62 won't pass because it would cost too much. Democrats are expected to step up their attacks on Sinclair weeks and Commerce Under-Secretary Louis Rothschild for being pro-railroads at the expense of airlines and trucking. Someone wants to embarrass John Taber. Induction officials say that your odds of being drafter next year are one in fifteen. The Bureau of Ships says that construction of the first atomic-powered surface ship will begin next year. It will be a 7000t frigate with anti-air and anti-surface missiles. U.S. submarine Jallao's good will cruise is also scouting the route to be taken by Nautilus in its planned around-thr-world underwater cruise. The German Army is having trouble finding non-Nazis to run it. The Red Chinese are training an entire Soviet-style paratroops corps that will be ready by spring. Lord Mountbatten wants to junk virtually the entire British mothball fleet, including four battleshipos, three carriers, and fourteen cruisers. Seventy-give Russian "technicians" are "still" in "Syria" even though one might have thought they ought to have left by now. Sinister! German businessmen are just as worried as British about Soviet inroads in the Far East, while the Soviets are worried about falling water levels in the Caspian Sea due to persistent drought and real estate prices are spiking in "H-bomb proof" Nortehrn Ireland. Where Are They Now reports that Charlie O'Rourke, star of the '41 Big Game, is now coaching at UMass, while Ernie Nevers is in sales in San Francisco.
National Affairs
By Seasider53 - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia. org/w/index.php?curid=168676926
You know what would go well here? A story wondering whether Ike will run in '56! Also, the President has a grand-daughter, and the Wayhouse Inn has had a fire, which is important news because it's old.
"The Wanton Waters" Newsweek covers the Yuba floods in a bit more detail, although it's early coverage. Thirty-seven people dead in Yuba! Then General Marshall gets a full-page-spread box story to promote his memoirs. Then, because it is January and there's hardly any news apart from a catastrophic flood or two, here's a pictorial spread entitled "America at Dawn." A BLACK-AND-WHITE PICTORIAL. If you want to see it, a copy of Newsweek is cheap, but disappointment is a million dollars.
"1956: The Odds For World Peace" Peace would be great, if it weren't for Communism. Then Newsweek covers the "anti-Eden" push in a bit more detail, singling out Beaverbrook's Daily Express for running a story labelling Selwyn Lloyd as his obvious successor, ahead of Rab and MacMillan. Newsweek sticks to a more responsible tack, noting the push and then turning from Eden to a biography of Lloyd.
Newsweek reports fairly positively on Sudan's unilateral declaration of independence and notes the way that it reflects tensions between Britain and Egypt.
"What the French Want" For North Africa to go away and also be a integral part of France. Faure has brought the French garrison there up to 320,000 men. I'm sure that he has them to spare now that he's given up on making the Saarland French! The French also want lower taxes and higher pensions, and the election is sure to deliver more Communists and more Poujadists in the Assembly. The first Soviet ambassador to West Germany is some kind of Communist plot. Red China is backing off from collectivisation, cancelling or postponing most of the Five Year Plan targets and undermining the industrialisation that was supposed to be funded by agricultural surplusses created by efficiencies from collectivisation. But all of that's boring, so here's a story about Morris Cohen's secret mission into Red China with a personal message from Chang to Mao, instead of more tedious coverage. Argentina is celebrating the end of Peron with random violence, rumours of coups, and a cracking inflation. The copper strike in Chile is sure to be solved by the President declaring it illegal.
Business
The Periscope Business Trends reports that the recession that won't really be a recession is on the way according to fourth quarter inventory numbers. ATT is having a good year, Firestone Rubber is the latest billion-dollar company, the Westinghouse strike continues, SAS has ordered DC8s, bringing Douglas' order book to $105 million, the Comet III has aborted its round-the-world sales trip after a fire warning, having so far only sold 20 planes, all to BOAC. Eastern is buying Allison turbines for the 40 Lockheed Electras it is buying, RKO has sold its entire film library to C&C Super Corporation for TV licensing.
This isn't anything like the aerodyne that Claude Dornier and Lippisch eventually pawned off on the Bundeswehr, but the important point is that someone got paid.
The lead Business story is more about the Ford stock sale, and is followed by a much more interesting and important story about beach wear, an industry that was worth $100 million last year and isn't chasing the last penny stock investor who hasn't gone all in on ATT. The Automobile Club of New York is in trouble because it can't handle its money. Rustling is big these days. Aristotle Onassis has bought off the Justice Department for $7 million, while Henry Hazlitt uses Business Tides to explain why government spending keeps growing. It's because all those regular people and bureaucrats are greedy and lazy, not like businessmen! Meanwhile, Alexander Lippisch has somehow got on with Collins Radio, where he is spinning theories about some kind of supersonic wing-in-body plane design. Business knows what it's doing!
Medicine, Education
That helicopter borne medical missionary expedition to equatorial Africa gets another story.
Periscoping Medicine reports on the Centri-Filmer, a GE centrifuge device that sterilises virus samples for vaccine production by spinning the tube to spread the solution in a thin film on the surface of the test tube so that it can be sterilised by a flash of ultraviolet, successes in raising the IQ of delayed children with Thorazine at the Parsons State Training School in Kansas, a successful vaccine for leukemia in chickens, announced by Dr. Joseph Beard of Duke, and insulated medical instruments coated in fluorocarbons.
Nothing happened at Wake Forest College this weei, but the important point is that it could have! Female schoolteachers in Tokyo think that they're being mistreated. SHOCKED! RONNIE IS SHOCKED!!! Alice Lloyd is a great educator honoured this week by the naming of the post office location at her junior college after her.
Art, Life and Leisure, Press, TV-Radio, Newsmakers
Marcel Breuer has a book out about his theory of architecture, Sun and Shadow. The feature on "the enchanted lands of the south" in Life and Leisure gets the colour plates that "America at Dawn" missed. Haiti is getting 500% more tourists! The Centre Times is getting its best circulation in years after Viktor Lowenfeld took the trouble to write in to denounce its Christmas colouring contest for stifling children's creativity. The Charlotte Observer is in a circulation race, so it hired a friend of Newsweek, which makes it a story. The Detroit Free Press is on strike. Playwrights 56 on NBC is up against some stiff competition from The $64,000 Question,
Konrad Adenauer, Mary Margaret McBride, the Dockers (and Billy Hill, and Art Buchwald), and Dr. Harold Dodd are in the column for the usual reasons, and the Archbishop of Canterbury for breaking up Princess Margaret and Group Captain Townsend. Nelson Rockefeller wants us to know that he is leaving public life for urgent personal reasons and not because he can't repress the desire to punch Sherman Adams out any more. Barbara Warner and Joe Louis are married. Robert S. Hillyer and John Fell Stevenson are ailing. Herbert v. Dirksen and Josephine Peary have died.
Movies
Fox's The Rains of Ranchipur is an adaptation of a Louis Bromfield novel in De Luxe Colour. Pakistan is "strangely beautiful," and the climax is a "rare spectacle," but the rest is pretty bad. Lease of Life is a British import, as is The Night My Number Came Up. They're melodramas, but that's fine.
Books
Newsweekdidn't like Graham Greene's The Quiet American, although it sees the point. Kenneth Roberts' Boon Island is a shipwreck novel by the old historical novelist, while William Hoffman's the Trumpet Unblown is a novel set in the triage ward (although the review doesn't use the term) of an American field hospital in the ETO, and is "shocking," and terrifying.
Raymond Moley concludes that '56 is a Republican year because all the Democratic Presidential candidates are terrible.
Robert Hotz's Editorial talks about the "Jet Transport Problem," specifically airlines throwing millions of dollars at planes which haven't even been fully designed yet even though the noise, traffic control, and reservations systems haven't been worked out yet.
Industry Observer reports that sales prospects of the Comet IV seem dim, and buyers of the Comet I and II aren't happy about their prospects of a settlement with de Havilland. A method of turning solid propellant rocket engines off has been found by venting the combustion chamber. British guided missile development has reached the point where RAF technical officers have been sent to English Electric, Fairey, de Havilland, Vickers, and Armstrong Whitworth for liaison. Navy pilots are getting ready to test fly Piasecki's giant HUP-4, while British observers are concerned about the pressure that the Ministry of Supply is putting on Ted Petter to get him to leave Folland for a real company. Boeing Seattle is going to build a small gas turbine for the Navy. Stanley Aviation has an Air Force contract for an F-84F cockpit simulator. A "shakeup" is expected in the British helicopter sector to the benefit of Bristol. The Air Force is racking up 10 million flying hours a yar, and among accident statistics of note, had roughly two fighter crashes a day last year. Washington Roundup reports that various Congress committees are looking at the CAA, that the ANDB is thought to be too pessimistic about transponder interference by some observers, that industry and government officials are meeting to talk about what to do about airports, that Maxwell Taylor has his foot in his mouth over the "short war" concept. He thinks that there will be a long war, not a short nuclear one, so the Army will fight it, not the Air Force.
Preble Staver reports for Aviation Week that "Air Traffic Control Problems Go Before President" That is, the unanimous report of the Aviation Facilities Study Group has gone before the President. The body of the article lists all the exhaustive studying done by the AFSG. Also, the Office of Defence Mobilisation ordered even more dispersal this week, the hearings over Fred Lee's firing as CAA Administrator have turned partisan, and the USAF has released details about the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) and their pilotless interceptor equipment. None of it is new, although I'm interested in the emphasis on "automatic data transmission," which seems like it has much wider application than just intercepting Red bombers.
Claude Witz reports that "Army Budget Stresses Planes, Missiles," although the only thing to come out of Taylor's speech to an SEA session in Detroit (very misleading headline, by the way!) is that the 101st Airborne is almost ready to go. The substance of all those misleading reports about the atom-powered plane flying is that a B-36 has been carrying the test reactor as cargo. Congress is yelling at the services about competitive bidding again, one of the pre-production F-105s has had a landing accident, defence policy on war reserve machine tool use has changed again. (Factories can now use them in peacetime.) The Navy wants $2 billion for new aircraft. The crash of Piasecki's YA-16 turbine-powered helicopter, which killed two pilots, is believed to have been caused by test equipment failure, and not the fact that Piasecki is a half-baked company flying half-baked planes.
David Anderton reports for Missile Engineering that "Talos Integrates Terrier Frame, Ramjet" The Talos is a supersonic beam-riding missile for naval anti-aircraft use, with a supersonic ramjet motor. It is under production by Bendix, with a land-based variant being developed by the Radio Corporation.
Ralph H. Miner reports for Aeronautical Engineering that "Operations Knowledge Keys Safe Design" Miner is a staff engineer at the Lockheed Missile Systems Division. Miner appears to have "written" this directly into a Dictaphone, and the part that's not a boring recitation of the office organisation of his division is a few examples that come to mind, including a pilot who has a really hard job landing a jet,. and what can the Operations Division do to fix that, and a moment when the 1000kn Interceptor returned to the aerodynamics staff with two feet more wing for stability issues, which upsets the staff, because they thought they'd designed in quite enough safety already, and in the end a new failure-prone nose gear is the result, and, boy, isn't all this stuff that Ralph Miner does, hard! Ralph seems like a pretty good egg, considering how much space he's ready to use up for Aviation Week.
Irving Stone reports "New Approach Points Way to Safer Pressurised Structures" Stone went to a session in which the speaker seemed more interest in pointing out all the ways in which current pressurised system design is inadequate. What's New gets, because it is January, a full page and a half, and there is absolutely no way I'm listing all the catalogues and such that it got this week, including one for test dummies. Also hearing the clarion call of "It's January, give me some copy" is an "Engineering Forum" ready to fill four pages, less ads, on the subject of backwards-facing seats being safer. Now I just need an article about flying wings and one about tip-jet rotors. New Aviation Products has a hydraulic selector valve, a "pre-fire detector, or "overheat detector," fuel primers, a fan, and a torque measuring gauge. Also on the Market goes on for pages, and Douglas' new Auto Cycler piece surface preparation tool, somehow gets its own advertorial at the end.
Philip J. Klass reports for Avionics on "Inertial Guidance, III: Component Design Challenges Industry" Mainly this is an excuse to discuss accelerometers and the principles of gyroscopic stabilisation and gyrocompasses again. The conclusion is that they are complicated enough to justify "hybrid" designs that simplify at the expense of accuracy. New Avionics Products looks at silicon rectifiers and transistors as well as the usual lot of miniaturised equipment (focussing on capacitors this week) and test equipment.
