Postblogging Technology, June 1956: The Querulous Old Man And the Central Bank

That is quite the artist's impression of the King of Rock and Roll. 

R_.,C_.
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada


Dear Father:

In anticipation of your question, this month's Fortune, claims that Sievert Thurston and Western Hotels now have the inside track on Uncle Henry's "Hawaiian Village." My first assumption is that Thurston planted the story with Fortune, probably just the column editor. It's not like Henry Luce is taking an interest in our affairs! That doesn't mean Hilton is out. My theory is that Uncle Henry is shaking them down, and that it will blow up in Uncle Henry's face, as usual, and that we should keep our money out of Uncle Henry's hands, as usual. I mean, his developments usually do get built, and Hawaii is the coming thing, but this just seems a bit rich for my blood. 

"One of the earlier geodesic domes constructed in the United States." Photo credit https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Harald-Reportagen, or Kurt Liese (1915--2010)

 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Economist, 2 June 1956

Leaders

"Britain's Trade Defences" What will happen to Britain's finances if America enters its third "pause" since the war? After framing the question, The Economist manages to overcome its distaste for the modern lingo and call it a "recession." It hastens to add that  an American recession isn't guaranteed, and it might or might not cut American demand for sterling area imports, because while that is what happened in 1938 and 1949, it didn't in 1953--4. What should be done? Well, unemployment is always great, but it can't be carried too far, so probably spend down the gold reserve a bit, and we should keep on poking around for non-dollar trade. The Economist hears tales of a distant continent called "Europe" that  should be considered. 

"Time Grows Short in Cyprus" Oppressing Cyprus until it likes us might not actually work, so we should probably negotiate before it is too late. For five pages. 

"Good Business in the Good Book" I guess I vaguely knew that British Bible-printing was a bit of a monopoly. The Economist recounts the story of how licenses to print the King James (Authorised Version) went from the Crown to Eyre and Spottiswoode, who are the current Queen's Printers, and not the GPO, as one might naively suppose. That doesn't make it a monopoly, because the university presses also have licenses, but does from the perspective of Scottish printers, who are not allowed to export Bibles to England. Scotland has competition, and cheaper and more accurate Bibles, but only in the sense that English Bibles are imported, because Collins is the only surviving Scottish Bible printer. That is, of the very nice Authorised Version sort of Bible. Everything else is fair game. Is this a monopoly? Should it be ended? Maybe, maybe not. Really, the fun part was explaining the history of it all. 

From The Economist of 1856, "Peace Rejoicings." On the occasion of the glorious peace that The Economist didn't like but that you can't criticise, it occurs to the editor that all these celebrations might lead to statutory holidays, and we can't have that. 

I feel like, if you read every number of The Economist from 1848 to 1856, this stuff wouldn't be weird

Notes of the Week

"The Second Trump" The Government isn't giving away any  more wage increases in the nationalised in " dustries because of inflation, says Harold Macmillan, and private industry shouldn't either. And Labour better go along with it, because you'd have to be some dumb leftist not to see the need for it. You see, inflation might be driven by government policy, but it's up to the government to make policy and decide how to stop inflation, so the left just has to go along. 

Siege and relief of Chitral, Illustrated London News

"'Interdependence:' Theory and Practice" and "A Policy for Algeria?" Moroccan independence is "interdependent" with France by slogan only, and Mollet has to be "brave" to find a policy that will actually satisfy Algeria's Moslems, with the implication that it will require more bravery than French politics will allow. 

"Economics of the Doubt" The year is shaping up to be a hundred-year drought in the United Kingdom this year, and heath and woodland fires are already breaking out. The solution is obviously not increasing "services" to meet the hundred year standard, or nationalisation of water (The Economist rolls its eye at silly Labour ideas), but rather home water meters  and raising the price of water during droughts. The next Note prods at the current state of suburban development policy in Britain. India has put in a claim on Chitral, but it's just a diplomatic manoeuvre to strengthen India's claim on Kashmir. Obafemi Awolowo is the coming man in Nigeria, a Note that is more noteworthy for inventing the "Lyttleton touch" says. That's right, we're talking about that giant of diplomacy, Oliver Lyttelton. Parliament is fussing about whose responsibility it is to look after cruelty to children cases in the home, reported incidents of which have risen sharply under new legislation. As many as a hundred thousand British children may be of concern! Konrad Adenauer is in a spot of trouble after denouncing two members of his cabinet and the German central bank over recent rate increases, which he opposes, along with tariff reductions. It is suggested that it is time to look for the successor to the Chancellor, who is, after all, 80 years old. Eastern Europe is to have a common market, which will be quite good for them and, the Soviets insist, for the world. The Law Society is on about legal aid, Europe is on about Europe, the Church of England would like to see it, and society, out of sex crimes except for the ones that actually are sex crimes. Norway is not going to have a strike wave like Denmark and Sweden, which would have been bad, and the Daily Mirror Spotlight series on British unions is pretty good, except maybe not saying enough about how Communism is bad. Italy had boring local elections, so I guess we can cancel the fall of Western Civilisation for this week. The British Trawlers' Federation seems to be making some headway against the stead fall in herring sales with its ad campaign playing on the growing suspicion that a diet  heavy in "eggs, butter, and cream" might be bad for you, and fish actually quite good, as see the Japanese, Bantu, and Italian peasants, who are not afflicted by the current rise in hardened arteries and heart disease afflicting Western Europe and the United States. "The evidence implicating fats," (and particularly animal fats) "is far from complete," but is slowly accumulating, like the evidence linking smoking to cancer. So eat some fish, and live longer, like "even comparatively sedentary Japanese." At least until fish kill you of something else!  

