Postblogging Technology, August 1945, I:Polarising Moments

Group Captain R_. C_.,

OC Special Intelligence Interpretation Unit,

RAAF Richmond,

NSW, Australia. 

Venerated Fatherly Elder Brother:Greetings to you and the Brethren of Australia:

With apologies for my presumption, I have taken up the brush for Mrs. C. You will be pleased to hear that Doctor Rivers has had her transferred from Oakland to more suitable care in San Francisco. The good doctor is still on furlough, although there is now no chance of his being called back to the Corps, and he is able to give mother and daughter his full attention. He hopes that Mrs. C. will be discharged within the next two weeks, and says that our little Vickie will suffer no long term effects, although Mrs. C. will require minor surgery when she is well. and of course she is under strict instructions to rest for at least another week whle she recovers from her ordeal. The twins, luckily, are too young to understand what has happened, and seem content enough in Fanny's care. 

And that is the private business! Of course you will have heard of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki, only a few days later. My heart was, understandably, in my throat, until I heard from Admiral Stump through private channels that Fat Chow was hale and hearty and in Tokyo. I gather that your youngest had something to do with this, and that it will be an interesting story if it ever comes out, which the Admiral has promised it never, ever will. It seems a little reckless for an American plane to land in Japan hours after an atomic attack, but I gather it was decided that Mr. H. had to be in Tokyo that night. Admiral Stump did suggest that Eldest Brother might want to look into the decision to attack Nagasaki. I hadn't the heart (or perhaps the recklessness, since his reputation protects us) to tell him that Eldest Brother is fading quickly. I have, however, mentioned it to "Miss V.C." And who knows? Perhaps someone will mosy up to me while I am in Virginia next month and volunteer the information. 

I hope that my lack of technical education will not leave these letters entirely barren of interest, but if I have not cared much for technological news in the past, technology, it turns out, has cares for me. I also apologise for not having more details about the "atomic bomb," but none of the papers we have been following have recovered their wits enough to give an account, and the ones I have read in the papers make no sense to me at all. One has left me with the distinct impression that the Air Force must have dropped a swimming pool (full of "heavy" water, no less) on Hiroshima, 

 I have had Tommy Wong at my side, fortunately, and he has explained the confusion well enough, but then he screwed up his face and stressed very heavily that some of these details really were secret, all slips and revelations in the press aside, and now I am petrified of sharing them with you, even in the old code --not least because I would need a whole slew of words that do not appear in the Classic of Documents! Or the Romance of the Nine Kingdoms, which I actually have read now. 

Queenie, if you were wondering, had a most undramatic delivery, and will be home tomorrow, ending my precious week's freedom as a glamorous San Francisco single gal with her own flat and inaugurating my new career as associate volunteer aunt. 

I Remain Your Most Humble and Obedient Little Sister,

v. Q.

A Technical Appendix That is a Bleg for a Water-Cooled Slide Rule And Better Cashiers

Edit: Material completely not relevant to post, as opposed to comments, way down at the bottom.

I had not intended to do a technical appendix this week; but looking at my work schedule, I'm not sure I want to rush into August I

Besides, losing a day's work in a second failed autsave fiasco in two weeks leaves me with a backlog of images to inflict on you.

You've seen this one:

Horace, the Tame Stressman, is my hero. Look, a nerd before their time! Shackleton is also burying the lede here, because Horace is blowing smoke rings (although he describes them as "stationary vortices," which is hilarious if you've read too many first-half-of-the-last-century aerodynamics papers than any sane man should), and you know who else blows smoke rings?

Sure, the joke has been revised for our times. (Heh, heh, he said "revised.") But I like to think  that we're actually tapping into the mind of 1945 here. Horace is a wizard, but he does it with a slide rule, and not magic. Not that Gandalf does much magic, either, fabulous smoke rings apart.

Also, I'm posting enough multimedia to push this down far enough that it won't jigger up the front page. 

Speaking of culture, there's a lot to be learned about a British "engineering industry" work culture from the old Desoutter ads. First, forget the mustache. It's just a running gag. (Ordinarily, thirteen year-old boys don't normally have handlebar mustaches. Come on, it's funny!) 

