Postblogging Technology, August 1954, I: Alert and Eureka

R_.C_., 

The Lakehouse,

Twenty-five hundred years after the invention of the Chinese
abacus, this abacus-like device has turned up on the frontiers
of electronics. Its similar purpose: to help businessmen
with their arithmetic. The network of black magnetic
beads smaller than a postage stamp, is one of a number
of input-output "memory" units in the new "702" electronic
calculator built by International Business Machines. The
702 was designed for the world of commerce to help handle 
the vast quantities of sums involved in figuring business
payrolls, inventories, production schedules. 

Nakusp,

Canada

Dear Father:

And just like that, our business trip-slash-family vacation to Toronto in August is over, and we are back in blessedly cool Toronto. As far as I can tell the Super-Viscount will not be high-winged. On the one hand I'm not surprised since I think of high-wing airliners as a British affectation. On the other hand, the Lockheed C-130 is the closest plane to the Super-Viscount, and it is high winged. This is admittedly because the Air Force actually needs high wing cargo planes, but the C-130 could have been competition, and now it's not. The Super-Viscount is not going to enjoy the same kind of clear field that is giving the Viscount its enormous sales, but there doesn't seem to be any American competition in sight. It is, essentially, just the Britannia. 

James is unfortunately not with us, as he flew out of Toronto on Navy business bound for an undisclosed location that is certainly not Hong Kong, where he is certainly not going to be interpreting in a very urgent meeting about Koumintang pirates. 

I'm sorry that we weren't able to meet during our trip, but look forward to seeing you at Christmas. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Electric City, VII: Normalising Telegraphy

 

So, and as will come as no surprise, I've had the experience of a short work week pulled out from under my feet at something like the last minute. It was perhaps not impossible for me to write Postblogging Technology, August 1954, I: I Know Eyewash When I See It, and I'm honestly not sure who besides me to blame for my taking a day off on the 11th and yesterday, but I'll settle for Larian Studios, for making Baldur's Gate III so seductive. That, of course, means that instead of something long, with a lot to chew over, you're getting a bit of a dive into semi-random thoughts I had this week. 

In this case, and as a development of "smokeless powder is just another textiles industry development, therefore the modern rifle, and modern war, comes out of industrial cotton," I am wondering about how normal early telegraphy was. (Is the rifle, or telegraphy, more important to the transformation of war before 1914?) So 

let's forget about all that "information  industry" stuff, and look at the telegraph as it came in, and try to understand why people might take the first steps to improve on semaphore and heliographs and pony expresses, and see where we are.

Gathering the Bones, XXXI: Raven And The First Men

 

This morning I am thinking about Raven the trickster, creator and king. but I also travelled on the weekend and visited my world-travelling doctor brother and his wife, who in conversation chanced to mention how much better the Pacific Northwest art held at the British Museum is than that shown here in its homeland.

"After the great flood had at long last receded, Raven had gorged himself on the delicacies left by the receding water, so for once, perhaps the first time in his life, he wasn't hungry. but his other appetites, his curiosity and the unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures, these remained unsatisfied.

Raven gazed up and down the beach. It was pretty, but lifeless. There was no one about to upset, or play tricks upon. Raven sighed. He crossed his wings behind him and strutted up and down the sand, his shiny head cocked, his sharp eyes and ears alert for any unusual sight or sound. The mountains and sea, the sky now ablaze with the sun by day and the moon and stars he had placed there, it was all pretty, but lifeless. Finally Raven cried out to the empty sky with a loud exasperated cry.

And before the echoes of his cry faded from the shore, he heard a muffled squeak. He looked up and down the beach for its source and saw nothing. He strutted back and and forth, once, twice, three times and still saw nothing. Then he spied a flash of white in the sand.

There, half buried in the sand was a giant clamshell. As his shadow fell upon it, he heard another muffled squeak. Peering down into the opening between the halves of the shell, he saw it was full of tiny creatures, cowering in fear at his shadow.

Raven was delighted. Here was a break in the monotony of the day. But how was he to get the creatures to come out of their shell and play with him? Nothing would happen as long as they stayed inside the giant clamshell.

They were not going to come out as long as they were so afraid of him. So Raven leaned over his head, close to the shell, and with all the cunning and skill of that smooth trickster's tongue, that had so often gotten him in and out of so many misadventures during his troubled and troublesome existence, he coaxed and cajoled and coerced the little creatures to come out and play in his wonderful shiny new world."

"Raven and the First Men" is a Haida creation myth, here truncated. The second image is a rattle, used in shaman and healing dances. The specific meaning belongs to the owner who commissioned it, but the general theme is the transfer of power, which is another way to understand the creation myth. Deprived of its context by the decision to sell it to an outsider, it remains an eerie symbol of the relationship between Raven and one man, no doubt privileged.  I would be stretching nonexistent wings in a ludicrous play at exegesis to go any further (Raven would approve!), but we can reasonably ask how it was made around here.

Postblogging Technology, July 1954, II: Somewhere Between Unacceptable and Unattainable

Because Betty Boop cartoonist Ving Fuller is in a What's New segment. Deep cut, I know.

R_., C.,
Nakusp,
Canada

Dear Father:

Well, I left my current numbers of Aviation Week and The Engineer on the train when I dashed to catch a connection to Weybridge. So if this letter isn't to your liking, blame the clowns at Handley Page for not putting the tail of the Victor on firmly enough to balance flying without the "weapon system"-y radar that's supposed to go in the nose. (James thinks, anyway. He was right about the Comet, though!) This led to an all-hands-on-deck sales meeting over the Viscount replacement, from which I had to turn around for my flight to Montreal, upon which I am writing these words, far away from replacement copies, and there you go.

As for the meeting, the super-Viscount, or whatever they're going to call it, might be completely different from the Victor, but that isn't stopping the American industry, as you can see from the Newsweek coverage. to be fair, it is good news for them that the Victor won't be out setting high publicity speed records while there is a Vickers team still touring the States. I know I would have loved  some British Pathe footage of the Victor prototype landing in Montreal, not that it was even vaguely close to ready for a trans-Atlantic flight, but a girl can dream. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, July 1954, I: Red Meat and Free Men

 

Nurses of the Experimental Civil Defence Mobile
Column like motorcycles. Do they get to ride 
motorcycles, or is just their despatch riders?

R_.C_.,

Nakusp,

Canada

Dear Father:

It is so wonderful that you will be living in the lakehouse this summer! I am sorry that we will not be able to visit, as James' leave for my trip to Montreal can't be extended to two weeks thanks to Farnborough preparations. (The Fairey "The F-102 Can Eat My Dust" is being talked up as a static display, but I don't think that it is going to be anywhere close to ready.) 

Around here, meat rationing ends this week, and while I'm not sure how much difference it is going to make in daily life, it seems like some kind of patriotic duty to go out (or in) for roast beef like a free and patriotic Englishman could never do under those socialists. Or, on the other hand, it's some kind of disgusting display of complete loss of self-control. But as that verges suspiciously on vegetarianism if not outright Bolshevism, the roast beefers are winning the day.  Just have a look at the latest edition of my beloved "Schweppsshire" ad series. If only poor Orwell were alive to see us now. (Except wasn't he a vegetarian? I should look that up. Doesn't seem like the healthiest of lifestyles if you're going to farm in the Outer Hebrides!) 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1954, II: Just You Wait

 

Surely I'm not the only person who hears "[Henry] Wiggin Works" and thinks of My Fair Lady, the 1964 film adaptation of the 1956 Broadway musical based on the 1913 George Bernard Shaw play. I don't even watch musicals, but that particular song, like the dreadful menace of Cobalt-60 Doomsday bombs, from another movie I've never seen, is, well, I guess that's why it's called popular culture. 

You know what's not popular culture? The Wiggin Works, and, for that matter, Nimonic, and Nineteenth Century businessman and Liberal Unionist Henry Wiggin, and finally, the actual operator of the works, Mond Nickel, which probably merged with Inco at some more recent  point. The trademarks for "Nimonic" and other nickel alloys like Brightray, and Inconel, are now held by Special Metals Corporation, and various grades of Nimonic continue to be used in aircraft engines among other specialty applications. I see no evidence that it is used in nuclear reactor fuel slugs these days, although Cobalt-60 continues to be produced in trace quantities by the nuclear transmutation of Fe-58 in steel components into Cobalt-59 and hence Cobalt-60. (I did not know that!)  There's a Wiki page on the cobalt bomb, but it doesn't really get into the isotope as a signifier of universal nuclear destruction, upon which subject I am sure I have seen websites if not scholarly articles over the years. 

Not that any of this really matters. I want to talk about the British steel industry today. It just happens that special alloy steels are an important part of that story. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1954: Gormenghast

 

Just kidding. Today I'm talking about the pioneering nuclear power plant, Calder Hall, not Mervyn Peake's weird 1950 novel about a giant estate that's a country sort-of-thing. (I'd offer a more insightful summary if I'd ever been able to get into the darn thing. Anyway, here's one of Eleanor Morton's bits. The Mervyn Peake reference is a running gag at the end.) I'm just making a witty (YMMV, as the kids say) literary reference. Somewhat surprisingly I find that I'm the first to do it, maybe because all that "Second Elizabethan Age" stuff is down the memory hole. (Hah! Witty literary reference!) 

Calder Hall actually gets its  debut in the 4 June 1954 issue of The Engineer, exactly a month before the Cabinet reluctantly agreed to go ahead with the British hydrogen bomb, in a not-at-all coincidental development. But we don't cover the first two weeks of the month at The Engineer, so we missed it, and also the ominous foreshadowing that is a picture of a Ruston gas turbine set up to burn methane. "The purpose of the demonstration is to show that natural gas, which is available in almost unlimited quantities on many oilfields, can be burnt with the same efficiency and controls as liquid fuels."