Safety reports on the CAB investigation of New York Airway's Bell 47G crash last 13 July, which was caused by a combination of pilot error and stupid detail design. Air Transport reports on the pilot shortage, which is a new and novel thing and probably the services' fault. Alpheus Jessup reports that "Radar Will Control N.Y. Traffic in March." By which is meant that by March there will be radars in the control tower at Idlewild, which will be a big improvement on ringing them up on site. Two recent collisions between airliners and private planes were the private pilots' fault, the congestion at New YOrk is top priority for air traffic reforms, Boeing's "Intercontinental" is its biggest 707 version, and it is very big, the recent Northwestern Stratrocruiser accident was caused by, say it with me, a prop malfunction, and '55 was a pretty bad year for air safety.
Letters
Martin Philips of MIT has been enjoying the "Inertial Guidance" series, John F. Brown of Landrum and Brown wishes that city governments would take more of an interest in their airports, and Karl Sander of Cordoba, Argentina, explains the area rule at great length
Cover lost. Here's a splash of colour from Cadillac in lieu.
Newsweek, 9 January 1956
Letters
Madeline Mellenger Mann writes in with her reminiscences of the sinking of the Titanic, Ira Freeman of Rutgers has a joke about national territories and space law, Eileen Callahan explains the New York News Guild's approach to Fifth Amendment firings, Leo St. John defends modern poetry, two correspondents support fox hunting while one opposes it, T. R. Johnson of Minneapolis catches an error in a crime story. For Your Information returns with changes at editorial.
The Periscope reports that the White House wants to send Hoover and Truman on a tour of Asia to respond to the "vaudeville antics" of Bulganin and Khrushchev. Yeah, I don't think Hoover does vaudeville. Truman, maybe. Air defence is likely to get a 35% budget increase next year to cover all those Nikes. Harold Stassen is likely to get Nelson Rockefeller's old job as "psychological warfare consultant." Secretary Benson wants relief for farmers on the federal gas tax, while the GOP platform will call for $650 million in farm aid, up from $400 million in the last draft. The latest on the U.S. satellite launch is that it will be a three-stage rocket, that it will be steered by gyroscopes that swive the motors, that the first stage will fire for 140 seconds, and that at the terminus of the third stage firing the rocket will be going 18,000mph. The Joint Chiefs are privatelly alarmed by the speed of Russian rocket development, GI's will get built-in radio receiver/transmitters in their helmets soon, the Air Force is talking about making its atomic planes into tankers, because they can stay up forever, a Federal disaster insurance law is almost a guaranteed pass, and Stevenson is being urged to build up his relationship with our allies. Otto Johns now says that his re-defection was inspired by East German plans for another Berlin blockade, the Imperial General Staff is working on plans for a base at Labuan, North Borneo in case Singapore "slips behind the Bamboo Curtain," Khrushchev is working on a secret plan to expand the permanent membership of the Security Council to six by including India, word from London is that Macmillan and Rab are fighting over the succession, and anti-Communist sentiment is rising in Hungary and the Reds are worried. Where Are They Now reports that Otto Kretschmer, who is after all only 43, is working at the German Defence Ministry, and is a leading candidate for Inspector General of the Federal Navy, when there is one. Ernst Torgler, the German Communist parliamentary leader imprisoned by Hitler over the Reichstag fire is still in labour politics.
The Periscope Washington Trends reports that plans for Eisenhower's renomination at the GOp convention in San Francisco are being quietly made, that he is building his team and is already moving to block McCarthy's and Knowland's campaigns in key states. The Army is set to announce that Picaninny Arsenal has squeezed an atomic warhead into an 8" shell, increasing the potential atomic cannon force by hundreds of barrels and greatly improving its manoeuvrability. More and even smaller warheads for mortars, airborne artillery, and AA are coming. The Pentagon is worried about a Red Chinese buildup in North Korea.
National Affairs
The Reds want us to know that if we build up our arms, they'll build up their arms. Eisenhower is really enjoying his Florida vacation, there's an Congressional election coming up, too, it says here, and the full State Department Yalta record was released the other week, with nothing incendiary in it except to underline how Communism was actually bad in those days. More coverage of the aftermath of the Marysville/Yuba City floods, and neither of the F-86D crashes in Long Island last week caused any deaths, but Long Islanders are still demanding that Mitchell Field be moved. And in crime, a little old lady turns out to have been an embezzler. In a very genteel town in Virginia!
"Electronic 'Eggheads:' Can Automation Help Balance the U.S. Budget?" The government has fifty computers and other things that aren't computers, which do statistics for the Veterans' Administration, weather forecasts, keep records for the CIA, and a variety of accounting jobs in the Pentagon. Computers bailed the Patent Office out of a two year backlog. In general, the government will spend billions on computers and they will save it billions.
The caverns where Floyd Collins died are now officially the largest cavern system in the world, say local boosters. Frank Hague has died, and since it's been weeks since the last "Aerocycle" photo ran, here's another one. A Senate committee has concluded that there are about 22,000 Communists in the United States and ten or twenty times as many sympathisers, that they are a militarised conspiracy against the United States, and crushing them would require a secret police, which is un-American, so the Senate guesses we'll just have to put up with them.
Ernest K. Lindley uses Washington Tides to point out that farmers have lots of friends in Washington.
International
"Oil War: Will It Split the West?" British backed Omani forces have taken oil-rich areas claimed by separatists (if that's the right word, as there might be two states here, Oman and Muscat) backed by the Saudi Arabians, and somehow they've roped in Dulles, and, domestically, The Spectator, to condemn British involvement and demand negotiations, moderation, cool heads, etc. Communist Russians are propagandising the wrong way, unlike us. We make good propaganda! (No amount of facetiousness will do justice to this short piece about a demand for ideological correctness from some Russian official made to Russian journalists. It's a full page of text!) The Italian version of the $64,000 Question has created quite the scandal. It has also been determined that there are too many bureaucrats in Italy and they are too highly paid, and arguments about a pay increase for them are splitting the cabinet, and there's a rail strike, and of course there are worrying Communist developments. Tito is visiting Egypt, and Dulles has asked him to warn Nasser to stop getting so cozy with the Russians. The Pope's statement Christmas message, which called for the end of nuclear tests, was controversial and embarrassing for the President. The Malayan Emergency continues to wind down. Admiral Byrd is back in Antarctica, and James Dunn gets an obituary in Canadian Affairs, which, as usual, I fold into this section. The Prime Minister predicts a good year for Canadians after a "mild recession" in 1954. the Dionne quintuplets are in a scandal again.
Business
The Periscope Business Trends The recession that won't really be a recession will be over by the middle of '56. On the other hand, Edwin Nourse says it will be a significant correction. Uncle Henry's Argentinian assets have been frozen by the new government, which is looking into whether he and 97 other countries "unjustly enriched" themselves under Peron.
GE's fight with retailers over retail price maintenance gets the lead story. The other main stories are litigation, mergers, and stock offers. Products: What's New has Emerson's new air conditioner, which has a built-in electronic bug fryer, Radiant Products has a heating pad that goes under rugs to warm the floor, and the NRC has an oil-life extender consisting of a calcium alloy cylinder that goes into the tank to retard degradation. Also, cigarette use is falling in Mexico and more on the RKO picture library deal, which may prefigure bigger deals to come. A Special Report looks at how the Chicago area might benefit from the St. Lawrence Seaway, and Henry Hazlitt uses Business Tides to point out that it is really hard to forecast the economy and that you should take predictions with a grain of salt. This man gets paid for this!
Science, Medicine, Education
"Hypnotic Adventure" Is hypnotism real? How about spirits and mediums and reincarnation? I don't know, but it's January and we have a paper to fill, so here's the story of Ruth Simmons/Bridey Murphy, which is admittedly turning into quite the thing. Of slightly less scientific importance, the tragic tale of the world's first captive dugong, Eugenie, which isn't captive any more, because it is dead, of a lung infection.
"The Tubercular Mind" finds that the main problem with treating tuberculosis these days is that released patients don't keep up their post-treatment regimen, and that's where a psychologist can come in, says Dr. George Calden, of the Madison VA, who has a plan. Dr. Joseph Thomas of the Washingtonian Hospital in Boston says that the new tranquilising drug, meprobamate, is helping heavy drinkers to quit, while in another AMA session, Dr. Theodore Koppanyl of Georgetown recommended saline injections into "dead drunks" to flush out the alcohol. "In Cancer's Shadow" attends a session on cancer trends and finds that rates are increasing.
The National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools is doing good work and has upstanding patrons, while the University of Pittsburgh wants student dorms, and owns the Schenley Apartments opposite campus, so it is evicting the rich and famous people who live in massive suites there so that it can convert the buildings into dorms.
Art, Press, Newsmakers
A link over there will take you to a biography of Ruth Montgomery. Now that's some Americana!
Art has only theatre and music news, which I skip, but Periscoping the Arts appears. No juicy rumours, just upcoming corps de ballet tour news and a planned Picasso show at MoMA, but I thought I'd mention it.
Do You Trust Your Wifeis the latest quiz show, and looks like it will be a hoot. Periscoping TV-Radio makes an appearance with some up-comings, only one of which, Charles Lindbergh narrating a documentary on the early days of flight, sounds like Periscoping-style moonshining.
John Foster Dulles, Peter Townsend, the Aly Khan, Errol Flynn, Rita Hayworth, and Kim Novak are in the paper for the usual reasons. Herman Welker is in it, again, for consorting with New York mobsters. I hope Idaho voters are proud of themselves. General Randolph McCall Pate is the new head of the Marines. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine have honorary degrees. General Marshall is 75. Ely Culbertson, Mrs. Dwight Davis, Dr. John Peters, Ludwig Lewison, the Archbishop of York, and, as mentioned in the main text, Frank Hague have died.
Movies opens with a Special Report on John Huston before reviewing UA's the Indian Fighter, Too Bad She's Bad, an Italian import, and Warner Brother's The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell. The Kirk Douglas oater is very formulaic according to the new formula where the Indians aren't that bad, while Sophia Loren shines in what's actually an amiable comedy, and Gary Cooper makes the showboat airman into a (poorly acted, says Newsweek!) martyr.
Books
Last week, Graham Greene, this week, Evelyln Waugh's brother, Alec, with Island in the Sun. (So, England?) NO, a crime novel set on a British Caribbean island and inspired by Dostoyevsky. Constantine Fitzgibbon's 20 July tells the story of Staufenberg and his plotters. Evan Hunter's The Second End is not about a formerly famous American writer/artist/actor/comic strip illustrator dying of drink and old age in a tenement in Brooklyn. It's about a formerly famous musician, etc., etc. John Master's Bugles and a Tiger is . . . you know what, sometimes a book just reviews itself.
Raymond Moley uses Perspectives to say that the Ford Foundation is corrupting the young less now that it is giving some of its money to hospitals and medical research, because there's no way that egghead professors can smuggle liberal propaganda into science! Because apparently Moley's never heard about Prohibition or vaccines.
Robert Hotz's editorial is a scathing denunciation of the "stagnation" defence budget for '57, even though the Russian aviation industry is awesome and Communism is awful.
Industry Observer reports that Douglas has received a contract to build an intermediate range ballistic missile, that B-47 production has met all SAC needs so more will be built as tankers. The Navy has been firing off two stage rockets in the Arctic. The Short Seamew has been cancelled because it is useless. (It is too slow.) Ford has a contract to build the J75, because the J57 contract has fallen through. AVCO is working on nose cones for ICBMs. The Pratt & Whitney T34 is going into various testbeds, while the Tupolev TU-104 twin-engined jet transport is going into service this month. Production models of the F-105 will get the J75. Bell Labs has a new diffusion method that will allow it to make higher frequency silicon and germanium transistors than ever. Washington Roundup reports various investigations of excess profits in the industry might get going soon, that the Administration is casting around for a CAB Administrator who will put that story to rest (way down in editorial is coverage of Senator Mike Monroney's bill to make the CAA an independent federal agency, which would really fix the problem). "There is growing hope that the Administration's complacency about Russian technological competence will be jarred" by all the good fellowship visits being made to that country by various industry figures who come back talking up the Russians, and then there's six column inches about the Administration's press/information policy. NOT ENOUGH! TELL ME MORE ABOUT WHO IS COMPLAINING ABOUT WHAT!!!
The big Aviation Week story is, of course, the budget. The Defence Secretary says it is enough. The industry and some renegade talking heads from within the services like General Thomas Power, currently at ARDC after SAC crews quietly mutinied against him, James says, says it isn't. Who to believe, I wonder? Power, in fact, contributes a three page article about how awesome the awful Communists are, fortunately qualified by the observation that it is all down to those nice fascist scientists they captured in '45. Then it is off to Chance Vought, which is holding David Anderton hostage until he says something nice about the Crusader, which he does. Can't be worse than the last Vought job, and an unsigned article notes that the Defence Department has told Hoover to but out of departmental reorganisation proposals. Mackey has ordered two Fokker F-27s, and Theodore von Karman is upset that people are paying attention to Alex Lippisch again, so he has surfaced an airliner-sized coleopter. Northrop is targeting Canadian engineers because of the shortage on the West Coast, and because it is January, Aeronautical Engineering sends Irving Stone to Wyle Laboratories to buff up the grammar in an advertorial for their independent test facilities, which are looking for work around LA. (They have boxy equipment with dials and lads in lab coats; they must be good.) To fill out the section, and, frankly, fill out a need, the section continues with the subheader Human Factors, with a precis of a talk by General Joseph Caldera, an Air Fore flight surgeon, demanding that the Institution of Aeronautical Sciences get the lead out and make their contraptions vaguely operable and safe before the new wave of jets kill everybody. (Counterpoint: Air Force flying is safer than ever, statistics say.)
Edwin Bulban gets the honours of the worst headlline in the issue, for Business Flying, with "Aircraft Radio Booms Commercial Sales," which is actually just an advertorial for Aircraft Radio letting owners know that they can fit one of the new radios into some pretty small planes. Production runs a no-yline advertorial about General Dynamics' stretched canopies, which are optical plastic canopies that are "stretched" into shape instead of cast. Lighter, safer, stronger, you know the drill. Part IV of "Inertial Guidance Systems," running in Avionics, allows Philip Klass to explain how "Hybrid Systems Ease Design Problems." Some of the trickiest mechanical bits in gyroscopic systems can be replaced by "cheating" inputs like radar measurements and ground fixes, bringing weight down to reasonable numbers, such as under 100lb for a missile guidance system. Not much to say about the New Aviation Products/New Avionics Products/What's On the Market axis except that silicon is starting to show up as a commercial product, in the form of a silicon rectifier. Somehow Philip Klass then has time to jump over to Air Transport to put flesh to the industry's worries about transponder interference, while George L. Christian checks out Idlewild's new airfield illumination system, and we hear about SNCASE's big Caravelle sales drive.
Hilliard L. Lubin, of Omega Aircraft Corporation, has a very long but informative letter about air traffic control from his perspective as a radar systems trainer who set out to train in aviation but now works with the marine industry. Radar isn't the whole story, but going back to 1945 when there was a chance to get things started in the right foot, the issue was radar equipment. Long wavelength radars were cheaper, especially since you needed fewer of them, but weren't up to the job in bad weather. The choice to ignore preliminary recommendations in favour of millimeter traffic control radar tells you how we got from 1945 to 1956, and from the possibility of a working system to the current muddle. Says Lubin, anyway. Worcester Municipal Airport really liked the letter about how good Worcester Municipal Airport is.
Robert Hotz's Editorial is still on about the budget. This is apparently "Airpower's Year of Decision." It might SEEM like every year that the Pentagon budget doesn't buy more airplanes than the industry can possibly build, it's a "year of decision," but 1957 is different! It's a REAL year of decision! I'm sorry, did I get a fleck of spittle on you?
Industry Observer reports that even the Navy won't buy a dog as doggish as the Douglas F4D Skyray. Ryan wants us to know that it is still screwing around with a VTO jet, even if everyone else on this side of the Atlantic has lost interest. Goodyear is talking about an "inflatable all-rubber aircraft," and by that I mean an actual aircraft, which will be blown up in the field and used in reconnaissance missions. I don't know, I've actually used an inflatable mattress. Still more practical than the Aerocycle, though. Republic's contract for a complete avionics package has had some interesting submissions that tell you how this all might go. The French Trident prototype shows how the latest departure in high speed control, differential control of all-moving tail surfaces, might go. Northrop's F-89H will have lots of rockets. Lots of rockets! Vickers is X-raying the wings of some of its Viscounts to find the cause of cracking recently detected in a BEA plane, and their N-113D twin-engine supersonic naval fighter has been rolled out in the form of a second prototype to replace the one that crashed in its first flight. Washington Roundup reports that we really need to talk about Government information policy and security, that the Senate is still on to investigate industry profits, that now the Administration can't find anyone to head the CAB, either, and that the latest service mutiny against the Secretary is surreptitious attempts on the speed record against Wilson's ban. The Army is giving up on the idea of building missiles in its arsenals, because that way the industry doesn't wet its beak.
"Sure, TACAN is better, but DME is cheaper and only doesn't work a little bit."
Speaking of which, we've now dug up James Killian, who is president of MIT and so should be above such things, to give a talk to the IAS about how the awful Communists are awesome. Without super science technology research now now now, communism must triumph. Wait, now I see how they got him to attack the Administration! Also at the IAS, Boeing premiered hopeful results from its noise baffling jet nozzles, about Wright Air Development Centre's efforts to make missiles reliable, the area rule, VTOL research, current efforts towards a uniform air navigation system, several papers on the satellite program, and the latest news from the Redstone Arsenal to the effect that the Redstone has, after ten years of work, the same range as the V-2 it was designed from. Then it's off to regular news, where Claude Witze and Katherine Johnsen let us in to the little known fact that the Fiscal '57 budget doesn't spend enough on airplanes according to industry. Oh. And there's not enough fuel, either. I mean, I don't doubt that part, and I expect it will also be true of spare parts, missiles, bombs and guns. And you know why? Because industry wants all the money for planes. You heard it here first!
"Satellite Nears Final Design: Scientists Fight Deadline" Little things like the contractor for the third stage rocket haven't been placed. It sounds like it will be a miracle if this thing goes off in time.
Missile Engineering has an Army advertorial to the effect of "'Honest John' Replacing Medium Artillery" Uncle George, as part of his remit as cynical man of the world, thinks that "medium artillery," as in the 8" Long Tom and its ilk, is far too big and ornery and overdue for replacing, and I guess an unguided missile might be cheap enough. The question goes to the motor, because it doesn't matter how big a bang a shell makes if it lands in the wrong place, and that's the only area left to get accuracy from in a rocket. In other news, GE has started mass production of airborne electronic jammer units.
Avionics has the indefatigable Philip J. Klass reporting that "SAGE Provides New Defence Concept," and now we are in the weird world of the technology paper, where something that is old, old news is actually quite new as it actually arrives in the real world. We all know how SAGE is supposed to work. The only real news would be technical details of the MIT-designed computers, the datalinks, and so on, and that stuff is still secret. It is interesting to see the very short boxed story asking whether SAGE might be a solution to the air traffic control problem. Because there is some useful thinking! Filter Centre has three bits about Hughes getting into air traffic control. Guess we know who bought lunch! Some company you never heard of is selling high speed magnetic memory to Remington Rand. Then George Smith is off to A. O. Smith for Equipment to look at how they bend and roll high strength alloys. ARDC is looking at a slotted, slow parachute, and Curtiss is forming its own small-turbine division.
Safety reports on the 12 July collision between a TWA DC3 and a Cessna just outside Kansas City, which boils down to asking how no-one saw anything, or, if they did, didn't report it. Maybe there weren't enough windows? Air Transport attends the Senate Aviation Commerce Sub-committee hearings to watch Louis Rothschild get roasted for taking the vim and firing Fred Lee for being sticky about it. It seems like a Rothschild should already have enough money without doing favours for the railroads. TCA will buy four DC8s or 707s, not the Comet 4. The President has authorised the EAL-Colonial merger because Rickenbacker knows how to work the GOP old boys. We get a nice picture of Convair's latest attempt to sell the ConvairLiner, the 404, and Captain Robson is back to his column to look at the sheer volume of radio calls in controlled areas that require a plane's radio operator to take a call every three minutes.
Letters has L. B. McVicker of 86 Peck Lane, W. Cheshire, Connecticut, writing to point out that in the event of atomic war we'll want complete underground factories, but by then it will be too late! Hee. "Peck Lane." Grady L. Patterson explains what an "F-84 anchor" is without making the obvious joke, although that doesn't make Republic's efforts to stop the F-84 once it touches down any less funny for anyone but the pilot. P. G. Carney of Griffis Air Force Base writes a desperate and out-of-place letter calling for engineers to make job applications to the Rome Air Force Depot of Air Materiel Command, and William Arsics of Metal Textiles Corporation points out that Aviation Week ran the wrong picture of someone's home-built private plane.
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