Postblogging Technology, April 1956: Mirage Rising

R_., C_.,

Shaughnessy,

Vancouver,

Canada

Dear Father:

It is, of course, my fault that I forgot some issues while packing for our trip to Honolulu, but in my defence, they are small and easily missed! Perhaps all the advertorials in the lost numbers of Aviation Week will seep out into the air and into the minds of possible buyers. It's not like anyone would ever read them anyway.

Your son is a great deal more upset at the sudden apparently universal decision that the lesson of Kefauver's win in Minnesota is somehow that the Democrats will suffer for nominating a progressive in '56, unless, for some reason, it is Averill Harriman and not Kefauver specifically. As he points out, farm voters defecting from the GOP isn't a sign that the party needs to nominate the man who looks the most like the President they're defecting from!

On the other hand, it looks like Stevenson is going to win in California and go into the Convention on a winning note. On the other other hand, it will all be over soon, at least for eighteen months or whenever we start worrying about '58, and we can all agree to worry about something else, like WWIII starting in the Middle East.  

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Missile Gap? A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1956

 

Long time readers will be tired of me bleating about how I was sold a bill of goods in high school about how "we," meaning of course the United States --and, by the way, those Latin American whiners complaining about how "America" has been recently appropriated to mean just the U.S. are 100% correct, to my surprise, but it was the British press that led the pack-- were surprised by the unexpected space technology gap signaled by the shocking surprise of Sputnik. (That was as shocking surprise.) For me, the takeaway point, twenty-four years later, was that it was still necessary for every bright child in a provincial high school to major in the physical sciences if "we" were to have any chance to catch up. 

And you will of course heard from me that this is not true, that the satellite launches undertaken for the International Geophysical Year were scheduled years in advance. Sputnik was no more of a surprise than the T-34's appearance on the battlefield, the first Soviet atomic test in 1949, or the defection of Kim Philby, to name three. It turns out that our received history of the Fifties has been sucked of nuance and detail for any number of reasons. In the case of Sputnik, and the missile gap in general, we can even see the explanation. The Eisenhower Administration's attempt to rein in military spending in the 1956-57 fiscal year led to an industry response that was coordinated with congressional Democratic majorities to produce an  airpower-centred arms race. (Much to the disappointment of those wanting an infantry-centred arms race.) 

But that isn't the limit of my disillusionment. Missile programs might be a silly starting point, but I am, er, beginning to doubt the value of the American experiment.

 

Postblogging Technology, February 1956, II: Working Class Atoms

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada


Dear Father:

A typically foggy winter here in San Francisco sees me with my magazines almost all sorted out just in time to celebrate the atomic age, held back in Britain by its obsolete industry and the stifling weight of atomic tradition. That's not how our distant forefathers gathered plutonium! Seriously, it's what the Americans are saying now that it is clear that Calder Hall will beat American commercial atomic power generation into service by a year or several. Unfortunately, the printer's dispute has kept The Engineer from going on and on about it, as it would surely love to do. I, on the other hand, will not go on and on, as I have documents to review. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, December, 1955, II: Peace On Earth and Sick Presidents. (In 1955!)

We've done this before, but Pogo has never been more relevant.

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Once again I am writing to the man downstairs. It seems a bit silly, but I also feel blue and somber and like somehow marking the occasion of Victor's death, which has hit James even harder than it has me. 

Test flying is dangerous work, and we have lost friends before, but this is the first of them to be killed on a plane that James was not sparing in describing as a pointless death trap. You have to swallow a certain amount of bile when your warnings go disregarded, and it is not like Victor is the last man this silly contraption will kill. 

I suppose this what we deserve for living in a country that turns out not to need a President at all, after apparently living through almost two centuries labouring under the illusion. At least as long as the Cabinet consists of good Republicans, the country flies autopilot!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, December 1955: A Heart-Warming Christmas Time

R_. C._,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Hopefully this, and the Christmas post accompanying, will reach you before you leave for Santa Clara, where I will see you for our a dinner which I'm sure will be as jolly as the Geneva Conference. (If I can b be Molotov, Grace has to be Dulles!)

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, October 1955, II: Boom boom!

According to  Reddit User WeirdWings, this is the  Bartini A-57, a supersonic V/STOL delta
wing flying boat nuclear bomber, with a supersonic recon plane piggyback. "It was never put 
into production" says Wikipedia, which proceeds to speculate on why it was cancelled in 1957.

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

With this one you find me back to work, in the office, and missing my children, whom I got to see a lot more when I was running around the Santa Clara Valley. As exciting as making sure you aren't followed on the way to a secret rendezvous and passing coded messages is, it was not to be. The young men who want to leave Dr. Schockley's employ have neither a patent case nor money, and there's not very many of them. We might be able to turn around the money. There are investors out there, but Shockley will have to get a lot worse for the rebellion to spread across the office, and, I don't know, tell them he doesn't want their work. It is hard to believe any of that is going to happen. 

Your son, if he hasn't written you separately, is settling into squadron life again. As he says, being in charge of planes at least means that he doesn't have to be in Washington championing the SeaMaster. He will be back in town next weekend, and we will go see Oklahoma!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, October 1953, I: It's Just A Cardial Infarction! Walk It Off!

R_., C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

Here I am, your favourite daughter-in-law, dashing off a late one from an undisclosed location in our dear very own Santa Clara County. It's so convenient being a native daughter when you have to propose a very private meeting place in a very public setting! I have just had a lovely discussion with some very nice, if awkward, engineers, about the troubles they are having with a manager whose initials might or might not be "Shockley."

Honestly! I took this job to do patent law. (But, then, the President didn't take the the job to be heartless, unlike his Vice-President, and look who is going to be our President now!) Unless I am being unnecessarily about Ike's "mild" heart attack. At least my dark humour gives you a bit more of a sense of how we are feeling right now down in these United States. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Has Anyone Mentioned That Einstein Was Jewish? A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, September 1955

 

If you are of a certain age and a nerd, you may have encountered the idea that the "spindizzy" reactionless drive of James Blish's City in Flight novels were actually a real thing that Norman Dean was demonstrating to various smart people in the science fiction world. It was probably someone about that age who wrote Spindizzy for MobyGames, which was a big release in 1986 and drives nostalgic interest in its theme music that blends into electronica more generally and dominates an internet search for "spindizzy." 

I did eventually sort out what Newsweek's nonsense about variations in the speed of light was about, and the link between this pseudoscience and the Dean Drive was made, although not until the early Sixties. Some of the people involved then went on to promote the Reagan Administration's SDI. Fun times!

Even some of the crackcpots hat John W. Campbell promoted
in Amazing were embarrassed to be associated with him,
but Norman Lorimer Dean was not noe of those guys.

 

But before it derailed, there was real science, and to make it even more fun, the real scientist who did the real work eventually derailed himself and became a big Einstein critic of the "relativity is like moral relativism," which used to be bad and opposed to Western Civilization, which is maybe not where we are right now, I can't keep track of the ongoing "start a new car wreck to distract people from the old car wreck" approach to politics they've got going on down there these days. 

Maybe in the interest of sanity I can expose some long-gone unsavouriness in the course of discussing some actual history of science and technology, after the jump. 

Postblogging Technology, September, 1955, II: Ike in '56!

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

You might be happy to hear that I have been branching out from pouring over patent tenders to wining and dining Bill and David. While it might seem as though the partners are taking advantage of my connections, I see it as me taking advantage of the partners! It is nice to be working a bit closer to home, though, as I am feeling more than a little guilty about how little I am seeing my children. 

You'll notice a lack of aviation journals. The Farnborough issues of Flight have vanished into the postal never-neverland. On the bright side, an October number of Aviation Week has managed to track me down at the Palo Alto address in defiance of all probabilities. Maybe circulation remembers our long correspondence the last time I couldn't get my magazines here?

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Ray Milland's last directorial effort?

Postblogging Technology, August 1955, II: Plane On Ice

(Per Newsweek of 1955, the theme of Porgy and Bess is that American racism isn't as bad as they say.)

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

The last Renata cherries are off the market here, the peaches are ruined, it's raining,  the roof is leaking again, and James is off to his squadron. Summertime is not easy! And the worst part is that we only have a week to go, because I have to go down to San Francisco to look at our new digs and meet the partners, who seem very pleased to have someone with a track record of staring at patent applications all day, albeit admittedly in the service of selling turboliners, rather than making vast sums of money defending and prosecuting patent violation cases. At least I got to wear a nice flannel plaid to market in Nelson, which you would ordinarily not do in August.

But we did get Canadian polio vaccinations, and I guess no-one ever offered to cancel September. And, even if they did, I voted for the other guy. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, August 1955: Open Skies

R. C.,

Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Smaller than Sputnik, but solid state. NASA. No spying, 
pinkie swear!

The slow task of reassembling my subscriptions continues, with an all-British collection this week, just in time for Canada to abandon the Old Country in favour of  the United States, which I am sure will not be a problem notwithstanding the warnings from down Vancouver way that since Canadian rivers run south, except where they don't, we all shall be induced by easy fits of relaxation to join the United States to enjoy all the advantages of efficient transportation. 

Looking around Nakusp and comparing it with Kamloops, I certainly see the advantages of being on a river that flows into the United States, the innocent young mother said, innocently! 


Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Satellites, Satelloons, and Golf: A Technological Prologue to Postblogging Technology, August 1955

 

"Dirk Boh-Garde"

So I discovered, while trying to re-order some of my requests from the library, that the ASRS definitely doesn't have my email address, or isn't bothering to send me, specifically, emails, by the simple expedient of noticing that the catalogue was listing my Flight retrievals as being held for pickup. I have physical copies of Flight, Newsweek, and The Economist in hand, and I may have missed the pickup windows for retrieval requests for Fortune and The Engineer, so God knows when I'm getting those. (Online subscription for the Aviation Week archives seems to be re-enabled, although I'd prefer to have physical copies for image quality and because it is cheaper.) More importantly, due to my boss getting his three-times postponed vacation this week, I worked 6-2:30, 1:30-10, 8:30-5, and 5-1:30 schedules this week, and was either washed out or lazy this weekend. 

Anyway, here is a  technological prologue instead, because between Eisenhower revisionism and post-revisionism and the announcement of a planned IGY American satellite launch on 29 July 1955, there's a pretty good reason to run one!

Source: https://www.original-political-cartoon.com/cartoon-gallery/buy/caption-displayed/385/

Historians' views of the Eisenhower Administration have . .  . evolved. Better known as a late-era Modesty Blaise-relief cartoonist, Neville Colvin, a newly-arrived refugee from the "stifling atmosphere of Fifties New Zealand," captures the contemporary view of Eisenhower for Fleet Street. Uninterested, or even lazy, but with a lashing of malice barely under control. This is a thoroughly worthless First Executive. While the Britain, having given the world a senile dotard and a meth-head in succession, is not the country to point fingers, there's a sense that the United States has lost eight years. In contrast, writing in 1986, Robert J. MacMahon reviewed a decade of "Eisenhower revisionism" as being most successful in overturning "the traditional interpretation of an inept, bewildered President overwhelmed by his formidable secretary of state." Although "it can be fairly said that the majority of case studies have not sustained Eisenhower revisionism," because the revisionists "have elevated process over policy," we can at least agreed that foreign policy, at least, was "orderly and rational." I'm a bit surprised that MacMahon never gets into the President's health, but, anyway, about that---

 Satellites. 

War Balloons and Satelloons! A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1955

 

That's "Fu-Go," not "Fugu." Those wacky Japanese! So I hope that the readers have been as struck as I have been by The Periscope's ongoing obsession with balloons. Since the column has been talking up balloon-carried H-bombs as an Air Force project, this isn't necessarily all about the Skyhook programme, but Periscope is definitely on that case, too, with its talk of the programme setting an altitude record soon, and reaching 250 miles altitude, which is why you should never have a third martini when you're having lunch with your sources. I mean, there was a time when cementing your name in history as the dumbest nepo baby ever was a potential achievement, but nowadays we've got Larry Summers. In conclusion, why even try?

The walk along the new lakeshore in downtown Nakusp. The Upper Arrow is mostly too cold for cherry trees to fruit, though.

Just go somewhere that's a ferry from anywhere and wait for this whole "Western Civilisation" thing to blow over. Bring some books. And lots of flour, Spam, peas, and lard.  You'll be fine.

Postblogging Technology, June 1955, I: Crash Not Crash

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father: 

As we continue to pack up and decide what we can't possibly live without in San Francisco (or Hawaii), some things just get overlooked, which is my excuse for not booking and confirming travel plans. We will be at the docks at Galena Bay at 5PM Pacific on the 5th. We have decided not to try to rent a car on Revelstoke, so make sure there is someone to pick us up if you don't want us to have to hitch a ride with a farmer! 

Your Loving Daughter, 

Ronnie

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, January 1955: Phreaking Over Fallout

R._C._.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada


Dear Father:

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.

International Geophysical Year: A Scientific Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1954

 

Last seen around here playing Calamity James as an adorable autist, Doris Day sings "Que Sera, Sera," an incomprehensibly popular hit considering the other things people were listening to at the time, but certainly a compelling bit of music in its own right. For that reason I grant a full and free pardon to whoever named the Que Sera Sera, the that gave a name to the Dakota that flew in the Polar battalion of Seabees and the construction materials from which were erected, at the freaking South Pole in freaking 1957, Amundsen-Scott Station.

The International Geophysical Year of 1957 is pretty pivotal to the history of science and technology on account of Sputnik, but if I want to have material to Technological Appendix about in 2027/8, it might be best to leave Sputnik, and Vanguard, until they come up chronologically. But the point of my appendices is to follow up on things as they blow up in the postblogging, and, oh boy, the Antarctic has blown up this fall.

There's actually an International Geophysical Year reason for this, which is that people do everything  backwards and upside down in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Antarctic exploration year runs from November to roughly May, so November 1954 is only two Antarctic exploration years before the Big Show starts with Que Sera Sera landing att he South Pole on 31 October 1956 in what is already the second year of OPERATION DEEP FREEZE. 

Postblogging Technology, November 1954, II: Flying in the Grass

Because of boundary layer control

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

The cat is truly out of the bag after Senator Knowland's floor speech, of which I am glad that someone had the consideration to give us all of five minutes warning so that we could get well clear of our apartment before anyone was curious enough to look in at us. We are now in transit to Hong Kong with the understanding that we are not wanted in London until January. Which means last minute Christmas plans, if you haven't let James' room to a lodger yet.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, August 1954, II: Mambomania

R_.C_.,
Lake House,
Nakusp,
Canada

Dear Father:

You will see that I have, once again, not covered The Engineer and Aviation Week, and will, OF COURSE, be thinking that I have lost my copies again, and not at all about the fact that they are the most boring magazines I cover. 

What, you wonder, will be my excuse this time? Did I leave them on the train? Were they destroyed in some kind of robot uprising, as in the movie that Ronnie went to the other week? And why are the robots always uprising, when it seems like strikes and "go slows" are more effective in getting a raise in the amount of robot oil applied? After all, when you have a car, it starts out being very reliable, and then when it gets old, it just stops working one day and you have to take it to an expensive mechanic who perhaps fixes the exact thing that is wrong with it, but not the fact that the car is old. And I guess the car is happy with this, and never "revolts," because the breakdowns get it all that it needs. Until comes the day that you replace the car. But what if you can't afford to replace the car? Or what if you move to a place where the busses and subways are so efficient that you are connected to the world in a way that makes a car pointless, and everything you need can be delivered, and the only time you need a car (or a robot, I should mention, since I started out talking about robot revolts) is when you have to travel to meet elderly relatives in some very old town in the country. Wait, I guess that's not something you should do with robots, and my analogy is falling flat.

If it qualifies as an analogy. So the point is that I am missing two of the regular magazines in this week's letter because the robots have been on strike for months, and not because I left them on the train again.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, June 1954, II: We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us

R_C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

And that's the end of my month. If I may dwell on the political for a moment (Moi? Never!), this really is Pierre Mendes France's moment, and I cannot help a smile on my face and a lift to my feet, even more than when the Capital deal went through. (We'll leave aside the question of whether they can pay for their planes.) He has a vision for Europe, and he is going to close out the Tunisian and Moroccan adventures as well as Indo China. Newsweek seems to have capitulated to him, describing him as a Dewey Republican or such. I hope he'll have a chance to apply his vision to France, although the times are running against his economics, with the Anglo Saxons catching up with the Fourth Republic's Government-by-rentiers. On the other hand, Ike seems too sick to run in '56, which means that Stevenson will have a good chance, and we might see the back of the odious Dulles brothers. (Not that the prospect of seeing McCarthy and Allen Dulles tussling doesn't do my heart good.) James is predictably disappointed that there aren't more signs of the party rallying to Kefauver, but I will take what I can get. 

On the other hand, London is a bit giddy right now, so maybe I'm just being infected by the optimistic mood. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie