A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, September 1949, II: Ferrite Age

That's the spirit. Now for something whitebread. CBC Radio's old time stable of local Can-Con did a Christmas album together! 

Christmas is a time for being nostalgic and remembering old-timey things. The problem here is that British Columbia is such a young province, that, apart from some generic big-band music, I'm digging into the Nineties here. Does that even count for nostalgia yet? If it does, Canada's Metal Queen  has some seasonal stuff. "Peace on Earth," And, yes, Michael Buble has a Christmas album, because of course he does. I'd honestly rather a tribute to the ancient concrete barn to which I will say goodbye on 16 January:

A Youtube search for a "Vancouver Christmas" does turn up something. It's tongue-in-cheek, but it is this year's Christmas in Vancouver.

(Bike lanes are funny.)

Speaking of old-time British Columbia, here's the picture I've been pushing down the page with gratuitous video inserts so that I can post it in its glorious original size. 

This is the Kemano high-voltage ("high-tension") line. It runs from Kemano Powe House 75 kilometers to the Alcan plant in Kitimat, British Columbia.  Kemano generates 890 MW from eight turbines that receive water from the twenty-six and a half million acre foot Nechako Reservoir on the high upper reaches of the Fraser River. The water is diverted through a 16km tunnel carved through  the Coastal Range, falling 800m from the heights of the Interior Plateau to sea level. Built from 1951 to 1954 by the province and Alcan, working together, because the provincial government could not be persuaded that such a project was feasible in such a small and remote province, the power lines are less interesting than most other aspects of the project. Nevertheless, the twin 300kV lines carried fully 35% of the power generated in the province in 1956. (And a super-imposed telephone voice channel, if you remember that bit of mid-century technology from earlier installments.)

Kemano I would not have been built without Alcan. There was no point in generating electricity so far from a major market. It would also not have been built for a plant at Kitimat much earlier than it was. Even a 75 mile high voltage (tension) line would have been too much. Nowadays, the Kemano project is controversial because Alcan would like to go through with Phase II, which is controversial both because of environmental reasons and because Alcan is suspected of wanting to shut the aluminum smelter down and selling all the power into the continental grid.

That's where this digression gets me to Engineering this month, and a vague awareness that we are getting an opening-night ticket to the Ferrite Age. 

Iodised Salt and the Problem of Money in Science: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, September 1949

Where I got this. (Not exactly the source, but fair's fair.)

So I was pretty gobsmacked when I discovered that a lobby of salt manufacturers were holding up salt iodisation in the United States in 1949 (and for a long time after that!) on the grounds that it amounted to "medication by legislation." I got a lot more gobsmacked when I learned just what the scale of the problem was, and one more time when I learned that salt iodisation still isn't mandatory in the United States. I guess I shouldn't have been, given that I grew up during the tobacco industry's rear guard fight, and am facing, like the rest of the world, the consequences of global warming denialism today. 

The actual issues involving the "medicalisation" of iodine have little to do with the tragic death of Little Nell, although iodine tinctures were important to the revolution in public health that prevented many tragic Victorian-era deaths. Here's a link to documents on sickness in the Royal Navy related to "Malta disease," which, in the literature, is actually brucellosis, against which the zealous application of tincture of iodine to all cuts and scrapes is a preventative, but not the cure-all the Granny thought it was.  I could have used actual images of goitre and cretinism as this post's thumbnail, but they're usually horrifying. I guess I'm complicit in sanitising the health risks of iodine deficiency, too. (Attention, salt industry, I want my Bjorn Lomberg money!)

Postblogging Technology, September, 1949, II: The End of the Great Siege

(When Suzy was due to come back from pregnancy leave in '53, her boss told her that "they'd decided to go in a different direction," and that's how Frosty's career was born.)

R_. C_.,

Falett's,

Lahore, Pakistan

Dear Father:

I hope this finds you well after your long flight. We have a telegraph from Rangoon. Wong Lee is going on to Shigatse, while Mrs. C. remains in seclusion at the Benevolent Association for coordination until we decide how to move a white woman across the frontier. A Sakya guide is being sought. You will be coordinating things at your end, but, if not, Wong Lee thinks he may have a way of getting you across the border in Ladakh. It's a formality by now, but we have definitive confirmation that the new American Oriental secret service fund is prepared to pay out if the Panchen Lama does not go to Shigatse. We are working on an angle where challenging Lhasa is "objectively" anti-communist. I have no idea how we're going to sell that, but I sure will be impressed when we do! Nothing like a share of seventy-five million dollars to get the blood flowing!

As for San Francisco, well, it's boring by comparison, that's all I can say. I'm enjoying law school and we took the Jeep up into Sonoma over the weekend, which was great fun. But driving a Jeep, even  a brand new Jeep around in tamed American hills isn't nearly as exciting as visiting the Tashilhunpo Monastery on yak-back. (They do ride yaks, don't they?) 

Yours Sincerely,

Ronnie

It's not Christmas music, but I don't care. 

Postblogging Technology, September 1949, I: Viscount Ordered

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

First week of law school, all that I hoped for! Reggie's getting a car! A Jeep, actually. I'm talking like a telegraph, because of a sudden we're helping Mrs. C. with the babies due to Fat Chow being called away to India and points beyond! (News from Lhasa re. Red Hats versus Yellow Hats Not Good.) Driving up to San Francisco for the weekend as soon as I mail this! Sally coming with to read me case files from the front seat of my luxurious new convertible, top down, beautiful Bay day, etc.  

Yours Sincerely,

Ronnie

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXI: Silver and the State

My schedule briefly had me working an overtime shift next week, so as long as that prospect was before me, I was working on September of 1949. (Avro 707!) But I've also been nibbling at the edges of the early money problem, so when the totally unnecessary shift was struck from my schedule, I had something to blog about. Also, a chance to highlight the work of some fine young female scholars who are a lot more deserving of tenure than some I can think of. 

Courtesy Ephraim Stern

We are once again delivered into the hands of Biblical archaeologists. In 1995, a team excavating in "southern Phoenicia/northern Israel" found an amphora containing 20lbs of silver. Conditions weren't particularly kind to this collection of pieces, deposited in linen money bags and long since agglomerated by oxidation. The Ein Hoffetz hoard, discovered last year, is a bit prettier:

 It's still hack silver and ingots, but the taphonomy is at least clear. It's not coinage, that's for sure. (For the purposes of the elaborate archaeometallurgical analysis, it is, in fact, important that the Dor hoard be recycled jewelry, it turns out. Otherwise, it's got too much gold alloying the silver.) These collections have achieved some notoriety for the usual, discouraging reasons. The Bible describes joint expeditions to "Tarshish," sponsored by Hiram of Tyre and King Solomon, and the traditional Biblical chronology would place these in the 900s, rather too early by the conventional narrative, which would push Phoenician-Tartessian interactions down closer to 700BC. Does cutting edge science vindicate the Biblical narrative and therefore etc? (I don't want to get into it, but the ideological goal of the research is obvious enough.)

Maybe. Lead isotope analysis (about which more below) shows the silver in the three recently discovered southern Phoenician hoards are sourced to the Taurus mountains of central Anatolia, the interior of Sardinia, and Iberia. The Phoenicians were obtaining silver from Sardinia from about 950BC and from Iberia before 800. Other considerations lead the authors to conclude that the Phoenicians introduced the cupellation method of producing silver in the west. And, incidentally, whoever the technicians were, they were better at it than the ones refining the Taurus ores. 

The westward quest for metals is back on! And, converging with modern archaeology's distaste fort he traditional colonialist narrative, it is notable that the timeline puts the Phoenician presence in the west well ahead the earliest Phoenician colonies.  

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, 20: Green Mountain Boys

Modern Cyrene is a complex of archaeological tourist traps on the outskirts of Shahat, Libya, although you can't see that clearly here due to my increasing the scale to get Marsa Sousa in the picture.

Given Libya's current difficulties, it isn't clear to me just how many tourists the tourist traps trap, but Shahat does have an international airport. Oil, wishful thinking, archaeotourists --I have no idea. Marsa Sousa is at the other end of what's probably a fairly spectacular road, given that it climbs from sea level to 300m in fifteen kilometers. For a modern traveller, the old town is nestled in the final switchback on the way to Shahat.

The fact that the back country road goes through Shahat rather than Cyrene makes me uncomfortable in calling old Cyrene a crossroads town, but it does seem to have been quite something. The area around the ancient ruins is graced by numerous sanctuaries and a necropolis of overwhelming scope (40,000 tombs before various modern depredations). The necropolis is a bit of a focus due to its victory over various feeble systematisation efforts of a series of archaeological investigators. There's a sense that we could learn  a lot about it if we could just grapple with its sheer scale. All credit due to the sketch work of some of these guys, though! And to the modern Polish mission to Ptolemais, which has produced a major monograph summarising a century-and-a-half of half-ass efforts to cope with an overwhelming site, written by Monika Rekowska and translated by Anna Kijak. (There's a Libyan Studies?)

Modern Marj, and the old town that  may or may not be Classical
Barca. (By Smiley.toerist -
Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27630656

The issue here is that Cyrene is the dominant city of the ancient Cyrenaican federal league, a distinction the site hasn't enjoyed since, inasmuch as the port city of Benghazi is so obviously the better candidate. As an upland town characteristic of periods of "managed collapse" of Mediterranean world systems, I asked last time just when and how Cyrene came to be, and what its history tells us about the Iron Age transition. This post is the result of that investigation.

Before I go to the cut, I'll note that in one sense, Cyrene is not unique. There's a very similar city, and it is in Cyrenaica, too. Barca and Ptolemaishave formed a similar pairing to Apollonia (Marsa Sousa) and Cyrene. One might be unique, but two is a pattern!

Postblogging Technology, August 1949, II: Axis of the World

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Well, here it is, another summer over. No matter for me, for I am a daring naval aviator now, but Ronnie is on to law school and the legendary rigours of First Year Law, which, in a single year, determines whether you will sit on the Supreme Court or chase ambulances. Horror stories are told of the "Socratic method," which apparently involves professors humiliating their students one after another in class. Ronnnie is looking forward to  it. 

I know, I'm frightened, too. But I did rent a truck and move Ronnie down to Palo Alto! Moving, it seems to me, is a big part of this whole thing. She only has to study, while I have to double clutch. Also, I have to be seen dead in Palo Alto, something I feel keenly even though I have difficulty explaining to anyone just why I find it so offensive. (It's got Herbert Hoover, that's why.) 

Your Loving Son,
Reggie

(A portrait of Harvard Law roughly seventeen years after Ronnie's first year. My fond memories are of watching the tv series on Showtime while attending Okanogan College It's been many years, but I still remember the theme music. I might have been a bit naive about the university experience.)