Fireflash and Sparrow: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1955

 

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!  

Aswan and Wittfogel: A Technological and History of Technology Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1954

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.

A Technological and Political Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1953 With No Public Engagement Whatsoever: Willow Run and Dien Bien Phu

 Well, I might well be on strike next week, and I certainly have split single days off this week. And that can only mean one thing. A Technological Appendix with absolutely no reference to modern day events. Instead, I'll talk about a long deadlock in the French National Assembly requiring multiple votes for multiple candidates to select a new premier, and a devastating military setback for colonialism. People, it's the Fifties! It was a different time. 

GM's lease at Willow Run, signed in August of 1953, and the fall of the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu in the Sip Song Chau Tai, on 7 May 1954 stand as two signal failures of  high modernism. 

They are also drawn together as threads in the June 1953 news, while I am writing less than a month ahead of the 70th anniversary of the creation of the fort at Dien Bien Phu, threaded through by a technological story, if not a very exciting one, that of the Fairchild C-119, and the month-long series of votes in the French National Assembly that was required to finally find a premier who could command the confidence of the house. 

The first candidate for the premiership was, pictured, Pierre Mendes-France, who gave The Economist the vapours, as reported in the issue for 6 June, with his neutralism (he was cool to the European Army), his socialism, and his openness to an outcome in Southeast Asia that didn't involve the final crushing of Communism.   The final, and successful one, was Joseph Laniel. I've joked several times in alt text that the Assembly was choosing the man to throw under the bus of Dien Bien Phu, a hair-brained strategic scheme that is already cooking, inspired by dubious success of a small airlift of troops into Vientiane, in which C-119s played a non-trivial role. Mendes-France will negotiate France's disengagement from Indo China in the course of 1954, when the Assembly grudgingly accepted that he had been right all along, and liberated Tunisia in the bargain before the diehards expelled him in order to make the Algerian situation as difficult as possible. 

There's not necessarily anything funny-ha-ha about this. The Fourth Republic did fall, and not long after the deadlock of 1953. It's the only modern democratic state to do so in the post-WWII international order, and evidence that it can happen. On the other hand, in retrospect it seems like it mostly came about because of obdurate resistance to social democracy, and, anyway, the Fifth Republic might not be perfect, but it is better than the Fourth, and one has to wonder if some of the other modern democratic states of the post-WWII international order could do with a one-and-done revolution and a new constitution. Maybe if they're having difficulty selecting a head of government, that's a sign? Of course, it's hard to think of a perfect modern parallel, given that we're well past the days of colonialism. 

Dien Bien Phu also has a more unusual hook on my imagination, because I cannot escape memories of Tactics of Mistake, an entry in Gordon Dickson's Childe cycle. Tactics is a late novel, but strikes me as marinated in the contemporary reaction to Dien Bien Phu, which might be because it is a fix-up, like Soldier, Ask Not, but of unpublished stories from Dickson's first decade as a professional science fiction writer.  Or he just read Bernard Falls. If the first theory is true, though, we can thank Nguyen Van Giap for the boomlet in military/mercenary/war-world science fiction that continues to this day.

Postblogging Technology, May 1953, I: Happy Times Are Here Again

The Hon. A.

,_. Hall,
_,

England

Dear Cousin:

I write in some hurry as Ronnie is gathering her things so that her husband can do his part in the delivery, a solid twenty minutes depending on the traffic on King Edward. Was that funny? Not? I can't tell. I'm a ball of nerves. It was so much easier off being a dashing aviator when Jim-Jim was born. I try to distract myself by thinking about other things, but I keep being dragged down to the fact that the Commerce Secretary tried to fire the chief of the National Bureau of Standards at the behest of a mail order con artist, and the Administration and its supporters at the newspapers are lining up behind him. This, this is why McCarthy is winning. It sometimes seems like I should seriously consider not going back to the States after my furlough. Or maybe that's "transferrence," or "displacement" in the new psychiatric jargon. I'm scared, cousin!

Your Cousin,

The Dash(ing) Pilot

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, April 1953, II: Cutlass to the NBS!

 

It will not have escaped the attention of the alert reader that this is a technological appendix to a postblogging installment which hasn't posted yet. Why? A difficult work schedule and my own stubborn refusal to face the reality that I wasn't reasonably going to finish the installment before Tuesday. 