Letters

Walter Oakeshott relates an anecdote about that one time Lord Wavell expressed an opinion about the Greek campaign, which goes to show something in light of the recent publication of the first volume of the official history of the campaign in the Middle East. W. T. Newlyn explains how the Bank of England can disinflate by [insert financial market gobbledygook here]. John Connell piles on The Economist's "The General Strike of 1962" joke. People shouldn't do that. It's not usually as funny as the first time around. I have no idea about this case, but the point still applies. Jay Lovestone of the Free Trade Union Committee Labor League for Human Rights of New York writes to say that The Economist can't understand how anti-communist he actually is, because he burns with the white hot rage of a thousand stars against all the works of Marx. (Karl, yes, but Groucho isn't as funny as he used to be, and don't even get me started on Zeppo.) Robert Sowter thinks that local rates are bad.

Lovestone seems to have lived for trolling
the Communist Party from within until
he found that George Meany and James
Jesus Angleton would pay him for doing
it from the outside. 

Books

 Elizabeth Wiskemann explains about Germany's Eastern Neighbours. They're exasperated with Germans and for good reason that the author drastically understates by downplaying Nazi misbehaviour. Margaret Cole's Servant of the Country is a very worthy book about how London County Council works, John Slessor's Central Blue is a memoir of two wars and a good reminder that the air marshals of the Second War were the dashing pilots of the First who flourished in the educational apparatus of schools and academies and colleges that was "Trenchard's Royal Ground Force." It's pretty tough reading except for the personal reminiscences (the reviewer singles out hunting stories) and pen portraits of contemporaries. Walter Weisskopf is the latest to weigh in on The Psychology of Economics. It seems like there is a general agreement that there's a lot of psychology in economics. It's just that the economists have no idea what to do with it. Sacheverell Sitwell has the sort of book he likes to write out about Denmark this time. Moses Finley and Charles Seltman are jointly reviewed for World of Odysseus and Women in Antiquity. Finley is "sociological" and insightful, and the reviewer really liked Seltman, while making it sound like a sillly book. George Lias' Kazakh Exodus is another of those books about odd collections of Central Asians showing up at the gates of the Raj with tales out of school on Communism, in this case the 1800 Kazakhs who crossed into India via the Kashmir passes in 1951. 

Looks like the frontispiece of an old time fantasy novel, doesn't it?

Norman St. John-Stevas has Obscenity and the Law, which is entertaining and erudite, but wrong to its core. John Wellington's geographical treatise on Southern Africa and Harold Wincott's book of selections from his Investor's Chronicles "Beginners, Please" advice column get shorter notices. 

American Survey

"New Russian Look" The United States is rethinking its approach to Russia in light of Russian demobilisation. Because if the Russians can save so much money on men and guns, then why can't . . Oh, no, the aircraft manufacturers are rolling around on the carpet turning blue again. Harold Stassen is the only man in the Administratin who sees an opportunity, while Dulles is talking tough and  Congress is punishing the Europeans for not spending enough on arms by cutting their foreign aid for buying arms. Unemployment is up in Detroit and Harlow Curtice has joined the attack on tight money. Meanwhile, 1956's weak sales can be explained by reference to over-production during 1955's record year, and the superficial changes in the 1956 model year that suggest that Detroit is running out of steam, especially when talk from the companies, and particularly Ford, is of dramatic changes in 1957, or even a cold spring. Will all the big companies even survive? For example, will Studebaker-Packard make it? 

"Pyrrhic Banking Victory?" The replacement of Alan Sproul at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York by Alfred Hayes is clearly occasion for  much tea-reading, since Sproul took early retirement, and who does that when they are on the Federal Reserve? That's the kind of job that you cling to until you start confusing your colleagues with your third wife! It appears that Sproul is on the wrong side of an ongoing argument about the way things are done in American finances, but once again the dreaded phrase, "Open market operations" appears, and we, the laity are reminded that we have no right to even understand how our future prosperity is guided by wiser heads than ours. Seriously, I imagine that even to define "open market operations" in the course of this kind of story is too much text for the page to bear, but if you leaf over to international affairs you will find many articles that start with "France is a country in Europe" explainers, so surely something is possible! Stevenson's win in Florida is "of great psychological importance." Because, psychologically, we now know that Stevenson is a lock! (Stevenson was introduced by a supporter, former Governor Caldwell, as the "Democrat least unacceptable to the South on racial matters," while Kefauver was a "leftist sycophant seeking the Negro vote." Supposedly, says The Economist, which has apparently never been to Los Angeles, this will hurt Stevenson with California's "Negro vote." 

