Tinkertoy to Dexion: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, April 1956

By susiq5555 - ebay #120137669430,

permission granted [1], CC BY-SA 3.0,

 

"Tinkertoy" is the title because it is what comes to mind when I think about the building sets of my earliest childhood. (Next up are my rich cousins' Lego sets, please don't tell them I called them "rich.") I do not, however, have much of a sense of a Tinkertoy set, as opposed to oddments at the bottom of a toy chest. Tinkertoy Construction Sets are an American product dating to 1914. Their signature feature is the use of wood, which makes it easy to implement wheels and pulleys with child friendly components, but there were lots of wood construction sets. The issue here, it tuns out, is the non-wood one.

The departure point for today's appendix is  the use of Dexion components for field repairs of DC3s. 

 Dexion turns out still be a thing, although such is the state of Google Search today that you won't find them on the main page. essentially A "slotted angle steel strip construciton system," it rather reminds me of the various aircraft-building systems of the Twenties and Thirties that often had their origins in prefabricated steel building sets. But we did Nissen huts around here a long time ago. Dexion seems like an everyday product with a primordial use case and a secure  business plan, so I was a bit surprised to learn that  "it ran into difficulties" and "eventually ceased trading" story, in 2003. The Dexion trademark was bought out, by Swedes, perhaps, and the product is now made in factories in Germany  and Romania. 

The other inciting even this week is that quaint Danish general strike over the forty hour week. Not only is this sure to lead to a wage-price spiral and inflation, but now Britain's supply of butter and bacon is in trouble! And since there isn't much going on in Denmark to my knowledge except bicycling, which they have to share with the Netherlands, and Lego, we might as well go there. And the ever worthy Meccano, of course.

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.

 

Minesweeping: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1955

 In a perfect world where everyone spent their time following the paparazzi who follow me around, you all would have learned not to take my complaints about my work schedule too seriously. The last time I did this, I was getting ready for a grueling week that did not, in fact, emerge, thanks to the timely deployment of my entire paid time off bank. But! In the last week I had split days off, always bad for my productivity, and an exciting variety of shifts that made it worse. I ought to be reporting this in a "view from thirty thousand feet" sort-of tone, in that the reason that I'm not posting my December technology postblogging this morning is that I started a new Baldur's Gate 3 run yesterday instead of working on it. But my excuse for that is tired, etc. 

On the bright side, I'm a little over half done, and have a long weekend for Easter followed by a vacation week. So! Don't cry for me, post-Peron Argentina set on a bright course of democracy for all.

Our current King reached the apex of his active naval career as the commander of a "Ton-"class minesweeper, one of the enormous class of minesweeper/minehunters built in the mid-Fifties. Timing is right for the ships, and the Prince is in the  news, even if it's hard to get a picture of him in his service uniform that isn't camped by Getty Images. Relevance, 1955-style! 

Shiny!

Or so I say, holding a poker face. In fact, as hard as it will be for visitors to this blog from the distant future to believe, we're in the middle of a global crisis brought on by an American attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran conducted in spite of four decades of acknowledged American naval mine warfare deficiencies. The Persian Gulf is narrow and shallow, its entrance strait particularly so, with Iran controlling its northern shore, and vast quantities of shipping, and in particular, oil tankers, pass through it. Warhawks in Washington have been pushing for an attack on Iran for this entire period, without much self-awareness in general (at this very moment as I write, an interview with John Bolton is up at Vox to the effect of "But not like this!"), but historically very conscious of these deficiencies and a solid record of trying to solve the problem with magic battleships. That is, "Littoral Combat Ships," and not "battleships," but "magic battleship" is more euphonious. 

How did we get here? Mine warfare is hard is how we got here.

Postblogging Technology, November 1955: Even the Moderate Adlai Stevenson

The Ballad of Davy Crockett hit the Top 10 twice in 1955, by two different artists. Leaving the historic Crockett aside (JFC he was a Shawnee, deal with it). "Justice was due every Redskin band." What do you even do? RIP Estes Kefauver.

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada


Dear Father:

The idea was good, but the material wasn't up to 
it and they took it too far. 

Fall is here, and I have to say that, as materialistic as it sounds, it is very nice to be making good money and not from a family allowance. James had leave, and we took the family up to Napa in our very nice new 405. (Fortunately the neighbours take it for granted that it is family money, and I don't correct them, because I am a liberal, but I am also a hypocrite, because it is just safer that way.) 

We saw the Ks for the first time since their return from Europe. I regret to say that all does not look entirely happy on the domestic front, but there is the thought that they will do it for the children, and one might hope that misery will lead to a great novel. One's fingers are crossed. We also saw, in a more bohemian way, V., who is making quite the splash on the science fiction literary scene, if not precisely the money. He pretends Bohemian diffidence, but I'm sure that he would be more comfortable being diffident with more money! On the bright side he introduced us to some friends, wild-eyed vintners, if you can imagine, and leaving us half-convinced that there's a reason to be wild-eyed about California wine. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Le Mans Disaster: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1955

This is a snip: Source is https://www.mike-hawthorn.org.uk/lemans2.html
Discussion below.

There is something to be said, once again, for the idea that there is no historical era a person knows less about than that of the decade before their birth. Searching around after I personally heard of the Le Mans Disaster of 11 June 1955 for the first time last Sunday morning, I discovered that I was the last guy to the party. In fact, I proved to be so ignorant of the biggest story in the history of motor racing that I am too embarrassed to post the first draft of this paragraph, written in a distracted frame of mind based on some half-assed idea of what should have happened. 

One thing that holds from that draft, which, I reiterate, you will never see because it was so dumb, is that it continues a theme from these posts, which is that people were pretty reckless back in 1955.  This week's post could just have easily have been about the Salk vaccine contamination disaster, which still has me shaking my head as the contemporary press brings me further abreast of it. (The modern view, such as it is, being very much of the "Look forward, never back" variety.) On the other hand, there's a lot of America bashing around, here so a bit of a palate cleanser in the form of a look at an all-European fiasco is welcome! Even if I somehow get back to the America-bashing at the end. Sheesh. 

What the heck, though, it's been a week, and I dearly hope that anyone reading this in  a year's time has no idea what I'm talking about. 

Postblogging Technology, July 1954, II: Somewhere Between Unacceptable and Unattainable

Because Betty Boop cartoonist Ving Fuller is in a What's New segment. Deep cut, I know.

R_., C.,
Nakusp,
Canada

Dear Father:

Well, I left my current numbers of Aviation Week and The Engineer on the train when I dashed to catch a connection to Weybridge. So if this letter isn't to your liking, blame the clowns at Handley Page for not putting the tail of the Victor on firmly enough to balance flying without the "weapon system"-y radar that's supposed to go in the nose. (James thinks, anyway. He was right about the Comet, though!) This led to an all-hands-on-deck sales meeting over the Viscount replacement, from which I had to turn around for my flight to Montreal, upon which I am writing these words, far away from replacement copies, and there you go.

As for the meeting, the super-Viscount, or whatever they're going to call it, might be completely different from the Victor, but that isn't stopping the American industry, as you can see from the Newsweek coverage. to be fair, it is good news for them that the Victor won't be out setting high publicity speed records while there is a Vickers team still touring the States. I know I would have loved  some British Pathe footage of the Victor prototype landing in Montreal, not that it was even vaguely close to ready for a trans-Atlantic flight, but a girl can dream. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, July 1954, I: Red Meat and Free Men

 

Nurses of the Experimental Civil Defence Mobile
Column like motorcycles. Do they get to ride 
motorcycles, or is just their despatch riders?

R_.C_.,

Nakusp,

Canada

Dear Father:

It is so wonderful that you will be living in the lakehouse this summer! I am sorry that we will not be able to visit, as James' leave for my trip to Montreal can't be extended to two weeks thanks to Farnborough preparations. (The Fairey "The F-102 Can Eat My Dust" is being talked up as a static display, but I don't think that it is going to be anywhere close to ready.) 

Around here, meat rationing ends this week, and while I'm not sure how much difference it is going to make in daily life, it seems like some kind of patriotic duty to go out (or in) for roast beef like a free and patriotic Englishman could never do under those socialists. Or, on the other hand, it's some kind of disgusting display of complete loss of self-control. But as that verges suspiciously on vegetarianism if not outright Bolshevism, the roast beefers are winning the day.  Just have a look at the latest edition of my beloved "Schweppsshire" ad series. If only poor Orwell were alive to see us now. (Except wasn't he a vegetarian? I should look that up. Doesn't seem like the healthiest of lifestyles if you're going to farm in the Outer Hebrides!) 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1954, II: Just You Wait

 

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. 

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."

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

 

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

Sea power is submarine power now

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

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

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, September 1953, II: Missing Plugs, Missing Rebuttals

 

Is that a bandwagon going by? Let me hop right on that thing! 

I am going to go with the assumption that no-one wants to hear my potted history of Boeing's ongoing struggle to not embarrass itself with the millions of 737s-only-slightly-different it is currently selling to the airlines that only want 737s. (Even if they are slightly different.) I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with an  industry being locked into an airplane that looks and acts like an old-time 737 in spite of having a ridiculously large pair of engines dragging off their wing and a whole app on its computer set up so that it will fly like a 737 even though if you use the app wrong you crash and die. 

Because if I was going to make fun of this situation I'd say something like "Good thing grandparents don't fly planes," and then the dam would burst and I would point and laugh and laugh and laugh, and we're way more serious about that around here. And anyway it frankly doesn't even crack the top fifty of inexplicable institutional malfunctions we've got going on these days. (Just kidding about "inexplicable." It's obviously all the old people we've got these days.) 

On the other hand, I can go back to 1953 and the approximate moment we got locked into this path and try to understand how we started down it.

The Great Siege, I: Attlee Was Right

 

I added "The Great Siege" tag early in the life of this blog to organise the idea that Germany's strategic campaign against the British Empire was effectively a siege of Great Britain with consequences extending well beyond the end of the war. One could say, I thought to myself in 2013, that it was ultimately a success, inasmuch as the British Empire no longer exists. That is because, by situating the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic into an overarching effort including mining and, most easily missed, the V-weapon campaign, one could extend the long range consequences of the campaign well beyond the end of the war, and, in particular, say that the attrition of British housing stocks during the war was an important factor in What Came Next.

Well, this is a travel installment, with me currently struggling to touchtype with reasonable speed on a very nice ASUS laptop with a keyboard that is just too small for my fat fingers, which doesn't encourage me to be loquacious, but which on the other hand leaves me thirsty to share pointless vaction pictures and experiences. 

The overall idea with which I started this tag was, I now see, hopelessly naive, which is why I have decided that the right time to call an end to the Great Siege is with The Economist's disgraceful surrender to permanent deficit financing of the British economy with the 1953 budget introduced by RAB Butler for the Churchill government, because what's more important, "economy" or higher interest rates, lower taxes, and a tacit turn away from  full employment? Without either agreeing or disagreeing with the  traditional Liberal "peace, retrenchment, and reform," so blatantly giving the game away is the 1953 equivalent of the French "rearming in 1938" to the tune of "What about the rentier?" It's capitulation, is what it is. Here's the keys to the city, Herr Grossadmiral, on the sole condition that you let us march out with our consols shouldered. 

The town of Keremeos lies on the junction of the Similkameen River with Keremeos Creek on Highway 3 and Highway 5C in the south centre of the province, in one of two regions that loves to attach itself to the Okanagan Valley as an extension of BC's "summerland," to borrow the actual name of an Okanagan Valley town between Penticton and Peachland, across the lake from Naramata. Keremeos, like the rest of the "Similkameen" part of the "Okanagan-Similkameen," has no lake suitable for summer fun. It is a farming and crossroads town in the midst of endless orchards and vegetable farms with a good run to Vancouver since the Hope-Princeton opened in 1953, although the housing stock you see in these pictures is earlier than that, dating to a previous era of prosperity based on loading fruit cars onto an extension of the Great Northern Railway. The town has a population of a bit over 1700, which explains why the drugstore in town is open 12--4 on Sundays. 

