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.
How about that sport history? Guys, and I do mean "guys," some of us, maybe most of us, are here for the cultural history, for which purposes we're more interested in dates than the areas of early polo grounds.
Anyway, it turns out that Major General Joseph Ford Sherer (1829--1901) is the "father of modern polo," which I will take as proxy for a stronger claim about how polo as a social phenomena of the high Victorian period. There's a website associated with the Polo Hall of Fame, but I decline to explore it further, even though, I notice, it has a brief and actually pretty relevant discussion of the history of polo ponies;. My excuse is that equestrian history is even more inaccessible than sport history. In truth, I want to gesture at the evolution of the wealthy British male consumer's "need for speed" through various horse breeds strictly as a prologue to machines, and facts would just get in my way.
It turns out, and here I am just showing my lack of culture, and specifically the fact that I didn't read or have Wind in the Willows read to me, that Mr. Toad follows exactly this path. Beginning with a horse caravan (a Victorian fad I completely missed above), he moves on to his notorious automobile-born adventures. Finally, the questionable "Scouring of the Shire" conclusion in which the "Wild Wood" hoi polloi are expelled from the family seat. A perfectly understandable plot point in a child's novel, it becomes questionable when seen as a political allegory, and it might reflect the kind of anxieties which Joseph Chamberlain set out to embody.
Kenneth Grahame would have written a much more useful book for my purposes had Mr. Toad escalated from row boat to yacht and through a bicycle to an aeroplane, but that's a bit much to ask of a book published in 1908. Plenty of people have carried Toad's adventures on into the air, and the Amazon entry opposite even credits Kenneth Grahame as author, but that seems to be some kind of automation error.
So I understand that the way to get ahead in this blogging game is to go after the big guns and Brett Devereaux, of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, did a three-parter on the fall of Rome back during the winter. Well, I did a three parter back in 2013, and I could easily do a fourth, and I have some things to say about the things that Devereaux says about the fall of Rome!
Which, big deal. Everyone talks about the fall of Rome. People were talking about it before Edward Gibbon decided it would be a good idea for a big book that would make him famous and offer a sly commentary on the whole thing with America, which everyone was on about back in the day. The idea for the series was foisted on Devereaux by his Patreon patrons, and I am only talking about it because it is a way to focus on the throughline from the Early Iron Age Revival of the State. Also, apart from some minor errors in the ongoing archaeological-reconstruction-of-the-Roman-economy thing, Devereaux mainly put me out by trash-talking Gibbon. Which, the thing about Gibbon is that it is easy to trash talk the man; the writing finger moves on, and all that. But what we know about ancient Rome is still dominated by what ancient Romans said about Ancient Rome, and Gibbon lived in a milieu in which everyone read the ancient Romans in the original, and talked about them. We don't do that today, and it is easy to see how Gibbon might have had a fingertip feel for the way that Romans thought and lived their lives that even a modern archaeologist might lack.
Also, and most importantly to get at the throughline from Revival to Decline we go by the most prolific literature of ancient Rome, ancient Christian apologetics. and while I am not going to make a point from this literature that Gibbon knew so well, I am going to make a point about it.
British Pathe covered this? Past, another country, etc.
R_. C_., Shaughnessy, Vancouver, Canada
Dear Father:
If you detect a certain brevity in my treatment of Aviation Week this time around, it is because my subscription was held up by troubles at the office, and I had to use the public library copies, which, being current, I had to keep to an hour. I hope things are back to normal next week, but it sometimes seems like these things always get worse.
On the bright side, Man Mountain Dean is running for a Congressional seat as a Republican on a platform of "making Communism a national crime!" Given the possibilities, (and you'll see The Economist go nuts below as it weighs a contest between Richard Russell and General MacArthur), I'll settle for Kefauver. At least he's got a wife, Governor Stevenson!
So I thought that scenes of anachronistic hot-air balloons were a B-movie/animation trope. And they probably are, but thanks to the publicists for The Aeronauts, actually finding one turned into a fifteen minute hunt. On the one hand, thanks to Andrei Tarkovsky for putting a balloon into the prologue to Andrei Rublevand Youtube user Eagle Burger for putting it up. On the other, thanks a bunch to the producers of The Aeronauts for spending all that money on spamming the Internet instead of making a good movie.
The question that I meant to foreground with that interpretation is, "Is there a history of technology answer to the question, Why did the Montgolfiers come when they did?" It's sort of a science fiction question that took me back to the afore-mentioned hunt around the Internet that failed to turn up any cavemen in balloons, an answer, which appears to be taffeta --and not an economically endogenous "free lunch" of pure innovation arising from the-superiority-of-the-White-race-Shit-I-can't-say-that-"culture," as the neolibs would have it. (In an unarticulated way.) Fuckers just won't go away.
