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.
It's too bad that there was no use or market for a high-speed delta wing fighter in the late Fifties and Sixties, and, if there was, Saunders-Roe was the ideal contractor to deliver it, since they were due for a win. By The Trempe See: http://www.1000aircraftphotos.com/Contributions/Trempe/TrempeInfo.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1785669
R_.C_., The Lakehouse, Nakusp, B.C. Canada
Dear Father:
As March melts into April here in the Bay City, I am bound to work when we are not tittering over the disaster overtaking Richard Nixon, as who doesn't want the worst for jumped-up L.A. parvenues? Do not get me wrong; I am sure that he will be the Vice-Presidential nominee in 1956 and he will probably be the Presidential candidate in 1960, but when Ike --IKE!-- stabs you in the back, what is there even left to say?
Which is quite enough politics, and since I have exhausted myself on family matters under separate cover, I will simply sign myself
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.
The February blues are upon the city by the bay. Yours truly is coping with consent decrees and the many ways of turning germanium and silicon into husband replacements, as I pointed out to James when we discussed the many traumas of kindergarten. (He'll be on leave at the end of the month, and it's poor May-May who has to deal with the storms and gales of the pint-sized social life.) But it is never untimely to point out to your hubby how he is on the verge of being replaced by a pile of wires.
1:39, though the talking heads do manage some explanation for why you're listening to this.
R_. C_., Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
I see as I put this in the packet that I have mixed up my notes and sent in the wrong issues. What can I say? It's been a busy week, with a flying trip to L.A. and back. In way of apology, all that I can say is that you're not paying for this, and you're not getting your news from me. I always like to read Uncle George's old letters, especially from the old days, before the war, and I'm always upset when he misses a month (or a year --what was going on in 1931?) and so by extension I am mad at me. There was quite a bit of news at the end of the month, and I will catch you up briefly next week.
This cover is credited to Richard M. Powers, and is so beautiful that I decided that I couldn't just stick the credit in a subtitle. Cat's Eye is a 1961 Andre Norton novel, relatively early in Norton's career, and the first appearance of The Dipple, the sprawling refugee camp from which many of Norton's socially alienated protagonists originate. It has been a very long time since I read the novel, but as far as my limited recollection go, the title isn't a reference to cat's night vision, but the cover art is another matter.
The crucial thing about cat's eye vision is that, in contrast to the night vision equipment of the 1950s that turned infrared input into visible-light images, cat's eyes work by focussing ambient visible-spectrum radiation to give better imaging, at the expense of loss of losing the kinds of visual information that are less relevant to crepuscular predators. People like cats, so there are lots of explanations and reconstructions on Youtube. Here's an older one that doesn't have AI narration.
My familiarity with all of this begins with vignettes in Charles Stross novels in which Concordes and the like demonstrate that there's something to high Elizabethan British aviation technology by penetrating American air defences. Since sourcing pastiche science fiction novels is no basis for a system of historiography, I remained agnostic until I arrived at OPERATION SAGE BRUSH, which I find pretty fully summarised online here with respect to land operations, and with respect to air superiority operations by Not A Pound For Air to Ground at Youtube.
SAGE BRUSH opened with 9 Aggressor B-57s crossing the Exercise's "Truce Zone." The Canberras of the attacking force easily evading defending interceptors and nuked 18 air bases as far north as Tennessee. Our narrator summarises the lesson of the Exercise as the one about the bomber always getting through and goes on to talk about the upcoming generation of American fighter bombers, blaming the Great Mistake of the Vietnam War on an excessive emphasis on atomic warfare (275 simulated atomic bombs with 15 simulated megatons was used by Aggressor forces alone in an exercise area consisting basically of Louisiana, a rather smaller area than, say, West Germany). This being a judicious combination of strategic velleities and hobby horses, I will defer to Newsweek, which focussed on the transient technological aspects, successful jamming and the unstoppable speed of the B-57. I mean, general atomic war is a bad thing, but they actually built F-111s and Buccaneers, and tried to build TSR-2s, so in some sense this part is more important. No-one, apparently, gives a shit about backward-wave oscillator, aka the "carcinotron," for reasons unknown to the author
Just kidding. Let's talk about Latin grammar next! But Concordes dropping James Bond pastiches on Cthulhu-occupied Washington (spoilers I guess) is a bit more graspable than analogue electronic circuits. Just one aspect of all this is tactical reconnaissance to find atom bomb targets, which you don't want to waste, there being only 300 of them to spare. (On the bright side, the defending side in SAGE BRUSH had twenty-five bombs to spare for not-Louisiana at the end of the exercise.) The line is very pithy: The TSR-2 was to carry sidescanning "line scan" optics, which previously had gone into a pod on the Buccaneer. So what was that thing they did with the lines and the scanning?
So we are sorted at work about how this humble blogger is going to be plugged into our current workplace "the retail emergency is forever" scheme:
Saturday: 6-230; Sunday, 10-6:30 "Need experienced people in the mid shift on our busiest day," until Saturday at 3PM, at which time it was changed by text message to 6-2:30: Monday, 6-2:30: Tuesday: 6-2:30: Wednesday, 1:30-10 "The DM will visit tomorrow, we need the department in good shape." It's good to be wanted at work, but if I asked you to guess what I did on Thursday, and you answered, "Managed to sleep for six hours, then sat on the couch eating stale chips and watching Youtube clips, taking a break every hour to nap," you would be right! As it turns out, I wouldn't have been able to finish it on Sunday morning, either.
And this is why this post is largely in response to things Newsweek will cover in our next installment of postblogging, which was about one quarter done Saturday afternoon when I gave up and went out for dinner.
Math time:
+
=
The point of this week's technical appendix is that some people say that British Airways ruined the British aviation industry by rejecting British planes, and some people say that British aviation ruined British aviation by forcing the Britannia on British Airways. In the spirit of the Internet these days, I'm going to present the case that it's actually "both"! And along the way I'm going to drag in some infrastructure projects of the mid-Fifties that are also having a continuing impact in a little part of the world that I like to call "the Middle East," which you probably haven't heard of. We're very geographically educational around this blog!
(Photo credits are Navy, Air Force, and a Vickers-sourced advertorial that I consider to be public domain. Look, you pretend that it's journalism, I pretend that it isn't proprietary.)
Three technological objects, three fiascos, two countries, two lessons, one post!
It appears that Susannah and the Singing Dogs are only represented on Youtube by this, and not their chart-leading performance of "Jingle Bells."
R_. C_., Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
A short note as I am fitting myself in at the firm and a bit frazzled, as you might be able to tell from all my screaming at The Economist to just get on with it! Hopefully I will be a bit more at ease by Christmas.
Lady and the Trampis that movie with the spaghetti. Per the proffered selection of Youtube shorts, people also remember the Siamese cats. According to the Wikipedia summary, they're the villains. Also, the movie's plot sounds like everything wrong with Disney in the Fifties, but that can't be news to anyone who hasn't been catatonic since before Steamboat Willie. (Ooh, bed sores!) It turns out that it was a technical achievement, though, the first animated movie made with CinemaScope, which is a significant part of why the movie is so well loved today. The plot might be insensitive, sentimental, and shallow, but the whole thing is gorgeous. Gorgeous is what CinemaScope is all about!
It is my last day in Britain, and I have handed off this letter and other confidential papers to the courier. We are waiting on a taxi to take us to Waterloo, and from there to Southampton to catch our ship providing it hasn't been struck in. Montreal and by rail to Revelstoke, none of the troubles of Atlantic flying with two children in tow, thank you very much! James cannot travel with us as there is some tedious planning exercise in regards ground radar at the East Anglia stations, so he will be flying in by stages, eventually to Kelowna. So we will have a rented car for the vacation, after all! Just as well, since there are probably going to be some trips to Nelson when Nakusp palls.
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.
You find me in the doldrums of an ongoing election campaign. The world has discovered peace, and I have discovered just how angry a four-year-old can be. (Very!) She finds the disruptions of packing far too much to bear, and the intimation that she shall have a nurse while Mama is away all day is not to be countenanced. At least her baby brother is a placid little cuddle bear! And I shall be well clear of Britain when Tony Eden launches whatever manic midnight expedition he has his mind set upon by then. I am betting on Athens, but not ruling out New Guinea.
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.
Tony Randall as sex symbol is the perfect lead into the musical act that closes the thumbnail below.
R_. C_., Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
It is my understanding that I am to call you "Daddio" and decline to do my homework until such time as there's a revolution or something, and there's really no point in doing anything but knock over newstands. I'm not even sure that I am allowed to care about Kefauver '56 or Aneurin Bevan, as they might be too square. (Bevan sure is. Binge drinking is for when you're young and irresponsible, not putting yourself forward as a potential prime minister!)
So, you know, who cares about stuff and anything? Not us young people today! (I am young, right? At least, I'm not thirty!) Anyway, because it is March and the technical press is still exhausted from the New Year's stuff, and the British press is waiting on an election, it will probably feel like this installment is all rebellion.
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
It won't hit the top of the charts until the summer, but Rock Around the Clock is the hit single from the Blackboard Jungle soundtrack. Did you know that the novel that Blackboard Jungle is based on is set in a British school? I didn't!
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.
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.
So let this be a lesson to everyone. If you're ever tempted to make friends with a nice admiral that nobody loves, you might just live to regret it if he gets promoted after all. Considering that Felix is Ray Spruance's man through and through, I guess it's no surprise that he doesn't get along with Radford. Unfortunately, Wild Bill is in Washington, and Felix is out here managing the Straits, as far as Chiang will let him. There are rumours of a split between Radford and the President, but he still has Dulles' ear, and what they're talking about is a preventive nuclear war against China. Churchill has been able to impress on Ike just how crazy this is, but there's no talking to the Dulles brothers. (I'm told there was a long lecture about Marlborough, Queen Anne, and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in general, to the effect of not letting ideology get in the way of diplomacy --the sort of thing that Churchill would never dare say in public, which is unfortunate because Tony seems to have taken the public Churchill to heart, but now I'm just passing on the rumours I hear to make myself look important.)
So the gist of it is that Chiang, and many of his subordinates, are ready to start a war in a hot minute if he gets the chance. That's the reason he sent those troops to Quemoy in the first place --that and to get their officers out of his nonexistent hair. If Felix doesn't stop them from crossing over to the mainland, he completely undermines the United States' argument for being in the Strait to start with. If he does, he has to shoot at Nationalists. The obvious way out of this is to let the Reds shoot the Nationalists --Oopsie doopsie, silly me, must have been looking in the wrong direction. The problem is that this has to be made clear not to Chiang, but all the rambunctious types underneath of him, especially the ones unhappy with the Koumintang, and it sure as heck can't go through State because the leak will be on Knowland's deck before it even clears the cable office.
So who can do that? How about a fluent American naval aviator with inside connections and his incredibly beautiful young wife? Which is why this letter is coming to you from Taipei and why I had to give my notice. Your country calls, and all of that. James hasn't been formally transferred because that would raise all sorts of red flags. So James is here on leave to do something because something, and unless someone backs down soon, he will continue to be on leave here in Taipei through the end of next summer, and hopefully not longer than that, because I will be off to take the bar in San Francisco.
Unless we're fighting giant ants in the radioactive rubble of civilisation, I mean.
Your Loving Daughter,
Ronnie
PS: Lots of talk about "capital goods" in the press this time around. I honestly had no idea that economic theory could be so sophisticated and nuanced, and in spite of my education, this is the first time I've heard the field discussed in such a way that I feel like I need to understand WHY Karl Marx thought he had to write Das Kapital. I don't think I did the Fortune article on the subject justice, never mind the field, but it is definitely something that I will be turning over in my head as I burble on about "technology" here.
Genocide with weapons of mass destruction is the only answer to Comm ---Ants. Ants.