The Administration is shoring up soft cotton markets, but will not consider tariffs on Japanese imports, which are anyway not serious competition except in a few types of fabrics. The AEC has extended the guaranteed price of uranium for another decade to keep the mining boom up. Congress and the Administration are fighting over funding for the TVA, a "Correspondent in St. Louis" reports on "Integration in a Border State," domestic oil producers are pushing for tighter controls on oil imports to protect their investments, and the President has appointed Fred Seaton of Nebraska to be Secretary of the Interior because he's the only man in the running for the job who doesn't have a giant "giveaway" scandal hanging over him. If you are wondering how integration is going in Missouri, It is going fine except for the part where cities and neighbourhoods in Missouri continue to be so racially segregated that school integration doesn't make much of a difference. 

The World Overseas

"Mr. Hatoyama In Search of a Young Man" Japanese politics are very inscrutable and no-one knows who the next prime minister will be; and, of course, Communism is terrible, a point that also neatly summarises "Faint Hope for Laos," details of Laotian politics aside. Our Correspondent in Karachi replies to "The Indian Point of View." It turns out that Pakistanis have a much less favourable view of Indian foreign policy than do Indians! We visit the Canadian pipeline debate, which is not going very well for the St. Laurent government, as you might have seen in your morning paper. India is "flirting with inflation," the latest on de-Stalinisation in Russia is explanations of the cult of personality aimed at juvenile readers, while the International Labour Organisation reports that there is lots of forced labour around the world, in a submission to the world that seems almost as much a complaint that the problem is being dumped into their laps as a documentation of abuses particularly in Portuguese Africa and (controversially) behind the Iron Curtain. 

Report on Shipbuilding

"Shipping for World Trade" Oh! THAT'S what it's for! We are living at the end of a long age of dramatic change, as "reciprocal dependence" gives way to world trade thanks to the change from wood to iron to steel, and from wind to steam, made the world's oceans as regular and reliable as the railways. Now there are only corners to fill in, like the possibility of refrigerated tankers carrying natural gas from the Middle East to Europe. "Almost all the possibilities of ocean trade have been tapped." Even passenger traffic is up, with more people crossing the Atlantic each year by sea in 1954 than any year since 1920, although the numbers cannot match the great emigration of the early years of the century. But the growth of the fleet will be from now on slow and gradual, except for oil tankerage. Two full articles get us to the point where we might expect a need for 35 million tons of new shipping in the next ten years besides replacements, a total that falls well short of building over the last ten. In 1955, the world's shipyards launched 5.25 million tons, and the annualised rate through March is 7 million tons, with a third of that coming from British yards. World capacity might be estimated at 5--6 million tons/year, indicating that the world industry will be far from fully employed in the next decade. British yards are good and competitive, but they suffer from a labour shortage that drives up labour costs, The Economist very briefly admits before pivoting to the usual complaints about unions. Also, the Americans might go back to subsidising their industry. The future is cloudy! 

 The Business World

"Fighting Talk at Harwell" The Atomic Energy Authority "laboratory" at Harwell is on a giant scale, with total investment across the Authority coming to £235 million, surely not less than the £30 million spent at Sellafield invested at Harwell specifically. About 70% of the effort at Harwell and "a thousand" of its staff" are committed to nuclear power. The breeder and homogenous reactor demosntrators are on show. Unwrapped this week is its work on fallout, particularly strontium-90, which seems most dangerous since it is taken up in the bones instead of calcium. Most of the strontium-90 produced in the tests so far is still up in the atmosphere. Is the money being spent wisely? Harwell is all in on the Calder Hall-type natural uranium reactor, and believes that the entire American investment in enriched uranium reactors is an uneconomical mistake. That's pretty bold! The second feature article, "Long Haul at the Docks," proposes that, in the long run, London will be able to compete with Rotterdam and Amsterdam in spite of appearances to the contrary because the continental port's emphasis on transshipments limits their potential business. On the other hand, the labour problem is "intractable."

Business Notes

Commodities down, sterling down, inflation (maybe) down. The redundancy situation at Standard is so sticky that The Economist even manages to direct some tepid criticism at management for not being forthcoming about how many permanent redundancies there will eventually be. The government continues to argue that  investment is the main driver of inflation. The Economist was willing to buy that as long as "industrial investment" was meant, but now there are intimations that it might be financial investment that is at issue. Heresy! The coal price increase will probably also cause inflation. BOAC has shown an unexpected £1.5 million deficit this year. It is taking immediate steps including curtailing its contract with Bristol for Proteus engine maintenance, which will be taken in house in six months. More drastic changes are expected soon. The downside to the ten year extension of the American uranium price is that there are signs that there is too much uranium on the market already. Red meat is more plentiful and cheaper in Britain this year, and the maximum road speed of heavy lorries will be raised from 20mph to 30 next year. (The issue has always been that for most British drivers, who spend most of their time within city limits, the change is more theoretical than real, and somehow the way that wages and hours were calculated under the change came out in th eemployers' favour.)

Editorial: "The New NATO: Shield or Diaphragm" Robert Hotz points out that the new NATO strategy is for its forces to be only a "diaphragm," penetration of which will trigger massive atomic retaliation, which is what makes Charles Wilson's official policy of complete unilateral disarmament in the air "so chilling." The 300 or so bases, radars, controls, aircraft carriers, seaplane atom bombers, atom submarines, and logistical infrastructure might not be enough to deliver all those retaliatory atom bombs! 

Industry Observer reports that the most powerful radar in the world is being built at Laredo to monitor missile tests, and another is contemplated on an offshore platform in the Gulf of Mexico to detect surfaced submarines and be a "southern DEW line." North American continues to test fly its Navaho intercontinental missile. B-52 flap skins have been strengthened to prevent cracking. Three features on new airborne or sled-fired targeting or testing systems. The roll-out of the RCAF's Canadair CL-28, based on the Bristol Britannia, will begin at the end of the year. The 707 will have 600lbs of fiberglass acoustic insulation between its outer and inner shell. The US Army is looking at adopting the Navy's mirror landing system for forward-area landing strips. The cost of JATO units for B-47s has gone down from $450 to $160 per unit, which is good, because the B-47 requires 30 units for a fully-loaded combat takeoff. Douglas has had to lower the DC8's guaranteed maximum Mach number at high altitudes due to gust loading concerns. Washington Roundup reports on several on going Democratic-led investigatory committees looking at military aviation, now to include the Army, and commercial; at a fight at the CAA over whether federal funds can be withheld from segregating facilities, that ALPA is lobbying to make the CAA independent of the Department of Commerce, and a fight developing over a bill designed to curtail the White House's power over international route cases.

David Anderton reports for Aviation Week reports that "Army's Nike Scores Seven for Eight" Which is good news, because this sort of trial is never staged! (Says Ronnie sarcastically.) They're not real tests, anyway, because as far as I know, Nike will use atomic warheads in service. 

Much more dangerous than it looks. Never tell Frank 
Frazetta that he's not allowed to draw Tarzan's pecs.

Irving Stone reports that "ICBM Re-entry is Simulated" This is more about the "gas gun" at Ames that isn't really equipped to simulate re-entry speeds, so it is more an argument for developing the improved gas gun or a really high speed supersonic tunnel than anything. Also in high speed explosion news, the dummy used for a recent supersonic ejection test at a place called "Hurricane, Utah," exploded, not a good sign for the pilot! It is the Smart research facility, which is built on Hurricane Mesa, allowing the test aircraft to be thrown off the side to achieve high speeds painlessly. Katherine Johnsson attended General Earl Partridge's testimony to the Symington Committee and learned that you're now allowed to say that subsonic jet interceptors can't deal with high altitude bombers ("Soviet Bison Outstrips U.S. Interceptors"), which is something you weren't allowed to say back in the Revolt of the Admirals. Supersonic interceptors will fix this. The USAF has them coming along, and the Soviets are apparently ahead of us, in spite of never actually showing one. Missiles are kind of fine, but in the future bigger motors bigger radars bigger planes bigger missiles, at which point General Partridge tore off his shirt and began beating his chest with his fists and yelling African war cries. Congress is going to have to sort out the fight between Pan Am and Northwest over the Trans-Pacific route, United has released DC8 data, Bonanza has ordered the Fairchild version of the F-27, France, or actually Snecma, is going to build an atomic aircraft engine; Robert Hotz was invited along for some DC7C proving flights, Capital is asking stockholders for permission to issue more stock.

Captain Robson's Cockpit View is back to give us an inside look at pilots' reactions to the SAE Committee 7 recommendations on new cockpit instrument arrangements. They're not happy! 

David Anderton reports for Aeronautical Engineering on the B-58 engine installation, which is aerodynamically optimised for cooling and thrust, because going Mach 2 is hard, and so is designing an engine nacelle for best air flow at Mach 2. Now we're tired, so it is over to Sperry for an advertorial about how it is spending half a million on the "hunt" for "the most accurate gear ever cut." But even that's too much work so here's a pictorial of the second XP6M-1 SeaMaster, a beautiful, if deeply stupid, plane that my husband will not fly until they work out that "ejection test dummies explode" issue. Then we punish Robert Cushman by sending him to the GE plant to take pictures of its T58 engine. The Vulcan has a new wing, the "Reds" are still using aircraft in "Polar Operations," Lear has put one of its autopilots in a 707 (actually a KC97), Lear wants you to know. It didn't blow up! George L. Christian is also punished, this time by Equipment, and less harshly, since he is sent to New York City instead of  upstate, to look at Fairchild's high speed cameras, in spite of there being very little to say that is actually new about high speed cameras. (They have gears, they have high shutter speeds, you use them to take pictures of things going fast.) Ten books and papers and a whole bunch of catalogues in What's New. New Aviation Products has several bench instrumens, a vacuum for cleaning jet airfield aprons, and even smaller pumps than the last very small pumps, from Vickers. Also On the Market is longer than the main section! Lots of bench instruments, including an alignment interferometer that detects small errors by optical methods, and a "step-function speed reductor," essentially a kind of transmission between manual and automatic. McGraw-Hill's line-wide editorial asserts that we are losing the engineering workforce war with Russia, which we will not win by adopting their methods of creating "robot scientists," but will have to win somehow. 

