Bench Grass

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.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Patent Trolls Again: High Temperature Steam, Boilers, and World War II.

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If you follow the Admiralty's technological progress from Naval Estimate to Naval Estimate through the Nineteenth Century in the popula...
Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Plantation of the Atlantic, XIV: Praying For a Pale

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So Nathan Myhrvold is in the news again. (Well,  Slate, anyway.) And this time the patent troll is arguing about how America just isn'...
Thursday, December 8, 2011

Plantation of the Atlantic, XIII: What the "Leaky Pump" Means

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I know that I promised to reconstruct and post my research on Praying Towns here. That basically means that I'm going to run down some I...
2 comments:
Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Plantation of the Atlantic, XIII: New Towns

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Not to belabour the point, but we have enough details to  make it clear that there was a long-distance trade route running along the coast o...
6 comments:
Tuesday, November 22, 2011

It Begins

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Here it is: first draft, first page. Hopefully, I won't just find myself trapped in a cycle of endless revision. The Plantation of...
1 comment:
Monday, November 21, 2011

The Plantation of the Atlantic, XIII, 1:Preparing The Ground

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So, the thesis, which I owe to a better historian than I, is that the story told by the many failed European colonies established on the Eas...
Tuesday, November 15, 2011

The Plantation of the Atlantic, XII: Evidence, Experts and the Source of the Susquehanna of th

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Historically, by 1650, and probably by about 1600, the Eastern seaboard of North America was linguistically organised in a way that no-one f...
4 comments:
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Erik Lund
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