Tinplate: An Inquiry for a Vacation Week

I should have taken a landscape portrait,
but it was before breakfast. 

Five weeks ago I went to visit my sister's family in Kamloops, and the familiar landscape of the Okanagan-Shushwap inspired me to respond to a reposting at Brad Delong's joint of some material from Pamela Crone's batshit  "Hagarism" controversy.

I can't say that the sources of ancient tin  have the same personal resonance for me, but the subject did come up over at Delong's, and I do feel that I have to issue a defence and expansion. I do not, personally, have strong opinions about where the ancients got their tin, but scholars I respect have arguments that are not getting their due. And given that the conversation is at an economical history blog, the fact that Niall Sharples ties tin to a "general glut" argument is germane, and ought to earn him some attention. 

It won't, of course, because he wrote a scholarly monograph about Social Relations in Later Prehistory and not some attention grabbing work of debatable generalisation, but all you can do is put it out there and hope it gets some attention.    

As you can see, a solid chunk of cassiterite is conspicuous and valuable in
its own right. By CarlesMillan - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20842834

The Eyes Have It: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging, April 1949

Two things from last month that are obviously much more interesting than Standard Telephone and Cable's version of that new American gizmo, the "transistor."* They are mercerisation, which is one of the more common, yet mysterious, ways of treating cotton textiles, and a complicated Barr and Stroud optical gadget that no-one would call a household device, but which is still interesting from the point of view of trying to understand how a machine can do what it does. I tell you, these "robots" and "automatic machinery" today!

(STC  led to Alam Blumlein, "inventor of stereo," commemorated at "historic Abbey Roads Studio)

And now the fold . . . 

Postblogging Technology, April 1949, II: Prelaxed

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada.

Dear Father:

I can't express how grateful I am to  you, and how happy we all were to hear that you were all right after that call from Wong Lee. I hope that there were no Hakka-speaking FBI eavesdroppers, because even the unflappable Wong Lee . . . 

It is very hard to believe that at 74, Hoover is going to learn the sense that avoided him in his active career, but trying to hijack a peace meeting? Even if we weren't ready for it, it would have been a terrible idea! And now he will have to wear a hearing aid for the rest of his life. Even a tiny little Italian .25 makes a din in a small room! I know I still hear mine going off. What a terrible thing it is!

Perhaps, just perhaps, the ex-President will remember watching while our men bundled two bodies out of that hotel room, and examine his conscience. He could have had our treaty, with no dead men on his conscience, if he hadn't convinced himself that his dime store hoods could outdraw the men Great-Uncle trained. This is the trouble he gets into when there is no Soong standing at his side to supervise. 

At least it wasn't Dragon Tong men, so that the Soongs have to feel that they have lost face. Do we even know where Hoover got those mooks?

So now I am composing the kindest letter I can write to UBC now, explaining that I will be attending Stanford after all. I hope this doesn't cause trouble for you! 

I will be working at Magnin's as an assistant buyer this summer while Mrs. Stanley is taking her daughter around Europe, while Reggie's orders have been cut for Alameda, from where he will be flying a "hush hush" P2V with a filter trap to catch radioactive dust, rumblings being heard from behind the Iron Curtain again. (I wonder if there is a British Standards Specification for Curtains, Iron?) It is so wonderfully convenient for both of us. Reggie expects he will have plenty of time to write these letters over the summer. You can only sieve the North Pacific for Strontium 90 and whatnot for so long. 

Yours Sincerely,
Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, April 1949, I: A Generation of Pearls

R_.C_.,

Hyde Park Hotel,

Tampa, Florida,

U.S.A.

Dear Father:

This comes to you by the hand of Willie Yeoh, because he does a fine "Wa Yeoh," complete with a real Fu Manchu goatee and a kris that he really has used to dispatch a Japanese soldier and perhaps a rubber planter a time or two. More importantly, if he fails to intimidate, he has quite the trick for smuggling a .25 automatic into meetings like yours. If the other side does cause a breakdown in negotiations, Willie has ended them before. 

Uncle George will give you an oral briefing on our discoveries in respect to third parties that you might use one way or another. Suffice it to say that, as far as the ex-President goes, we found a ledger detailing the Hoover payments in Pegler's lawyer's office, but not whatever material Pegler was holding over him. We have a lively suspicion about where it might be, but none of us has the stomach to torture an eighty-year-old, or the granddaughter, who is probably holding them. She has three children under four!  I sincerely hope that you will be able to bluff Hoover into thinking that we are in some kind of "mutual destruction" situation. Uncle George's information, which obviously must be kept discrete, will perhaps create the impression that all of the blackmail archives are in our hands, and not a single self-destructive letter by a perverted old drunk. 

Yours Sincerely,

Ronnie

PS: I am feeling really uncomfortable about Mr. Flynn paying a blackmailer, as opposed to being in jail. Is there perhaps something that can be done?

