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.
So, nothing much has changed in that I am back in glamorous London. (Joke! Rose Dolores is in the news. It turns out that Dolores Del Rios also used the "most beautiful girl in the world" tagline, though.) The letter is a bit different in that I am finally reunited with my magazines. I hope that you don't mind that I'm a bit shorter with Aviation Week than I have been in the past, but two things have changed. The first is that Aviation Week's editor since 1945 has just disappeared. Robert H. Wood's departure from the publisher's chair was announced by his deputy in the 21 January issue, effective 2 February, but Wood did not contribute an editorial for the next issues and I have no idea what became of him. I have no idea why this matters to me, but I feel sad. Second, I am very tired of treating advertising-disguised-as-editorial content seriously.
I've continued to read to James-James before bed, since it was such a hit at Christmas. After some experimenting I've hit on a book he likes, a wartime fantasy in which some siblings romp around on a flying bed. It's marketed above his age, but he seems to be enjoying it, and I am thinking about The Hobbit when we are done. Best to get him started on fantasy and science fiction early considering the work his mother is doing. (And by that I mean patent law, and not helping out around the studio.) Too bad about the old job. I know if I were at the desk I'd make sure those Australians buy the Avro Vulcan!
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
PS: I guess we know how the world ends now: With clouds of Cobalt-60.
The British Greenland Expedition has been over since the summer, and since I'm not going to bother going through the archives, I'm just going to say that it's been a few months since the announcement of the existence of the Lomonsov Ridge, an "unusual ridge of the continental crust in the Arctic Ocean" that emerges as the New Siberian Islands in the Eastern Hemisphere, and maybe Ellesmere Island or Greenland in the Western.
There might be some people on the New Siberians mining ivory. Otherwise, God just made them to amuse himself. Which is also something you can say about the Lomonsov Ridge. It made a desperate play for relevance in the Cold War because the Americans and Soviets were playing at keeping the drift patterns in the Arctic Basin secret so that they couldn't find each others' Apocalypse Ice Station Zero airbase that no-one built because, come on, seriously. Though on the other hand "come on, seriously" was a scarce commodity in the Cold War and the Reverse Bungie Cord air pickup system, which is also relevant this month on account of it trying to start WWIII by getting two CIA operatives put on trial in for espionage in Beijing, appears in one story about those ice floe bases.
But that's not the story holding everything together this week. That would be the story about the Oklahoma oil field services company doing boat drills off New York.
Brazilla Carroll Reece was born in 1889 in Butler, a town in the far northeast of Tennessee that was inundated by the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watauga Dam, begun in 1942, and completed in 1948. He attended a small Baptist college in town, and somehow made the transition to city life well enough to complete a master's in economics, and work at NYU until he completed a law degree. Or perhaps he didn't, because the next line in his Wikipedia biography says that he "also studied at the University of London.
He ran in the Republican primary in his home district in 1920, campaigning on his war record, term limits, and against "exempt profit taxes on corporations." Having won the nomination, he cruised to victory in the general, but lost in 1930 over what the biography characterises as TVA politics, even though the TVA was still two years away. (Hoover vetoed a precursor plan.) He recovered his safely Republican seat in the wipeout of 1932 notwithstanding accusations of voter fraud, retained it until 1948 when he resigned to run for a Senate seat, and recovered it in 1950, holding it until his death, still fighting for the TVA and against the New Deal.
A photogenic man and a longterm politician, it isn't surprising that there are a great many Google Images hits for "B. Carroll Reece," the one chosen here making his high colour (creepy affect, great performance) and homeboy shavecut particularly obvious. (One-sixteenth Cherokee, I'm sure, although to be fair he was consistently pro-civil rights.) So here I am, amplifying colour again. But that's only a part why he's in the introduction to this here "Technological Appendix." The rest is his ridiculous performance leading on from being slapped down in the 1952--54 United States House Select Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations. The chairman launched an attempt to discover how tax-exempt foundations were promoting "anti-American values" but gave up under pushback. leaving Reese to continue a lone campaign to prove that the Kinsey reports were promoting socialism and communism via sexual deviance in the form of an attempt to "reduce our meager knowledge of social phenomena to the level of an applied science." The mix of legitimate concerns --for example, the way that the foundations were promoting oligarchy-- with right wing craziness is fascinating, but, hey, what about R&D?
On 2 March 1954, Tudor I G-AGRI, belonging to a young Freddie Laker's Air Charter, Ltd, was flying 9500ft near Paris on a freight trip from London to Bahrein when it entered cloud. Slight icing was experienced, and the de-icing and anti-icing systems were deployed, due to which the Indicated Air Speed fell from 155 to 135 kt. The captain maintained altitude via electronic control. This capability, built into the Tudor's SEP4 by its now forgotten manufacturer, Smith's Instruments, was developed from the military requirement a bomber's bombsight be able to fly the plane in the targeting run. It was enormously convenient to be able to correct course and altitude via a single knob, or "joystick," as we would say now, but it was also fuel efficient. Taking the plane off autopilot would inevitably lead to course and engine power adjustments, and gas is money. This might, in fact, be why Captain J. M. Carreras did not increase engine power, although the final report notes that "He did not again consult the airspeed indicator." (It is likely that there was no stall warning indicator, as these were facing resistance from the aviation community. At this point, "[n]oticing that the autopilot was applying large aileron corrections and that the directional gyro indicated a turn to port," the captain disengaged the autopilot, with the disruptive results noted, and "the aircraft made a rapid descent in a spiral manoeuvre." The fact that, contrary to regulations, neither pilot was strapped in at the time might explain much of this if we had any clarity about what was going on in the cabin at the time.
Later in the report, we learn that "[t]his resulted in an increase in the angle of attack until flying speed was lost." Saying things without wasting sentences is why we invent new words, and in this case I am lost as to why the word isn't "stall." The upshot is that Carreras regained control and pulled out at 2500ft and the plane continued on its merry way to its refuelling stop in Malta, a flight distance of 2000km, at which point the airframe was "found to be severely overstressed." The airframe dossier says that it was scrapped "circa October 1956."
The relevance of this anecdote is that the Tudor was originally ordered as an interim long range large airliner for the "charters," that is, BOAC and the short-lived British South American Airlines that was for some reason, probably related to possible dollar earnings, created alongside BOAC. The Tudor I, with grossly inadequate seating, was followed by the stretched Tudor II, of which BOAC ordered 79 before returning it to the shop for poor "hot and high" capability, which, for the British aviation historian, will trigger memories of the VC10, or the Ensign, for us antiquarians. The Tudor IIs were on their way to becoming something like the Tudor IVs improvised out of some of the initial Tudor Is for BSAA when BSAA began losing scheduled services for never-explained reasons over the Atlantic: Star Tiger and Star Ariel in January of 1948 and 1949 respectively, with a total of 51 people on board. The plane was withdrawn from service, BSAA closed up shop, and the remaining Tudor Is/IVs sold off for freight or occasionally chartered passenger service.
If at this point you're thinking about tapping the screen where the title says "Comet Inquiry," you're just going to have to wait for the break, because all this talk about air disasters is a great excuse to post
Since James and I are a bit worried about our letters being intercepted, I will answer a possibly sensitive question here instead of by post. We do not know when we might be going back to London. We expect we will. We have seen no reason to think that the holdup on cooling down the Qemoy crisis was anything but politics, and that a Democratic victory won't mean a prompt cooling of the Straits crisis. At the same time, those poor Russian sailors are not going to be released soon. They've become an issue in internal Koumintang politics. Whether the crisis will be sorted out, therefore, depends on whether Moscow is willing to swallow the insult. I'd like to say that I have a line on Russia's man in Taipei, but I have no idea how much to credit him. He might be some kind of confidence man, so I am being very cautious. The Koumintang is more than ordinarily enthusiastic about shooting each other down by the water at the moment, so everyone is being understandably close lipped except the people being inexplicably garrulous. So all I can say is that if I know anything, Moscow will. If I don't, all I can say is read the papers for yourself.
