A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1949: I Heard An Owl

That was earnest.

I've been fascinated by Vice-Admiral (E) Sir John Kingcome (1890--1950) since I first encountered him in the Proceedings of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers article summarised by Engineering in the 26 February 1949 number. Part of that is the fact that his title is "Engineer-Vice Admiral of the Fleet." I'm just plain partial to that neat old English wordsmithing.

Part of that has to do with the local connection with Kingcome Inlet, and my youthful interest in Lisa Halliday, of the town of that name. I bring this  up because I find that this post is just better if I dive into my earliest, callow youth; not so much because of Lisa as because, a little later in 1982, when I arrived at UBC, I fell into the company of the UBC Wargamers, much to the detriment of my first year grades, and had various profound and difficult naval matters explained to me in an extremely glib way by the participants in that club's then-thriving naval miniatures set. To the extent that they still wargame, they've been playing rail games for years now, but, back in the day, they collected naval miniatures and crawled around the tables at the old Student Union Building of a Sunday, blowing up Montana with Kitakami.  

Pursuant to this fascinating diversion, someone explained to me that British warships of WWII sucked because they lacked "locked train double reduction geared turbines" that would have allowed them to use "high pressure steam." This was consequent to some generalised failure of British science and engineering which had lost the Empire, doomed the Royal Navy, and occasioned Margaret Thatcher. (One could not be so optimistic as to hope that Thatcher would fix this, but any damage she did to British society would be fit punishment for a country that allowed Two Cultures to  get in the way of the Social Role of Science. Notice that this is four years before the publication of Correlli Barnett's Audit of War, which took this argument up to varsity. I think by this time I'd already read a biography of Admiral of the Fleet Sir John Fisher, and been introduced to the Fisher Scheme,  the controversy over which, culminating in the 1923 cancellation, further overdetermined the end of British engineering culture. (Also, Jutland's in there, somehow.)

It's interesting to come back to this, thirty years on, to see how things came to this pass, with a little distance.

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging February, 1949, II: A Thirst For Colour

If you're wondering why a sale of 30,000 tons of Argentinian linseed is hanging fire in the winter of 1949, it is because linseed oil is a drying oil. That means that it dries out to form a hard, water impermeable film. If impregnated with molecules of base metals such as lead, a batch of drying oil will be even more susceptible to creating this durable, protective surface. Moreover, it will take on the colour of these molecules, which is often quite bright, as in the example of this street from Capetown, South Africa, which is the second Google Images search return for "brightly painted houses" this Saturday afternoon. 

Postblogging Technology, February 1949, II: A Lithium Depression

R_. C_.,

Shaughnessy,

Vancouver,

Canada.

Dear Father:

You will be glad to know that I have my law school acceptances (and rejections, who shall all suffer my wrath!!!) before me. These include Stanford, frankly my first choice for family reasons, so considering that I have been deemed not to be Ivy League girl material, as see above, the choice is settled. I gather that there is even a little money set aside for worthy girls by the Women's Club, and I am both quite worthy, if I do not say so myself, and partial to money. 

But I did say that I had all my choice, and you will know, of course, that I did not apply to the University of Chicago, but there is their acceptance letter on my desk, brought to me by --oh, but I cannot say, except to express my happiness that I did not see his temper when I told him that I could not return to Chicago as long as Mom is being that way about Reggie. He, I think, vaguely, understands. Uncle Henry, of all people, had him by to chat about it! I'm not entirely sure I want Uncle Henry in my corner in personal matters, but you can't deny that he is good at getting his way!

On the subject of the senior thesis, the most mysterious aspect of the Horace Stevens case is that he actually got on the train for Portland, and yet there was no commotion when he didn't get off. The usual understanding is that he got off along the way, but if that's his body . . . Well. So there's the question of who might have dealt with him on the train, and with an athletic trunk as a clue, I looked at what we know about that train, which is a surprising amount, since it was carrying the Golden Bears ice hockey team and a number of boosters, and there are some articles in the Daily. 

Hmm. 

Yours Sincerely,

Ronnie.

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

The Bishop's Sea: Saint Colman, Saint Boniface and St. Tridwell, Pray for Us

I'm not going to go pointing fingers, but someone underperformed on the writing front this holiday long weekend. (In completely unrelated news, Captain Marvel was okay, but I --excuse me, someone-- was a bit disappointed by his first visit to Pineapple Hut on Burrard above Fifth Avenue Cinemas since Wonder Woman.) February technology postblogging comes next week. This week, I've practically been commissioned to put on the tinfoil hat and look at the Atlantic on the front porch of history --the phase in which Europeans might have crossed it early. 

I know, I know, it's inconsequential in the long run. The most plausible explanation for the historic trajectory of Eastern Woodlands civilisation remains endogenous change. The appearance of the cross motif in the earliest phases of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, about 900, has provoked wild speculation since the Nineteenth Century, which itself has tended to discredit the idea that known European activities on the western shore of the Atlantic in this period had any larger impact. The subsequent sequencing (1250--1450 for the mature "Southern Death Cult;" 1350--1450 for the attenuated Cult period; 1450--1550 for the post-Cult) is almost aggressively dissociated from the closing of the Atlantic gap. 

And yet there are the gaps, the mysteries, the attenuations that the crackpot loves. And, surprisingly enough, when we turn to northern Britain, it seems that crackpottery is all but triumphant.

Shell gorget recovered at Spiro Mounds. By Herb Roe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19409020. The cross motif has a number of interpretations, none of which involve missionary Scandinavian bishops wandering the wilderness preaching the word of Christ to the Lost Tribes of Israel.

A Technical Appendix to January, 1949, II: Machine Tools, 1943 and 1949

According to Ibis World, the British machine tool industry had a projected revenue of £1.1bn, an annual growth rate for the period 2014--2019 of -5.4%, employed 15,181, and involved 1,027 businesses, compared with £30 million and 42,700 in 1948. (And £8.9 million and 22,400 in 1935). The negative growth rate is due to the downturn in commodities (so oil and mining dominate the British scene, I guess.) To frame these numbers, the "red-hot" American scene is projected to buy $8 billion in machine tools in 2019. (Note that I am not adjusting for inflation.)

That reminds me of last week, when I took my bike into the shop for the first time in over two years, and got the usual mechanic's litany of "We had to replace this, and this, and this, and then we discovered that this had to go. Then there was labour, and the GST, but we cut you a little break on that, so," with a pause and an apologetic look, he ended up, "It'll be $450."

If you drive a car, that's the punchline. If you don't, I'm not sure what I can do. My instinct is that bikes are getting cheaper, although some time spent noodling around looking at historic cost of living figures isn't exactly confirming that. The idea here is that, while the machine tool industry has lower employment than in  1949, it's just about as big as it ever was. It's just a bit irrelevant, because making things isn't such a big deal any more.

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, January 1949, II: Long Playing

Edit: While I've left an incorrect title stand for a week without the sky falling, correcting it will be helpful to me.

Source

We've been treated to three technology stories worth following up on this last week. The first, which should be the most pressing, is the loss of the third Avro Tudor airliner, which, incredibly, is not the end of the Tudor's time on the cross, with the Llandow disaster still to come. Second, Farnsworth Television has just been caught in a little fib. Somehow, the Fort Wayne, Indiana company has managed to lose money making televisions, and the NYSE takes a dim view of companies that issue stock to cover losses without mentioning the losses in the prospectus.  ITT will buy out Farnsworth in 1951, but, as near as I can tell, the takeover will be put in motion a bit sooner than that. Third, in contrast to the sordid tales of two unrelated business failures, Columbia has just introduced its new 33rpm long-playing vinyl record format, which will soon come to dominate the industry. I wouldn't say that these are related stories, but they do belong in some kind of compare-and-contrast discussion.