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.
Hugh Keenleyside (High Arrow) Dam, Castlegar, British Columbia
Renata, British Columbia, is a lost town on the right bank of the Columbia River in the 232km stretch from Revelstoke to Castlegar, where it forms the Arrow Lake, or Lakes, in dry years. It might seem like cheating to call a river a lake, but the Okanagan River runs through Okanagan Lake, and Nakusp is the next Kelowna. (That's a joke for all you BCers out there.) Most of Renata (there's a bed and breakfast or two still operating in the upper reaches of the former townsite) was quickly flooded out by the rising waters of the Lake after the Keenleyside Dam was completed on 10/10/68. As an isolated farming community still mainly populated by the Mennonite farmers the railway originally suckered into settling there fifty years before, Renata wasn't much missed, any more than the other small communities similarly affected. Although when Nakusp real estate goes for as much as Kelowna's that lost waterfront property will be the subject of much speculation. (Doubling down on the joke.)
Since we're currently visiting old Renata and witnessing the Eisenhower Administration's bumbling approach to hydroelectric and related hydraulic control issues, I thought this might be a good time to talk about the Columbia River Treaty, so the reader will know what the heck I am talking about.
Also, considering how insane the Eisenhower Administration has turned out to be so far, on this issue and so many others, I wanted to poke around the Internet and find out, "Why now?" Well, now I know, and the answer is pretty typical of the actual record of the Infrastructure President, in that he didn't actually do fuck all except get in the way.
I guess it won't surprise anyone that Port Alice didn't have a movie theatre, so I saw most of the movies that shaped us Gen Xers (more-or-less; technically I belong to the last gasp of the Baby Boom) on TV at a later date. Star Wars IV and 1982's Young Doctors in Love are exceptions, and, of the two, A New Hope was the better movie. Does Young Doctors in Love even have a life support/heart-lung machine scene? I guess it also won't surprise anyone that I am not going to rewatch it to find out! It's probably not nearly as hilarious as I remember, from the look of the Youtube extracts I watched looking for a heart-and-lunch machine scene. This one's got the surgical theatre-blinking-lights machines, so it will do, and I will preserve my nostalgia for a time just slightly past.
We're not completely out of the news around here. We have shortwave. What we've heard makes the Soviet purge sound pretty anticlimactic, and we're beginning to think that there won't be an atom war this summer, after all. So we took the cable ferry over to Renata to see the sights, which involved hiking up a substantial hill, which was certainly good for the appetite. Renata is a bit sad, a town of old people. A Mennonite colony of old times, most of the young folk have long since moved away. Just like we're going to do in not very long now, although bless those Soviet plotters for a wonderful summer getaway!
Two things, first, a very late change of schedule; second, a scary moment at the Silver Kettle Lodge as my 92-year-old father seemed to be failing after his vaccination. These mean that I do not have Sunday to work on my postblogging, although I am covering a mid-shift on time change day, and do have some extra writing time. And I am reminded that we do not live forever and I should get my intellectual life in order.
So here's a summary of work to date on Sacred Spring: The Early Iron Age Revival of the State and a brief outline.
I feel like one of those insufferable country correspondents prattling on about the seasonal delights of some place with an insufferably English name, except that "Nakusp" is insufferably Canadian, instead. Oh, right! My point! Stuffed fresh rainbow trout. With green beans. And a sour cherry confit. I'm in Heaven. And "eating for two."
Is it just me, or has Fortune finally discovered the "Baby Boom?" At some point in the near future, if we're not to have an atom war after all, and perhaps no war at all, perhaps we could have some advertisements directed at the people doing the booming?
Uncle George now tells Reggie that there is no chance of the Korean War dragging on. The famine in China is real, and Party and collectivisation aside, it's the war, he says, or my husband says he says. The idea of Chinese troops intervening in Indo China right now is out, says Uncle George, but so is the idea of Ho settling for anything short of complete independence. I know you've already heard this from the same sources, and if you could supply me some assurance that my husband won't be fighting a war in Indo China next, that would be great. Thanks!
Well, I might well be on strike next week, and I certainly have split single days off this week. And that can only mean one thing. A Technological Appendix with absolutely no reference to modern day events. Instead, I'll talk about a long deadlock in the French National Assembly requiring multiple votes for multiple candidates to select a new premier, and a devastating military setback for colonialism. People, it's the Fifties! It was a different time.
GM's lease at Willow Run, signed in August of 1953, and the fall of the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu in the Sip Song Chau Tai, on 7 May 1954 stand as two signal failures of high modernism.
They are also drawn together as threads in the June 1953 news, while I am writing less than a month ahead of the 70th anniversary of the creation of the fort at Dien Bien Phu, threaded through by a technological story, if not a very exciting one, that of the Fairchild C-119, and the month-long series of votes in the French National Assembly that was required to finally find a premier who could command the confidence of the house.
The first candidate for the premiership was, pictured, Pierre Mendes-France, who gave The Economistthe vapours, as reported in the issue for 6 June, with his neutralism (he was cool to the European Army), his socialism, and his openness to an outcome in Southeast Asia that didn't involve the final crushing of Communism. The final, and successful one, was Joseph Laniel. I've joked several times in alt text that the Assembly was choosing the man to throw under the bus of Dien Bien Phu, a hair-brained strategic scheme that is already cooking, inspired by dubious success of a small airlift of troops into Vientiane, in which C-119s played a non-trivial role. Mendes-France will negotiate France's disengagement from Indo China in the course of 1954, when the Assembly grudgingly accepted that he had been right all along, and liberated Tunisia in the bargain before the diehards expelled him in order to make the Algerian situation as difficult as possible.
There's not necessarily anything funny-ha-ha about this. The Fourth Republic did fall, and not long after the deadlock of 1953. It's the only modern democratic state to do so in the post-WWII international order, and evidence that it can happen. On the other hand, in retrospect it seems like it mostly came about because of obdurate resistance to social democracy, and, anyway, the Fifth Republic might not be perfect, but it is better than the Fourth, and one has to wonder if some of the other modern democratic states of the post-WWII international order could do with a one-and-done revolution and a new constitution. Maybe if they're having difficulty selecting a head of government, that's a sign? Of course, it's hard to think of a perfect modern parallel, given that we're well past the days of colonialism.
Dien Bien Phu also has a more unusual hook on my imagination, because I cannot escape memories of Tactics of Mistake, an entry in Gordon Dickson's Childe cycle. Tactics is a late novel, but strikes me as marinated in the contemporary reaction to Dien Bien Phu, which might be because it is a fix-up, like Soldier, Ask Not, but of unpublished stories from Dickson's first decade as a professional science fiction writer. Or he just read Bernard Falls. If the first theory is true, though, we can thank Nguyen Van Giap for the boomlet in military/mercenary/war-world science fiction that continues to this day.
My first niece-in-law chose this for her wedding processional. For relevance see note!
The reader will probably be tired of my half-assed explanations of the carcinotron, but there have been a series of heavily publicised bombing exercises so far in the spring of 1953, and we are closing in on the decision, trivial at the time but gradually snowballing, to cancel the Valiant B2 (while in the United States the B-47 programme was sharply curtailed), the so-called "pathfinder" variant, leading to the cancellation of the "V1000" military transport variant, the VC7 derived from it, and in general the failure to field a British turbofan airliner prior to the VC10, which is more-or-less the "blowing the lead" that everyone was warning everyone else might happen in 1953.
By wallycacsabre - sv3, CC BY 2.0, https://commons. wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59596203
So what happened? In the spring of 1953, bombing raids were still being led by "Pathfinders," and 199 Squadron, at least, was flying Canberras modified for ECM operations with the other "pathfinder" Canberras. At some point in the mi-1950s, offensive carcinotrons went into the electronic warfare suite of the V-bombers. It seems like reasonable speculation that bomber penetration tactics were significantly modified by the introduction of the carcinotron*, that this happened in about 1953 (the first manufactured carcinotron tubes show up as antiquities on Internet sites devoted to such things with a 1952 date) , and that the carcinotron was defeated by monopulse radar, which might have first flown on the English Electric Lightning in the form of the AI23 (AIRPASS) in prototype form in 1958. The picture I am getting here is a window in the mid -Fifties from roughly 1953 to 1958 or so when strategic bombers gained a substantial advantage over radar defences. Given all the fuss made about decision processes amongst the historians of nculear deterrence, and their often formidable technical expertise, you might wish that someone would take this in hand and confirm or discount such speculation.
Oh, well, you're not here to have me repeat myself and I'm not going to do it, because, bereft of other obvious routes into the kind of general aviation history that might bear some rough fruit, I finally read the Wikipedia article on the De Havilland Sea Vixen, an aircraft that I'd been ignoring out of a general sense of disappointment that attaches to the Fleet Air Arm aircraft of the Fifties.
