Postblogging Technology, July 1948, II: Bearing Down

R_.C_.,

The Oriental Club,
London.

Dear Father:

Well! Don't let me tell you that I am not cross with you! Instead of being off in the Lincoln to Arcata, I am sitting here in a rented Cadillac, Wong Lee keeping me safe, waiting for Fat Chow to escort Grace out of the terminal. Don't get me wrong! I'm glad to have Grace and James home and safe! My heart was in my mouth for the entire time they were in Hong Kong. I guess I should admit that I was wrong about Mssrs. Wu and Kwan. Now if only we can make good on the bullion.

I left myself some space so I could finish this letter, which, as you know, did not get off until we had seen James and Grace off to Santa Clara the next afternoon. That left me time to talk to Reggie on the phone. Except for a bit of heat over politics, I'll draw a veil over that, except to say that he is full of enthusiasm for the latest British developments in blind landing, and can't wait to pester his CO about it. I don't suppose it is news that he thinks that Arcata is wasting its time fiddling with lamps when it could be fiddling with cockpit radar --even if he admits that he can't figure out a way of using it.

Bill and David stopped by the apartment immediately that Miss K. left to be with her beau, so that I could pass on your package. I was very carefully not curious at all, although I couldn't help noticing that there is a story in Engineering about the little gadget I carried from London in my luggage. I have a feeling that it doesn't explain what makes it so important to Bill and David!

Also, received yours of last week, no longer cross. Thank you!  No just don't read this letter, change your mind, and send my application in to Hastings College, instead. (Sorry, joke. All will be understood if you read every word to the end, but since when do you do that?)

Yours Sincerely,

Ronnie.

A Technical Appendix to June/July 1948: Berlin By Night

So here's a technical appendix that looks at radar developments, and a particularly significant aircraft development delay due to problems with the "avionics," as we say now.

It will also not escape attention that it is a "Zombie Day" post, as I've already mentioned. It's because of overtime. On the bright side, my boss has decided to burn three of my accumulated paid days off leading into my holiday at the end of next week, so expect a bit more activity around here in the near future. 

Three years ago, the RAF spent its nights over Berlin in a perverse attempt to hasten an age of peace and love with a wild spasm of violence. This year, seventy years past, they are bombing it with candy. Okay, their ally is: I wanted to work the Candy Bomber and the night offensive into the same paragraph, and it was hard. Also, radar.

In our long, rear-view mirror interpretation of the beginning of the Cold War, stories tend to be shaped to fit. In the final version of the story of the English Electric Canberra

the main stories are Britain's "exhaustion" after WWII, and the Cold War alliance of the NATO powers, which obviously started with the Cold War, which began . . . when it did. Iron Curtain Speech? Berlin? Korea? Let's just say, given that the Cold War is a metaphor, that it can begin when I say it does, and this month, I say it starts with the Berlin Airlift.

Neatly folded into the story is the production triumph of the Canberra. Nine hundred were built in the United Kingdom for the RAF and the RAAF, and an additional 400 at the Martin works in Baltimore, Maryland as the B-57, which is quite an extraordinary thing to happen. The military-industrial complex frowns on producing foreign weapon systems, and for fairly good reasons. 

Since the Canberra had a somewhat late and troubled service entry, a model narrative has Britain "broke," and the United States paying for it, because the Cold War might get hot, in which case the RAF would have to do its part in stopping the Soviet steamroller from reaching the Channel in 48 hours, or whatever. 

Postblogging Technology, July 1948, I: Democracy Through Boogie Woogie

Edit: I was going to hold off on fixing the title of this entry until I had the actual "Postblogging II" post done; but that would have required buckling down on getting it done this week, and overtime has made that look a bit ambitious. So look forward to something about early postwar radar in the next few days, and Postblogging II next week.

R_., C_.
The Oriental Club,
London.

Dear Father:

Surprise! Here's the letter I told you that I'd never be able to write in between flying across the Atlantic and buying fall fashion by the gross. (Hope you don't mind the absence of Aviation. I hope that there's enough science, or possibly "science" in Fortune to more than make up for it! On the  other hand, I didn't have the time to find out that I didn't know the name of the President of the New York Stock Exchange, so "Oops" on that one.

You'll have heard from Reggie, so no need to go on for hours about the Berlin Blockade and the airlift. Reggie is not going to be flying in, as it has been decided that he is needed in Arcata. He'll be leaving his ship and escorting  his radar home to be installed in a less strategically vital hack. Bill and David are quite excited about flying over to Germany to do the job. I hope they don't mind "doing the "potato salad" a bit. (That's a joke.)