We have had an exciting few weeks as various European diplomatic efforts and one American one have inserted themselves in our little Crisis. We got to show the French the Tuapse detainees, which drew some looks from one fellow, who seems to have been a China hand who has talked to people who perhaps do not have the family's best interests at heart, but there is some urgency to the action, as the Europeans do not have a feel for American politics and find it hard to believe that a single mid-term election could end the McCarthy era at a stroke. WE can hardly argue the point without raising questions about just who we are, so hopefully someone else has. I wish I could coach them. While Lindley is a nepotism hire at Newsweek, he's perfectly right that any prediction based on historical that Eisenhower will lose in '56 if the Democrats take the Senate is stuff and nonsense. It is hard to see the way that the Democrats are falling in line behind Stevenson as anything as conceding in advance. The idea is that if Kefauver really wants to be President, he needs to be thinking about beating Nixon in '60. But what I want to ask is how likely it is that Ike will even run in '56 given his health. He really doesn't seem to be enjoying being President right now. Sherman Adams might be able to carry the load when the GOP holds Congress,but he is not going to enjoy tussling with the Democratic leadership in the back half of his term, so why try for another?
Anyway, that's my thought. Hopefully this Crisis wraps up before Christmas.
There's nothing to discourage a guy from amateur FallofRomeism than the "Men think about Rome a lot" thing of a few years back, for which reason I haven't visited this thread in a long time. I'd like to say that I was into the fall of Rome before it went mainstream, but, yeah, no. Gibbon might be the most influential historian in history, and I will actually read Pocock's Gibbon if someone can make a case that he didn't have Seventeenth Century precursors. What brings me back this week is, first of all, a Quora answer about Picts that reminded me of a small bit of loose ends, and second the fact that it's Christmas, and I am off to meet my first great-nephew in Campbell River on Boxing Day, which is anything but a guaranteed day off in my line of work. O. is six months old, so a bit young for Christmas, but soon! I, on the other hand, am totally ready for Christmas, which the visiting and the family reunions and the long walks with dogs and the Baldur's Gate 3 marathons . . .Oops, definitely shouldn't have said that last bit.
It has also been suggested that for various more widely applicable reasons that we should lighten up and just enjoy a Christmas for a change. And I don't disagree, so here's a Christmas message calling for peace on Earth, good will to all, and a proletarian revolution!
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.
"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.
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."
With the very low key add for the IBM 650, "the first mass--produced computer in the world,"we take another big step in the direction of home computing. With the bizarre use of a Mark 14 bombsight as a frame to describe the workings of the bellows in a modern pneumatic system points us towards AIRPASS. With all that going on, Aviation Week has a pictorial for us showing how transistors are made, and everyone in avionics seems to have a transducer on ad this month. And something strange is going on. By this I do not mean the Wikipedia article illustration.
According to the Wikipedia Commons credit, is from the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, and I am guessing that it is from the early Sixties. The obvious sociological question I have here is why the two operators in our retrospective view of early computing are male, while at the time operators of complex technological systems consistently code as female. It's a very striking change that I've worn out the electrons commenting on, because I want some smart person who isn't me to do all the hard work of coming up with an analysis of it.
What I mean, rather, is the default assumption that a "transistor" is made of germanium, in a month in which piezoelectric transducers are being pushed heavily in the advertising space. Only 40 tons of germanium were mined "by the end of the Fifties," per Wikipedia. (Or, in 1998, germanium cost $800/kg, silicon, $10/kg. We are not getting to the Information Age using the 50th most abundant element in missile guidance systems.Crystals of various germanium do appear to have piezoelectric properties, but I'm not sure anyone knew that in 1954, and in any event quartz is a satisfactory piezoelectric material and is as common as dirt, so that would be what we would use here.
But first, before the jump, something for 1954 from the Paul/Ford studio, although not obviously electronica, which word I apparently can't use because "electronica" is a 1990s music genre and holy shit look at this Wikipedia listicle.
Is that a bandwagon going by? Let me hop right on that thing!
I am going to go with the assumption that no-one wants to hear my potted history of Boeing's ongoing struggle to not embarrass itself with the millions of 737s-only-slightly-different it is currently selling to the airlines that only want 737s. (Even if they are slightly different.) I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with an industry being locked into an airplane that looks and acts like an old-time 737 in spite of having a ridiculously large pair of engines dragging off their wing and a whole app on its computer set up so that it will fly like a 737 even though if you use the app wrong you crash and die.
Because if I was going to make fun of this situation I'd say something like "Good thing grandparents don't fly planes," and then the dam would burst and I would point and laugh and laugh and laugh, and we're way more serious about that around here. And anyway it frankly doesn't even crack the top fifty of inexplicable institutional malfunctions we've got going on these days. (Just kidding about "inexplicable." It's obviously all the old people we've got these days.)
On the other hand, I can go back to 1953 and the approximate moment we got locked into this path and try to understand how we started down it.
You will be pleased to hear that Reggie's paper went well, with none of the security-related theatrics that scuttled the conference's most anticipated paper, the Avro reply to George Schairer on pods. (I think pretty much everyone knows that the paper was considered far too embarrassing and dangerous because it discussed the extraordinary frequency with which B-47 engines explode, and J47s by extension, but the face-saving story is that it couldn't be given because the Vulcan is still on the Secret List, or something like that.
Aside from attending conferences and sad associated"wine and cheeses," I have been enjoying London, although that must come to an end next week when I head out to the studio and find out what they've been doing with our money. Hopefully there will be a convincing explanation and some wonderful film is in the can, and I will spend the day enjoying out-takes and what passes for British food, which is even worse than Californian.
Someone once said that J. H. Hexter would have been a better known historian if he hadn't been like the horse that only ran when it had a burr under its saddle, in his case this being historians with an excessive bent for synthesis, particularly Marxists. I understand, Jack, I understand. For me, it's Correlli Barnett. Audit of War comes out of an era of intense British self-loathing, building on Fordism, with all its Fascist tendencies. Practically everything American is better, and there's a neat convergence between supporter and critic, where the American factory is better for Barnett, while his critics defend laggard British per-person productivity by pointing to the vast floor space possible for American factories.
Well, I might well be on strike next week, and I certainly have split single days off this week. And that can only mean one thing. A Technological Appendix with absolutely no reference to modern day events. Instead, I'll talk about a long deadlock in the French National Assembly requiring multiple votes for multiple candidates to select a new premier, and a devastating military setback for colonialism. People, it's the Fifties! It was a different time.
GM's lease at Willow Run, signed in August of 1953, and the fall of the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu in the Sip Song Chau Tai, on 7 May 1954 stand as two signal failures of high modernism.
They are also drawn together as threads in the June 1953 news, while I am writing less than a month ahead of the 70th anniversary of the creation of the fort at Dien Bien Phu, threaded through by a technological story, if not a very exciting one, that of the Fairchild C-119, and the month-long series of votes in the French National Assembly that was required to finally find a premier who could command the confidence of the house.
The first candidate for the premiership was, pictured, Pierre Mendes-France, who gave The Economistthe vapours, as reported in the issue for 6 June, with his neutralism (he was cool to the European Army), his socialism, and his openness to an outcome in Southeast Asia that didn't involve the final crushing of Communism. The final, and successful one, was Joseph Laniel. I've joked several times in alt text that the Assembly was choosing the man to throw under the bus of Dien Bien Phu, a hair-brained strategic scheme that is already cooking, inspired by dubious success of a small airlift of troops into Vientiane, in which C-119s played a non-trivial role. Mendes-France will negotiate France's disengagement from Indo China in the course of 1954, when the Assembly grudgingly accepted that he had been right all along, and liberated Tunisia in the bargain before the diehards expelled him in order to make the Algerian situation as difficult as possible.
There's not necessarily anything funny-ha-ha about this. The Fourth Republic did fall, and not long after the deadlock of 1953. It's the only modern democratic state to do so in the post-WWII international order, and evidence that it can happen. On the other hand, in retrospect it seems like it mostly came about because of obdurate resistance to social democracy, and, anyway, the Fifth Republic might not be perfect, but it is better than the Fourth, and one has to wonder if some of the other modern democratic states of the post-WWII international order could do with a one-and-done revolution and a new constitution. Maybe if they're having difficulty selecting a head of government, that's a sign? Of course, it's hard to think of a perfect modern parallel, given that we're well past the days of colonialism.
Dien Bien Phu also has a more unusual hook on my imagination, because I cannot escape memories of Tactics of Mistake, an entry in Gordon Dickson's Childe cycle. Tactics is a late novel, but strikes me as marinated in the contemporary reaction to Dien Bien Phu, which might be because it is a fix-up, like Soldier, Ask Not, but of unpublished stories from Dickson's first decade as a professional science fiction writer. Or he just read Bernard Falls. If the first theory is true, though, we can thank Nguyen Van Giap for the boomlet in military/mercenary/war-world science fiction that continues to this day.
I added "The Great Siege" tag early in the life of this blog to organise the idea that Germany's strategic campaign against the British Empire was effectively a siege of Great Britain with consequences extending well beyond the end of the war. One could say, I thought to myself in 2013, that it was ultimately a success, inasmuch as the British Empire no longer exists. That is because, by situating the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic into an overarching effort including mining and, most easily missed, the V-weapon campaign, one could extend the long range consequences of the campaign well beyond the end of the war, and, in particular, say that the attrition of British housing stocks during the war was an important factor in What Came Next.
Well, this is a travel installment, with me currently struggling to touchtype with reasonable speed on a very nice ASUS laptop with a keyboard that is just too small for my fat fingers, which doesn't encourage me to be loquacious, but which on the other hand leaves me thirsty to share pointless vaction pictures and experiences.
The overall idea with which I started this tag was, I now see, hopelessly naive, which is why I have decided that the right time to call an end to the Great Siege is with The Economist's disgraceful surrender to permanent deficit financing of the British economy with the 1953 budget introduced by RAB Butler for the Churchill government, because what's more important, "economy" or higher interest rates, lower taxes, and a tacit turn away from full employment? Without either agreeing or disagreeing with the traditional Liberal "peace, retrenchment, and reform," so blatantly giving the game away is the 1953 equivalent of the French "rearming in 1938" to the tune of "What about the rentier?" It's capitulation, is what it is. Here's the keys to the city, Herr Grossadmiral, on the sole condition that you let us march out with our consols shouldered.
The town of Keremeos lies on the junction of the Similkameen River with Keremeos Creek on Highway 3 and Highway 5C in the south centre of the province, in one of two regions that loves to attach itself to the Okanagan Valley as an extension of BC's "summerland," to borrow the actual name of an Okanagan Valley town between Penticton and Peachland, across the lake from Naramata. Keremeos, like the rest of the "Similkameen" part of the "Okanagan-Similkameen," has no lake suitable for summer fun. It is a farming and crossroads town in the midst of endless orchards and vegetable farms with a good run to Vancouver since the Hope-Princeton opened in 1953, although the housing stock you see in these pictures is earlier than that, dating to a previous era of prosperity based on loading fruit cars onto an extension of the Great Northern Railway. The town has a population of a bit over 1700, which explains why the drugstore in town is open 12--4 on Sundays.
A walking tour of the town might seem very familiar if you have seen Beaverdell, Greenwood, Olalla, Hedley, or similar towns laid out before WWII which have since not enjoyed very much growth. It is a four--to-six blocks by four block street grid, readily walkable, with a solid downtown area with enough vacant space for more businesses if you're in the mood to move and invest, and enough room for far more houses than are there, overwhelmed by the size of their lots, and even a few apartment buildings, mostly comically undersized, as if the builder lacked a certain conviction. Around this core area is an area of new building from the postwar era, where such new houses as have been built over the subsequent eighty years are located, abstracted from the town core in every case, and in that of Keremeos, dramatically overlooking it from an Okanagan bench --meaning that although they are very close to the city physically, you have to drive down to a draw that gives access to the Upper Bench of the Keremeos in the far northeast corner of the town.
Now let's talk about one reason that Clement Attlee was right.
In February of 1953, Engineering published on titanium, a swing-wing jet prototype, gas turbine locomotives, a proton synchrotron, and nuclear power; and in retrospect the most science-fictional material published in the course of the month (apart from speculation about a nuclear reactor that generated electricity directly from particle emissions rather than thermally) is a short summary of A. P. Paton's "Fuel Cells: A Non-Technical Outline of Their Development," published by the British Electrical and Allied Industries Research Association, Thorncroft Manor, Dorking Road.
Having long since covered Mr. Atlee's atom bomb, I definitely want to do a technological appendix for the month that sees two actually Earth-shattering scientific developments: The firstreference to a "birth control pill;" and the first reference to using a semiconductor chip to store computer memory. On the other hand, it's really hard to see a throughline from one story to the other, so while I'm going to try because that's the artistic thing to do, I'm not going to apologise if it doesn't work. So there!
It will be noted that Benjamin Sieve's phosphorylated hesperidin pills aren't "the Pill," and didn't work, and that J. R. Anderson of Bell Labs is touting "a 1 inch square of barium titanate," and doesn't say anything about integrated circuits. Nevertheless!
Before launching in, I should mention that I captioned the photo as being of Caroline Geoghegan, the author of the blog linked here, but image search shows the photo coming up as stock. Maybe it's a stock photo of Geoghegan? Idk! It's what I came up with when I went looking for a modern picture of a jogging stroller, and it is more photogenic than what I eventually turned up in connection with the baby pram from Minneapolis that converts from wheels to sleds. And by this time I really can't say that this is "before launching in."
So the original plan was to write Postblogging Technology, August 1952, II: Clever Subtitle, I Wish, this weekend. But then two things happened. First, my final week of holidays for 2022, reappeared after getting itself mysteriously lost last month. (Just kidding, I know exactly what happened to it, but I don't see that there's much reason to press one schedule writer's screw-up if he's not inclined to own up to it.)
I don't know about you guys, but I'm not at my best planning around weeks off that appear on my work schedule with four hours' notice. Second, my flu shot is scheduled for tonight, which might or might not wipe me out tomorrow.
The upshot is that I'm going to write the postblog starting tomorrow and then head off to Vancouver Island for the weekend to meet up with my Mom and my godlike sister-in-law and my bigshot brother who is a doctor and also my bigshot nephew who is also now a doctor. (And getting married! Whoo-hooh, M.!) And also maybe the other nephews and nieces on that side, depending.
So instead here's some technological appendixing, about what might be, depending on how this whole "global warming" thing plays out, the most historically significant single highway in all of human history. (If we do, it's the Royal Road.)
Wikipedia lays out the story in a more accessible way than a seventy-year-old number of Engineering: Interstate traffic from New York through Philadelphia, the first and third largest cities in the country, combined in northern New Jersey with traffic for the capital and the South and with western traffic via the Pennsylvania Turnpike to create intolerable congestion for New Jerseyites as automobile use advanced through the Jazz Age. Then, a combination of the Depression and World War II prevented any more gradual remediation until by 1948, the situation was intolerable, leading to capos getting separated from carloads of bodyguards on the Jones Beach Causeway, with unfortunate consequences.
The Governor of New Jersey therefore authorised a "turnpike," or toll-supported highway, to run from the George Washington Bridge connecting New Jersey with Manhattan, to the Delaware Memorial Bridge (actually, an interchange next to the bridge; close enough). On 5 November 1951 (but not really, because of delays in deliveries of the rolled steel components of the Hackensack and Passiac river bridges) only three years later, the Turnpike opened to traffic, which is only a bit less astonishing than the schedule of its complementing Delaware Memorial Bridge, begun on 1 February 1949 and opened on 16 August 1952. (Between province and city, we have a commitment, announced 2 October 2019, to replace the George Massey Tunnel under the main channel of the Fraser River between Richmond and Delta with an eight-lane tunnel that will be completed in "2030.")
It was so good to see you last night! Uhm, okay, if you ever read this, it will be months from now, because this package is going to your house, and not to your hotel room. I am writing it, with the customary epistolary opening, in the name of completeness, so that my historical posterity (which there will surely be!) will have an entry for the summer of 1952. Who knows what historical insights there will be to be had in retrospect? And, of course, your own Ronnie will have picked out the gems, I am sure. Although when the biggest science and medicine story of the week are successful public vaccination drives and some crackpot worrying about flooding due to the Greenland ice caps melting, it is hard to see what kind of history is being made.
So how did I drive myself up this road, this wrong way cul-de-sac like the planners of your little neighbourhood so love? Because of the movie, of course. I couldn't stop thinking about it. Reggie couldn't stop thinking about it. I have my concerns about casting a 51 year-old as the love interest of a 23-year-old, but at the same time my woman's eye is pleased to rest upon Gary Cooper at the least excuse, so I suppose that means that I am part of the problem. BUT THE MOVIE! And I am so glad that I could see it with you and with Uncle George, and to be there with you talking about it afterwards at the Lotus. What a meditation on cowardice and service and the death of Admiral Ting, and to hear Uncle George talking about the kamikazes at last!
In this new age of inflation, two-and-a-half things for the week.
The first thing is the Bagehot quote. Is this really the secret spring of history, that investors will not tolerate interest rate going below 2% without staging some kind of secret and self-regarding counter-revolution against easy money?
The half thing, the thing that put my mind to Bagehot, is the verponding, the property tax that the States of Holland began to impose in place of taxes on rental incomes as the crisis of the Dutch Revolt deepened. There's nothing new in property taxes, and my slow progress through Scott Tracy's excellent monograph is a disgrace, but I'm going to call attention to it because of the method of the Estates, which was to estimate property values based on twenty times the rental income.
Obviously, it's the data they had. But, also, as far as the survival of the Dutch Republic and the Reformed Religion (as they said in the day) goes, 3.5% is in the nature of things. It turns out that Henry VIII, who knew from sin, defined usury as an interest rate above 10% in the 1545 Act Against Usury, an act revoked by Parliament in 1552, thus in the last year of that young shit disturber, Edward VI, and restored, my source says, in 1571. (The Act was subsequently revisited several times until the rate of usury fell to 5% in 1713, another politically salient year.)
All of this, of course, is about interest rates (and rental rates) which are too high. A lot can be said about this. If you'll follow the link above to John Munro's 2011 working paper on "Usury, Calvinism and Credit in Protestant England: From the Sixteenth Century to the Industrial Revolution," you will get a brief primer on the old idea (Protestants are proto-capitalists with no time for usury laws) being deconstructed by the scholarship and tentatively reconstructed by Munro. So that's great. The current draft of my chapter on English through the maturity of the Newfoundland fishery wants to argue that the economy, royal succession and Reformation interacted with social legislation (Statute of Labourers, Petty Treason, heresy, vagabonds, and finally the poor law) to create the mould of North American racism. The current draft has, says Munro, some idiotic blathering about discounting notes during the Hundred Years War. I'm glad I read it!
However, the issue here is the other one: rates which are too low. No-one seems to care about that, but Bagehot says it is the secret of the winter of our discontent.
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