Letters has R. F. Hodges of San Diego pointing out that U.S. missile development is still a complete mess, Donald Abel, and separately Name Withheld pointing out that he's an engineer and cant' get a job, and so are his friends, so what is this engineering shortage?, while an "Engineer's Wife" writes to agree with an earlier correspondent that her husband isn't paid enough. 

The Economist, 9 June 1956

Leaders

"A Daniel for Defence?" The Prime Minister's statement to the effect that the balance of trade was a bigger threat to Britain's security than the threat of a world war is "certainly foreshadowing the Government's hope of a substantial long-term cut in  Britain's defence programme." This is not the ongoing search for economies that has led to the requirement of £100 million in savings this year, and, among other things, the closing of Scapa Flow. It is the Government asking whether Britain can afford to go on spending £1600 million on defence and £32500 on social spending forever? Well, it is "politically impossible" to gut social spending, but the defence jar is just sitting out on the counter. We then have to pass through some mealy-mouthed paragraphs about how the government is in charge of knowing how much defending we need and we need to think about the allies, and all of that, before moving on to the critical question of whether Macmillan will be better at extracting cuts than Walter Monckton at stopping them, or whether Monckton will be a "Daniel," come to fearlessly discover the truth about redundant Army, Navy, or Air Force programs. And we get the bizarre occasion of Alexander being held out as an example of a defence hawk. 

"India and Pakistan" India and Pakistan are fighting in every way but war, and they shouldn't do that, and Britain shouldn't take sides. Labour is wrestling over housing policy, but it is all pointless, since the whole problem right now is framed by rent control, and the Tories will do something about that before they leave office. The UN is arguing over the Law of the Sea. The Economist takes its opportunity to denounce the 200 mile limit again and call for a three mile limit and freedom of the seas, per standing British policy. 

Notes of the Week

"Both Cheesman and Maynard appear to have been amateur artists."
Say what, Wikipedia?

A Tory backbencher asks that the bank rate be reduced because "it's not working," Macmillan says, oh, no, but it is; and The Economist launches into a tour d'horizon to show that it generally is, and will, unless possibly there is an American recession, and see p.. 91 to find out what The Economist thinks of that! Tito keeps being neutral to the Soviets and the West, too, the cad. Mollet's government has survived its latest contretemps in the Assembly mainly because the new bill for the Algerian war (£100 million is obviously unpayable and the main job of the day for party leaders is to avoid being blamed when it all goes south. Also, after years of ignoring the Saar question, I am pleased to report that France and Germany have an agreement to give up and let it rejoin Germany. "The text of Mr. Khrushchev's attack on Stalin has finally found its way to the western press." An Egyptian official with the Suez Canal Company has made it official that the Egyptian government will take over administration of the canal when the Company's concession ends in 1968.  This is bad because Egyptians are Egyptians, but not intolerably so, and the job of complaining about Egyptian incompetence should be fobbed off on some kind of international body-to-be-created rather than left to foreign governments, because the Egyptians won't  listen to them. The statement on Kenya, that the twelve-year-old girls being sentenced to hard labour for nationalist activity were actually 15, leaves the Economist in despair. While "[o]f course African women are mature at 15," the tone is wrong! Labour's tone is, of course, wrong as well, but given that there is plenty of repression in sight in Kenya, they're less wrong than the government. Given that we're subsidising farmers £200 million a year, confiscating the farms of the 50 worst farmers every year is a reasonable sacrifice, so everybody please shut up about Lady Garbett. "The allies have handled the winding up of the Korean armistice commission very clumsily." In other words, they got tired of the scrutiny and evicted them, breaking the Geneva agreement. Britain should be aware that the Cyprus question is eroding the Greek state, as well. Burma has politics, too, and there is talk of exporting British atomic reactors to Germany, with plans for the sale of three research reactors revealed this week. Germany stil plans to move into commercial nucleae power when designs mature, because its coal and general power situtation is "more favourable" than Britain's. The Church of England will deal with church schools under the Education Act of 1944 at its next general meeting. 

From The Economist of 1856 comes the insight that there is "Too Much Legislation" these days, specifically all that public health stuff is getting in the way of landlords making a profit the way Nature intended. 

The Chinese government's latest response to de-Stalinisation is to order more non-conformist tinking for the good of the people. It is mainly directed at scientists, and needs some catchy slogan, I think!Russia's population of around 200 million, instead of the 240 million demographically projected and the 215 million allowing for war losses, showing that the war was even more frightful than realised. So why did the Soviet government keep this secret? Because so far the return on investment in agriculture has been disappointing and the government finds that it needs to be more candid to justify that investment. There will be no vast cohort of future farmers to make up for its lack, The Economist supposes. Now, me, I though that dead people can't have babies, and so that's why the numbers are lagging projections, but what do I know?

Letters

George Baxter, a civil water engineer, replies to the editorial on the current drought. Domestic meter installation and monitoring would be insanely expensive compared with some more supply. The main issue is that local water suppliers don't have regulatory power to tell industry to stop wasting water. Eric Underwood, of the UKAEA replies to "Fighting Words at Harwell" by setting The Economist straight. Stage II reactors will enrich uranium with plutonium bred in Stage I reactors, but full breeder reactors are a distant prospect for the 1970s, with "aqueous" and liquid-metal cooled reactors likely before then. George Allen & Unwin is worried about rising printers' wages. 