Fortunately, we have a science-policy-politics story this week which deserves its prominence at every level, the "AD-X2 controversy," and another story, slowly rolling on to its 1958 denouement, the Chance-Vought F7U Cutlass, announced this month in an attack variant that Chance Vought expects to produce after completing its contract for 90 of the air superiority type. 

Our historical memory of the Eisenhower Administration has over the years veered between a roseate nostalgia for the President of interstates and Brown Vs. Board of Education and an increasing disquiet as the damage done by the Guatemalan and Iranian coups keeps on compounding. There is, therefore, something revelatory about descending from our 20,000ft historical view into the trenches to find incoming Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks receiving a well-deserved bayoneting from Drew Pearson and the 400 employees of the National Bureau of Standards who threatened this week to quit if their boss, Allen V. Astin, were fired.

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, March 1953: Cryptologic

 

Here's a simple question with a very frustrating lack of answer: When was the carcinotron deployed? Technically a carcinotron is a backward-wave oscilloscope in which an electron beam was passed through a strong radio frequency field. The upshot is a strong output radio frequency emission, which can be in the frequency range of a microwave rada. Altering the modifying rf field allows the output emission to be  rapidly "swept" across the entire emission band of a given radar, permitting what looks like universal jamming. 

I honestly don't know much about the subject, and I am very glad that radio engineering enthusiasts continue to update the relevant Wikipedia articles. We thus now know that one kind of backward wave oscilloscope, also called, or a variant, of the so-called travelling-wave tube, which was invented at and by, among other people and places (the patent wars are strong with this one), in 1943, by Austrian Jewish emigre Rudolf Kompfner, then working at the Admiralty Research Laboratory. Kompfner's patents were gazetted starting in 1957, while the first published work on the backward wave oscilloscope was published in 1953, and the Wiki article on the TWT points us at the Hughes Aircraft Electron Tube Laboratory, or Microwave Tube Division in Culver City, California, a research facility that is new to me as of right now, and which has been recently folded into Stellant Systems along with many other ancestors. All that institutional history, gone, like tears in the rain.

The upshot is that, in Britain or in America, the carcinotron specifically, the revolutionary airborne radar jamming device that, in the Thomson incarnation above, weighed no less than 25kg, went into production/service in "the 1950s." 

This is, I have to say, an unsatisfyingly vague dating for what seems to have been a very quite technological panic over the future of air defence radars. It seems like a reasonable guess that its appearance is linked to the very substantial "ECM suite" on the V-bombers, upon which so much faith was, apparently, justifiably placed. One assumes that it went into the Canberra, B-47, and B-52, as well. One infers that it might have been a problem for the SAGE rollout and for the upgrading of Britain's radar defences. One wonders what the implications of the new technology were for the radar station at CFS Holberg, up the road from my small hometown and something of a big deal in our sparsely populated region, in which every rationale for the existence of a community was to be celebrated. There's not much to be said about it beyond that except that evidently there's a crisis in air defence radar going on behind the scenes right now in  March of 1953, but shh, because it is a secret, wilderness of mirrors and all of that stuff. If you hide how flustered you are from the Reds, maybe  they won't notice the carcinotron before some counter-measures emerge!

Remember when Americans took the train? I don't, either. I'm only 58, and too  young for that stuff. The title's historic, too. No-one likes it hot any more. We've got enough heat, amiright? 

So, anyway, about that Fortune article about the year of the transistor . . . . 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1951: Audiovisual Aids

 

So I took my summer bike ride last week, nine days, seven in the saddle. This is the final downhill coming down from Rock Creek Summit, the height of land on the old Kettle Valley Railroad that became Highway 33. so I'm showing off a bit with this particular vacation photo. 

(Although in terms of climb and gradiants Highway 33 has nothing on the Hope-Princeton, the route that my family used to take on vacation in the distant days of the 1960s, when the highway was new and home movies, about vacation trips and this and that, were the rare enthusiasm of hobbyists. 

Postblogging Technology, September 1950, I: "This Calls for Champagne All Around"

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada

Dear Father:

Here's  your friendly letter from the frontlines of the war-to-come, the land of camphor and oolong tea! If Mao builds a navy, that is. Or needs one, because the Koumintang stops surrendering to the first Red soldier they see. You will be glad to know that we are doing our part. Reggie is pretending to atom bomb China, in hopes that the Reds . . . I don't know. What are we  hoping? That the Reds bomb us first? Meanwhile, I'm a little ahead of the news again, so I've heard of Inchon, which definitely means that America has pulled it out and managed to defeat mighty North Korea. I feel so patriotic! 

Considering some of the things said about Koreans and "Orientals" in the press these last two weeks, I wonder about whether it is some kind of cosmic coincdence that The Black Rose is out, featuring the long ago English hero who brought compasses, gunpowder, and paper to the backwards West. What goes around comes around? Or is this an even more subtle way of belittling Asia? Ronnie has her doubts!

Oh, and you're wondering what I'm doing. Besides doubting, I mean! Learning to cook on a wok and getting to the point where I actually want to see my subscription to The Economist catch up with me. As for yours, I am glad to think that you are already looking ahead to the arrangements for me to resume law school next fall. I've had rumblings from Chicago that my Dad wants to pay for our nanny, and if he wants to be involved, he should be. If not, I will gladly take you up on your offer, although it is early days yet to make plans, tempting fate and all. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1950: Jetliner Dreams

 

Early jets tended to lack a bit of oomph coming off the runway.

I've covered the outline of the early passenger jet here before. The De Havilland Comet seemed to have the market to itself at first, but then was pinched out by the Boeing 707, which was developed from a jet-powered tanker that the USAF eventually decided it needed to support its B-47 fleet. The Comet plays an important part in the British narrative that says that Britain's postwar aviation subsidy programme was a big waste of money. Meanwhile, the USAF order for 250 KC-135 Stratotankers cushioned Boeing's 707 project and suggests that Cold War military spending played an important role in the transition to jet transports. 

But is there more to say about this? In a quiet week before, hopefully, the UBC Library reopens, I take my inspiration where I find it, and Brad DeLong has posted a lecture online suggesting that the historic expansion of the British economy through 1870 might have run up against a renewed Malthusian world but for a bunch of exogenous factors that accelerated "innovation." 

It's modern economics latest surrender to the implacable grasp of the "free lunch" school of technological progress, according to which "innovation" comes from outside the economic process, and that the human species is forever vulnerable to a return to a Malthusian world of subsistence economics at any arbitrary level of technological achievement if we ever fail in our continuing propitiation of the mad gods of invention. 

As, away back in May of 1950, the American aviation industry plays with the idea that a transition to jets is impossible, barring some kind of "socialist" intervention to pay the costs of developing a jetliner out of the taxpayers' pocket, I'm inclined to stop and meditate on exogeneity.

Postblogging Technology, March 1949, I: A Sturdy Refusal to be Perplexed

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada.

Dear Father:

a month left to my undergraduate career, but not even really that! My undergraduate thesis --the one that I am turning in for grades-- is already in hand. I will receive it back for final revision next week, and, since I have no final exams scheduled for April, it is all over but the relaxing. Perhaps on the thought that my mighty mind will go to rot and ruin before I reach law school, I have even been invited to some graduate seminars! Ordinarily, I would be honoured but . . . But, firstly, wine and cheese gratis. Second, the Philosophy Department is hosting some Big Names from back east preparatory to the appearance on our shores of the one and only Wittgenstein, of which --Well, if you're not a philosopher, don't ask, because I cannot speak. Ha! Joke!

Sorry. Perhaps one glass too many. So the thought was that the Big Name might, science being close to technology (I know, I was as surprised as you to hear it!), like to comment on the notes an enterprising Junior College lad took at a Heidegger seminar in Berlin last month (he was being there! Ahem. Definitely one glass too many) where the Great Man, who is definitely not a Nazi, launched a new "research programme" in technology. German philosophers have "research," you see. When they're not being not-Nazis. 

The upshot is that the Big Name has hardly any idea of who this Heidegger fellow is, disapproves of what  he did know, and hardly stayed awake through our enthusiastic graduate student's report. The young man was visibly crushed (though he didn't help his case by showing off in the question and answer session), and it was all anticlimactic leading into Wittgenstein, for whom the vogue would seem to have passed, anyway.

