Line Scanning: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1955

 My familiarity with all of this begins with vignettes in Charles Stross novels in which Concordes and the like demonstrate that there's something to high Elizabethan British aviation technology by penetrating American air defences. Since sourcing pastiche science fiction novels is no basis for a system of historiography, I remained agnostic until I arrived at OPERATION SAGE BRUSH, which I find pretty fully summarised online here with respect to land operations,  and with respect to air superiority operations by Not A Pound For Air to Ground at Youtube.

SAGE BRUSH opened with 9 Aggressor B-57s crossing the Exercise's "Truce Zone." The Canberras of the attacking force easily evading defending interceptors and nuked 18 air bases as far north as Tennessee. Our narrator summarises the lesson of the Exercise as the one about the bomber always getting through and goes on to talk about the upcoming generation of American fighter bombers, blaming the Great Mistake of the Vietnam War on an excessive emphasis on atomic warfare (275 simulated atomic bombs with 15 simulated megatons was used by Aggressor forces alone in an exercise area consisting basically of Louisiana, a rather smaller area than, say, West Germany). This being a judicious combination of strategic velleities and hobby horses, I will defer to Newsweek, which focussed on the transient technological aspects, successful jamming and the unstoppable speed of the B-57. I mean, general atomic war is a bad thing, but they actually built F-111s and Buccaneers, and tried to build TSR-2s, so in some sense this part is more important. No-one, apparently, gives a shit about backward-wave oscillator, aka the "carcinotron," for reasons unknown to the author

As the electrons travel down the tube, they interact with the RF signal. The electrons are attracted to areas with maximum positive bias and repelled from negative areas. This causes the electrons to bunch up as they are repelled or attracted along the length of the tube, a process known as velocity modulation. This process makes the electron beam take on the same general structure as the original signal; the density of the electrons in the beam matches the relative amplitude of the RF signal in the induction system. The electron current is a function of the details of the gun, and is generally orders of magnitude more powerful than the input RF signal. The result is a signal in the electron beam that is an amplified version of the original RF signal.

Just kidding. Let's talk about Latin grammar next! But Concordes dropping James Bond pastiches on Cthulhu-occupied Washington (spoilers I guess) is a bit more graspable than analogue electronic circuits. Just one aspect of all this is tactical reconnaissance to find atom bomb targets, which you don't want to waste, there being only 300 of them to spare. (On the bright side, the defending side in SAGE BRUSH had twenty-five bombs to spare  for not-Louisiana at the end of the exercise.) The line is very pithy: The TSR-2 was to carry sidescanning "line scan" optics, which previously had gone into a pod on the Buccaneer. So what was that thing they did with the lines and the scanning?

Postblogging Technnology, May 1955, II: It Sure Better Not Be 99 Balloons Going By!

R_.C._,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

@Ferry Life: https://ferriesbc.proboards.com/thread/9490/bc-ferries-memories

You find me in the doldrums of an ongoing election campaign. The world has discovered peace, and I have discovered just how angry a four-year-old can be. (Very!) She finds the disruptions of packing far too much to bear, and the intimation that she shall have a nurse while Mama is away all day is not to be countenanced. At least her baby brother is a placid little cuddle bear! And I shall be well clear of Britain when Tony Eden launches whatever manic midnight expedition he has his mind set upon by then. I am betting on Athens, but not ruling out New Guinea. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, April 1955, II: Streaming and Peppermint Bombs

Fortune is going to get you Philistines into abstract art even if it takes another
25 years

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

The much predicted election is upon us. I cannot see "my" side winning, but I have to confess to some trepidation about the nation's choice this time around that goes beyond the partisanship of us wooly-minded young progressives. Anthony Eden is not, quite frankly, in his right mind. I expect the cabinet to restrain him, but I am also worried that he will run right over the men I am depending upon. Rab Butler hasn't the strength of character to stand up to Eden, and MacMillan is too deferential. If Eden hits on some disastrous policy that appeals to the 1923 Committee types, what is there left? 

Or I could just relax and enjoy the optimism of this new Elizabethan Age. (Except, yikes, inflation!)

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendx to Postblogging Technology, March 1954: Noise About the Type 2001

 

For me, there's something infinitely cosy about the first generation of professors at western Canadian universities. I've lived more than half my life near the campus of UBC, and routinely bike by the old neighbourhoods where these gentlemen built their homes, way back in the Twenties, and there lived reasonably comfortable lives during the upheavals of the Thirties. My case example is usually UBC's Garnet Sedgewick, an English professor for whom the kernel of the modern Koerner library is named, which gives me an excuse to insert the video below, filmed in front of it, with two-for-one Grace Park. This week, however, we're on about Robert Boyle (1883--1955) of the University of Alberta, born in Carbonear, Newfoundland, just in case anyone ever asks you what happened to the Beothuk. Boyle headed the physics department at UofA from 1912 to 1919, and was dean of Applied Science from 1919 to 1929, after which he went to the NRC in Ottawa, retiring in 1948. No family is mentioned, so my "cozy" image of a Boyle family settling into a quiet neighbourhood in Edmonton and growing happily old is completely off-base. 

Oh! And he invented sonar. Like a lot of other people, sure, but I wanted to share that photo and talk about cycling by old houses up  near campus. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, March 1954, II: Revisiting the Nuclear Submarine Question

 

The story here is that the United Kingdom is a rich, first world country and a Great Power. It fought the Second World War in alliance with the United States, now a superpower. At the time the metropolitan British Isles had 34% the population of the continental United States, compared with 20% today. It is fashionable to compare and contrast the technological achievements of the two states across a wide range of warmaking capabilities in WWII, and after, and to attempt to draw larger conclusions. It is particularly interesting to ask whether the steady decline in creditable comparisons over this period (or longer ones going back into the Nineteenth Century) is consequence or, perhaps to some extent, cause of the increasing disparity in national power (and, of increasing relevance, population). One such comparison is between the first nuclear submarine launched by the United States, Nautilus, commissioned on 30 September 1954, and the first British nuclear submarine, Dreadnought, commissioned 17 April 1963. 

Sea power is submarine power now

I looked at Dreadnought back in 2021, when the decision to build Nautilus (and the less-celebrated Seawolf) was first publicised. In the interest of pushing back against some of the cross-cultural comparisons referred to in the previous paragraph, I focussed on one of the more celebrated British contributions to American power, the "raft" that isolates the relatively noisy atomic machinery of modern submarines. I discussed developments in steam machinery in the 1950s, and even got into the hydrodynamic experimental submarine, USS Albacore, and its influence on the development of the nuclear submarine. 

What I didn't have was a contemporary view in the form of a leading article in The Engineer explaining what a mid-century British technocrat would deem important research questions needing to be worked out before the nuclear submarine could take the sea as the lynchpin of modern strategic power. So in this short week, I am going to take another dive. 

A Technological But Also Inevitably Political and Medical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1953, I: Diagnosing Presidents

 

Leaving aside the unintentional, dark irony of an ad exalting modern diagnostic practice and focussing on peptic ulcers,  this post was only secondarily inspired by this ad. It actually mainly has to do with my nephew, C.'s, enrollment in a doctoral programme in medical physics. No, that's a lie. It has mainly to do with my company put roasting chickens on two for one last week. I spent entirely too much time on Tuesday and Friday cooking them, so Postblogging June, II is stuck two-thirds of the way through 15 June. 

And that is why my attention is very much focussed on the already reported 10 June 1953 press conference in which Senator Robert Alphonso Taft announced that he was ill and would be temporarily resigning as Leader of the Senate, with William F. Knowland as his interim replacement. "The Senator from Formosa" would end up remaining as Majority and Minority Leader, until 1959. 

Taft had first sought treatment at Walter Reed in May after a round of gold with the President was interrupted by the increasing severity of hip pains which the Senator had been suffering for some time. At the time the pains were dismissed as arthritis. It was not until a late May visit to Holmes Hospital in Cincinnati that nodules were removed from his neck and abdomen and biopsied, coming back malignant. It was for some reason found necessary to hospitalise Taft again in New York on 7 June to finally confirm the cancer diagnosis, and a final diagnosis of metastatised cancer of unknown origin was made on the basis of exploratory surgery on 4 July. As The Periscope will report next week (around here), by 15 June, there were rumours that Taft's condition was life-threatening, but he was only officially put on palliative care in July, and died of a brain hemorrhage on 31 July some hours after a final visit from his wife, a detail that I assume Wikipedia offers in a spirit of "Do I have to paint you a picture"? 

The man who almost won the Republican nominations in 1948 and 1942 was dead, within months of beginning his first or second term, depending on which alternative history you prefer. This is something that has struck me as somehow significant ever since I read the grief-stricken Time obituary of 1940 Republican candidate Wendell Willkie in October of 1944. At the time and since it has been my lively suspicion that one of the problems with Willkie is that Henry Luce had such a massive crush on the man, but I think we can all agree that it is a bigger problem that in some alternate history he would have dropped dead at the climax of WWII, just a month away from contesting the 1944 Presidential election. In other words, pick your alternate timeline carefully, and you'll get three Republican Presidents dying in office in thirty years.   

Gathering the Bones, XXVIII: Devil Take the Tobacco People

 Who knew that I'd need the "Drug Humour" tag again the week after I created it?

Tilsonburg is a town of 18,700 fifty kilometers southeast of London. (Where nephew M., who is getting married next Saturday, attended medical school. W00t! Go M.!). In the golden postwar days of the Canadian leaf, it may or may not have been synonymous with the Canadian tobacco industry before Stompin' Tom Connors recorded "Tilsonburg" in his golden years after the Centennial. Afterwards, Tilsonburg became synonymous with back breaking fieldwork in the "nicotine dew." This isn't exactly a trivial point. There wouldn't be a Virginia, or, quite possibly an America had John Rolfe not been able to establish the broadleaf Virginia tobacco industry in 1611. The received story is that Rolfe obtained Nicotiana tabacum seeds produced in Trinidad, the so-called "Orinoco" strain, and established it in Virginia in place of the tobacco then grown in Virginia, said to have been the rougher tasting and more psychoactive Nicotiana rustica.  

Apparently, some historians I've never met don't listen to Stompin' Tom and certainly a larger group have never seen the  1992 Sommersby movie, perhaps because they weren't dating way out of their league and thus weren't into seeing a later Richard Gere vehicle. 

(It's too bad that the extract doesn't include the later footage of the beds being covered.)

Since I, personally, have this rigorously scholarly background in the literature, it occurs to me to wonder whether, given that producing tobacco is evidently quite hard,  there isn't more to say.

Postblogging Technology, February 1953, II: Too Good To Be Forgotten

R_. C_.,
Shaugnhessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

I think I would be on and on about either feminine complaints or politics if I spent overlong with this, so best wishes, my love, and what a complete shambles the Eisenhower Administration has been! "Car dealers for New Dealers." 

Hah! Also, oops. Sorry. Like I said, better not to spend too long on this.  

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie