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.
So much for more talk about the Comet this week! (After a planned week off from work collapsed due to labour churn, before which it was going to be April, 1952, I, possibly with Flight and Fortune.)
Promoted from the comments:
ChrisM: So, I need some clarification on the "in 1947, sterling represented 87% of global foreign exchange reserves" (noting from the paper that this means that roughly half of the world's reserves outside of the US in practice, because gold was still the actual dominant reserve) because I'm not understanding what it means. Does this basically mean that India, Pakistan, semi-demi-hemi colonies like Egypt and the White Dominions, and heck even the colonies themselves, mostly stored their foreign currency reserves in Sterling (and outside of Latin America I would expect the colonial mainland currency to be the dominant exchange reserve, so mostly Sterling, with some Franc or Peseta or whatever for their colonies).
Basically, is the argument that these countries turned all of the dollars they earned into steel or wheat or whatever, and sat on the Pounds because they couldn't buy cool things like the Comet, in practice? And that is replacing the previous "they continued to save Sterling because of affinity for the old country" theory?
I'm just very confused here, tried reading the source paper, and still didn't understand.
With you 100%, Chris. I was brought up with opinions about economists, that, well, when I went searching for the appropriate Bloom County cartoon, I found that, first, Bloom County cartoons are not well indexed; and, second, that lots of people want to explain the joke on the Internet:
Economists talk funny and never agree about anything, so you can probably just ignore them and watch Demi Moore do a full-bikini strip tease to the Eurythmics, "Money Can't Buy It," instead. If only the real world worked like that. It's kind of like how no-one explores what impact the tens of thousands of British military in the Canal Zone might have had on the citizens of Cairo in discussing the events of 1952. Apparently all that rioting and guerilla warfare was motivated by "nationalism" and "fanaticism," and the fact that the Sweet Water/Ismaili Canal, in spite of being the main source of drinking water for Canal Zone cities, was deemed to polluted to drink, isn't worth having a serious conversation about.
Per Wikipedia: Derek Leebaert is an American technology executive and management consultant who writes books on history and politics, which evoke insights on leadership. He is the winner of the biennial 2020 Truman Book Award and also one of the founders of the National Museum of the United States Army.
I'll admit to being a bit surprised. I was alerted to Leebaert's 2018 Grand Improvisation: America Confronts the British Superpower, 1945–1957, by a highly positive review on H-Net last month, and have been picking my way through the book, which is peppered with references leaving me with the impression of a long-time foreign relations specialist putting a book together from an eclectic selection of notes the author no longer has time to check. (In particular, many references to articles in Time are surely taken from clippings rather than a skim of the 650 issues covering the period from the end of WWII to the Suez Crisis, easy enough to do in a library or online.
With that and a few other petty caveats, and after the de rigeur jurisdiction policing (it's okay for historians to invade technology and archaeology and linguistics, but the favour is not to be returned!), I will endorse the H-Net reviewer, and, apparently, the New York Times, this is a pretty good, if not always convincing book. Okay, there I go with the caveats again, but I honestly do not think that John Snyder was the eminence grise of the Truman Administration and single-handed architect of the postwar order. I just don't.
Leebaert's main argument is directed at the "rise of the American empire," which he wants to postpone from 1945 to 1957. Inter alia, that requires arguing that Britain was a much more significant presence on the world stage in this period than most accounts allow. To get even more specific, he has a brief with Peter Clarke's "last thousand days of the British Empire" thesis that brings the curtain down, not with Indian independence, but with the financial shenanigans of the next year. Without going so far as to actually read Clarke (the horror!), I'm going to guess that he is using "thousand days" loosely. Whatever. The key point is a call to re-evaluate the "end of the Great Siege" waged by Germany against Britain, to see its end at Suez rather than the 19 September 1949 reduction of the exchange rate of pound sterling from 4.08 USD to the pound, to 2.80.
A few more details below from Aviation Week about our cousin's blockbuster plan to merge Kaiser-Frazer and Convair. As I said on the phone, I am pretty sure that this is Edgar's doing, even if it seems flamboyant enough to be an Uncle Henry project. That gives me a bit more confidence that it will go t hrough, but it seems like a lot will depend on what is actually going on at Willow Run. The news of the "first" Packet reminds me of the "first" B-24 to come off the lines mid-war, after a similar delay. The fact that we have breaking news of more Air Force contracts being shifted to Detroit is just going to sharpen the knives if production falters. Edgar probably looks at this as a way to impress and one-up his father --that's my keen psychological insight!-- and as far as the world is concerned, this is about Uncle Henry. And as far as the world is concerned, Uncle Henry is a flim-flam man.
What I'm saying is, in my opinion, and as usual, Uncle Henry is a fine fellow and I would lend him the shirt off my back, but not a penny of investment money. How you take that is up to you.
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."