Excuse me. In that rush of words, I may have managed to avoid mentioning why I actually have a serious interest in what philosophy  has to say about technology, since I am not very happy with what patent law says about it. Yes, disappointment ensued, but progress. Maybe. 

So, as to what my thesis doesn't say. I'm tolerably sure that Horace Stevens was killed on the train that took the Stanford hockey team up to Oregon in February 1912. Mr. V., of all people, who knows murderers, maybe, and murder mystery writers for sure, said I should ignore the athletes and coaches, who would have been isolated in an excursion car. Boosters and journalists were your guys. And who should be among them but Russell Pegler, apparently distantly related to same, and the journalist who covered the unidentified corpse-in-a-trunk story for the Examiner --and who provided the tips that led the investigation to focus on the demi-monde. Why would he do sports? 

Wong Lee didn't even hesitate. "Blackmail, of course. Stupid blackmail. So there will be cheques." And current cheques, too, since Pegler is still alive at 90, and someone still cares enough to try to kill me. (Twice, says Wong Lee, who found a bomb under the Lincoln the other day. Unfortunately, it's the only thing holding on the exhaust manifold, so we have to leave it there and we start the car by hot-wiring now. Kidding! Slightly.) That's where being able to ask Pete Giannini for a favour comes in handy.  Story made too-late short, Pegler receives a quarterly stipend from Union Oil,  or, previous to 1945, Consolidated Engineering, or, previous to 1937, the Union Aircraft Corporation. It won't stand up in court, especially because I think it might be slightly illegal to ask the chairman of the bank to look at confidential bank records for you, but Pegler's services in the ain't-saying-anything department are being retained by Junior, presumably for his Dad. 

Heaven knows I don't want to cross the man again, and I'm not exactly boiling over with zeal unrequited for justice for the murder of Horace Stevens, who does not seem to have been very nice. I'm just at a loss to think of a way of persuading the Boy Genius of it before some Tong assassin gets lucky. 

Yours Sincerely,
Ronnie.

"The world owes South Africa a debt for refusing to go along with the mania of majority rule and 'one man one vote once." John Davenport's papers are in the Hoover Institution Archives.  

Postblogging Technology, March 1949, I: When Roosevelt Bombed Pearl Harbour

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Thank you so much for putting Mr. Sutter on the case! It turns out that this was a particular bit of research for which he was well suited. Not as a distinguished member of the California bar, as you would think, but as a man. It turns out that the archives were withholding a file because they thought it would give me the vapours or something. 

Just to review, I've been trying to find out why Horace Stevens didn't show up for Binger Hermann's trial in Portland in January of 1910. It's a bit of a puzzler, and for three years I thought I was going to ask either Stevens or his family, but I couldn't find the man! It seems hard to believe that he just disappeared, but last year, after one too many detective movies, I finally decided to look at the obvious other avenue --"Unidentified corpses of 1910." It was a pretty long shot, but Mr. V. has some friends who write detective novels, which is just as good as actually being a detective, if you ask me. They disabused me of the idea of some desperado shooting Stevens on the train to Portland and heaving the body out of the windows. Dramatic, I know, but reading the biographies of the men of the Land Scandal puts you in the way of thinking of these things. Anyway, it turns out that it's harder than it seems, and the body usually ends up on the tracks, attracting attention. Better, I was told, to pack a big, empty trunk. 

Bodies showing up in trunks, you say? Well, yes. Specifically, in Los Angeles, in early February. Said trunk was weighted with some dumb-bell plates and wrapped in a terrycloth Turkish bath towel, and thrown in Buena Vista Lake, but floated to the surface. a Los Angeles detective took charge (I'm not sure why, since the body was turned over to state troopers out of Bakersfield) and proceeded to generate a thick, thick file by going around every boxing gym in Los Angeles looking for the man's supposed homosexual lover, on the basis of a violent murder in a fit of jealous rage, etc, etc. The file included many pictures of a decayed, naked male body, since the detective had to prove a violent death, and there was evidence of a beating and death by asphyxiation. Hence the womanly vapours. 