Camels, Salt, and the Rise of Islam: Some Small Reflections on a Minor Controversy on Someone Else's Blog

Westwold, British Columbia, lies in the trees at the far left. The view is from the shoulder of Highway 97C. Arable bottomland stretches to the right of the picture and beyond Westwold proper. It's quite a big piece of land, is what I'm saying.

British Columbia Highway 97 has a familiar and storied number for those who've taken long vacations on the Pacific slope, continuing the California-Washington-Oregon route number for the simple reason that it is the Canadian extension of that road. In its earliest recorded form, it follows the Okanogan River, becoming the Okanagan Trail at Osoyoos once it crosses the border and the regional spelling changes. Once into Canada, many old-time travellers on the Okanagan Trail wanted to get to the Cariboo gold fields, which requires crossing from the Okanagan- Columbia basin to the Fraser-Thompson basin at Kamloops, which happens to be where my sister and her family are now living. 

About halfway from Vernon to Kamloops,  Highway 97C runs through the unincorporated community of Westwold, which lies in a peculiar, glacial valley suspended about 200m above both river basins. Westwold is only one of three major areas of flat, arable land along the route. Since that kind of farm country is rare in British Columbia, it might seem surprisingly little-used, but it is probably too high and too cold for fruit, and back when steep climbs and bad winter weather actually mattered to travellers, it was avoided in favour of the slightly longer route running through Salmon Arm. Traditionally, Westwold was the  winter pasture of the nearby Douglas Lake Ranch. 

I could talk about this at even greater length, but really my only point would be that I was thinking about mountains and winter pasture a great deal this past week, and I travelled through Westwold three times in four days. Since the thing I wasn't doing was reading and writing towards the next postblogging installment, I thought that I would talk about something else. Specifically, a reading that bloomed over at Brad Delong's blog not incidental to my own attempts to plough through Raoul McLaughlin's Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, March 1949, II: Interim Bombers of the Future

Grumman F9F

As March of 1949 winds down, the "B-36 Controversy" is in full swing.

Aviation Week has told you recently that the Air Force now plans an expensive development program on the B-36, including the application of turbojet and turboprop engines, swept wings, etc., that will ultimately place in the 500mph speed category at 50,000ft. We told you that with its four jet engines it will have a top speed of 435mph, at 35,000ft. These data were obtained from reliable sources and checked with the proper authorities, thereby making the information as authoritative as it is possible for us to gather.
But there are experienced aeronautical engineers who say that the B-36 does not obtain the performance currently credited to it by its builders and the Air Force. And they add that in their opinion the B-36 can never attain the figures now anticipated by the development program. They tell us in its present confiugation it does not exceed the following performance: top speed, 350--360mph; ceiling 38,000ft; range 8000 miles in combat conditions. The unanimity of these figures alone warrants their presentation, for they are the calculated performance of not one engineer, but a group of the most respected engineers in the field.

Aviation Week's focus is a bit different from mine, which is why it laid out the policy implications before getting into the question of whether someone has been fibbing to it about the B-35:

. . . If Air Force tests . . . [are correct] . . . vitally important decisions are necessary, not only for the Air Force, but for the Navy, and for the entire National Military Establishment."

Aviation Week asks for a thorough test flight program, carried out by "neutral" observers, and asks that any decisions be put off until those tests are completed. Not to recycle last week's material, but that's not going to happen. USS United States will be cancelled on 23 April 1949, after the Navy admitted that the five ship program and associated bombers would cost at least $150 million, more than ten times the price per bomb of the B-36 programme. John L. Sullivan, American Secretary of the Navy, would resign on the evening of 2 May and explain his reasons in a letter to Louis Johnson, and the press, released the next day, by which time a threat to the Marine Corps had surfaced, and Carl Vinson was on the floor. "The B-36 Controversy" was over, and the "Revolt of the Admirals" had begun. 

Postblogging Technology, March 1949, II: A Comet in the Future

R_.C_.,

Shaughnessy,

Vancouver,

Canada.

Dear Father:

I leave this for you so that you will know that I haven't been wasting my time while enjoying your hospitality. Besides, I don't really know the rules about what an air stewardess can carry along or not. (Although, yes, this is a thin excuse for calling this a finished letter. They do carry overnight bags, which are a lot bigger than a rice paper manuscript!)

So by the time you read this, I will be landing in San Francisco, and exploiting my fake identity to pass through Customs without anyone the wiser. I'd be more dramatic if this weren't your plan; Yours and Wong Lee's. Hopefully, the next stage goes as well, and we have a fait accompli to present to the College Man. Otherwise, Wong Lee will have to go to war for our honour, and I will return across the border at the usual place on Thursday. Since my plans for next year will then all be thrown aside, I retract every unkind thing I said about anyone and everyone when I first heard the suggestion, and humbly throw myself on your mercy. Please do  secure me a late entrance into the University of British Columbia School of Law. 

Yours Sincerely,

Ronnie