On the bright side, being just back from Europe gives me a certain cachet. I just wish I'd stopped in Paris, and not Wiesbaden and Frankfurt! Thank you for your package, by the way. Exquisitely chosen, and I can put on an "airplane set" look, even if I had precisely no time to shop.

Uncle George is very intrigued by your suggestion that, if a movie studio works in London, it might also work in Hong Kong. He is even talking about going out himself, which would be very good for him! (I'm worried that he is drinking too much.)

Yours Sincerely,
Ronnie.

P.S. Please no atomic wars until Reggie has had a chance to see me in the red number.

Not a single fashion ad in this coverage, because Forties. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, Sweet Sixteen: Four Key Innovations And a Key Social Context

This building, if erected, on Cornell University's New York City campus, will be the largest passive building in the world. It's hard to argue with the ambition, but, at the same time, I'm reminded of Adam (T.) Smith's impossibly pompous but profound observations about the "political landscape" created by public architecture. This structure won't be in the world, so much as making a new one, by intent. 

By Steve Swayne - File:O Partenon de Atenas.jpg, originally posted to Flickr as The Parthenon Athens, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17065839

The comparison I am aiming for is with that most famous of ancient urban sanctuaries, the Parthenon, a temple to the goddess Athena, likely in her role as patron of virgins and maidens. The inevitable comparison with the Vestal Virgins in Rome would then link it to the city's symbolic hearth, while Joan Breton Connolly proposes an association with a mythic virgin sacrifice that links Athens' patron goddess and democratic ideology to a narrative of female empowerment. There's also plenty of room for it to be about the women's work of textile production. 

Urban sanctuaries are the social context of the title, while the four key innovations are iron, alphabetic writing, equestrianship and money. All these innovations of the Iron Age are clearly significant, just on the basis of what ancient writers said, and sometimes did, with them. The modern approach that takes archaeology before text seems to undermine and complicate the received, literary narrative. And since no historical effort can avoid its contemporary context, one may wonder about the ideological motivation that might have led elite literary practitioners to constructively misunderstand the foundations of the world they lived in --to invert transcendental and substructural concerns and reverse causality, as some mad-eyed ideologue would put it. 

This may ask too much of the interpretative power of archaeology. Or it may not! In the interest of dealing with Haselgrove and Wigg-Wolf's 2000 colloqium on "Iron Age Coinage and Ritual Practices;" the published version of Alexander Mazarakis Ainian's thesis, From Rulers' Dwellings to Temples; another colloqium,ill digested, Santuari mediterranei tra Oriente e Occidente; Jorrit Kelder's The Kingdom of Mycenae; Bakker, Maurer, Pischke and Rauch on "Trade and Growth in the Iron Age;" and, still hanging about the apartment and perhaps somewhat old-fashioned by comparison with the other work, D. W. Harding's Iron Age Hillforts. Some other work is going to get mentioned below. As I type, I notice a certain paucity of writing about writing. As I try to reconstruct how it fits in here, I turn to Kelder, who is, of course, interested in what came before the Iron Age. Still, there's an interesting point to be made. I hope. (tl;dr: The urban sanctuary, with its sacred boundaries, might be necessary for the emergence of these technologies.)

A Half and Half Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1948: From the Oder to the Spree

It's time to catch up on a few things.

UBC's copy, or at least the copy in my hands, comes from the library of Dr. J. S. Milsum, who seems like an interesting guy in his own right. 

Given a choice of which numbers of The Engineer and Engineering I was going to epitomise last week, I ended up choosing the ones that didn't have reviews of James, Nicholls and Philips, Theory of Servomechanisms (Internet archive entry), which came out, as Number 25 in the Radar Handbook series from the MIT Radiation Laboratory, in June of 1948. It's in the 18 June issue of Engineering, which means that it's not up as a pdf yet at Grace's Guide,  so you'll have to trust me that it's quite a nice notice. 

You will have noted that all three of the British technical periodicals I follow, have notices about the upcoming summer schools on the theory of servomechanisms, to be held around the North. (No comment needed.) It has now been a year since the Institution of Electrical Engineers' special session on a"automatic regulators and servo mechanisms," which was held in May of 1947. As far as I can put a finger on it, it would be the publication of the proceedings of that conference in the Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, as much as anything, that inspired the summer schools. These are huge developments in the history of information technology; the problem is that our received history of same is so shallow and episodic, that I might be the lone voice in the wilderness of history of science who is even aware that the conference happened. I don't blame the profession. It's just too small to cover this enormous subject. I do blame the people making policy based on bad history, but I say that every week, and I haven't changed the world yet. 

Also to be caught up on here are the intersection of race and natural disaster at Vanport, Washington, and the Berlin Blockade. The latter is pretty closely connected to the history of servomechanisms via the problems of air navigation, while the former . . . is not. 

Black soldiers on flood control at Vanport, 1948, from the files of the Oregon History Project

Postblogging Technology, June 1948, II: Blockades, Airlifts, Antitrust and Floods

(The surprisingly apropos theme for the Vanport Flood documentary, embedded below.)

R_. C_.

Oriental Club,

London,

U.K.

Dear Father:

I don't know if I've mentioned that Ronnie had a Monday in lieu of the 4th, and that we're flying spares out to the Zone and then turning the planes right around. 

Put two and two together, and here we are in our weekend boudoir in beautiful (not!) Frankfurt. I can't imagine what Ronnie is going to be like at work on Tuesday morning, but, as she says, she's flown the Atlantic more often than I have, and she aims to keep it that way! I'm not sure that that's going to happen. I may be back in Arcata soon. Right now, we have more planes and pilots in Germany than we have landing slots, which is the reason my CO sent me over with his Skymaster. (That and he's probably tired of me complaining about having to land on a Ronson.) The idea is that the Navy's instrument-flying whizkid will suss out the tricks to keep landings up. I'm not sure what ideas I'm supposed to be coming up with, but I will be doing a night flight into Templehof in six hours to see what's what. Then, who knows, I'll probably be in London on my way to Boscombe Down. Perhaps I can drop in and see you, if you're not off to Aldermaston to talk about sniffing for Russian nuclear tests. 

When you do get back home, watch out for trouble from the kin down California way. Uncle George had no sooner got Uncle Henry settled down over the Vanport floods when US Steel got the go-ahead from the Supreme Court to buy into Los Angeles. Uncle Henry can't blame that on us, but he is wall-eyed angry, and testing out the idea that if we'd only invested in Fontana, he'd be strong enough to keep Big Steel out of California. It's gibberish, but it gives  him someone to blame. Meanwhile, Grace and James are off to meet her father in Macao now that a Communist victory is more than a cynical joke. It's an all-the-stars conference on the question of whether we can get back into Hong Kong. The important point is that Grace isn't in California to manage him. I almost wrote "here!" This flying around the world is disorienting! 

And as if that's not bad enough, R. is going through the wringer. He is getting divorced, which is normal enough for the Hollywood types, but which has brought out H. He had this bizarre notion that his youngest son could have followed him into the Presidency, unlike his legitimate sons, with their habit of sticking their hands out. Can be? I doubt it. Divorce, you see. And family drama, because it turns out that H. has been talking to some friends at GE about promoting R., now that his movie career is, uhm, well . . . 

I had a thought in there, but I've lost it now. That's probably a little angel whispering that I should take a nap while Ronnie's out.

Your Son,

Reggie

On the same theme, the music from the documentary on the Berlin Airlift, embedded last week.

The flood occurred on 29 May 1948, and President Truman toured the damage on 11 June, so I guess I can forgive Time for having dropped the story by the June 18th issue. But 39 people died! 

Postblogging Technology, June 1948, I: If We Don't Believe in the European Recovery, Maybe It Won't Happen

"Peck a hole to see if a redwood's really red"? It's almost like there's a subtext

R_. C_.,

Vancouver,

Canada.

Dear Father:

You will have my postcard announcing my promotion to Lieutenant, which I sent because I am bummed out about Glenn and Ed. The last time I talked to Ed, he was all test pilot bluster until he had three drinks in him, at which point he used some language about the YB-49 and Jack Northrop that was not complimentary at all. Preliminary talk is that they'll pin this one on the pilot. I'm told that he wasn't as easy to like as Glenn, and Northrop isn't about to let reality invade the private room he shares with his flying wings.

Maybe, just maybe, the Air Force will grow the nether appendages needed to cancel the damn plane. Then if it goes infectious,  the Navy gets rid of Fido, too. It's a dream.

I would say more, but as I'm writing, word's come down about Berlin and Ronnie and I are making plans to meet, in case it's the last time we can get together this summer. The CO says there's a good chance I'm going over at some point.

Your Loving Son,

Reggie

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