So we can all agree that by 1783, the Industrial Revolution was well along. The steam engine is thoroughly invented, we've had the flying shuttle, we've got the exciting part of the history of railroading in Britain where there aren't any railroads yet. Or if you don't want to riff on a half-remembered joke that you can't even reference, the "Age of Navigations." The authors of the Wikipedia article drag the Montgolfier brothers into the story via the family paper manufacturing business, which seems appropriately modern and innovative. But they made their hot air balloons out of taffeta. The Wiki says that taffeta has been made in France and Italy since at least, well, the Montgolfiers, and that the word itself is from Persian. Fashion history adds the detail that it was first woven in the Attabiya of Baghdad sometime in the 1100s, which seems like it is going to introduce us to a lost history of fabric making, since surely medieval Baghdad had a flourishing rags district and trade, and it sounds like this UNESCO explainer is going there. Unfortunately, it turns out to be purely etymological, going vial Seventeenth Century London swells dressed in "tabby," to slang for the prostitutes they habituated, to the modern "tabby cat."
This sounds like the kind of anecdote that old time OED editors would enjoy too much to fact check, and is as dead-endy as dead-ends get. Taffeta is a twisted, woven (originally) silk cloth. It looks nice, has as close to zero permeability as you can get with animal fibre, and was still being used for parachute silk in WWII. Like all the other fabrics made in England proper (no Scottish jute mills or Belfast linen makers need apply), it is by definition not of the slightest interest to industrial history. A "quilted taffeta bedspread" turns up in the story of Darnley's 1567 death, at which point the narrative of taffeta as an exotic Middle Eastern import will serve as well as the Queen's Consort being "alive in South America somewhere." By the Montgolfiers' time it had gone native in the silk-producing countries of Italy and France, and I am willing to bet that they had improved the finish in such a way as to make it a better aerodynamic cloth. Could be right about that, could be wrong. It's not like anyone is investigating trivial questions like "who innovated what, where" before launching into Big History projects.
. . . Which brings us to "Victorian Britain, workshop to the world."
It looks like you'd better book your passage home with Canadian Pacific, because there might not be any airliners flying in America at the end of the month, to read the aviation press. All the stalwarts are sure that the three crashes at Elizabeth are just a terrible coincidence. If it's not, it has to be somethign serious. Reggie suggests that the CAA might have been allowing the airlines to get away with skipping maintenance and training, and the winter weather is catching up with us. If that's the case, planes are going to keep on falling out of the sky, and I don't know what will happen. The President is hiding under a rock, the Kefauver and Eisenhower campaigns are stumbling, and Taft and McCarthy are everywhere. I know I am not usually much to worry about politics, but I'm just off the phone with Reggie, who had some pent-up opinions about Kefauver and Stevenson that he wanted to get off his chest. While he personally supports Kefauver, he figures that Stevenson will get the nomination (the President can't win), because he is more "moderate" on civil rights. (Translation: He won't do anything.) Stevenson will promptly proceed to not win the election because he is, let us face it, a divorcee, and if Eisenhower doesn't come through, we are stuck with "Mr. Conservative," who will be as bad for the country as Hoover, and lose the Cold War in the bargain.
The inclusion of a train into the funeral procession is interesting
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R_C_., Oriental Club, London, England
Dear Father:
I hope you're enjoying the funeral! It sounds like so much more fun than the Bay in February. Well, I mean, it's a funeral, but it isn't like any of us knew George VI. Well, you might have known him. Although his brother seems like more your speed. Who knows? Maybe Uncle George knew him? Probably not. We'd have heard about it. I feel badly for the new queen, especially since I haven't been able to warm to her husband. At least over in Europe you can't hear the screams of anguish from the aviation industry, and possibly you can even pick up a newspaper that isn't front-to-back stories about whether Governor Stevenson will run. Good for gloomy old Britain!
Morbid thought for the day: No book is ever finished, except by the author's death. Not that I have that to worry about a posthumous edition, having failed to sire me a Brian Herbert or Christopher Tolkien.
On the other hand, I don't think I've ever committed an outline of what "I Would Run Away to the Air:" Industrial History of Strategy, Great Britain, and WWII would look like. Which is just as well, considering my early notion that it would include a comprehensive wiki of mid-century industrial technology, a project that, in draft, was spiraling into hundreds of pages while being blatantly, obviously incomplete.
I mean, what are you going to do with a project that needs to take synthetic poop and the Unified Thread Standard into account? The whole project would be completely insane were it not a response to Correlli Barnett's Audit of War, which essentially achieves the same project by simply spamming "If it's British, it's crap" for every entry. Any reply to Barnett's thesis would then appear to require going through the complete list of mid-century made things and explaining why Barnett is wrong about it. (Except for coal mining, where he's got something of a point about the problems, if not solutions.)
Correlli Barnett is going to live rent-free in my head for my whole entire life. I've made my peace with it. Basically, this is a project in opposing an "industrial history of strategy" to a "production history of strategy," which further reduces to the claim that 50 fighters of a new design are much more than 1% of the production cost of a run of 5000, but be a gain, in that 50 MiG-17s are more useful than 5000 F4Us.
Also, maybe it matters to the way we live our lives today, what with the technological change and the tech bro billionaires and all.
