Postblogging Technology, January 1955, I: The Crash of '55

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

Well, here I am, a young mother and unemployed, like, apparently, very few other women in London right now. I do miss my job selling turboprop airliners to Canadians, but the higher calling of secret diplomacy to stop WWIII was more important, I suppose, even if the actual work was done by the American voter, who seems to have been more motivated by the recession than the atom bomb's red glare. 

You shouldn't worry that I will get bored, though, because a good economy turns out to be a good time to  make movies. The lads in Bray have the rights to a movie version of that runaway BBC serial. After some going around and some waving of the latest Economist talking about the difficulties exhibitors are having finding non-pornographic "X" rated films to show, they have decided to do the movie version as an "X" release. Given the fuss over the BBC 1984 adaptation, it's pretty clear that  you don't have to be get very gruesome by old Hollywood standards to warrant an "X," and it is hoped that it will bring in the teenagers, who apparently have time on their hands from all quitting school at the stroke of sixteen. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1954: Microelectronics and Music

 

"Micro" indeed. The screencap is the first size comparison for the proximity fuze I've ever seen, which is why I took the screencap. If you're disappointed that it's not a video, here it is:

I'll start with some housekeeping. The ordering software for the holdings stored in the UBC Library's  Automated Storage Retrieval System is working, and has been for several weeks now. The aisle that holds Engineering and Aviation Week is still only intermittently operational, and your requests will be available when the Library tells you so. I am not sure of the details of this, and the desk librarians are not forthcoming. My best guess is that they cycle the aisle every few weeks; and the moral of the story is that I probably didn't successfully place my request for them last fall, and so missed some retrieval windows. Or not. It's not like the library is inclined to explain! 

Honestly, automated storage is such a fiasco, especially considering that it cam in just as physical acquisitions collapsed. I know that it could be worse. When I got back to Vancouver after my PhD, much of UBC's old technical journal collection was held off campus with no intention of ever making them accessible again. The intent was to destroy them and create a pdf  library in the cloud, and there is going to be a history of the fiasco of Google Books one day, but the short summary is that this was, as usual, placing more faith in computers than warranted. (Seriously, check out this disaster!) Instead, it all went to PARC, which may or may not have automated retrieval, but, importantly, actually works. The building of PARC somewhere in the no visitor's part of UBC campus did lead to The Economist and Time being withdrawn from the open shelves, which is annoying, especially considering that  the university used up the freed floor space for underutilised offices. But, on the other hand they didn't pulp Newsweek. 

So will I have Aviation Week and The Engineer next week, when I have a long weekend to finish October postblogging? Who knows? The important thing is that I got in 40 hours in Baldur's Gate 3 during my (short) vacation.

Fortunately, there's a lot of "microelectronics" to catch up with, going back to the proximity fuze.

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.

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."

Postblogging Technology, February 1954, I: Howard and Me

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

We are finally and securely back in London. It is February, James' appointment is a quarter done, and I am pleased to report, as  you've no doubt heard, that I have found part-time work to keep my hand in. Since, unlike some magazines, I can read between the lines, I thought that Aviation Finance would be fun, because if there is a place in Britain where we might have the next "Affair of the Poisons," it will be here. (Don't look it up in the Encyclopedia; read a novel if you're inclined to learn more, and notice that I didn't say "know.") 

Around the old lodgings, the children are flourishing, our host not so much, as he has been taking quite a ribbing for suggesting that the Comet crashed because it is a hunk of junk, and not because dastardly saboteurs blew it up. I have tried not to have an argument with him, and have prevailed on James to do the same, because there is some reason to think that de Havilland has not delivered the soundest of planes, and I guess time will tell, which seems to be the theme around here right now. And also because it is hard to get a place in London right now! Anyway it's probably the it's-not-going-to-be-a-real-recession getting us all down in the dumps about the future. 

At least we'll have tupperware parties to make fun of! (I would make fun of Howard Hughes, but frankly he sounds ill, not eccentric.)

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, September 1953, II: Sweetness, Thorazine, and the Madness of Howard Hughes

R_.C_.,

Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

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. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, September 1953, I: Scupper me Skull-and-Crossbones!

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada

Dear Father:

It was so good to see you in London, and you were so sweet with Nat. McGraw-Hill certainly didn't where it is by paying its correspondents too much! now I know why they were so slow to admit that the Russians had a hydrogen bomb. Actually, no-one has a hydrogen bomb! I suppose I shouldn't be any more clear than that, lest I reveal the big secret here in my secret letters.  

I'm still mad that you couldn't stay long enough to take in Farnham. I do understand. You're only back in the land of your disgrace on Her Majesty's Secret Service. I hope you will find Vancouver well and that you will listen to  your doctor, no matter how badly that is working out these days for someone taking the new wonder drugs, and have a good long rest. 

I would to, but I'm in London! 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

I Would Run Away to the Air: The British Economy, Montgolfier to 727, II

 

How about that sport history? Guys, and I do mean "guys," some of us, maybe most of us, are here for the cultural history, for which purposes we're more interested in dates than the areas of early polo grounds. 

Anyway,  it turns out that Major General Joseph Ford Sherer (1829--1901) is the "father of modern polo," which I will take as proxy for a stronger claim about how polo as a social phenomena of the high Victorian period. There's a website associated with the Polo Hall of Fame, but I decline to explore it further, even though, I notice, it has a brief and actually pretty relevant discussion of the history of polo ponies;. My excuse is that equestrian history is even more inaccessible than sport history. In truth, I want to gesture at the evolution of the wealthy British male consumer's "need for speed" through various horse breeds strictly as a prologue to machines, and facts would just get in my way.

It turns out, and here I am just showing my lack of culture, and specifically the fact that I didn't read or have Wind in the Willows read to me, that Mr. Toad follows exactly this path. Beginning with a horse caravan (a Victorian fad I completely missed above), he moves on to his notorious automobile-born adventures. Finally, the questionable "Scouring of the Shire" conclusion in which the "Wild Wood" hoi polloi are expelled from the family seat. A perfectly understandable plot point in a child's novel, it becomes questionable when seen as a political allegory, and it might reflect the kind of anxieties which Joseph Chamberlain set out to embody.

Kenneth Grahame would have written a much more useful book for my purposes had Mr. Toad escalated from row boat to yacht and through a bicycle to an aeroplane, but that's a bit much to ask of a book published in 1908. Plenty of people have carried Toad's adventures on into the air, and the Amazon entry opposite even credits Kenneth Grahame as author, but that seems to be some kind of automation error.

"I Would Run Away to the Air:" Industrial History of Strategy, Great Britain, and WWII: Preliminary Comments on a Projected Outline

 

Morbid thought for the day: No book is ever finished, except by the author's death. Not that I have that to worry about a posthumous edition, having failed to sire me a Brian Herbert or Christopher Tolkien. 

On the other hand, I don't think I've ever committed an outline of what "I Would Run Away to the Air:"  Industrial History of Strategy, Great Britain, and WWII would look like. Which is just as well, considering my early notion that it would include a comprehensive wiki of mid-century industrial technology, a project that, in draft, was spiraling into hundreds of pages while being blatantly, obviously incomplete. 

I mean, what are you going to do with a project that needs to take synthetic poop and the Unified Thread Standard into account? The whole project would be completely insane were it not a response to Correlli Barnett's Audit of War, which essentially achieves the same project by simply spamming "If it's British, it's crap" for every entry. Any reply to Barnett's thesis would then appear to require going through the complete list of mid-century made things and explaining why Barnett is wrong about it. (Except for coal mining, where he's got something of a point about the problems, if not solutions.) 

Correlli Barnett is going to live rent-free in my head for my whole entire life. I've made my peace with it. Basically, this is a project in opposing an "industrial history of strategy" to a "production history of strategy," which further reduces to the claim that 50 fighters of a new design are much more than 1% of the production cost of a run of 5000, but be a gain, in that 50 MiG-17s are more useful than 5000 F4Us. 

Also, maybe it matters to the way we live our lives today, what with the technological change and the tech bro billionaires and all. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging July 1951, II With Some Public Engagement, Even: MiG Alley

 

In the course of a bit more than a century of aviation, the air has seen its share of  the ancient tradition of deniable war. For example, the Condor Legion and Republican aircraft smugglers in Spain, the AVG in China, and the American volunteers of the Ethiopian air force. Probably the single most currently relevant example is one I have been postblogging: The clandestine participation of the Soviet 64th Fighter Aviation Corps in the Korean War.  Clandestine, in that Soviet pilots flew aircraft with North Korean and Chinese insignia. Everyone knew what was going on. The secret existed only because  it was in everyone's  interest to pretend that it was secret. Although I do not find numbers for the personnel side of the Russian auxiliaries, the Wikipedia account says that there were 297 Sabres available in theatre facing 950 MiGs at the time of the 27 July 1953 ceasefire, flown by Chinese and North Korean as well as Soviet pilots. 

So that's an occasion when the pilots of one nuclear power faced off against another under a convenient veil of ignorance and also with the pilots of one of the powers further insulated from the brute realities of great power politics by a collective action system in which there was some guarantee that, between a provoked American President and a final nuclear confrontation, there would interpose an angry Clement Attlee or avuncular Winston Churchill. 

We have seen UN pilots playing the numbers game in the contemporary press, with a final claim of 792 MiG-15s shot down against 78 Sabres. A more recent estimate indicates a kill ratio closet to 1.3 to 1 in favour of American F-86s.This is, however, exclusive of other Allied jets and piston planes, and the point of the fighting was to drive off the B-29s bombing the Communist staging area on the Korean side of the Yalu around Sinanju, a name I cannot type without free associating.Which I probably should have repressed harder, since it turns out I was reminiscing about a yellowface performance.. 

It was the failure of the B-29, and not the F-86, which proved to be the crisis of the air war, since it was deemed necessary to maintain pressure on the airfields around Sinanju to prevent the Red Air Force from contesting air superiority over the battle front. The fact that the crisis did not eventuate does not change the fact that there was a bit of a "Fokker panic" going on in Korea in the fall of 1951. The USAF needed a new bomber, urgently. And while the aircraft in question was not ready in time for Korea, the USAF did get one, and that is the story on which this little technological appendix hangs. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging, October 1951: The All-New, High Sodium, Superheated Seawolf

 If I had to make three arguments for using Newsweek for postblogging, they would be: i) It's in PARC, and the library can get at the stuff in PARC, even as it begins to buy replacement copies of course work resources trapped in the ASRS facility on account of the automated retrieval system being broken and, at least for the moment, impossible to fix; ii) it has very pretty pictures that are more clearly out of copyright than Time's; iii) and this is where I stretch a bit, it is precisely because it is a bad newspaper. I mean, we're already reading The Economist, and it is, casual brutality and inordinate ego aside, a good paper. Why not see how the other side lives? Read the lazy, second-rate pundits and marvel at the idiotic predictions and rake-stepping proclivities of its business, political, and even show business prophets?*  

So when Washington Trends drops word that the Navy is working on two nuclear submarines, and not just one, the reader is not sure what to make of this. It could well be like "the South will be decisive in 1952," just another case of Tom Connally (probably), playing a befuddled Ray Moley like a violin. 

Or it could be something solid. As it happens, there was another nuclear submarine project proceeding in parallel with Nautilus. You haven't heard of it because it was a bit of an embarrassment, but Seawolf definitely happened. 

This is not SSN-575 Seawolf, but I've already shown you the Wikipedia picture of Seawolf, and I want to make a connection with the related DL-2, USS Mitscher, the second "destroyer leader" launched by the USN after the post-WWII hiatus in destroyer building. Laid down in 1949, commissioned in 1953, and scrapped in 1980, Mitscher mainly has an ambitious, superheated steam machinery installation in common with Seawolf. Considering that SSN-575 was the second US nuclear submarine and the first and only American submarine with a liquid-metal (sodium) cooled reactor, the superheat installation might seem like the wrong thing to focus on, but it was the most problematic part of Seawolf's plant in the short time between its March, 1957 commissioning and its its 12/12/58--30/09/60 refit.

Seawolf was a blip in a a very successful production programme which continued without a hitch to, ironically enough, the second Seawolf, which turned into "the second most expensive nuclear submarine ever," after a French boondoggle, and led to a construction pause before the less expensive Virginias were substituted for the remaining Seawolfs on the ways. Mitscher, on the other hand, was another straggler in a Fifties construction programme that culminated in a fifteen year gap in design activity between the 1957 Charles F. Adams class and the 1972 Spruances. I invite the reader to meditate on the Wikipedia characteristics box of the broad-beamed Leanders and that of poor Chas. Adams, struggling to achieve the same legend range (albeit with a swingeing top speed of 33kt) on a 20% larger complement and twice the horsepower. The USN has struggled to maintain a viable escort mix since WWII for what I have to assume at this point are structural reasons, but the construction hiatus between 1957 and 1972 certainly didn't help. Not to beat a dead horse or anything, but the very high superheat and pressure chosen in these 1950s-era ship classes dues not seem well-advised in retrospect. 

It is a reflection on the state of history of technology historiography that the story of high pressure steam in modern navies is told by two complementary books, Harold Gardiner Bowen's 1954 Ships, Machinery and Mossback, which presents the American programme as an unalloyed success, and Louis LeBailly's 1990 A Man Around the Engine, which presents the British response as reactionary and inadequate; whereas 1954 was the midpoint in the unfortunate American experiment with 1200 degree, 1000psi plants, while LeBailly could look back on the extraordinary production, service, and export success of the Leanders. 

All that said, more than once around here, SSN-575 was not really another product of Harold Bowen's NRL superheat shop. Marine liquid-metal reactors, and, even more so sodium-cooled ones, are fairly natural candidates for superheat installations, as the primary coolant is just so hot. Sodium boils at 883 degrees Celsius (1621 Fahrenheit). A separate superheat installation makes an abstract amount of sense, and Rickover's preferred pressurised-water reactor was already pumping hot water around ship under high pressure. I'm just not sure that the problems of installing one aboard a submarine were fully taken on board. The Wikipedia account of Seawolf's early propulsion trials led me to the official history, which is fortunately available online for download. Hewlett and Duncan provide useful background to the GE programme at Knolls/West Milton, which was proceeding separately from Rickover's programme. Technologically more complex than Rickover and Westinghouse's project at Shippingport, its success would further undermine Rickover's position with the President after his recent failure to beat Calder Hall into commercial power production in spite of a prodigious outlay of resources. (In fact, the prototype West Milton sodium-cooled plant was hooked up to the grid before Shippingport.)

The problem with Nautilus was that it was sold as a high-speed attack submarine, but  was slow, and all but unarmed. Rickover and Westinghouse's preferred S1W plant would evolve through multiple iterations, the S5W giving 15,000hp, sufficient to drive  Thresher (1958) at 33 knots, albeit with an even lighter torpedo loadout than Nautilus. On the other hand, compared with Nautilus, which vibrated too  much to even use sonar above 5kts, Thresher was a genuinely silent, as well as fast class. The performance characteristics of Seawolf's S2G plant appears to be deeply uninteresting, but I eventually found it buried here, at 78 MW, comparable to the S5W and 10% greater than Nautilus' 70 MW S2W installation. 

This is the quote from Hewlett and Duncan that appears in Wikipedia:

Although makeshift repairs permitted the Seawolf to complete her initial sea trials on reduced power in February 1957, Rickover had already decided to abandon the sodium-cooled reactor. Early in November 1956, he informed the Commission that he would take steps toward replacing the reactor in Seawolf with a water-cooled plant similar to that in the Nautilus. The leaks in the Seawolf steam plant were an important factor in the decision but even more persuasive were the inherent limitations in sodium-cooled systems. In Rickover's words they were "expensive to build, complex to operate, susceptible to prolonged shutdown as a result of even minor malfunctions, and difficult and time-consuming to repair."^[4]

 The odd truncation already appears in Wikipedia's source. It turns out that the "makeshift repairs" were inspired by the discovery of mercury in the moderator sodium, followed by the superheaters. The machinery had been built as a triple-vessel system with an intermediary space filled with mercury precisely to serve as a diagnostic of leaks between water and sodium leading to a potential catastrophic oxidation event. Leaks in the superheater and then in the S1G steam generator were fixed. Further leaking into the superheaters due to stress corrosion in the system during a full-power  trial led to the "makeshift repair" cited above, which consisted of bypassing the superheaters. Seawolf went to sea at reduced power, and Rickover proceeded to make over the West Milton lab as a pressurised-water joint, more-or-less taking it out of current work on Navy reactors well into the Sixties. 

Liquid sodium plants would go on to have a mixed history on land. The Atomics International(!) division of the Rocketdyne(!) subsidiary of North American Aviation worked on one at its Santa Susana Field Laboratory with the general intention of developing a nuclear reactor for space use(!) and had an unfortunate series of radiation-release boo-boos that you really shouldn't have that close to LA. On the other hand, the UK Atomic Energy Authority ran its Dounreay Fast Reactor mostly successfully for many years, and sodium and lead-moderated reactors have gone to sea with the Russian Navy without (mostly) blowing anything up. although perhaps also without a compelling use case. as the Russians reverted to pressurised water reactors in the follow-on classes,  much to the regret of us science fiction fans, although not necessarily anyone else. 

I will tentatively normalise the industrial use of liquid sodium by pointing out that sodium-cooled piston valves were the absolute go-to of mid-century aero-engines, but that was just a tiny dollop of liquid metal, and no-one is, or was, pretending that mid-century aeroplanes weren't conflagrations waiting to happen.  The same cannot be said for great dollops of liquid metal sloshing around a live reactor core. Still, fun's fun, and it sure looks like the S2G was done in as much by Hyman Rickover covering his ass as by its intrinsic weaknesses. One briefly wonders, after seeing the chronology of the Shippingport fiasco laid out, how Hyman Rickover kept his head during the latter days of the Eisenhower Administration, and it is noteworthy that President Eisenhower made a point of taking a cruise on Seawolf on 26 September 1957.  

So, in conclusion, Seawolf, and S2G, are kind of like Betty Grable in that it lost its studio contract due to contractions in the business and the actual and expected future volatility of a key liquid component; but it is not impossible to blame an  upstart successor. Is that the first time that USS Thresher has been compared with Marilyn Monroe? They both suffered from fatal depressive episodes!

I'll see myself out.  

 

____

*-"We're doing a remake of Uncle Tom's Cabin."

-"Okay!"

--"It'll be  a musical."

--"People will love it!"

--"Starring Betty Grable."

--"She's perfect!"

This is, apparently, not a made-up conversation.

 

 

Postblogging Technology, September 1961, II: Production Bottlenecks

 

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

I hope this finds you well. You will be glad to know that I followed your advice and took Ana and Jimmy up to Chinatown on the weekend. Ana had a grand time, while the staff at the Gold Garden fussed over Jimmy even after he started to get colicky. Back home in Palo Alto, she started singing as we put our treasures away. I was a bit worried that it was the Fenyang song, but I'm no-one to talk!

Speaking of being an absent mother, second year law seems like less work than first year. My old cronies, now firmly ensconced in the empyrean realms of Third Year, tell me that that's normal and that I should really be worrying about the Bar, like them. Reggie's first leave is in October, and there's some talk of a short attachment at Barbers Point to take one of the Willie Victors up for a spin. This would probably not be until  the New Year, because Lockheed is still busy stuffing more vacuum tubes into it, and apparently you can't just open the lid and step on them for some reason. That will at least bring him through the Bay and make him happy because it would involve not being in a flying boat. 

And that's the story of the week! 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February, 1951: The Last Days of the Labour Deterrent

I am using the Parliamentary announcement of orders for the Vickers Valiant, the first of the V-bombers, as a reason to talk about Operation HURRICANE today. The official British request to use the Montebello Islands off the northwest coast of Western Australia is still a month away as of February of 1951, and the Australian general election is not until April, but surveys of the isolated islands are already well under way.  Ultimately, the bomb would drop, the Valiant fly, and, indeed, the whole era of the independent British nuclear deterrent would come and go before Labour returned to office, promising "the white heat of revolution," in 1964,  In Australia, in contrast, the Liberal-County coalition would be in office until 1983. This is getting to be our last chance to talk about the nuclear deterrent that Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin wanted, and which Hugh Dalton opposed: The Labour deterrent. Although it is also the Menzies deterrent in some sense worth talking about.

Austerity, The Barrier Fortresses and the Pretender: Another Visit to 1745

In this modern age of computer-assisted scheduling and twenty-four operations,you can be sure that if you mention that your schedule violates the ten-hour-between-shifts rule (I know the rule; it's just you have to do it to claim overtime), you are likely to get a worse one. I won't trouble you with the gory details, but I've lost most of my days off to a blur of disrupted sleep. If, therefore, this post smacks of a certain economy of effort, well, hey, at least I was able to write a big post last Sunday!

Swedish GDP per capita growth in comparison to world

That being said, there are issues here that deserve addressing ahead of whatever happens next with Brexit, and a measure of resonance with the postblogging.

Last time, we saw The Economist urge Sweden to give up on the inflationary, high-investment programme. As it turns out, that was just plain bad advice, establishing that poorly-informed and partisan pundits really can make a difference. It's even more interesting when you contrast Sweden's Hugh Dalton-ish "trente annes glorieux" with Britain's Stafford Cripps-ish era. Initial budgetary returns reporting in the same number showing revenues disappointing to the low side, spending to the high, might be the first frost of winter.

Might be. After all, Britain did pretty well in the "trente annes glorieux," too. Today's interest lies in another glorious thirty years, the 1713--43 of Cardinal Fleury and Horace Walpole, guarantors of European peace and the Sinking Fund.

The question is whether this might have been a reverse "thirty glorious years?" That is, did the "return to normalcy" in financial affairs during the long peace between the wars throw the earlier economic expansion into reverse? Did the War of Jenkin's Ear save the Industrial Revolution?

That's the speculation, anyway. Let's see how far it can be supported. Warning though. I'm writing this at 5 PM Friday night, I'm a little bleary, and I'm expected at work at 7 tomorrow morning, so don't expect any luxuries like proof-reading here. 

Soap, Ash and Hope Chests: The Iron Age Revival of the State

It was, perhaps, just before Year 1 of the New Era of Ramesses XI, the age of the Whm Mswt, the Era of the Renaissance, that the foreigner, Nessamun, cozened a few gullible masons into joining him in breaking into the tomb of Ramesses VI and removing a cauldron of bronze and three bronze washing bowls. I say "perhaps," because it is likely that the trial was the cause celebre leading to the purges that lie behind the New Era. It certainly wasn't about protecting the tombs, which would be systematically opened and their goods removed, with the sacred mummies deposited in the Deir el-Bahri cache, along with an apology so unctuous that clarified butter would not melt in its mouth. 

When a civil war needs to be funded, piety has to take a back seat; and a civil war that has no end, has no resolution, because there is no state to resolve it. Not until Adad-nirani succeeded to the throne of his father in 911BC did a state arise to trouble the nucleated, strong-man ruled cities of the Middle East, each with their vague spheres of influence. I do not doubt that I am putting things too strongly, but it does remain the case that for two and almost three centuries, human society in the Mediterranean basin had done without the states that had arisen in the Late Bronze Age to make war and diplomacy against each other. I also do not doubt that this stateless era was something short of a paradise.

I do, however, know that I am going in this afternoon to work the third of eight shifts in a row at a grocery store that can no longer open its produce department with its own staff during vacation weeks. Nor can I complain about my shift to a manager who is called in during her own vacations. Since this is a grocery store situated square at the University of British Columbia's gates, and dependent on student labour for decades, I would be inclined to point a finger at my alma mater's deceptive enrollment practices, were it not for hearing the same complaints from Control Temp people and the Frito-Lay sales rep. Either we find a catchy label to reconceptualise our times and make our problems go away, or we loot Pharaoh's tomb and call it a country. 

I'd strain at some kind of argument about how an era doesn't recognise its pyramids until they're pointed out by foreign tourists, but instead I'll just post another picture of the Vancouver School of Theology-turned-School-of-Economics. Even back in the day when I used to look at the back side of this place from my Gage Tower window, VST mainly subsisted as a residence hall for people kicked out of the official UBC system. Since they were usually disciplinary issues, living at what was ostensibly a theological college, the mind boggles, the more so since I actually knew some of them. Since I don't think that UBC Residences can afford to have disciplinary cases any more, it's understandable that the Administration would want VST off their land. The president's statement in the linked press release has the familiar tone of "we need a new asset portfolio as we moves into the not-actually-existing phase of our institutional existence," which is not an uncommon problem in these sad, latter days. On the other hand,  obviously the Economics Department deserves to hang out in a cathedral in the "theological area" of campus. Good God, guys. 

Or we could solve the problem. Given that that seems unpossible in this diminished day and age, it's look at one place where it was solved. Just to simplify things, and to use some reading I've done anyway, since the whole point of belabouring my work schedule is to rationalise a time-saving post, let's look at Provence, from the last third of the Eighth Century to the late Fifth. (730--480BC, more-or-less.)

That means that I'm cheating, inasmuch as there is no pre-existing state order in the area to reconstruct, but of course I'm cheating. This post is not going to get done if I linger. (Possible LBA/EIA proto-states in Provence: (1, 2, 3).

Nimrod Was The First Of Those Who Were Mighty On the Earth: The 77mm HV, Technological Progress, And the 1940 Counterfactual

History is, as I never tire of saying, a floating referent. It's never entirely clear where to start, and, in the case of a counterfactual, it is even harder. Hypothetical questions about historical counterfactuals are happening right now, over on Quora.Com, so they are very much questions of 2017. (Just to remind you, the framing counterfactual for this occasional series is,  "What if the Commonwealth armed forces of 1940 were armed like the 21st Army Group on 11 May 1945?") (Also.)

On the other hand, the response is very much to Correlli Barnett's Audit of War, a book that came out in March of 1986, per Paul Addison's review, much linked to from here as an explanation of that book, which the reader may  have forgotten about, or never known. On the other hand again, Audit signifies around here as a programmatic manifesto of Thatcherism, and Dame Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, seven years before Audit was published. On the other hand again, Thatcher was famously "a research chemist before she became a barrister," while Barnett had been a military historian/media pundit since the 1960s. Although you'll have to take my word for this, since I am not going to engage the ideas behind Audit in any more detail than is necessary to trace its impact, Audit was exactly what an English research-chemist-turned-barrister born in 1924 in the Midlands would have produced had she turned into an ancestral voice prophesying war, as opposed to, say, a Prime Minister. 

 Finally, just to throw on one more guiding metaphor onto an already unwieldy mass, I have talked about the idea of "Technology Levels," as used in the classic 1977 tabletop roleplaying game, Traveller. I'll come back to "Tech Levels" at the end of this discussion. For now, suffice it to say that they were originally intended to be descriptive. Your party lands on a planet; do the natives, who know you Pappenheimers, shoot back with bows and arrows, or hand-carried fusion blasters? A single number in the planet's descriptor tells you! However, they tend to become prescriptive. A blender from a Tech Level 9 world will be 1/16th (don't ask) more effective at blending than one from a Tech Level 8 world. 

The Zhodani are alien humans (don't ask some more) who are very advanced and psionic and stuff; but they're assholes, for RPG balance. Anyway, they invade the Imperium with their high tech ships, which are just better on account of being higher tech level than Imperium ships. 

Traveller comes before Audit, but Barnett's treatment of World War II is a lot like this. Brits used to say (I take Barnett as saying) that they fought World War II at Tech Level, oh, say, 6.5, compared to Germany's 6. In reality, it was 5.5 versus 6.5, Barnett says. He then adds that, had WWII been fought in 1850, instead, it would have been Britain at Tech Level 5 versus Germany at Tech Level 4, and Britain would have won the war even more than it did. 

So, Britain has gone from a Tech Level advantage of 1, to a disadvantage of 0.5 --in my interpretation, of course. Audit purports to show that this is actually the case, while at the same time fingering the culprits. It's a very ambitious book --far too ambitious, in fact. But it does give us a way to think about technological change. My 1940 counterfactual seems, at least to me, like an elegant way to test this idea about technological change.

And by "test," I mean, stuff the demolition chamber with enough RDX to blow up a planet. (Which, by a wacky coincidence, is more-or-less what we're doing.)

Missing the Point: On The Economic Advantages of Eighteenth Century England

You will notice a "Blog Comment Follow-Up" tag this week.

And how! Anyway, this is Brad Delong quoting "the mysterious Pseudoerasmus" commenting on Robert Allen. 

I love the work of Robert Allen... steel... the Soviet Union... English agriculture. And his little book on global economic history—is there a greater marvel of illuminating concision than that?... . . . Yet I always find myself in the peculiar position of loving his work like a fan-girl and disagreeing with so much of it. In particular, I’m sceptical of his theory of the Industrial Revolution.

Allen has been advocating... [that] England’s high wages relative to its cheap energy and low capital costs biased technical innovation in favour of labour-saving equipment, and that is why it was cost-effective to industrialise in England first, before the rest of Europe (let alone Asia).... Allen’s is not a monocausal theory... but his distinctive contribution is the high-wage economy.... The theory is appealing, in part, because the technological innovations of the early Industrial Revolution were not exactly rocket science (a phrase used by Allen himself), so one wonders why they weren’t invented earlier and elsewhere. (Mokyr paraphrasing Cardwell said something like nothing invented in the early IR period would have puzzled Archimedes.) But... as Mokyr has tirelessly argued, inventions were too widespread across British society to be a matter of just the right incentives and expanding markets—and this is a point now being massively amplified by Anton Howes....

These are skillful economic historians, well-grounded in the data, and it would be the height of folly for me to say that they are wrong.

An Agro-Technical Appendix, V: Evil as Strategy

Someone had to go and make Rimmer an admiral, didn't they?

Unlike apparently every other person on Earth, I've really got no problem with the Empire building one death star after another, and getting them blown up, one after another. It's a dysfunctional regime, guys. That's what dysfunctional regimes do. If you need an explanation, just borrow a cynical line about someone's interest/income, whatever. If the Dark Side is all about evil and genocide, then regimes dominated by the Dark Side are going to be impervious to the idea that genocide is bad policy. Dark Siders like doing genocide: Rationalisation to follow.

The Third Reich wasn't dominated by Sith lords because Sith lords don't exist. So what's going on? The leadership's dysfunction is easily explained. They were the usual lot of over-promoted narcissists. The two questions are: how did people like that achieve power; and; Why genocide? The answer is that the Nazis promised to do stuff for people that other parties wouldn't. Weimar struggled for years over (agricultural) land reform because big owners and small had divergent interests. The Nazis promised to give both big and small what they wanted --and a pony! This is a trick that narcissists can do, because they don't give a shit about anything but postive reinforcement right now now now now. Since the big farmers largely wanted their  old Polish estates back, the outlines of policy were clear enough. The problem was not having stuff that belonged to foreigners, so the solution was taking stuff from foreigners. What would happen to the foreigners? They would, like all the other "useless mouths" and whatever other pejorative label we like today, just go away. (They're crude and nasty and backwards, so it's practically a good deed to shoot them in the back of the head. Am I being subtle enough here?)

There. No more subtle.

So, no Sith, but, nevertheless, a policy of genocide. I doubt that my summary of an argument about the roots of Nazi genocidal policy is going to sound anything more than glib and unconvincing tot he vast number of scholars who investigate these questions, so take my contribution for what it is worth. Where I can possibly push forward is by  asking how evil as strategy worked out. Not very well, is the well-known answer, but there's some interesting details in the corners of the situation.

An Agro-Technical Appendix, III: The American System

David Hounshell is the David M. Roderick Professor at Carnegie-Mellon and the author of  From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States [1985]. You should read one copy and buy two.

I started this series with a discussion that rambled on about farming, tractors, and ended with a discussion of the strategic consequences of human resources shortfalls on the Eastern Front. To some extent, that was a petulance. 

All honour to the mighty Red Army of Workers and Peasants!

Anyone can get irritated by fanboy enthusiasm. Talking about the deep operational art of Soviet forces, equipped with the world’s best tank, winning WWII while the Allies footled about out west  sure beats getting excited about the way that the superior fighting qualities of the Waffen SS reflect its racial purity! It does have consequences, however. The first, a dead issue now, is the idea of an unstoppable Red Army rolling over NATO to reach the Channel in three days. In the dead politics of the 1980s, such talk had consequences, even if those seem pretty harmless in retrospect. 

Maybe it helped get Thatcher elected? Although even that doesn't do much for the thesis considering that the Russians lost.

What's not important is the permanent misunderstanding that basically asserts that “Asiatic” or “Eastern” countries are exempt from the basic arithmetic of demographics because reasons. (Cloning tanks?) If Russia only had so many working age men and women, how did they keep the Army up to strength while manufacturing tanks and growing food? The answer is, first, that it didn’t, and, second, Allied aid. Throwing up either answer, seems to require being realistic about demographics and economics, and since that might lead us to uncomfortable places, well, why not talk about the Russian steamroller, instead?

Take America: Just today, Amazon was trhing to sell me another book about Pearl Harbour, with a subtitle something like “Awakening the Sleeping Giant.” [?] This is, of course, a perfectly clear account of exactly what happened. That 's why Admiral Yamamoto might have said it! The issue is, what made America a “sleeping giant?” Because if the answer is demographic –that America in 1941 had a population of 137 millions compared with Japan’s 73 (not counting Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria), then why is the comparison not: “Japan picks on a country that is a little less than twice as powerful as it, but, then, one that also had to fight Germany (and Italy, if it counts, and then all those Balkan countries and Finland, so there’s that, and, besides, Thailand was allied to Japan, so, wait, why the heck not, maybe China counted for more than you’d think?”)

The answer, as far as Japan goes (besides China --"March of the Volunteers" link) is that being a “giant” counts for more than population. America had a higher GDP/person, reflecting higher individual productivity. I’m told that economists of the day then explained this in terms of a higher ratio of capital investment to labour, but, if so, the advanced thinking of economists hadn’t percolated to all sectors of informed opinion, because your average Fortune editorial writer was aware that American productivity/person had been rising steadily since at least 1870, and did not always correlate with changes in capital investment rates. They would talk about the higher natural endowment of land and resources enjoyed by American workers, and also invention and technology, puzzles then as now.

This is not the place to answer profound questions about technological change, innovation and productivity increases. I mean, everybody is answering those questions these days! Maybe, though, it's a good place to ask those questions. Eventually, such an exercise might even be useful for those who prefer answering to questioning.*

An Agro-Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1946, II: Bad Food, Bad Land, Bad People

"The greatest thing since sliced bread."

I'm going to reprise a bit from last week. I still can't get over the fact that when people in 1946 got nostalgic for the Nineties, in their frame of reference, they were looking back at 1926.

Margie some more. Please ignore the central plot and enjoy the music, instead while contemplating your life, only with the 2000s as the Great Depression, and the Obama Administration as World War II. 

Last time, I repurposed that as comfort to the country that's about to be "run" by a narcissist for two years, maybe three, tops. Things have been worse! (Also worse, the Thirty Years War, Late Bronze Age Collapse, the Younger Dryas.) This time, it is to drill home the point that the Great Depression was a living, recent memory in 1946. This, too, you will have heard, especially if you're my age. You will have heard endless lectures about how people learned not to waste things in the Depression, about all the lessons that it apparently takes 25% unemployment, people dying of starvation, and a follow-on world war to learn

The old folk talked and talked about it. It's almost like they were traumatised by it all. One day, it's all relentless progress: Continental Baking is releasing its miraculous new, sliced bread nationally. The next, people are starving in the streets, out in public. (As opposed to starving in tar paper shacks up the holler.) Worse, there were all these experts popping up and saying that it was all unavoidable, and systemic, and that it would never end.  The best you could hope for in the future was a job in the Works Reliefs Administration, because the implication of an excess of savings over investment possibilities was the slow retreat of the economy via deflation into --well, into something. Back to the Stone Age. maybe?

 Instead, as we know, it ended with a world war, austerity, a global famine --and then, somehow, through it and beyond it, the best fed, richest consuming public ever.  Even more strikiingly, in the mid-1960s, Europe became a net grain exporter.