Since I requested the file the week before the attempted "hit," and was, in fact, there to see it, not knowing that the clerks were going to claim that it had been lost, it'll do as a movie-plot explanation that I was ordered rubbed-out because it is a vital clue. Well, it or one of the other 132 files in the fasicle, but this is the biggest and most interesting one, so there's that. 

(Who else is surprised to hear a moderate Republican attributing defeat in 1948 to the party refusing to repudiate conspiracy theorists who claimed that "Roosevelt bombed Pearl Harbour"?

Yours Sincerely, Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, December 1948, II: Transistor Dawn

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada

Dear Father:

Not much of a note to cover, as chances is that the streetcar will deliver me in time to feed and tip the courier for you. Don't mind me! I love to play the host in your kitchen, and the boys that Wong Lee chooses for these errands are so sweet and polite! And I honestly can't wait to be in a house, a home, and one that I can think of as belonging to my family, if you will pardon my presumption. With people that I love, anyway. I'll have more to say about that soon, perhaps. Right now, I have only inside rumours that I will be living the student life for three years more. Official word comes down at the end of next month . . . 

Oh! The letter. I've written it anyway, out of a spirit of completeness. Besides, I received the most ridiculous threat the other day at the city archives, where I am following up on some loose ends in regards to the old Oregon scandal. If they do find my body floating in the Bay, at least the world will know my opinion of Jane Russell. (Except that I forgot to give it. Never mind, I don't speak ill of the dead, and every time I see her act . . . )

Also, yes, I know that the streetcar doesn't go past your door, and that your neighbours will look askance at a girl carrying a suitcase down your street, where only taxicabs are meant to go. On the other hand, before they can look askance, they'll have fight their way through their ornamental gardens to the point where they can see the road. Perhaps askanceness will be reported to them from the groundskeeper's men via the butler. 

You'll notice a story below where I try to claim credit for the soon-to-be-Alma Mater (x1) for a quite exciting story (inside word has the "semi-conductor" set bound for a very quick Nobel). Well, yes, Shockley did not go to Stanford, and his colleagues don't even know how to spell "California," but the Shockleys are Stanford people, and it is the Stanford campus where all the scientists and engineers are running around and saying that he deserves a Nobel. So there!  

Yours Sincerely,
Ronnie

In 1948, a twenty-year old house that has just seen the last of its children leave, was built in ---1928!

A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1947, I: When America Gets a Cold, The Rest of the World Gets 70-Calibre Pneumonia"

Update: Put some words in.

At the head, I should point out that this appendix is up for the usual reason that I'm not going to get the next postblogging post up next week unless I can work on it this week. But, hey, the 3"/70 AA is morbid fun, and pneumonia might be going around this January. Relevance!

HMS Swiftsure is a cruiser that was scrapped in mid-modernisation in 1959/60 largely due to concerns about a proposed 3"/70 fit.

The postblogging series is still more than a year away from the final crisis of the Great Siege, the 30% devaluation of the pound on 19 September 1949. But, as Eric Groves helpfully reminds us, the devaluation was driven by the American recession, which reminded me of that old proverb about how the world gets pneumonia when America gets the cold; and we came across an earlier symptom of these ongoing problems this week, with the controversy over the reduction of the Home Fleet to a single cruiser and four destroyers. 

At one level, this reminds me of the Daily Mail's recent ginned-up outrage over the Royal Navy being reduced to "nineteen ships," in that it's complete bollocks. Submarines aren't ships, you see. Nowadays, the SSNs of the modern Royal Navy are the ships that keep the seas, and the nation's exclusive nuclear holocaust-related services providers (Yes, I have been catching up with my Laundry novels backlog over the holiday). Back in 1947, in the wake of the brief convertability episode in the summer, the Cabinet had forced cuts in the Estimates that reduced the surface elements of the Home Fleet to a single Dido-class cruiser and four Battles (with 1 battleship, 11 cruisers, 1 carrier, 24 destroyers and frigates and 5 submarines on foreign stations); but even though the cuts had been financial, their effective means of execution had been manpower cuts, and the fact that the Home Fleet was running twenty submarines probably tells us something about what was really going on. . . 

Postblogging Technology, November 1947, I: Warmongering

R_.C_.,
Vancouver,
Canada.

