A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, March 1953: Cryptologic

 

Here's a simple question with a very frustrating lack of answer: When was the carcinotron deployed? Technically a carcinotron is a backward-wave oscilloscope in which an electron beam was passed through a strong radio frequency field. The upshot is a strong output radio frequency emission, which can be in the frequency range of a microwave rada. Altering the modifying rf field allows the output emission to be  rapidly "swept" across the entire emission band of a given radar, permitting what looks like universal jamming. 

I honestly don't know much about the subject, and I am very glad that radio engineering enthusiasts continue to update the relevant Wikipedia articles. We thus now know that one kind of backward wave oscilloscope, also called, or a variant, of the so-called travelling-wave tube, which was invented at and by, among other people and places (the patent wars are strong with this one), in 1943, by Austrian Jewish emigre Rudolf Kompfner, then working at the Admiralty Research Laboratory. Kompfner's patents were gazetted starting in 1957, while the first published work on the backward wave oscilloscope was published in 1953, and the Wiki article on the TWT points us at the Hughes Aircraft Electron Tube Laboratory, or Microwave Tube Division in Culver City, California, a research facility that is new to me as of right now, and which has been recently folded into Stellant Systems along with many other ancestors. All that institutional history, gone, like tears in the rain.

The upshot is that, in Britain or in America, the carcinotron specifically, the revolutionary airborne radar jamming device that, in the Thomson incarnation above, weighed no less than 25kg, went into production/service in "the 1950s." 

This is, I have to say, an unsatisfyingly vague dating for what seems to have been a very quite technological panic over the future of air defence radars. It seems like a reasonable guess that its appearance is linked to the very substantial "ECM suite" on the V-bombers, upon which so much faith was, apparently, justifiably placed. One assumes that it went into the Canberra, B-47, and B-52, as well. One infers that it might have been a problem for the SAGE rollout and for the upgrading of Britain's radar defences. One wonders what the implications of the new technology were for the radar station at CFS Holberg, up the road from my small hometown and something of a big deal in our sparsely populated region, in which every rationale for the existence of a community was to be celebrated. There's not much to be said about it beyond that except that evidently there's a crisis in air defence radar going on behind the scenes right now in  March of 1953, but shh, because it is a secret, wilderness of mirrors and all of that stuff. If you hide how flustered you are from the Reds, maybe  they won't notice the carcinotron before some counter-measures emerge!

Remember when Americans took the train? I don't, either. I'm only 58, and too  young for that stuff. The title's historic, too. No-one likes it hot any more. We've got enough heat, amiright? 

So, anyway, about that Fortune article about the year of the transistor . . . . 

Postblogging Technology, March 1953, II: Searching for Savvy

R_.C_.,

Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

Per precise and urgent  instructions I have completed arrangements to store our household effects, secured plane, not train, tickets for the 18th of April, and have buckled down to at least pretend to take my upper year exams seriously, which is hard since I am putting the California bar off for a year while we are in London. The lads seem to be jealous, or are perhaps are just being cautious of my mood and my current state, which all gossip to the contrary is as sunny and light as the day is long. Very long. And heavy. 

Also per request I have done my reading. Stay Away, Joe is a very strange book. I think I see what the author is trying to do, but it seems to me that it would come off better from an Indian writer. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, March 1953, I: Death of Stalin

R_.C_,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

What an exciting few weeks it has been. And what a terrible time to be a weekly news magazine with the slow turnaround of The Economist, which is now all the way to the middle of the March with no idea who might be running the Soviet Union. Not only has Stalin's tyranny run its course, but so, almost, as not only law school but one's own delicate condition. I know that you are all impatient to know my arrival date, but I am finalising plans for moving out of the house and putting the furniture in storage, and exactly how that goes will determine the train I finally catch. I look forward to seeing you all, and am grateful to have a familiar home to go to in this hour. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

PS: You may have noticed all the pink in the picture attached. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1953 with Bonus Old Man Ranting: Fuel Cells

 

In February of 1953, Engineering published on titanium, a swing-wing jet prototype, gas turbine locomotives, a proton synchrotron, and nuclear power; and in retrospect the most science-fictional material published in the course of the month (apart from speculation about a nuclear reactor that generated electricity directly from particle emissions rather than thermally) is a short summary of A. P. Paton's "Fuel Cells: A Non-Technical Outline of Their Development," published by the British Electrical and Allied Industries Research Association, Thorncroft Manor, Dorking Road. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1953: Sluice Gates

 

I'm sorry, Dutch people, "Watersnoosdramp" reminds me of Futurama. This is a picture of Oude Tonge, on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee, which has such a clumsy name because it is a relatively late formation, being carved out of the mainland of North Brabant and South Holland by flooding events in 1216 and 1421, per Wikipedia. Oude Tonge, first attested in 1420/1, is a village carved out of the "Old headland polder" in the manor of Grijsoord, which sounds like an exposed location, and proved to be so over the night of 31 January/1 February 1953 when a windstorm drove the spring high tides up over its embankments, killing 305 people in this village including 42 family members of poster-child survivor Jos de Boet. 

The reclamation history of these islands in the Meuse/Maass/Escaut/Scheldt/New Rhine estuary (I vote for bringing back "the Maze" as the geographic designator) is an interesting one for the historian of the Late Middle Ages/Early Modern Period, perhaps the clearest evidence that the economy and population of northwestern Europe was expanding during the "waning of the Middle Ages" and not contracting as the grand overarching "The Black Plague Kills Everyone Except One Person To Pass On The Message" theory of European history. But I'm never going to roll that rock up that hill, so let's not talk about it.  Let's talk about even older coastal defences, instead.

Gathering the Bones, XXVIII: Devil Take the Tobacco People

 Who knew that I'd need the "Drug Humour" tag again the week after I created it?

Tilsonburg is a town of 18,700 fifty kilometers southeast of London. (Where nephew M., who is getting married next Saturday, attended medical school. W00t! Go M.!). In the golden postwar days of the Canadian leaf, it may or may not have been synonymous with the Canadian tobacco industry before Stompin' Tom Connors recorded "Tilsonburg" in his golden years after the Centennial. Afterwards, Tilsonburg became synonymous with back breaking fieldwork in the "nicotine dew." This isn't exactly a trivial point. There wouldn't be a Virginia, or, quite possibly an America had John Rolfe not been able to establish the broadleaf Virginia tobacco industry in 1611. The received story is that Rolfe obtained Nicotiana tabacum seeds produced in Trinidad, the so-called "Orinoco" strain, and established it in Virginia in place of the tobacco then grown in Virginia, said to have been the rougher tasting and more psychoactive Nicotiana rustica.  

Apparently, some historians I've never met don't listen to Stompin' Tom and certainly a larger group have never seen the  1992 Sommersby movie, perhaps because they weren't dating way out of their league and thus weren't into seeing a later Richard Gere vehicle. 

(It's too bad that the extract doesn't include the later footage of the beds being covered.)

Since I, personally, have this rigorously scholarly background in the literature, it occurs to me to wonder whether, given that producing tobacco is evidently quite hard,  there isn't more to say.

Postblogging Technology, February 1953, II: Too Good To Be Forgotten

R_. C_.,
Shaugnhessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

I think I would be on and on about either feminine complaints or politics if I spent overlong with this, so best wishes, my love, and what a complete shambles the Eisenhower Administration has been! "Car dealers for New Dealers." 

Hah! Also, oops. Sorry. Like I said, better not to spend too long on this.  

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie