A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1952: And Colour Television!

 

Last week, it was hard to avoid giving the impression of being prematurely bored of SAGE. Even as the postblogging approaches SAGE from the front-end back in 1952, my attitude is shaped by Annals of the History of Computing 42, 1 (October 1983), the SAGE special issue of the already-unbelievably old flagship journal of computing history. SAGE had only been discontinued three years before the special issue, which, to put it in further perspective, came out in my second year of undergraduate. SAGE led to SABRE, the "Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment," which had only rolled out to travel agents seven years earlier. SAGE made its smooth transition from working technology to academic history for understandable reasons. It's like the Protestant Reformation or the Eighteenth Century London underworld: an inherently good "site" for historical work. 

Having been somewhat personally bruised by the idea that the Ruthenian borderlands are a better "site" for historical work than, say the entire Austrian Empire, I am probably too willing to forgive myself for being cynical about overworked historical sites, but SAGE's claim here is hard to dismiss. Besides being a major customer and driver in the first decade of the computing industry, it pioneered many of the technologies behind the Internet, whose importance I will reluctantly acknowledge, and as the ongoing Ukrainian conflict underlines, national air warning and defence networks have a lot more staying power in the modern era than most utopian Fifties-era national security initiatives. Indeed, between the last Nagorno-Karabakh war and the repulsion of the initial Russian Special Military Operation, they would appear to be  right up there with aircraft, tanks, nuclear submarines and atom bombs in the list of things that international security cannot be without, a modern "queen of battle."

So, okay, yes. But SAGE is old hat, and boring. What about, I asked myself, the datalinks from telephone to computer? After all, analog lines are inherently noisy, and when you set out to conver analog input into digital data for processing, and then use the output data to create a graphical image for battle control, noise is a huge problem. The more data points to fit into your forced curve, the wilder the excursions which must be smoothed, to the point where the output data (the bomber track) might be nothing more than GIGO. 

The importance of the telephone  network, which, at its peak, received everything from VHF from the DEW lines and UHF data  from AEW aircraft and forwarded it at 1200 baud on commercial toll lines, is underlined by the fact that the telephone switchboard stations, unlike the SAGE blockhouses, were underground and fortified. I did not find much about the telephone engineering of the network, however, and was quickly shoved in another direction. As with MIT redirecting its early work on WHIRLWIND to the SAGE project, so RCA sought a second life for its Selectron tube memory system in the nascent national defence computer engineering project. Ultimately, Jay Forrester passed on tube memory, whether RCA's or the more-developed Williams tube, in favour of magnetic core memory, and RCA "assigned their engineers to color television development, and put the Selectron in the hands of 'the mothers-in-law of two deserving employees (the Chairman of the Board and the President).'^2]"

And this is kind of my objection to historical sites. (Silos?) We get locked into an academic historian's idea of what is important, and whole genealogies of advisors and students get bound up in them, and other subjects get missed entirely.  What's more historically important to our modern, Internet-enabled world, SAGE, or colour television? It's not, I submit, a question with an obvious answer.

A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1952: SAGE, Whirlwind, Simplicity

 

Wikipedia says that Kelly Johnson's current campaign for a "simple" fighter, inspired by "a series of interviews with Korean War fighter pilots," is going to lead directly to the F-104 Starfighter, which is going to gobble up a large proportion of American Mutual Defence aid at the expense of the Lightning, which was no big loss, and the Buccaneer, which was. In retrospect it seems absurd that the F-104 beat out the Blackburn product in the ground support role. Of course, it turns out that Lockheed edged out foreign orders in the fighter and turboprop transport sectors on the strength of massive bribes, and it is this overwrought demand for the Yankee dollar that the MSDAP was obliquely addressing in the first place. 

The question here is what "complicated" looks like, and the answer is the Starfighter's predecessor, the F-94C Starfire, a "first generation . . . all-weather, day/night interceptor," which renders into the English as "Oops." And I say that as a Canadian with a patriotic attachment to the CF-100, but there's a reason the pilots nicknamed it "the Clunk." 

319 Squadron USAF, flying F-94Cs, deployed to Suwon Japan in January, 1952, so Johnson would have had a chance to interview pilots and RIOs flying the latest Lockheed product. 

He would have  heard all about the basic problem with this generation of aircraft, which was their marginal uselessness. Instrument flying and radar interception require two crew, and extensive electronic impedimenta. This gave them marginal performance at interception altitude, particularly the F-94C, which was  heavily dependent on an inefficient afterburner to get the necessary performance boost. This meant that they have only a very short window to gain a firing solution before the pilot has to wrestle the plane into a not-stalling trajectory. That meant a "fire control system," which was not a novel concept at the time, and worth developing in its own right from an industrial strategy point of view, but leading to carrying even more weight, and also Fifties-era electronics, into the air. The Hughes E-1, and later E-5, which combined a radar, a computing gunsight, and, as we heard in the first installment of June techblogging, a crude heads up display for targeting. Clearly none of this would be practical in a high performance single seater, and the MiG-15 was doing fine in the air defence role by depending on GCI. The F-104 ended up with a spartan set of avionics by the standards of its competition, notably the Lightning's AIRPASS. It never mattered in the least on account of operators declining to fight any major wars with F-104s, but one has to wonder if it was the right decision.

It also, of course, places a heavy reliance on the ground side of "ground controlled interception," about which I am going to talk today. No history of Twentieth Century technology can ignore SAGE. 

Postblogging Technology, June 1952, II: Smart Money On Taft

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

All I can say is that Washington is a very strange town which has very strange people in it. Today, Reggie and I met no less a person than Senator McCarthy, in company with B. and a surprisingly circumspect Koumintang general, and I have to say, the company the Senator keeps! (Not even including B.!) I think the general quickly regretted it, as with friends like that, as it is said. B. has rather grandly flounced out of the CIA and into a journalism job, where he is saving the world at Mencken's old paper, although how long that is likely to last is anyone's guess.

And not a word about your son, your daughter, your grandson. All I can say is that, whatever his faults, B. is a lot more interesting than I could ever be! And you will be seeing us in August, although the last word is that, in spite of the shutdown, Reggie will be working, as the Navy wants him to fly some sub-hunting gadgets.  

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVI: Against Apocalypse

Earlier this week, when my work schedule looked quite different from the schedule that eventuated, I spent some time writing an answer to a question over on Quora. That question asked if the Late Bronze Age Collapse was an apocalypse.

As is often the case, I wrote to the question in response to an earlier answer by a popular and usually quite insightful Quoran with an inane theory about how the collapse was a salinisation event, as totalitarian Late Bronze Age elites forced the peasantry to over-irrigate the soil to the point where yields were ruined by soil salination. 

My first response was along these lines:

There's a reason that old time Middle Eastern irrigated agriculture focussed on barley. Then it occurred to me that if people were seriously going to go to a substructural accouint of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, than an exposition of the sustructure of the Antique Middle Eastern economy was long overdue. It also occurred to me that another blast against our addiction to exogenous apocalypses was overdue. 

This would be a longer and more lucid anti-apocalyptic blast if I had not been at work at 4am this morning on a scheduled day off, but as it is, I can neither type nor spell[t], and this will have to do. 

Let's call it an exercise in putting a marker down.  

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1952: Sidebands, AI Mark 17 and AIRPASS

 

Two 11,000lb Sapphires! Did we mention that?  Two posts back with Flight's insufferable smugness and I am starting to root for metal fatigue. Yes, Aviation Week is louche as all get out, but at least it isn't afflicted by whatever is bothering Flight. (Could it be an inferiority complex?) 

So this week we have word that the Javelin has been ordered as an emergency super priority, to give the the RAF the "all-weather fighter" capability it so desperately needs. The ad promises Hawker Siddeley shareholders even more: "Capable of continuous development in many roles," which doesn't exactly pan out. All that power, almost triple that available to the F-104 comparing both power plants at full afterburner and high altitudes, and the Javelin can't even make it past Mach 1.0. While the Javelin faces more onerous endurance, crew, and payload requirements, the fact remains that it needs significant aerodynamic improvement into the "thin-wing Javelin" to accomplish those "many roles," and that will be overtaken by the Sandys Report. 

All of this is perhaps less relevant in June of 1952 than the still-classified radar going into the Javelin, AI 17, Ferranti's winner in a competition against GEC for a "lock and follow" successor to the abortive wartime AI Mark IX. I have previously discussed around here because of the choice to replace it on the earlier Javelin models with an American radar, in which I might perhaps have taken too much of an "Imperial sunset" perspective. 

It seems, in fact, that the Air Ministry has tired of all that old stuff and has its eyes on something shiny and new. AIRPASS, which began design the year before, will make its first flight in 1958, and looks to crowd the Javelin's lifespan. Maybe an "interim" radar is a better approach than an expensive attack on AI 17's current problems?

Oh, and there's that bit about "American supermen are our superiors." Always good for laughs!

Postblogging Technology, June 1952, I: Javelins for Taft

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

I must say that Washington is everything I was promised it would be. I did not even know that my hair could frizz! And, yes, I am staying in  some hither suburb closer to Baltimore, but in later years  shall want every bit of credibility when I tell the tales of my salad days.

I shall be  a wizened survivor of the Potomac swamps. Assignations in limousines! Shaking off hostile tails! Leaks taken, bribes given. Like some wily CIA agent (of which there are by my acquaintance exactly none), I am obscuring my tracks now, and even more so then. 

Yes, there might be a bit of daydreaming in it, but at least I do not have to overthrow Mexico for Pat McCarran or whoever is running the CIA now. It's a Dulles brother, yes, I know. I might still be a bit tipsy from drinking my way through a cordial meeting with B. and his new wife. Hah! 

Reggie has promised to take me up in "the stupidest plane ever made until the next Martin plane," on the weekend, which is not is usual approach to test flying, but we are going to land mid-Chesapeake and have a picnic lunch and some plans .
. 

Well. Definitely still tipsy. I think I will close and salute now. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Bishop's Sea: "John Bull Can Stand Many Things, But One Thing He Cannot Stand is 2%"

 

In this new age of inflation, two-and-a-half things for the week. 

 The first thing is the Bagehot quote. Is this really the secret spring of history, that investors will not tolerate interest rate going below 2% without staging some kind of secret and self-regarding counter-revolution against easy money?

Second, there's Bosworth Field, which I've been thinking about as I make heavy weather through the Black Death, Price Revolution, and Reconnaissance. (And, apparently between Death and Revolution, the "Great Bullion Famine" of, roughly, 1457--64, and the "Great Slump"  of the 1430s--80s. 

The half thing, the thing that put my mind to Bagehot, is the verponding, the property tax that the States of Holland began to impose in place of taxes on rental  incomes as the crisis of the Dutch Revolt deepened. There's nothing new in property taxes, and my slow progress through Scott Tracy's excellent monograph is a disgrace, but I'm going to call attention to it because of the method of the Estates, which was to estimate property values based on twenty times the rental income.

Obviously, it's the data they had. But, also, as far as the survival of the Dutch Republic and the Reformed Religion (as they said in the day) goes, 3.5% is in the nature of things.  It turns out that Henry VIII, who knew from sin, defined usury as an interest rate above 10% in the 1545 Act Against Usury, an act revoked by Parliament in 1552, thus in the last year of that young shit disturber, Edward VI, and restored, my source says, in 1571. (The Act was subsequently revisited several times until the rate of usury fell to 5% in 1713, another politically salient year.)

All of this, of course, is about interest rates (and rental rates) which are too high. A lot can be said about this. If you'll follow the link above to John Munro's 2011 working paper on "Usury, Calvinism and Credit in Protestant England: From the Sixteenth Century to the Industrial Revolution," you will get a brief primer on the old idea (Protestants are proto-capitalists with no time for usury laws) being deconstructed by the scholarship and tentatively reconstructed by Munro. So that's great. The current draft of my chapter on English through the maturity of the Newfoundland fishery wants to argue that the economy, royal succession and Reformation interacted with social legislation (Statute of Labourers, Petty Treason,  heresy,  vagabonds, and finally the poor law)  to create the mould of North American racism. The current draft has, says Munro, some idiotic blathering about discounting notes during the Hundred Years War. I'm glad I read it! 

However, the issue here is the other one: rates which are too low. No-one seems to care about that, but Bagehot says it is the secret of the winter of our discontent.