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.
"Sabre Dance" is a movement of the final act of Khachaturian's Gayane (1942), crossing over to mainstream popularity in 1948, and a perennial favourite of figure skaters and, more recently, "sexy violinists" ever since. I'm not 100% sold on "sexy violinist" Youtube videos, but it's pretty hard to make money in classical music these days, so whatever. Subsequently, "Sabre Dance" was a bit of low-hanging fruit when the various aeronautical eccentricities of the North American F-86 Sabre became apparent at the height of its technological, pop-cultural, and, yes, political fame over MIG Alley three years later. It's not quite in the moment. These things often aren't. I've also referenced Chuck Berry's Run, Rudolph, Run in connection with the F-86, and it came out in 1958. It's hard to keep things historically grounded. The things you might imagine, happened together, are actually off a few, critical years.
On the other hand, politics makes and unmakes connections as it will:
I have yours of last week and am puzzling through it. So far I am struggling to make sense of our place in things. There is solid demand for gold in Hong Kong, but I am not sure enough to support a fullscale branch of the family operation, especially when we have enemies on the docks there who are going to be alert to any bullion movements.
On the other hand, have you considered the potential for gold mining stocks? I know they do quite well on the Vancouver Stock Exchange, and there is some connection between the VSE and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, isn't there? I almost think that you might look to Hong Kong for financial support for underwriting issues rather than for customers for the stocks themselves. Because, not to be more callous than I need, gold mining is full of swindlers, and business partnerships are built on being partners to the swindle, not being the swindled!
Thank you very much for your kindness during my too-soon-done trip to San Francisco. Dr. Rivers had the kindness to do up a full report that followed me back across the Pacific so quickly that I have it before me, which ought to be a lesson to some subscription services. It says, at more length and with some X-ray negatives, that everything is proceeding quite satisfactorily and that he sees no problems if I choose to give birth in Formosa, although as a practical matter I will be "couched," to be archaic and dramatic, in Macao and attended by some of your great-grandfather's intimate aides.
You can see perhaps some anxiety leaking through in my comments about air safety below. Reggie said, anyway. I prefer to think that instead of succumbing to the anxieties of the young mother-to-be, the scales are falling off my eyes due to the latest Air France and Northwestern fiascos. But maybe when I am delivered I will look back on these as just silly vapours!
Your Loving Daughter, Ronnie
The first few minutes are awful, but Grable's athleticism is amazing.
My interest in Fenimore Cooper's 1843 Wyandotte: Or, the Hutted Knoll, is currently confined to the introduction, which describes the creation of the eponymous patent in the western(!) New York wilderness somewhere between the headwaters of the Delaware and the Susquehanna. In it, Cooper describes how the patent, once located and cleared of Indian title, is created, by breaking a giant beaver dam and draining a vast low saucer of land, at once creating a large and fertile farmscape, devoid of tree trunks. Various adventures set in the American Revolution, follow which I may follow up on at some point, at the end of which all that is left are the ruins of the mansion and fort built on the rocky hill, or "hutted knoll" at the centre of the pond.
The image of a hill, surmounted by a chieftain's hut, in the middle of a flood seems to be referring to the spring renewal/creation myth and to the obligatory hutted mound/pyramid which has been the ritual centre of city settlements in indigenous North American civilisations since Olmec times, and extending up until at least Cahokia. Turning the flood into the breaking of a beaver pond seems to add another layer of allegory referring to the fur trade, and to its later end, when the beaver was driven out of the Eastern Seaboard to make way for farmland. At least as a hypothesis, it makes sense that the beginning of the fur trade would have seen a change in attitude towards the beaver, one that might well have had a significant effect on the landscape. Cooper talks a great deal about the cycle of civilisations, and while I am dependent on a Cliff's Note summary in talking about the "ancient ruins" of Wyandotte, as they appeared to the returning heir to the patent in 1795, in Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, Cooper quite explicitly refers to the fort at the centre of the little settlement of Wish-ton-Wish as having been built on an ancient ruin.
Does the planting of Wyandotte restore the pre-fur trading status quo of the "hutted knoll?" Probably not. Probably I'm reading too much into it; but we do have some interesting evidence for shifting populations and ecological change in the right time frame. While it continues to be analyzed in terms of a disease-driven demographic collapse, in this post I want to explore the possibility that the evidence we have is explicable in terms of human agency. God knows there's not a lot of effort made to think outside of the box in terms of American antiquity, Mormons apart (Bless their souls.) The frontier and the west confuses us.
The North American F-100 Super Sabre was the first of the Century Series fighters, although the design had a shorter path to production than the F-101 and F-10s, both of which originated in responses to late Forties USAF requirements. The F-100, in contrast, was an unsolicited design proposal submitted in January of 1951. Perhaps understandably, the "Fokker panic" currently being experienced over in MiG Alley inspired fast work on everyone's part. On the other side of the curtain, the MiG-19 was ordered in July of 1951 and first flew in September of 1953. So the first flight of the F-100 prototype, at the end of May, 1953, and seven months ahead of schedule, came none too early. After that, air forces of East and West alike dealt with growing problems as MiG-19s blew up mysteriously in mid-air while the F-100 gave us that ever-amusing joke about the "Sabre Dance" thanks to its yaw instability, only the most spectacular in a range of instability problems, from which the MiG-19 was hardly spared.
The aerodynamic problems don't need to be explored any further here, much less the rival Russian programme, because today's post is about titanium and Marinette, Wisconsin, home of the Ansul Chemical Company, manufacturer of Met-L-X Dry Powder, a fire-suppressing powder that
[M]ay be
used on sodium, potassium, sodium-potassium alloy, and
magnesium fires. In addition, it will control and sometimes
suppress small fires on zirconium and titanium;"
And Lith-X, another fire suppressant, which
"[W]as developed
for use on lithium fires, and will also suppress magnesium,
sodium, and potassium fires. LITH-X agent will contain, and in
some cases completely suppress fires of zirconium, titanium,
and sodium-potassium alloy."
About Marinette, I hard know what to say. I have just scrolled through all fifty or so photographs posted to Google Maps. Forty-eight of them were taken on the lakefront at Ann Arbor Park, of which two each are shot back at downtown or the mill; more than half are of the lighthouse, and there is one picture each of the city park and the museum, featuring exactly one building, the museum. (Bet you didn't see that coming.) Marinette seems to be the least interesting part of Marinette.
As predicted, the Communist advances in Annam and Korea turned on a dime just as soon as flying weather improved, which just goes to show that this is the Air Age. I will explain in person next week when I arrive via Canadian Pacific from Hong Kong, if Hong Kong is still there when I leave and we avoid any inconvenient mountains on the way. (It's ocean, it shouldn't be hard, but you never know.)
Here we are, back in beleaguered (they say?) Formosa, resuming our so-vitally important mission of annoying the People's Liberation Air Force and Koumintang hostessesboth at the same time. I am pleased to report that at least the base librarian has taken a shine to me, and we get regular packages of loans from Hong Kong back and forth, so I am not completely in the dark as to what is happening in the outside world, whether it be the exciting new age of titanium or Aviation Week tearing Uncle Henry a new foraminis rectus (see below for feeble non-joke; and don't bug me about the Latin, which is the fruit of five seconds in a dictionary). We have almost finished preparing the nursery, unless I suddenly change my mind on a whim, which I'm told is my prerogative as a woman, which is good because it feels like our prerogatives have been rolled back a bit since the war. Is anyone ever going to start hiring women for aircraft production work? Probably not, because we still can't quite agree to actually build all the planes we're mobilising to build. I see the point: The B-47 needs 16 JATOs to get aloft; there is no way that a B-36 can get away from a MiG-15, and who even asked for more F-84s or an improved Vampire that's actually a Vampire? (Only with a wing fence, yay!)
Yes, I am grumpy, because I had a difficult night, and well, you try sleeping comfortably carrying around this ahem, blessed bundle.
