Saturday, March 16, 2024

Boom: The Space Race, 1

 


Everyone has a first public event they remember, and for me, it is the live television broadcast of the landing of Apollo 9. I was a bit young as these stories go, and this might have something to do with the fact that, as it turns out, this was four days before my fifth birthday. I was far too young to remember the two events sequentially, but heightened attention to the one  might have leaked over to heightened attention to the other, I dunno. The point here, such as it is, is that I will have my 60th birthday this year. I try not to blather on about work around here too much, so I won't go into the details of why I am not getting all the paid time off that the contract says I get, just to note, once again, that it has to do with the lack of younger workers at my place of employment and in the Canadian economy in general. Hence the clever double meaning of the title of this series, a reference to the baby boom as well as to the "space race" that culminated on 20 July 1964. Do the two things go together? I sure think so right now!

Even if they don't, this blog obviously can't ignore the space race, and this is the first occasion in the progression of the technological postblogging where it seems appropriate to give the space race its own series. Notice how I've cleverly begun the enumeration of this series in Arabic numerals? That's so I'm not working out the Roman notation for "47" at some point in the probably not-so-distant future. 

Saturday, March 9, 2024

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1952, II: Around the Gyrotron

 The biggest industrial and technological story of this week is the collision of ongoing talk about civil defence or continental air defence with ongoing planning for OPERATION CASTLE, in which the BRAVO test blast of 1 March 1954 will demonstrate the feasibility of noncryogenic, "dry" hydrogen bombs. It will also detonate with two-and-a-half times the predicted yield, and catch Daigo Fukuryu Maru within its unexpectedly large fallout radius. With its usual maladroitness (I seriously  do not get the Eisenhower revisionism school at this point), the Administration tried to cover up the enormous screw-up and blame the crew of the trawler at a very delicate moment in American-Japanese postwar relations, and possibly leading (not a Japan expert!) to the confirmation of the postwar "pacifist"  constitution, and certainly to Godzilla. Would we have otaku culture without Godzilla? I don't know. Probably. 

Hydrogen bombs are a few things. First, they make civil defence seem vaguely ridiculous. Second, they need even less precise aiming than the previous generation of mere atomic bombs. Third, they can be lighter than that previous generation. People have been talking about intercontinental ballistic missiles since before the end of the war in Europe. Hydrogen bomb-tipped missiles actually make sense, because with an error of 3 km at the delivery end, you can still aim at "Moscow" and blow up all the strategic tarets in the Moscow vicinity, along with the rest of Moscow. That being said, ICBMs are a lot harder to build than to imagine. In the rough sketch of a plan for the future of the British nuclear deterrence that developed within its aviation-technical community after WWII, the ICBM would be preceded by an intermediate range ballistic missile. In April of 1954, the outgoing Minister of Supply in the Churchill government, Duncan Sandys, pushed through the concrete realisation of this schedule: the BLUE STREAK, a somewhat more advanced counterpart to the American Thor and Jupiter missiles that would deploy in underground bases in 1964, following several generations of life extensions for the V-bomber fleet and preceding an all-British ICBM that would never be ordered.

Today we are not talking about the BLUE STREAK so much as its guidance system, and we have been led to that discussion via a technology which was not used in it, the "tuning fork" gyroscope. My inspiration for this was taken from an article in Aviation Week about this new "gyratron" or "vibragyro," and an offhand mention of the fact that it had been tried by Smiths in the Smith's Automatic Pilot, SEP2 militarised as  the RAF Mk10. The Sperry vibrayro of 1953 doesn't appear to have gone any further. The idea was revived by Westinghouse for the space programme in the 1960s, but it wasn't until they were made piezoelectric that they became common in such vital gyrostablising applications as electric skateboards. 

So instead I'm going to talk about the technology that was used, and the concept of the BLUE STREAK as a total weapon system.

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Postblogging Technology, November 1953, II: Calamity White




R_C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada


Dear Father:

I know that you're going to call me a flighty girl for saying it, but the biggest technology story of the week is a silly movie from a producer who obviously hasn't a clue what he or she (but let's be honest, it's a "he") is doing: Flight to Tangier, in which the studio's money was staked on Jack Palance as a romantic lead. The movie itself, a CinemaScope, Technicolor production for flat screen, 3D or widescreen viewing, is just an amazing statement on the progress of the technology of film making over the last few years. If you can credit television with anything, it is for getting the studios to drop some money into something besides' actors' salaries. I'm thinking about this a lot because of the amount of time I am spending up at Bray, and I know that the studio doesn't exactly spell "sophisticated" to anyone who isn't impressed that I have Eva Bartok's autograph. I don't care. More money is being spent on making bad movies look good (and sound good, too, how did we get beat out to be the first with video tape?) than anything else besides going fast. It's going to matter some day! And not just for those of us making money by smuggling silver. 
 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie



Saturday, February 24, 2024

Postblogging Technology, November 1953, I: Kulturkampf





R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

An update from London, where yours truly continues to look for something to do that isn't swanning around film studios like a crazy investment-minded great aunt. Maybe I'll write a science fiction novel. It doesn't look that hard! Your son has not had any more chances to indulge his particular passions, because he has been attending one meeting after another in London about making sure that British radars play politely with American radars. Which, he says, "If I was interested in all this stuff I would be in television and making ten times as much money." SIGH.  

Your grandchildren are fine, not neglected in any way. It's just that I have plenty of help. The only reason Nat is cooking for us is that there isn't room to turn around in the kitchen due to the way that the building got a wall kicked in courtesy of Herr Goering, so the help doesn't eat here. Don't worry, though, Harry MacMillan has promised to pop over and fix it personally, so the place will be back at its full Edwardian grandeur by the time we leave next summer.


Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie




Friday, February 16, 2024

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1953: Transducer Days

 


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. 


Saturday, February 10, 2024

Postblogging Technology, October 1953, II: The Warren Court and the Idiots


R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

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.  


Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie





Saturday, February 3, 2024

Postblogging Technology, October 1953, I: Cheque or Cash, It's Easy Money




R_C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada


Dear Father:

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 movie and 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.)

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie