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.
Responding to a 29 November, 1952 article in The Economist putting forward "rather pessimistic predictions" about the future of the Basin after the departure of English managers, writing in a letter published in the 30 April 1955 issue, P. X. Levandis, the Greek Agricultural Minister was pleased to refute those predictions by citing high production per hectare. I missed this letter because I don't do the end-of-month issues of The Economist unless I've screwed up my withdrawal requests, which never happens, practically. Well, hardly ever.
I did not miss, and mentioned in the postblogging, the response of the Liquidator of the Lake Copais Corporation, F, W. Willis. Willis refutes the claim of increased productivity of wheat and cotton by showing that Levandis is using misleading figures, specifically only those of the freeholding farmers. When land held by the company, or now the Greek government, and run as largescale farms are included, there is no trend line. Without going back three years to find out just how pessimistic The Economist was being, consider it not refuted. On the other hand, there's evidently a whole history here of the people who actually farmed the land, and something of an elephant in the room in terms of what was farmed. Wheat and cotton are cash crops, and in particular the great cash crops of third-quarter Nineteenth Century agricultural expansion that gave us bonanza farms in the Americas and Australia and more complicated booms in the Old World. (For example, the "salinisation crisis due to irrigation/irrigation failure due to rampaging Mongols" story about Iraqi agriculture derives from abandoning barley for wheat in this period.)
Wheat and cotton are, as these things go, extensive crops, not traditionally the ones you grow on expensively reclaimed land. The Greeks eat rice and make linen, right? Given the emphasis on the landholders, one wonders exactly how much consultation there was with the locals who might have been using the Lake for traditional purposes like retting flax for weaving prior to the beginning of excavation and pumping.
As Philco ("Philadelphia Electric Company") launches the marketing campaign for its Transac computer line in 1955, it was celebrating twenty-five straight years of leading the American radio industry by volume of sales. Curtiss-Wright, named for Glenn L. Curtiss and Orville Wright, started as a patent pool holding virtual monopoly rights over American aviation, from which foundations came a major aircraft company and one pole of the virtual duopoly of American aircraft engine manufacturing. The Douglas DC-7, currently winning the sales that will, it turns out, end the British airliner resurgence, is flying with four Wright R-3350 Turbo-Compounds, essentially demonstrating that, as far as long distance commercial flying goes in the mid-Fifties, there is basically just one alternative.
Today? There's still a Curtiss-Wright, sort of, but no engines, no computers. And it took barely five years.
Detail of 1779 chorographical map of New York (including chorographical details of adjacent parts of New Jersey but evidently not those of Pennsylvania) showing the "Minisink Valley." https://minisinkvalleygenealogy.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_10.html
So Braddock's Expedition is a bit confusing because American historians all talk about his two regiments, and military historians of the Nineteenth Century know that's about ten thousand men, which is a huge force by the standards of Eighteenth Century colonial warfare, and meanwhile military historians of the Eighteenth Century are, like, "what's a regiment?" It's not inaccurate, in that regiments did exist in the Eighteenth Century as political, financial and administrative elements, and the particular two battalions of the Irish Establishment that came out with Braddock belonged to single battalion regiments. American military historians are probably informed by reading about the Civil War, where, as was often the case in that era, it was found necessary to insert an additional tier in the command structure of the Age of Reason. That is, in 1755 there were so many companies per battalion, so many battalions per brigade, so many brigades per [insert tedious historiographical discussion here] division. In 1860, armies with lots of conscripts found that this wasn't enough supervision and turned the regiment into an organisational level between battalion and brigade. Conscripts, and their ROTC officers, just need more attention from more headquarters because they can't be trusted to know what they're doing on their own.
The aftermath of Braddock's Defeat is also confusing, because, we are told, a wave of Indian attacks caused settlers to abandon frontier settlements and flee eastward, with a strong subtext of a racial war against the Westward Drive, Frontier Spirit, and Manifest Destiny. And we are not told wrong, except that, with the exception of three extraordinary attacks, the trouble took place in what was then Pennsylvania's Northumberland County, now Monroe and Pike counties, or, in Eighteenth Century usage, the "Minisink Valley," which is not a valley at all, but the region north of the Delaware Water Gap cupped by the Poconos Mountains that was shared between Pennsylvania, New York, and West Jersey, as it still was. The attacks were absolutely Indian attacks, made specifically by the followers of Teedyuscung, probably a grandson of Tamanend and, if my tinfoil hat isn't fitting too tight, William Penn, with an internally Pennsylvanian objective, which was why the raiders spared New York and New Jersey, and why the raids were probably actually a pogrom, which is why almost all the attacks killed the patriarchs of the settlements raided, and probably why there's a slightly panicked subtext to Ben Franklin's reports about the refugees gathering in New Jersey. Because if they weren't leading members of these families, they were probably mostly enslaved. This was a Pennsylvanian civil war. The racial component isn't "Scotch-Irish" versus Indians, but rather a peasant's revolt.
No wonder, then, that the Pennsylvanian Assembly settled quickly in the 1758 Treaty of Easton. But before that could happen, and just to drag this preamble around to relevance, Henri Bouquet, the Swiss Protestant (that is, Francophone) favourite of the Duke of Cumberland, had arrived in Philadelphia and there formed, not to get all genealogical, one of the ancestral units of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, most easily searched, I suspect, as the 60th (American) Rifles. Per the source most recently consulted --probably Wikipedia, but I forget-- this was formed from immigrant German workingmen. Wikipedia does not note that in 1756 the Germans who were immigrating to Philadelphia were mostly coming from German Flats, far up the Mohawk, where a German-speaking community had been growing by ethnogenesis from 1719. With regards to the demographic raw material, this can only have been the free Blacks who could not exist as such in the Eighteenth Century American cosmic order. This probably explains why Bouquet didn't need to subject his riflemen to some specialised training regime to turn them into another of the mid-Eighteenth Century's many ethnically-recruited special forces.Which is usually a bit of an anachronism in that the European units that trace their tradition to the Eighteenth Century special forces have all been long since de-specialed, pipe bands apart.
The American ranger tradition is an exception, and one that, I suggest, is rooted in race, not the primeval (hah!) forest of the American frontier.
Yeah, well, I was tired yesterday and I needed to do some bike training (mainly wearing calluses into my tender tootsie) ahead of my summer bike trip, which is in July this year. That's why I'm talking about something that came up while I was half-finishing the March II postblogging.
The Special Report in the 7 March issue of Newsweek covered the then-ongoing movie industry revival, and the 28 March issue has some letters about it, including a self-promoting but still valid explanation from Lester Rand of the Youth Research Institute (kids like going to the movies), and a letter from Zira Siegel of Culver City, California, pointing out how extraordinary this self-portrait with the Junior MGM Players, shot by Newsweek staff photographer Dale Healy is. Siegel asks whether it is a composite, and the Editor replies that it is not. Leslie Caron is 20ft behind the lens; Debbie Reynold is three feet away leaning in, and Pier Angeli is sitting on a pillow.
Dean Schary doesn't even appear to have an online biography. He was just one of the anonymous staffers who made Newsweek, in spite of itself, a great magazine. And speaking of "in spite of itself," I first encountered the "U-bomb" in The Periscope, which feature, as was its way, got the whole thing so hilariously wrong that I was sent down the very productive rabbit hole that makes up most of this post. The U-bomb, it explains, means that the American atomic stockpile has been suddenly increased ten-fold, that there are enough bombs to "knock out the USSR with radioactivity," and that since the U-bomb "does not, (contrary to some reports) necessarily require a hydrogen bomb to set it off, the Soviets are in a position rapidly to overtake our lead."
So my boss is on his annual pilgrimage to the Old Continent to show everybody that he's a big shot in Canada, and we're training yet another ambitious young man as a future produce manager, as we do because the company totally has a skilled labour continuity plan that involves systematically identifying talent and nurturing it. "Nurturing" in this case tends to mean humping oversized orders around the back room, because our automated perishable ordering system is proving the brilliance of our plan to use AI to replace skilled labour. (Look, it's obviously not the computer's fault that we use the same produce code for two distinct kinds of carrots, but manually straightening out the order and inventory every day is precisely the kind of fiddling that AI was supposed to get rid of!) The upshot is that yesterday was my second day off in the last eight and I was not exactly filled with energy on what had to be a laundry day anyway.
Which is fine, because this is the month that Flight grudgingly fessed up to an explanation for why the United States has the Matador, and we don't. We have the UB.109T, or RED RAPIER. So why have I chosen a Bomarc for my thumbnail?
Because.
On 31 March 1958, the Canadian electorate got its long-awaited opportunity to send Canada's Natural Governing Party to the benches, electing "Prairie populist" John Diefenbaker and his Progressive Conservatives by a swingeing 53% to 34% popular vote majority. Diefenbaker proceeded to reign over the Party for an immensely destructive decade-and-a-half. Anyone who has read as much contemporary Newsweek as I have and wonders whether my narrator's cynicism is anachronistic is referred to my Dad's collection of old Brothers-in-Laws albums to illustrate one fairly common reaction to Dief the Chief. One might even draw larger conclusions about contemporary events if it were desired!
Although as far as aerospace defence issues are concerned this would be a red herring. Cancelling the upcoming Avro long-range supersonic continental interceptor was an unfortunate necessity, and the fact that the Bomarc was insane has nothing to do with the fact that Diefenbaker was also crazy. And since Wikipedia has pictures of Bomarc and not RED RAPIER, there you go.
This post is about the contemporary British Fireflash and American Sparrow beam-riding air-to-air missiles, so of course there is a perfectly good reason that I picked this old picture of a Vought F7U Crusader for thumbnail. A very good reason. I'm certainly not picking on Vought, Westinghouse, and the United States Navy. No sir!
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?
Last seen around here playing Calamity James as an adorable autist, Doris Day sings "Que Sera, Sera," an incomprehensibly popular hit considering the otherthings 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.
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
Britannica. Which lifted it from Shutterstock, how the mighty have fallen, etc.
The Aswan high dam is one of the biggest dams in the world, which is understandable, since it controls one of the world's most important rivers, although one with perhaps a bit less volume at the outlet than I expected.
So, yeah, thought I'd start with negging the Nile. I'll let you all know if it decides to date me. The numbers, per Wikipedia, if you're a dam fan, which no-one is except when they're visiting them because civil engineering is boring unless you're there to see it is that it is 111m high and 3,830m long, and because it is an earth embankment dam, it is a kilometer wide at its base. It has an installed generating capacity of 2100 MW, which isn't actually that much by a jaded BCer's perspective. The Revelstoke Dam generates more current, and even the Keenleyside flood control dam at Castlegar that plays an important role in the tech blogging "story" such as it is by flooding beachfront Nakusp on its 1968 completion, still has a 185MW capacity. This is because its main purpose is to regulate the flooding of the Nile, for which reason it impounds a 5250 square kilometer, entirely within the boundaries of Egypt, and it is the most historically consequential dam on the world's most historically consequential river.
The introduction to the Wikipedia article notes that it exists in large part for political reasons. The British had a plan to manage the Nile with sacrificial zones in Sudan and Ethiopia, to which Nasser and his colleagues said, "Thanks, but no thanks," which, given the historical reluctance of upstream authorities to sacrifice sacrifice zones when sacrificing is called for, seems like it was a wise choice notwithstanding the high evaporation rate off the Aswan reservoir.
In terms of its political history, there is a lot of meat on the High Aswan Dam bone. Were I to write about that, there are many satisfactory blog-sized conclusions that could be drawn, such as that John Foster Dulles was preposterously unqualified for his role; that the China Lobby is enough to have you rethinking the Great Terror (We could use a man like Robespierre today!); that, er, something about the post-Six Days War territorial settlement in the Middle East (Erik looks around, cringing pathetically); that imperialism is bad.
I do want to talk about politics, but not those politics, even if I come around to the margins of my cringe, because civil engineering is boring, and so people just can't help talking around it, and if it isn't geology and geography, it is . . .well, it's something that hopefully some scholar of science fiction has put a name to and received tenure for, because it's goldarned important, the usurpation of reality by a story that scratches the science fiction itch, and that's as felicitously as I can think to put this insight.
"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 Engineernext 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.
Surely I'm not the only person who hears "[Henry] Wiggin Works" and thinks of My Fair Lady, the 1964 film adaptation of the 1956 Broadway musical based on the 1913 George Bernard Shaw play. I don't even watch musicals, but that particular song, like the dreadful menace of Cobalt-60 Doomsday bombs, from another movie I've never seen, is, well, I guess that's why it's called popular culture.
You know what's not popular culture? The Wiggin Works, and, for that matter, Nimonic, and Nineteenth Century businessman and Liberal Unionist Henry Wiggin, and finally, the actual operator of the works, Mond Nickel, which probably merged with Inco at some more recent point. The trademarks for "Nimonic" and other nickel alloys like Brightray, and Inconel, are now held by Special Metals Corporation, and various grades of Nimonic continue to be used in aircraft engines among other specialty applications. I see no evidence that it is used in nuclear reactor fuel slugs these days, although Cobalt-60 continues to be produced in trace quantities by the nuclear transmutation of Fe-58 in steel components into Cobalt-59 and hence Cobalt-60. (I did not know that!) There's a Wiki page on the cobalt bomb, but it doesn't really get into the isotope as a signifier of universal nuclear destruction, upon which subject I am sure I have seen websites if not scholarly articles over the years.
Not that any of this really matters. I want to talk about the British steel industry today. It just happens that special alloy steels are an important part of that story.
This is actually going back a bit, but Mossad has done a naughty telephone thing this week, and while Teleanswerphone was operating a pager system in New York in 1954, we're still six years away from the Motorola transistorised pager that made the technology ubiquitous. It's not interesting or significant, so how do I jump on that bandwagon? With something momentous that is also happening this spring, which is TAT-1, the first coaxial transatlantic telephone cable, which I've admittedly talked about around here in connection with the first announcement last December. I believe I've noticed the cablelaying vessel Monarchand also the technical details of the cable involved, and, no, I'm not going to hit my head on the Blogspot search function to find the entry, even if it is good for the blog's statistics.
Scraped from an ad: https://snapklik.com/en-ca/product/tinkertoy-30-model-200-piece-super-building-set-preschool-learning-educational-toy- for-girls-and-boys-3/05DL4PL73XTV5
I've been assiduously avoiding talking about "Project Tinkertoy" since the Bureau of Standards/Industrial Planning Division, USN/Kaiser Electronics Division, Wilys Motor Company pilot factory in Arlington, Virginia, hit the news, well before September of 1953, where Blogspot search turns up my earliest reference to it. The thing is that Project Tinkertoy's press people are most impressed by the ceramic wafers that the Project Tinkertoy modular components are mounted on, and that is the part of the technology that most obviously has no future. Integrated circuits most definitely do, but that's a story that doesn't really get going until 1957, and apparently we're still one cycle of abortive precursors away from that, with the Army's 1957 Micromodule programme. On the other hand, the actual technology of the integrated circuit has a prehistory which is not well integrated into that of the various abortive precursors. So I'm going to take a rainy laundry day Saturday to look at that!
For me, there's something infinitely cosy about the first generation of professors at western Canadian universities. I've lived more than half my life near the campus of UBC, and routinely bike by the old neighbourhoods where these gentlemen built their homes, way back in the Twenties, and there lived reasonably comfortable lives during the upheavals of the Thirties. My case example is usually UBC's Garnet Sedgewick, an English professor for whom the kernel of the modern Koerner library is named, which gives me an excuse to insert the video below, filmed in front of it, with two-for-one Grace Park. This week, however, we're on about Robert Boyle (1883--1955) of the University of Alberta, born in Carbonear, Newfoundland, just in case anyone ever asks you what happened to the Beothuk. Boyle headed the physics department at UofA from 1912 to 1919, and was dean of Applied Science from 1919 to 1929, after which he went to the NRC in Ottawa, retiring in 1948. No family is mentioned, so my "cozy" image of a Boyle family settling into a quiet neighbourhood in Edmonton and growing happily old is completely off-base.
Oh! And he invented sonar. Like a lot of other people, sure, but I wanted to share that photo and talk about cycling by old houses up near campus.
The story here is that the United Kingdom is a rich, first world country and a Great Power. It fought the Second World War in alliance with the United States, now a superpower. At the time the metropolitan British Isles had 34% the population of the continental United States, compared with 20% today. It is fashionable to compare and contrast the technological achievements of the two states across a wide range of warmaking capabilities in WWII, and after, and to attempt to draw larger conclusions. It is particularly interesting to ask whether the steady decline in creditable comparisons over this period (or longer ones going back into the Nineteenth Century) is consequence or, perhaps to some extent, cause of the increasing disparity in national power (and, of increasing relevance, population). One such comparison is between the first nuclear submarine launched by the United States, Nautilus, commissioned on 30 September 1954, and the first British nuclear submarine, Dreadnought, commissioned 17 April 1963.
Sea power is submarine power now
I looked at Dreadnought back in 2021, when the decision to build Nautilus (and the less-celebrated Seawolf) was first publicised. In the interest of pushing back against some of the cross-cultural comparisons referred to in the previous paragraph, I focussed on one of the more celebrated British contributions to American power, the "raft" that isolates the relatively noisy atomic machinery of modern submarines. I discussed developments in steam machinery in the 1950s, and even got into the hydrodynamic experimental submarine, USS Albacore, and its influence on the development of the nuclear submarine.
What I didn't have was a contemporary view in the form of a leading article in The Engineer explaining what a mid-century British technocrat would deem important research questions needing to be worked out before the nuclear submarine could take the sea as the lynchpin of modern strategic power. So in this short week, I am going to take another dive.
Did anyone else reading this frequent Young and Bloor in the early Nineties? Remember the giant poster of Pamela Anderson as Barbed Wire? There's something about comic book movies about girl characters where a dyke director (I assume) gets hold of the property and makes a movie with an aesthetic that says, "Hey, straight guys, we're just not going to apologise for not being for you," and then the straight guys don't go to see it and everybody looks at the box office and is, like, "What happened?' I mean, I don't want to be the culture warrior here. I liked Birds of Prey well enough. But "we're going to shoot Ella Jay Bosco like she's chunky (she's not!) because you should be ashamed of your male gaze" is quite a message to swallow to enjoy me some movie. While I am determined to validate the artistic choice, I am wondering how you get to spend eight figures on a movie when your head is that far up your ass. It's not like you got the MoD (MoS) to pay for it!
By MigMigXII - Animated from CAD drawing, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24337752
Speaking of which, this cool animation adorns the Wikipedia article about the Napier Deltic, an 18-cylinder opposed-piston diesel engine consisting of six layers of cylinders arranged in a stack of equilateral triangles. Beginning as Napier's visionary submission to an Admiralty requirement for a diesel engine suitable for Coastal Forces, as of January of 1954 it has been at sea in a proving boat for almost two years, and is about to go into service on 18 "Dark" class 50t patrol boat, as noted in The Engineer for 5 January 1954, which covers the current state of the Royal Navy (which absolutely needs 60 cruisers and its battleships, but which can afford to cut the size of its new aircraft carriers from the excessive 37,000t displacement of Eagle and Ark Royal.) The article also notes that the Deltic has "been covered fully in these pages." But in the first half of whatever month the article ran in, damn it! Apart from the "Darks," Deltics went into a number of subsequent large coastal classes and several classes of British railways locomotives, Especially the Class 55, which made an indelible impression on the trainspotting public running 100mph services and hitting 125mph descending Stoke Bank with its distinctive noise. (Did I mention that this high speed, high power diesel was noisy? And smoky? I know. Next thing I'll be saying that it rattled!) Boring and conventional engines rule the diesel engine world today since given the costs involved in high speed rail infrastructure they might as well be electrified. The Deltic isn't precisely forgotten, but it is a curiosity of a bygone age, and not the only one in this post.
There was something about "Delta Dawn," an earworm of my childhood (written by Larry Collins and Alex Harvey, as performed byTanya Tucker, Bette Midler, and Helen Reddy) that bothered me as a young man. That's not surprising given its disturbing lyrics, but I did not then pick up that it was written about Alex Harvey's survivor's guilt over his mother's apparent suicide. So there's that, even before the Wikipedia article has to disambiguate the song from an even sadder story, which is definitely not the kind of competition that people should be having.
The Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, on the other hand, just didn't go as fast as it was supposed to. Not much of a story, but jeez, the subtext.
I started the first installment of December technological postblogging yesterday before deciding that I was a bit too spent from the work week to have a hope of finishing it over the weekend. But before giving up (because it was hard), I did some pretty basic things, like finding the big Christmas song of 1953?
Which was Eartha Kitt's Santa Baby, which I'm saving for next week. Have some meta-commentary instead! So then I had a reaction. I'm not offended by Santa Baby. "Sex positive," I remind myself. We're sex positive these days. And it's a Christmas classic, which, I don't know, did we ever get it sorted out whether that saved Baby, It's Cold Out There? And it's not like Kitt invented the idea of putting double entendres in hit parade music. But it's Christmas. It's for the kids! So that was what I was thinking just before I thought to myself, "Speaking of louche things in popular culture, I forgot to make a fuss for the first issue of Playboy when it came out! When did it come out, anyway?"
December of 1953, it turns out. Begun, the louche years have! We are starting down a valley at the bottom of which is the moment when you're not allowed to complain about skin magazines at the front of the corner store, and all the cool high school teachers are sleeping with their students, and the "Me Too" moment, which might be over as a cry for justice, but sure seems like the mood in public culture. We may or may not be back where we started, but this isn't about before it began, some images below notwithstanding, and it's not about where we are now. It's about things that happened in the louche years, and here I'm thinking about that second wave feminist thing about pornography being a way to hold women back. Without going too far down that road, there's a story of images --or, should I say, because we're about technology around here, graphics?