A walking tour of the town might seem very familiar if you have seen Beaverdell, Greenwood, Olalla, Hedley, or similar towns laid out before WWII which have since not enjoyed very much growth. It is a four--to-six blocks by four block street grid, readily walkable, with a solid downtown area with enough vacant space for more businesses if you're in the mood to move and invest, and enough room for far more houses than are there,  overwhelmed by the size of their lots, and even a few apartment buildings, mostly comically undersized, as if the builder lacked a certain conviction. Around this core area is an area of new building from the postwar era, where such new houses  as have been built over the subsequent eighty years are located, abstracted from the town core in every case, and in that of Keremeos, dramatically overlooking it from an Okanagan bench --meaning that although they are very close to the city physically, you have to drive down to a draw that gives access to the Upper Bench of the Keremeos in the far northeast corner of the town. 

Now let's talk about one reason that Clement Attlee was right. 

A Technological But Also Economic and Engaged Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1953, II: The Bee Problem

 

I hope there's some of the bee scenes I remember from my slightly traumatised junior high viewing of this documentary based on Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive, because the "problem" here is the old saw about how science doesn't know how bees fly. The joke being that of course science knows how bees can fly. The airliner business, on the other hand . . . ? See? I knew there was a reason to read Fortune! 

A Technnological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, January 1953: 488,000lb of Actor-Network Theory

 

So, anyway, from Wikipedia:

 B-52 strikes were an important part of Operation Desert Storm. . . . a flight of B-52Gs flew from Barksdale Air Force Base, Louisiana, refueled in the air enroute, struck targets in Iraq, and returned home – a journey of 35 hours and 14,000 miles (23,000 km) round trip. It set a record for the longest-distance combat mission, breaking the record previously held by an RAF Vulcan bomber in 1982; however, this was achieved using forward refueling.^[9][194]  . . .  B-52Gs operating from the King Abdullah Air Base at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, RAF Fairford in the United Kingdom, Morón Air Base, Spain, and the island of Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean Territory flew bombing missions over Iraq . . . In August 2007, a B-52H ferrying AGM-129[s] . . . from Minot Air Force Base to Barksdale Air Force Base for dismantling was mistakenly loaded . . . ^[218][219] Four of 18 B-52Hs from Barksdale Air Force Base were retired  . .  at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.^[220]

B-52H "Ghost Rider" leaving the "bone yard".

 .  . . B-52s are periodically refurbished at USAF maintenance depots such as Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma.^[223]  On 9 April 2016, an undisclosed number of B-52s arrived at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, part of the military intervention against ISIL. T as a platform to test a Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept (HAWC) missile.^{[239] . . .}In late October 2022, ABC News reported that the USAF intended to deploy six B-52s at RAAF Tindal in Australia in the near future, which would include building provisions to handle the aircraft.^[240]

 I'm mainly familiar with Actor-Network Theory from Bruno Latour vanishing up his own butt in Aramis, or, The Love of Technology, and considering that I've never taken a serious crack at the book, that might be grossly unfair. The thing is, this 

"Actor–network theory (ANT) is a theoretical and methodological approach to social theory where everything in the social and natural worlds exists in constantly shifting networks of relationships. It posits that nothing exists outside those relationships. All the factors involved in a social situation are on the same level, and thus there are no external social forces beyond what and how the network participants interact at present. Thus, objects, ideas, processes, and any other relevant factors are seen as just as important in creating social situations as humans"

sounds like the kind of academic bafflegab too easily reduced to the kind of cynical nihilism that makes everything about politics. And then you realise that, never mind never-built new paradigms of subway transit being characters in their own sociological studies, the B-52 doesn't exist. (Except as the mediator of a network of relationships between the natural, technological, and social worlds.)

Postblogging Technology, January 1953, 1: Cold, Cold Heart

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

I hope this finds you well, as I am not. I could say that it is because of my condition, but it is not. I could say that I am sick at the news (or rumours, anyway) out of the Soviet Union. But  while I am, that is not the cause. I could blame Aviation Week for missing delivery dates and reversing the order of my usual readings. (Don't ask why, it made sense to me when I did it.) I could stamp my girlish feet at the library for unaccountably continuing its Christmas break through an extra weekend without so much as a sign on the door, which seems like an outrageous thing that could never happen in 1953, and certainly not in the bright, shining future of years from now. 

But that is not it, either. The truth is that I was up late playing canasta and so finishing this letter has led to me putting off dinner, and I am famished! I am, accordingly, off to remedy the situation and maybe some jambalaya? And now I am depressed again, at the tragic death of a musician you've probably never even heard of.  

Your Loving Daughter, 

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, November 1952, II: The Secretary

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

I don't want to alarm anyone, but we're in the middle of Mamie mania and everyone who doesn't like a straight-cut bob has come to realise that we've had two weeks of Eisenhower, enough to be sure that he was some kind of secret Taftite all along, and now our only hope is winning the midterms in 1954 before the inevitable Nixon/McCarthy ticket of 1960. 

Although by that time apparently the Viet Minh will be advancing from Cupertino into Palo Alto, so I shouldn't be worried that much. 

On a more serious note, I get the feeling from this week's coverage that the servo and magnetic amplifier have lost the battle, and the future belongs to the transistor, even if we're not exactly sure what it will be made of just yet. Gallium? Cadmium? Something exotic! The key point is that just as soon as we can build a recorder using these fancy "transistors," the sooner we will reap the profits when everyone in America has nothing better to do than watch television thanks either to ever increasing prosperity, or the Second Great Depression that will follow us running out of copper. Unless we crack the world open with a hydrogen bomb first!

If you're wondering why all this morbid thinking, I was reading Newsweek and ran into this unlikely ad announcing that a plastic eye-doctor-thing would keep your child safe from eye infections. Of course, the unspoken fear under that is your daughter will need glasses. And then, well, firstly, she will never get a man; and, secondly, you'll have to pay for it. No wonder my generation has gone utterly strange (not just scared) and is lashing out in all directions! 

Your Loving (and not at all paranoid) Daughter,
Ronnie

1:47 The Mamie bob so sexy

Postblogging Technology, November, 1952, I: Everyone Likes (M)ike

R._C._,
The Mayflower,
Washington, D.C.

Dear Father:

If this letter gives you the sense that I am feeling a bit out of sorts for reasons that do not need to be spelled out, well, you are right to think that. I am told that all law students cannot wait to be done with third year, so I am normal, even if my situation definitely isn't, and if one more preppy Stanford man offers to open a door for me I shall --! I have shot men before! Several times! (Twice.)

Speaking of shots heard around the world, no-one is allowed to say anything about the hydrogen bomb test, which went ahead before the election --but why am I telling you this? You hear better Service rumours than I do! 

Speaking of rumours, I hear that Mr. Hoover has recently taken out subscriptions to Engineering, Fortune and The Economist. I wonder if he thinks that this is some kind of revenge on me? Shot men for less!

Your Loving (if exasperated!) Daughter,
Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, September 1952, I: Vixen Crash

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

We are in a little hotel just outside of Maastricht, which I know was not in our itinerary, but we were having so  much fun cycling on the Rhine that we decided to make a trip down the Moselle and extend our stay by a day, returning via Rotterdam aboard Cebu Queen, as what is the point of being an international shipping heiress if you can't get a berth on short notice. We have  many pictures to show you, but none taken after dark, which threatens any minute due to brownouts, which are not one of the things about Europe that I will miss. I will talk to you about our meetings with the captains in Rotterdam when we get back. Not much to worry about, but there were some concerns expressed, mainly about an expected increase in traffic from the mainland due to Mao being increasingly erratic. Or so I'm told, anyway. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1952: And Colour Television!

 

Last week, it was hard to avoid giving the impression of being prematurely bored of SAGE. Even as the postblogging approaches SAGE from the front-end back in 1952, my attitude is shaped by Annals of the History of Computing 42, 1 (October 1983), the SAGE special issue of the already-unbelievably old flagship journal of computing history. SAGE had only been discontinued three years before the special issue, which, to put it in further perspective, came out in my second year of undergraduate. SAGE led to SABRE, the "Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment," which had only rolled out to travel agents seven years earlier. SAGE made its smooth transition from working technology to academic history for understandable reasons. It's like the Protestant Reformation or the Eighteenth Century London underworld: an inherently good "site" for historical work. 

Having been somewhat personally bruised by the idea that the Ruthenian borderlands are a better "site" for historical work than, say the entire Austrian Empire, I am probably too willing to forgive myself for being cynical about overworked historical sites, but SAGE's claim here is hard to dismiss. Besides being a major customer and driver in the first decade of the computing industry, it pioneered many of the technologies behind the Internet, whose importance I will reluctantly acknowledge, and as the ongoing Ukrainian conflict underlines, national air warning and defence networks have a lot more staying power in the modern era than most utopian Fifties-era national security initiatives. Indeed, between the last Nagorno-Karabakh war and the repulsion of the initial Russian Special Military Operation, they would appear to be  right up there with aircraft, tanks, nuclear submarines and atom bombs in the list of things that international security cannot be without, a modern "queen of battle."

So, okay, yes. But SAGE is old hat, and boring. What about, I asked myself, the datalinks from telephone to computer? After all, analog lines are inherently noisy, and when you set out to conver analog input into digital data for processing, and then use the output data to create a graphical image for battle control, noise is a huge problem. The more data points to fit into your forced curve, the wilder the excursions which must be smoothed, to the point where the output data (the bomber track) might be nothing more than GIGO. 

The importance of the telephone  network, which, at its peak, received everything from VHF from the DEW lines and UHF data  from AEW aircraft and forwarded it at 1200 baud on commercial toll lines, is underlined by the fact that the telephone switchboard stations, unlike the SAGE blockhouses, were underground and fortified. I did not find much about the telephone engineering of the network, however, and was quickly shoved in another direction. As with MIT redirecting its early work on WHIRLWIND to the SAGE project, so RCA sought a second life for its Selectron tube memory system in the nascent national defence computer engineering project. Ultimately, Jay Forrester passed on tube memory, whether RCA's or the more-developed Williams tube, in favour of magnetic core memory, and RCA "assigned their engineers to color television development, and put the Selectron in the hands of 'the mothers-in-law of two deserving employees (the Chairman of the Board and the President).'^2]"

And this is kind of my objection to historical sites. (Silos?) We get locked into an academic historian's idea of what is important, and whole genealogies of advisors and students get bound up in them, and other subjects get missed entirely.  What's more historically important to our modern, Internet-enabled world, SAGE, or colour television? It's not, I submit, a question with an obvious answer.

Postblogging Technology, April 1952, I: Metal Fatigue

R._. C_.,

Shaughnessy,

Vancouver,

Canada

Dear Father:

I am always kicking myself for getting these letters off late, and so last week I was patting myself on the back for getting one off early for a change when I heard the news that the President had decided not to run again! So that was what was completely missing in the last letter. It will be a bit neglected in this letter, too, because The Economist is a British paper, and because its obsessions tend to be its own. This week sees The Economist in particularly fine form, with all the regular hands on deck, and lots of good coverage of important stories, but also, with the regular editorial crew in charge, it is Doom, doom, doom everywhere!  Even Australia is (economically) doomed. First I'd heard about it! 

On the bright side, Estes Kefauver followed up his win in New Hampshire with one in Nebraska. I make a bit of fun below, since there's not a lot of Democrats in Nebraska, but this does contribute to his "momentum." Reggie hasn't fallen in love with Kefauver the way he did with Wallace, but he does seem to be the best of a sad lot. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie