Postblogging Technology, April 1952, II: Tired: Korea; Wired: Viet Nam

The Hon. A.,
_. Hall,

_,
England

Dear Cousin:

As Ronnie and I find ourselves together in Shaughnessy with my parents this month, niehter of us has reason to write one of these letters to him. But I do know that you have expressed your appreciation of them, and so I take the liberty --oh, gosh, you know that I don't talk like this, and, anyway, I know that it is you, P., and not your uncle, who is actually reading this. So I'm going to stop talking like I am writing to a peer of the realm and instead talk to you! Fair deal? Great! Do I sound a bit distracted and nervous! You know why! I found as I wrote that I was able to settle my nerves, but now that I'm doing the cover note I feel like that stewardess who was thrown free of the Miami Airlines DC-3 crash down in Washington State two weeks ago, which I am still digesting, since I have an inside account of the flight that makes me just sick to my stomach that they put our boys on those planes. 

Your Cousin,

The Dash(ing) Pilot

R.

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, April 1953, II: Cutlass to the NBS!

 

It will not have escaped the attention of the alert reader that this is a technological appendix to a postblogging installment which hasn't posted yet. Why? A difficult work schedule and my own stubborn refusal to face the reality that I wasn't reasonably going to finish the installment before Tuesday. 

Fortunately, we have a science-policy-politics story this week which deserves its prominence at every level, the "AD-X2 controversy," and another story, slowly rolling on to its 1958 denouement, the Chance-Vought F7U Cutlass, announced this month in an attack variant that Chance Vought expects to produce after completing its contract for 90 of the air superiority type. 

Our historical memory of the Eisenhower Administration has over the years veered between a roseate nostalgia for the President of interstates and Brown Vs. Board of Education and an increasing disquiet as the damage done by the Guatemalan and Iranian coups keeps on compounding. There is, therefore, something revelatory about descending from our 20,000ft historical view into the trenches to find incoming Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks receiving a well-deserved bayoneting from Drew Pearson and the 400 employees of the National Bureau of Standards who threatened this week to quit if their boss, Allen V. Astin, were fired.

Postblogging Technology, April 1951, I: Shoppers Showing Signs of Stress Fatigue

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

I feel a little silly handing this off to the courier so I can catch my flight to Vancouver, but we've decided we're going to do these, and you're not the only person who sees it, and I meant to have it done days ago, I swear. Please tell Ronnie to take her time, because TCA will, and I will see you when I arrive! Which will be long before you get this. In fact, I'm in the taxi from the airport right now, for all you know!

Your Loving Son,

Reggie

Gathering the Bones, XXIX: Sons and Daughters

 

A little something for a lazy Saturday afternoon, before we get back to exploring the dark and stagnant depths of the Eisenhower Administration. (I honestly had no idea! How that man must have been eaten by imposter's syndrome . . . ). The first image is of Bonnie Prince Charlie raising the standard before the Men of Mordaunt. The second, probably instantly recognisable to people just a bit older than me, is Tom Jones the singer, as opposed to Tom Jones the Foundling. 

It's about my theory that the novel is a comment on the whole "warming pan baby" scandal, and specifically a reference to a theory that people had at the time that the baby, the future Old Pretender, James III, father of Charles Edward, was actually the son of James II's younger daughter, Anne. It's a theory that explains a great deal that is anomalous about the 1688--1714 period, the only drawback being that I have yet to find a contemporary spelling it out in any more detail than knowing nods to Anne's whereabouts over the previous few months. (She was in seclusion in Bath for some time for health reasons, then went to assist her step-mother, Mary of Modena, in the birth. Then, of course, she went on to have multiple miscarriages with her husband, like an Rh-mismatched pair, a condition that contemporaries perhaps already understood required a successful pregnancy, even if they did not know that the reason was that the mother needs to develop antibodies by exposure to the baby's blood, which normally does not happen before delivery. See? See?) But I am only putting these two up here for the thumbnail, because this post is taking off from Samuel, Sieur de Champlain. 

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.