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.
With the very low key add for the IBM 650, "the first mass--produced computer in the world,"we take another big step in the direction of home computing. With the bizarre use of a Mark 14 bombsight as a frame to describe the workings of the bellows in a modern pneumatic system points us towards AIRPASS. With all that going on, Aviation Week has a pictorial for us showing how transistors are made, and everyone in avionics seems to have a transducer on ad this month. And something strange is going on. By this I do not mean the Wikipedia article illustration.
According to the Wikipedia Commons credit, is from the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, and I am guessing that it is from the early Sixties. The obvious sociological question I have here is why the two operators in our retrospective view of early computing are male, while at the time operators of complex technological systems consistently code as female. It's a very striking change that I've worn out the electrons commenting on, because I want some smart person who isn't me to do all the hard work of coming up with an analysis of it.
What I mean, rather, is the default assumption that a "transistor" is made of germanium, in a month in which piezoelectric transducers are being pushed heavily in the advertising space. Only 40 tons of germanium were mined "by the end of the Fifties," per Wikipedia. (Or, in 1998, germanium cost $800/kg, silicon, $10/kg. We are not getting to the Information Age using the 50th most abundant element in missile guidance systems.Crystals of various germanium do appear to have piezoelectric properties, but I'm not sure anyone knew that in 1954, and in any event quartz is a satisfactory piezoelectric material and is as common as dirt, so that would be what we would use here.
But first, before the jump, something for 1954 from the Paul/Ford studio, although not obviously electronica, which word I apparently can't use because "electronica" is a 1990s music genre and holy shit look at this Wikipedia listicle.
Greetings from London, where we only talk about the important things, such as Anthony Eden's digestion and Winston Churchill's weight! Oh, and whether we can have a nonaggression treaty with Russia before we're ready to throw H-bombs capable of flattening New York around. In the meantime, the RAF is working on being as good as it possibly can be at dropping the dang things. If you've got five million tons of dynamite under the hood, you only have to hit "Moscow" to get Malenkov. (But should it be Khrushchev?) But at 600mph at 60,000ft, can you even do that? Somehow the earliest version of the RAF's latest bombsight is in the pages of The Engineer this week, and it is all part and parcel of this new trans-Atlantic cooperation on electronic controls and relays in Very Secret Airplanes that has Reggie visiting Hadlett this week. As for me, well, if you deigned to notice, there was a little television serial over the summer called The Quatermass Experiment. And it has been proposed that one is not done making money from it just yet.
Well, here we are in London. I am seeing the sights, although a year of this and I might go a bit stir-crazy if I didn't have family business to attend to. I was up to Bray to meet the cast of what looks like a positively awful science fiction movieand ask searching questions about where are money is going, but by the books they're making money even before we "wash" the silver nitrate movements. Which isn't bad for such cheesy movies! Reggie has also been travelling, flying to Stockport to see (you must shoot me after reading this) Britain's Great White Hope to upset the F-100 speed record. He is officially there to worry over cooling servos, mostly electronic ones (which has implications for air-to-air missiles, too), but Fairey is apparently hoping for fighter sales and wants to get the word out in the USN. I don't know if anyone up there has met Reggie, but he is at least susceptible to a nice machine, even if he does think that fighters are a waste of time.
London, by the way, is much livelier than I expected from stories told by certain older male relatives recently here resident. Perhaps it is just the lack of glum foreboding and uncertainty about the Eisenhower Depression. Or maybe it is because the Prime Minister has already had his stroke, so you don't have to wake up every morning and turn on the radio to find out if Richard Nixon is your new President. (Instead you get to put money down on whether it will be Eden or RAB. Which is fun in a appalling sort of way.)
I'm sure everyone has seen 1973's "Soylent Green is People" clip, and the opening credits are actually pretty fun. And a good reminder that Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, came out in the same era as John Brunner's Dos Passos-inspired pseudo-found novels beginning with 1968's overpopulation-centred Stand on Zanzibar. I'm not sure how the movie money came to be left on the table for Harrison. but he did have the good sense to write a police procedural instead of a quadrology of sprawling, experimental novels. Harrison was, if anything, too succinct for his own good, hence Deathworld not being Dune.
Blue green algae might also be too succinct for its own good. It's small, and short-lived; There have been a million generations since blue-green algae started out being the next big thing in fighting overpopulation and the "limits to growth," and as far as I can tell, we're still waiting. But, then, that's the point of the movie, isn't it? "Soylent" is the food of the future; Blue-green algae would should have been the food of the future, but it turns out that there's a problem.
I know, I know, that's a link to a weird and poorly reviewed science fiction novel from the early Seventies. The Ballentine second hands are everywhere, so I suspect it sold well but was received coldly, and I can see why, because it is a strange, if epic, story. And it happens to be the place where the idea of the empty oceans was introduced to me --along with a lot of other very weird stuff. T. J. Bass probably deserves some kind of attention, and the idea of a dead ocean was definitely resonating in the early 1970s, replacing earlier optimism about the bounteous harvest to come of "Fish and plankton, sea greens and protein from the sea." Protein. It's always protein. And cannibalism. Yum!
Is that a bandwagon going by? Let me hop right on that thing!
I am going to go with the assumption that no-one wants to hear my potted history of Boeing's ongoing struggle to not embarrass itself with the millions of 737s-only-slightly-different it is currently selling to the airlines that only want 737s. (Even if they are slightly different.) I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with an industry being locked into an airplane that looks and acts like an old-time 737 in spite of having a ridiculously large pair of engines dragging off their wing and a whole app on its computer set up so that it will fly like a 737 even though if you use the app wrong you crash and die.
Because if I was going to make fun of this situation I'd say something like "Good thing grandparents don't fly planes," and then the dam would burst and I would point and laugh and laugh and laugh, and we're way more serious about that around here. And anyway it frankly doesn't even crack the top fifty of inexplicable institutional malfunctions we've got going on these days. (Just kidding about "inexplicable." It's obviously all the old people we've got these days.)
On the other hand, I can go back to 1953 and the approximate moment we got locked into this path and try to understand how we started down it.
You will be pleased to hear that Reggie's paper went well, with none of the security-related theatrics that scuttled the conference's most anticipated paper, the Avro reply to George Schairer on pods. (I think pretty much everyone knows that the paper was considered far too embarrassing and dangerous because it discussed the extraordinary frequency with which B-47 engines explode, and J47s by extension, but the face-saving story is that it couldn't be given because the Vulcan is still on the Secret List, or something like that.
Aside from attending conferences and sad associated"wine and cheeses," I have been enjoying London, although that must come to an end next week when I head out to the studio and find out what they've been doing with our money. Hopefully there will be a convincing explanation and some wonderful film is in the can, and I will spend the day enjoying out-takes and what passes for British food, which is even worse than Californian.
It was so good to see you in London, and you were so sweet with Nat. McGraw-Hill certainly didn't where it is by paying its correspondents too much! now I know why they were so slow to admit that the Russians had a hydrogen bomb. Actually, no-one has a hydrogen bomb! I suppose I shouldn't be any more clear than that, lest I reveal the big secret here in my secret letters.
I'm still mad that you couldn't stay long enough to take in Farnham. I do understand. You're only back in the land of your disgrace on Her Majesty's Secret Service. I hope you will find Vancouver well and that you will listen to your doctor, no matter how badly that is working out these days for someone taking the new wonder drugs, and have a good long rest.