Dear Sir:

You'll pardon me if I'm not my usual, chatty self, as I've just had the news that Mr. Rank's problems (which I notice are not in today's press, but will turn up next time) are somehow our problems. Or, my problems! And I am to fly across the Atlantic as soon as class is out to go up to Marleybone and rescue the money that we only spent in the first place because of the silver opportunity? It's just so silly. I'm not even sure it's the money so much as the legal rights to your grandfather's "story" (As interpreted by S.R.)

I know you had nothing to do with this. I have it from my Dad, and even he is apologetic, so I can guess that my Mom is behind it, and the fact that it came out the day after we had our talk about me going back to Chicago for Christmas pretty much seals the deal. She was all on about how A. could stay at the house now that he was my fiancé and all, and it was all I could do to tell her that if she liked the man so much, she could marry him. (Except that she's so taken by the idea of having an admiral's grandson in the family that she probably would. I've tried to explain that he's a Texan, but he's learning to fake an "public school" accent with the best of them, and apparently that washes the Texan right off of you.)

I had so wanted to spend Christmas in Santa Clara with everyone, and now I get to spend it. . . Well, I can't fight my parents, so another holiday season down, another horrid flight across the Atlantic. I hve only one request from you, and it's a small thing. I don't want to fly British this time. Please, please, take an interest with whoever is arranging this, and see that I have a Pan Am booking, preferably a Constellation. I would talk to Uncle George, but then it would . . . Well, anyway, I'm looking to you to be my white knight in this, just as Mr. R. ended up being last year. 

Yrs in desperation,
Ronnie.

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, IV: Harness Racing, Equestrianship, Oxhide Ingots and Coins

Olives are the definition of the Mediterranean diet. They also need to be cured in salt or lye. This isn't very relevant to this post, but it is your weekly reminder of the importance of the primordial chemical industry to subsistence agriculture during the EIA.

So my Christmas-New Years schedule is up, and when I started this post, I had some writing time during the down weeks at the store where I am currently working, which serves the UBC community. That took some pressure off in regards to long posts, leaving me to do a progress report towards this "Sacred Spring" series, this week.

Now, of course, I do not. On the bright side, my employer has conceded that it mishandled the process of reallocating employees from two stores that have been closed for renovations. I'm sure you don't want to hear the details, and I will draw a veil over the whole embarrassing exercise by pointing at one of our competitors --a major national corporation, which paid its CEO $8.5 million in 2015-- CEOs with buyouts of $15 million and $25 million paid in the millions-- defending itself on charges by blaming middle management, and fixing the price of bread for the last decade and more by offering everyone a free $25 gift card. It's not that I don't believe that middle management at Loblaws/Weston Bread didn't realise that price coordination is wrong. That seems par for the course in an industry that can take a week and a half to realise that no stores are ordering cranberries at Christmas because of a software issue, and not because it's  a wacky thing that's happening for no reason at all that no-one can fix. It's that I no longer have five days off after New Years to write. And while the company now owes me three weeks off with pay, I have no idea when that's going to happen, or what that means for my writing "schedule."

This would be a good time to nail down the horse problem, at least.

Prevalent from 1500-1200, disappearing after 1000, and cast to be easily carried in a pack saddle. Interesting. By Chris 73 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=190648

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).

Postblogging Technology, July 1947, II: Apocalypse Real Soon Now!

R_. C_.
__ Roxburgh Crescent,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Dad:

I'll be blowed if I can catch you up on everything that's happened 'round here. The ship turns out to have a cracked spar for sure, so I'm leaving for Hawaii tomorrow via Victoria, but that's the least of it. 

Because who should blow into town last week but A., with the --I know I'm not supposed to give out clues that might blow our code, but I've found a character that won't give the game away if I call V.'s parents, the "Ns." All the "C.s" were getting too gosh-darn confusing! Their story is that they got a  yen to yacht up the Alaska Passage, so naturally they borrowed a boat off of your neighbour. I didn't see anything natural about it at all, and I was a might suspicious to find "W.B." aboard as the deckhand/captain. You may recall him as the lad that Uncle George blackmailed into taking their daughter off their hands, and he really doesn't seem to be the type to swan about Fort Rupert of all places. For the most part he was civil --actually, loads of fun. But when I saw him looking at some of the Chinese and Indian boys, I couldn't help but be glad that Tommy was gone, because I was already thinking something might come up that would remind him that he was Wong Lee's son, and then would all the plans that have been made on W. B.'s head be?

So it turned out to me and Mr. Brookstein who caught W. B. in a boatshed with one of the boys. To his credit, he didn't try to brazen it out, just disintegrated. Turned out Mr. Brookstein knew just the way to put him back together --which should have made me suspicious right there-- while I just followed his line in trying to get the kid somewhere reasonable. It's pretty tough, since neither of us have Cantonese that is what it might be, but in the end I sent him home with a promise not to tell his parents, to recommend him to our local agent, and $60 in his pocket. 

Yes, yes, I do feel pretty low about that, like I've taken my first step down the road to being a brothel keeper, but I honestly couldn't see another way out of it. Then the other shoe dropped, when W. B. came to me that night and told me that Mr. Brookstein was blackmailing him to work for the Cominterm! I should have guessed from how hard the man works with the logger unions . . . 

However, I'm not completely wet behind the ears, so Mr. Brookstein doesn't know that I know A., who, it turns out, arranged the whole trip to recruit W. B. for the American intelligence services! It turns out that they're practically farming out the Mexican office to Mr. N., on the grounds that he's rich and influential and has ties to Mexico and somewhat old money, the meatpacking houses being long forgotten. I'm not sure that's the best qualification for spying on Mexico, but this would make W.B. a potential triple agent (for us!), and I'm not going to quarrel. Another step down the road. . . Well, all of that meant that I had to find a way to buck him up, with all his talk about "God this," and "God that," and I ended up telling him that he'd have to work things out as between God and man for himself.

Which, because he's an idiot, came down to a screaming match with V., after she'd politely and gently dismantled some gibberish about  the native word for cow showing that some Indian tribes were actually Welsh, and thus Caucasian. At the end of it, he was yelling about how much he could tell her about "God and Man" at --his college, can I name it? Probably not. Think "locks," though. And she yelled at him that he should write a book, and he yelled back that maybe he would, and half of bloody Fort Rupert must have been listening in. Not that that's the first drunken fight they've heard from the pub, but V. and W.B. are a great deal more genteel than most. 

You've notice that, in that long story, I've not said anything about the Ns. showing up out of nowhere --with A., yet, after I allowed in my letters that I was in the same county as V. You'll also notice that I started another page with the head of that paragraph. This time, no erasures that might be read by flipping the paper over! Yes, I'm encouraging you to read between the lines, and, no, I do not want this page sent on to Auntie Grace. I think our chances of keeping V. in Stanford are sinking pretty low by now already. 

Yr Loving Son,
Reggie.

The era's right, but I'm going to give a modern performer some exposure. Ha. "Exposure."

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.

In Silliness, Truth: A Snooperscoping Appendix to August 1946, II

August is the "silly season." Congress, and everyone else, is on vacation (some people will go on road trips in the Canadian Rockies).

Dickey Collection, Revelstoke Museum. Note that this is a point on the old York Factory Express. I think this collection is based on a random set of photos left over in a Revelstoke film developing business. Who is this couple, so clearly dressed up for a formal photo, way out in the wildnerness along the Big Bend Highway? (Seriously: this is no way to dress for a drive around the Big Bend.) A great many people travelled the Express route in the half-century and more of its existence, but as most of them were Metis, we don't have much history to go with them. Public history, anyway.  

Pity the not-so senior staff at Time. They're putting together the beach-read number of the paper. It's going to be Time or Forever Amber. (Okay, it's going to be Forever Amber. But still.) How do you produce a can't-put-it-down number of a newsmagazine without a single high-placed source to tell you how awful Harry Truman or Harold Laski is? The answer is that you run all the "man bites dog" stories.

Well, here's the odd thing. The "man bites dog" stories of August 1946 turn out to be a lot more interesting than the politics of 1946. Maybe that's because I already know who won in 1946, 1948, and 1950. Maybe it's because that stuff just isn't that important in the long run. Well, to be sure, in the long run, the proto-UFO story from Sweden isn't that significant, and the fact that Bing Crosby is being sponsored by the company that will soon produce the first consumer (and computing) transistor products to be placed on the American market is mainly interesting to me. On the other hand, you have Joe McCarthy running for the Senate,  polio, and the bikini.

Zeus, Hurling Comets: A Vacation Extra

(Not quite a vacation: My "accumulated time off" is being purged ahead of back to school.)

One of the more colourful stories about the end of the Hittites is that when they say that when the "Thunder God of Hattusa" smote his people, he literally smote them. With a meteor. I'm not advocating for this theory: I'm reaching for a reference to the Bristol Olympus, but here's a website with lots of nice pictures that deserve to be appreciated without reference to any wackadoodle theories.

I'm not going to offer you any deep insight into the Bristol (Rolls-Royce) Olympus or anything else, here. It's a two-spool axial-flow turbojet engine that began its development cycle in November of 1946, Wikipedia says.

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=909212

It found its first use as the engine of the Avro Vulcan, and then was chosen for the BAC TSR-2 and the Concorde. 

The Concorde, as we know, was an exciting new technology that attracted many advanced orders that were subsquently cancelled as various drawbacks became apparent. In the end, a small number were built, and they had a long and reasonably successful operational career, mostly with the United Kingdom's flag or semi-flag airline. 

To this point, the story is all-too familiar. It is basically the same career as the de Havilland Comet or the VC10.

For some reason Wikipedia doesn't insist on attribution, even though the photo is c.'d Adrian Pingstone.

Not every new plane can be a Vickers Viscount, and while the British aviation writer sighs and casts a half-jealous, half-angry eye across the Atlantic, where are the Martin, Convair or Curtiss-Wright airliners? Far gone, our airfleets melt away. . . 

All the same, the 250 Viscounts sold have to count for something in the days of "export or die," and one has to wonder if the world would not be a very different place today if de Havilland had sold 250 Comets. It seems as though de Havilland was much bolder in the 1950s with the use of alternate materials in the manufacture of civil aircraft than the mainstream industry allowed itself to be before the Dreamliner, but that's a pretty trivial observation compared with the trajectory I started out to trace here. 

Which is this: the basic reason that the Concorde won so many orders was that the airline industry expected the 747 and its contemporaries to be the end of the subsonic era. Looking ahead, the B-70 and the TSR-2 represented the military cutting edge of sustained supersonic flight that would lead to supersonic airliners, with the Dyna-Soar

or SR-71 or what-have-you leading to the next generation of hypersonic, ramjet airliners that would be, per schedule, taking off from YVR right now to make a breakfast date in Hong Kong.

It didn't happen, of course. Instead of ramjets, Boeing is just now winding up 747 production. What happened? Well, a lot of things happened, obviously, but one thing that happened was that the highly thermodynamically-efficient Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 wasn't succeeded by a next iteration of the Olympus design that might have addressed the basic Concorde problems of range, cabin size and fuel economy. 

There was a way forward: it was decided not to take it. Would the Olympus have evolved in the direction of the J-58 under the impetus of an extended TSR-2 programme? God knows. I don't. What I do know is that the Olympus went on to make money for Rolls-Royce as a generator for offshore oil platforms, and isn't that the world we live in? 

Bitter reflections on our over-carbonised world aside, I want to meditate on the declining labour inputs of long production lines, and, yes, the declining consumption of whatever-it-is-we-decide-technology-is across the last 50 years or so. We may only have woken up to the fact that productivity is stagnating in the last half-decade or so, but between 1933 and 1973, we went from thinking that commercial jet airliners crossing the Atlantic was impossible science fiction; to thinking that ramjet airliners crossing the Pacific was impossible science fiction. 

I can't help thinking that "impossible science fiction" is doing a lot of work here.  We're never afraid to invoke it to close off the future (usually by announcing that unemployment is about to go to 100% because of automation --and this is as true of 1933 as it is of 2016). O, it is an excuse to lie back and chill, abandoning half-completed projects because they're "too expensive") and wait for technology to swoop in from that exogenous thought-world of "culture" to save us.  

Because you know what? I see no evidence that innovation arrives from outside, and a lot that it comes from being willing to actually go ahead and spend the money to build things like the TSR-2. Something about the perfect being the enemy of the good?