Books

Extensive Wikipedia biography, too. 

A. A. Rogow's The Labour Party and British Industry, 1945--51 is very definitely the lead review, leaving only half a column of the first page for David Clory's edition of The Letters of George Santayana. Interesting to have a book about a socialist party's relationship with industry followed by the letters of one of our more notorious literary fascists! Cory avoids the subject, and Rogow, a business-friendly critic, is interesting in noting that the things that business liked least about Labour involved power, not property, and that when business and government came together, it was the sharehholder who was sacrificed. Richard Wright's A Colour Curtain explains that the biggest problem for western diplomats is understanding the "attitude of the non-white races to the white." This is Wright's account of the Bandoeng conference, and, as a Coloured man, an American, and a distinguished intellectual, he has something to say. Of course, his solution of a "Marshall Plan" for Asia is ridiculous, but he is certainly interesting on the subject of how much damage western racism is doing! L. de Jong's The German Fifth Column in the Second World War  explains that the opponents of Nazism justified their inefficiency in the early years of the war by pointing to a Nazi Fifth Column that never existed. But while that is true, this is just long one apology for fascists. Roman Dombrowski, Mussolini: Twilight and Fall, is a "film script" of Mussolini's fall, and the reviewer laments that no "serious historian" has taken up the subject. Appropriate! Osbert Wyndham Hewett, which is a real name, is the natural person to write Strawberry Fair: A Biography of Frances, Countess Waldegrave, 1821--79, while short notices are given for Glorney Bolton's Czech Tragedy and the Board of Trade's economic survey, The Federal Republic of Germany.  Bolton gets surprisingly sharp treatment for a capsule review, and if you have no idea who Countess Waldegrave was, she was the daughter of a famous tenor, whose parents died young, leaving her fabulously wealthy at a young age, where she entertained. The reviewer doesn't understand how this is a book, as the most that can be said about the Countess is that she was pretty and knew famous people.
 

American Survey

"Recession Talk" Maybe, maybe not. Stevenson has won in California and it might seem like we could now take a break from election talk until the fall, but not a bit of it, of course. The fact that Stevenson has all the delegates  just paints a target on his back! Harriman will dethrone him at the Convention if he doesn't look out! With the middle of the road firmly occupied by Eisenhower, people say that Stevenson will have to move left, and he can't! "People" here means, as it very rarely does, an actual person, Harry Truman. With record sales and profits, steel is strongly motivated to avoid a strike, which means that the new contract will be tough to negotiate because the USW can hold out for good terms. The auto worker's guaranteed income benefits are coming  in for a tougher test than expected, earlier than expected. 

"Republicans Despite Ike" The Economist visits the Wisconsin state GOP convention and discovers that Republicans ae crazy. They like the Bricker Amendment, the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, hate trade liberalisation, and, it turns out, Senator Wiley. At least Harry Cain's careening progress through the insanity that is our security state shows that most people aren't on board. Further to this, American farmers  will once again be paid to plough their crops back into the ground, only this time it is Ezra Taft Benson and not Henry Wallace signing the cheques.

The generalised Pennsyltucky location is offsent by its being a suburb of 
Pittsburgh. Look at that Nineteenth Century downtown! This is how most
Americans lived beforeair conditioning and central heat and California. 

"Research Business" So, United Steel's research centre in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, opened this May, which is occasion to notice that the United States spent $900 million in 1941 on research and $1.5 billion in 1949, and $4.2 billion in 1955, which even for SCIENCE seems unsustainable. Most of the money comes from government and is spent by corporations. The electronics and electrical engineering industries are the biggest spender, dropping $185 million of their own money out of a total of $431 million spent in 1951. This seems like a really good deal for major shareholders like us. MOre than 4000 companies have research centres, but most of the actual work is done by specialised agencies, including universities. The main criticism is that not enough is being spent on fundamental research, although it is pointed out that even if the money is available, the researchers are not.

The World Overseas

"Algerian Crisis in Midstream" Mendes-France and the Communists have left Mollet's coalition over Algeria, but he can still govern, so what comes next? The Right is happy to be "stomping" Algerians, but deplores the rise of pro-Algerian militias in eastern Morocco, just across the Algerian border, which the Sultan does not choose to control. The Communists, meanwhile, are free to play on anti-conscription sentiment, and the question is just how far the Communists and Mendes-France can influence the Socialists who are still part of the governing coalition. But, somehow, heroically, a "middle way" solution is in sight, as general French opinion is supposed to be so far in support of a real Franco-Moslem community that it will agree to stop being racist. "The government has begun to grope for a policy along these lines." But, "It has too often been supposed that, if the rebellion is crushed, the problem of nationalism will disappear." Perhaps some "transitional" "federal" solution is in order. Molotov is gone, to be succeeded by Dmitri Shepilov, the Netherlands are having an election,  mainly over housing, but also over whether Dutch Catholics should vote for Labour or the Catholic Party; we get a page-and-a-half on the Ceylon elections, and a look at Bulgaria's troubled farms before it is off to Canada and the pipeline debate, which is showing alarming signs of anti-Americanism over the flood of American investment capital. 