"Our oldest employee" neither likes, nor is afraid of his boss. He's immovable, though, because he knows what he's doing, "not good enoughs" notwithstanding. He's been training thirteen year-olds for years, gruffly, but probably not badly. Those thirteen year-olds go on to make patterns and jogs. amongst other things. There's no implications that they do designs on drafting boards --I might be old enough to have to explain with tongue out of cheek that the academic-looking fellow in the bow tie is holding a drafting tool for producing right angles called a T-square under his arm, so that, in spite of his other-worldly, English-professor mien, we can take if for granted that he's a good technical drawer. This is harder than it looks, especially if you've a less-than-average endowment of manual dexterity, and your instructor will probably prefer to work on the basis of a course in Euclidean geometry, but it is not really necessary. 

Just stop here for a second and wrap your mind around a time when good illustration skills are complementary and substitutable for math. Horace, and our grumpy, mustachioed old toolmaker are interchangeable on the Hawker Hart. 

Yet the times are a-changin'. The toolmakers aren't going away, but Horace is coming up. Desoutter needs a "water cooled slide rule" now. That much is conventional history. What we too rarely ask is to what extent it needs it because it's too much work to do all the drawings. 

There's a Western Union Boy Waiting in the Lobby

OC Special Intelligence Interpretation Unit,
RAAF Richmond,
Sydney, NSW.


Cancel emergency leave Stop mother and baby out of danger Stop Victoria Claire Stop Dr. Rivers attending Stop Please wire Captain C and Ensign C Stop Cannot reach them Stop All lines  overloaded Stop Hiroshima Stop More to follow Stop Fraulein v. Q

Postblogging Technology, July 1945, II: Who Doesn't Want a Water-Cooled Slide Rule?

Group Captain R_. C_., RCAFVR, OBE, DSO, DFC (Bar),
RAAF Richmond,
NSW,
Australia

Dear Father:

"GRACE."

Master of Horses: Gallic Invasions and State Mobilisations in the Third Century, BC.

Well. Someone didn't get to the library until 1PM Tuesday; and it so happens that it closes at 5 on Tuesdays, and that there turns out to be a lot more to say about technology in the second half of July than I expected. Did you know that a 24lb "disintegrating uranium" bomb is as effective as a 1-ton V2? Just as well the Germans didn't finish theirs before the end of the war, don't you think? 

(Also, I lost a good three hours work mishandling OneDrive. Stupid cloud.)

So, something else, today.

The Stickpin Fire has now burnt out a thousand square kilometers of Washington state, approaching within 4 km of the Canadian border at Grand Forks, where evacuation alerts have been issued to districts southeast of the rivers. My Dad's retirement home is, fortunately,not in the alerted areas. 

But who knows what will happen if "extreme events" force the firefighters to "cease suppression efforts" and abandon the wall of firebreaks they have  built to contain this historic fire. It will be a sad ending to a summer of heroic mobilisation if the wildfires enter the Town of Grand Forks.

Fortunately, relief may be on the way, as the first of what is hoped will be a long series of equinoctal storms makes landfall in the Lower Mainland early tomorrow before extending inland. The seasons are turning. The day is not far off when the firefighters come down from the ranges to rejoin civil society. 

For this year, anyway. Meanwhile, from Calgary, where air quality is now officially worse than Beijing's due to a fire 700km away, Deborah Yedlin denounced yesterday any attempt to discuss global warming in hearings over a new pipeline proposal on the grounds that "economists" say that it would be a "compositional fallacy." "You can't talk about that. It's illogical!"

A Not Terribly Technical Appendix: Bats in the Belfry

Yes, it's a repeat, but some things are a classic for a reason.

There have been many crazy inventors, and many things to point at and laugh. But there has only been one "Bat bomb."

At this late date, it's probably not even vaguely possible to add something to the story of the Marine Corps (Yes, the Marine Corps. Who let them play with all that money?) $3 million plan to burn the "paper cities" of Japan to the ground with incendiary bats.  

It turns out, however, that you can add something to the story of "Pennsylvania dentist Lytle S. Adams," Not surprisingly, the plan to set arsonist bats loose in nsuch belfries as Japan has,* originated with someone who --never mind, low-hanging fruit, to the point where you have to wonder if someone didn't authorise this just to make the joke.

My inspiration for posting on this comes from the left-hand side. That is, I was all-too aware of Adams from his incomprehensible ability to get funding, or at least attention, for his other crazy schemes before I realised that he was the Bat Bomb guy. Once I did, following up on him at The Atlantic piece which summarises the recent book on the Bat Bomb actually introduced me to aspects of his career of which I was unaware. Probably because they were late in life, and I am thinking of the fried chicken vending machine, here. This is a technology which apparently now works, although as a guy on the periphery of just this business, I could suggests some reasons why Dr. Adams' invention of the late Forties might not have been an entire success. I'm not going to do that, though, because there is more than enough material for this post in his patented (actually, multiple patents) method(s) for non-stop airmail pick-up  

Snipped from The Atlantic article. He does look a little like Colonel Sanders!

Postblogging Technology, July 1945, I: Something Smells Off

Source

Group Captain R_. C_., RCAFVR, OBE, DSO, DFC (Bar),
RAAF Richmond,
NSW,
Australia

Dear Father:

Your letter finds us well, but anxious in the West Coast, where the casualty lists from Okinawa are beginning to sink in. It sometimes seems as though California has given the Marine Corps all the blood it can, and obviously John's death has hit Michael and Judith very hard. Michael actually punched a hand who apparently suggested (in Spanish), that he had grandsons enough that he wouldn't miss one. 

For myself, I had considered moving into the Grant Avenue rooms to be closer to my doctor for the last few weeks; but Judith is firm on the point that there is no need for unfamiliar surroundings at this late date. She also has the fixed idea that Chinatown is dirty. In fact, we have brought Mrs(!) Wong down to stay in the ranch house, close to her inlaws without being too close. Tommy will be in town for two weeks at the end of July, after which all leaves at his station are cancelled through the end of August for very hush-hush reasons. We hope the event will be then. James has written separately, pleading with me to hold off another month, as though I had any say in the matter. So whatever the hush-hush reasons are, they mean early leaves for fleet engineers, no leaves for aircraft instrument men in Alaska.

Miss v. Q., unexpectedly, has been in touch with her cousin. Not the rocket-man, the other one. The explanation, insofar as it can be trusted to me even by Miss v. Q., is that modern code work uses booklets of specially figured numbers in their new-fangled "book codes," instead of astronomy chapbooks, as we do. This is all very well from the point of view of defeating the Black Chamber (as they say in the trade), unless for some reason the lists of numbers are recycled, as the Russians apparently fell into the habit of doing during the war. One way or another, this offers some hope of reading Russian diplomatic ciphers. The Germans were working on it, and her cousin has taken the liberty of supplying their materials to the Americans, for very patriotic reasons involving all the nice things that American dollars can buy. (Miss v. Q. loves her cousin without having a very high opinion of his honesty.) Now the American army and the FBI have put all hands on deck in an attempt to read the codes. From my other source in the matter, our young Lieutenant A_., I have it that there is some hope that the New Deal will finally be proved to have been communising all this time. 

I am not so sure. The Engineer must with the desire to expose the rot, and surely Mr. Luce would like to see the communists out of the State Department, where they are sure to hand China over to Yunnan. Unless Soong does it himself in the Moscow talks. recent election in Britain, but my brain trust at the University points out that the Laski Affair in Britain shows the limits of this. One wants to follow, not try to lead, public opinion in these matters, the Provost says. Look at the Zinoviev Letter, he says. Not a single Labour voter changed his mind, but it swept the Liberals from the field and gave the Tories their majority, anyway. (I forgot to look this up so that I could explain it, but I think it is a  reference to a scandal in a British general election in the 1920s, in which case I would sound like a pompous fool explaining it to you, and Santa Clara's faculty is full up already. 

I'm sorry, that was mean. I love the generality of my old Jesuits. It is just that I do not love sending my drapes out to the dry cleaners. (Cigars, to be discussed below. Would St. Francis approve of cigars? I shall have to ask, next time I host the Fathers.)

Speaking of the Moscow talks, where Macnhria's fate seems settled and the issue has turned to Turkestan, one bit of alarming news you may not have heard. Fat Chow was finally prevailed upon to travel there to meet with his pan-Turanian friends. He is flying out in an Army bomber with some dubious Japanese officers to no purpose I can imagine. 

Your son was in town very briefly on his way to his ship, which he will join in the last week of July. "Miss V.C." and Lieutenant A_. drove down from Idaho to meet them, and made a foursome on the town with our housekeeper, just like old times, young heads bobbing in an open Lincoln in the California evening sun. Blonde, brunette, redhead, another brunette. . . I wish I were seven years younger. . . 

Next morning, she even volunteered to drive him down to the docks. A hug from me, a brisk handshake from "Miss V.C.", and he stepped into the launch. It was all rather ruined when I had to give her a talking-to about reckless driving at home. At least she's growing up: whatever she wanted to say about my scolding, she held her tongue.

Though she did spend the rest of the day listening to sad songs on the radio.

"GRACE"