Business World

The Economist visits the gold and now uranium mines of the Orange Free State, then reviews the problem of calculating the national income, an approximation which could definitely be improved, and ought to include some kind of acknowledgment of depreciation of fixed capital. 

Business Notes

Lots of finance and complaints about the printing unions, and news that Sir Bernard Docker has finally got his comeuppance at the hands of BSA shareholders before we arrive at "Europe's Fuel Gap." Europe doesn't have enough hydroelectric, coal, oil, and gas to meet is needs, and atomic power will only provide the equivalent of 80 million tons, or 8% of electricity, by 1970. So something must be done! Meanwhile British railways would like more electrification. The one bright spot is that much of the demand would be off-peak hours. People are talking about underground gasification again, and a paper given to the ICE by H. G. Davey, the works manager at the AEA's Windscale facility, gives a hair-raising account of how repairs are done inside the reactor, specifically to some elements which "disconcertingly came apart." The fuel elements "sometimes came adrift," and ended up in "air channels where they had no right to be." Two metal plates fell off the back of the reactor, too distorted to even tell where they came from, and a third plate peeled away, allowing the fouling of some vital instruments. Engineers used an assort of tools and television cameras to do their repair work from a distance of 60ft, and have now done 121 welds and 180 bolt replacements, are growing confident enough at their techniques that they are getting ready to tackle the plates. They also did one particularly tricky operation by building a steel box around it and rotating 251 men through it on 25 minute rotations. The Economist concludes that regular maintenance of atomic reactors is proving possible. Which is good to know at this point!

Windscale Fire

 
  

Robert Hotz's Editorial is about how the latest drive to reduce Atlantic tourist fares features virtuous Americans against anti-competition, vaguely socialistic, but also conservative, Europeans. 

Industry Observer reports that the USAF has cancelled the proposed North American F-107 fighter bomber, that one of the B-58's roles will be to carry  "pilotless interceptor vehicles" called "Duck," and "Goose;" that the CF-105 will fly in the spring of 1957, that the F-101B will carry a radar operator, that Convair is redesigning the F8U wing so it won't fall off in the air anymore, that Dorset Laboratories of Norman, Oklahoma, has a $35,000 study from the Weapons Evaluation Group on the "problem of limited war, that plastic models of the F-104 now on sale show the air inlet that was the Air Force's top secret in April, that the USAF is working on "dispersal vehicles" that will move aircraft on and off airfields in Germany quickly. Washington Roundup reports that the Symington Committee is sure to release more classified testimony soon, possibly from Allan Dulles on Soviet air strength, that US officials say that the Russian air defence chief can visit the U.S. any time he wants, that Senator Margaret Chase Smith is on the airlines for pushing Air Force reserves out of federally-funded airfields. 

Aviation Week's lead news story is a move to integrate all the various North American air defence commands, including the Canadian, which might be a bit touchy right now! The magazine runs a three-view pictorial of the Tu-95 Bear. This has the advantage of pushing an article about "Joint Committee Indicates Renegotiation Policy Extension," where hopefully no-one will see it but industry ad buyers. (Strengthening my hypothesis is that opposite is a short pictorial about the F8U's troubles.) Page over, more pictures, more about inter-service rivalry, which the Air Force proposes to ignore, as being beneath it, like most things. Claude Witz reports that "Logistics Pinch Turns C-123 to Cargo." It turns out that the C-123s posted to Europe don't have any assault infantry to assault, so they're flying the colonel's laundry down to London instead. Ryan is upset that Hiller's retracting rotor convertiplane is getting press, so it sends in some drawings of its scoop-wing convertiplane. A pictorial shows the Britannia 300 prototype nearing completion; not nearing completion, a Proteus that doesn't flame out. Alphone Jessop gets to write this month's story about the Air Force trying to persuade the airlines to go with TACAN for Air Transport. Esso reminds us that kerosene is pretty safe jet fuel, and the Bristol Olympus looks like something else on a test bed. The ATA's latest conference hears that air traffic snarls need to be worked out, and world orders for the Viscount hit 316. Captain Robson follows up last week's column with a look at the apparently vexed question of cabin pressure altimeters. The question is whether they can be made to be accurate within 200ft variations of altitude, which is important information for landing jets to have.  San Diego Convair invites David Anderton over to see how they are using a pioneering construction method to construct the F-102out of bits they put together. I liked this story better when it was about the DH9A, or whenever it first ran. But I guess Production has to run something, and no-one else cares about the F-102. 

Philip J. Klass reports for Avionics that "Auto-Navigator Corrects Itself" They all do! That's how autopilots work! Anyway, Lear's Self-Correcting Automatic Navigator does it better, as illustrated by a a flow chart. (It takes input from VOR and DME signals, which is minimally new on the civilian market.) New Aviation Products has a variety of semi-conductors, tachometers, and other things that are smaller than the same thing that came before it, a high-temperature capacitor and a separate "Instrumentation" section this week, plus one for "Microwave Devices." George L. Christian is off to New Haven to hear about "Seals Designed for Supersonic Speeds," from Connecticut Hard Rubber, which makes them out of its proprietary rubber product, Chorlastic, which goes into three columns worth of planes in various applications. Piper has put laminar flow wings on its Comanche, and not to outdone in bringing back popular stories of years gone by, Beech is fiddling with cross-wind landing gear. Safety looks at the 29 December Gulf Oil Lodestar crash in Ohio, and concludes that it was due to icing. Letters has one from "Angry Engineer," who is tired of all the jumped-up draftsmen claiming to be engineers and making all the money, a meandering letter about "Christianity" (good) and "Communism" (bad) from Charles Eumerian of Minneapolis, who signs himself a "Senior Design Engineer," a letter from J. K. Carter of Chicago explaining how there can be both a pilot shortage and unemployed pilots without the "pilot shortage" being a myth, and Commander Gallagher of the "Fair Jax Staff" at Jacksonville, Florida, on the need for more industry training, since apparently we're short of training. 

Letters

Price Patton of the American Association of Credit Counsellors has concerns about easy consumer credit, since high carrying charges reduce demand-driving consumer spending. Three correspondents expand on the question of why the young folk don't save as much these days. A random person (Charles Porter of New Hampshire) and two Post Office employees comment on the article about the Post Office. A. Hamilton Menches of the Rocky Mountain Oil Reporter disagrees with the Editor about how much espionage there is in the oil industry. Gilbert C. Halbers of Paris asks a leading question about whether the "Fortune 500" is going to become a regular feature. It is! A. Gray Boylston of Evanston thinks that if his idea of "$5/month Republicans" takes off, the GOP can take the Democrat's populist tag away. 

Business Roundup is doing that one where the mixed signals from the economy include hopeful ones, so there is absolutely no "Republican recession" on  the way. The trend in defence spending, in particular, is up, for at least the next twelve months. There is some thought that 1958 will see the end of the capital goods investment cycle, though. I ordinarily ignore Businessmen in the News, but Sievert Thurston gets a spot on the strength of Western Hotels being in the running to develop Uncle Henry's "luxurious Hawaiian 'Village Hotel,'" and it is always a good idea to keep an eye on Uncle Henry's latest scheme! 

The Business Globe's take on shipping is that there is a "World Shipping Boom" based on a ship shortage. Fortune notes that the United States is sidelined in this boom by high building and operating costs compared to European and other countries, but shows no signs of going in for the subsidies that The Economist is so afraid of. Germans, or someone, are worried that the idea of an eastern European "common market" is some kind of plot to neutralise Germany, as the Germans will give up and go communist if they can't sell diesel locomotives to Bulgaria. Which leaves me looking at the box story about how Hans Bongers is behind the revival of Lufthansa and expecting to find that he is hiding the fact that he was Hitler's bookie during the war. Conrad Hilton's attempts to get a Hilton hotel into Rome are a story, and so are "protectionist winds" in the South, which is turning away from free trade after luring away the New England textiles industry. 

Editorial 

Fortune takes a stand against compulsory retirement, at least for senior business executives. Just look at Ike? Or don't! Editorial Notes gives us the latest in the "I'm in favour of all antitrust actions except the ones that actually happen" line. We check in with E. J. Zimmer of Chicago's Plumbing Testing Laboratory, who is worried about what synthetic detergents are doing to the pipes, sewage treatment plants, and Lake Michigan. Ike gets called on the carpet for suggesting that the government do something about the exodus of farmers from farms, as the United States actually has a surplus farmer problem, we check in with W. W. Wachtel, president of Calvert Distilling, who thinks that liquor taxes are "class legislation," because they keep poor people from drinking, and the executive board of U.S. Steel, which is contributing to inflation, perhaps, by raising the price of steel ot maintain profits. 

Our lead story is "Women as Bosses," with Katherine Hamill given the highly unglamorous job of explaining why it's actually okay. There might be as many as 5000 of them out of perhaps a quarter million "real" business executives. (Forty thousand American women earn more than $10,000/year.) You would think, considering that there is apparently a business executive shortage, that opportunity would come calling. We'll see.

"Boiling Ohio" Business wants to invest in Ohio, mainly, for the purposes of this article at least, in its hitherto fading coal industry, but is hampered by the fact that the state is a bit of hole in the ground. Aerial shots of giant coal mines, power plants, and tailing ponds do not do as much to contradict this reputation as Fortune seems to think! 

Daniel Seligman has a whole bit about how advertising has developed, paired with one from Perrin Stryker, who has discovered "motivational advertising," which is a clever ploy to use that whole "psychology" thing to sell stuff by. uhm, it says here, persuading people that they want it. William Whyte, who, you would think, would be all over "motivational research," is instead doing some real motivation by looking at "Sabbaticals for Businessmen?"

Speaking of science, here's a company profile of Bendix, which does engineering, followed by one about "How Strong is GM Research?" Sandwiched between is probably the meat of the issue, but irrelevant to us, an investigation into corporate borrowing. How much is too much?