Conquest of the Skies

Posted on November 7, 2017 by smellincoffee

Conquest of the Skies: A History of Commercial Aviation in America
© 1979 Carl Solberg
441 pages

If ever you wanted a history of commercial aviation in the United States, Conquest of the Skies is it. Beginning with the origins of flight and culminating in the 747, Conquest artfully combines business, social, and technical history. That distinguishes it from other books in this vein, like the tech-focused Turbulent Skies. Written for lay readers, Solberg brackets his history with reflections on how the romance of flight became – through persistent tinkering, reckless adventurism, war, and ambition– a perfectly ordinary form of transportation that shrunk the world, opening global vistas to the multitude.

In the beginning, there was the Post Office. Solberg’s first chapter, of course, is about the Wright brothers’ achievement and the rise of airplane manufacturing in the Great War. The story of commercial aviation picks up in earnest, however, after the war, when the US Postal Service began using the US Army airplanes created for the war to deliver mail. Delivering mail sounds tame and routine, but the early airmail service was anything but. These pilots were still flying by sight, looking for landmarks. In fog they were helpless; in turbulent weather, their canvas-and-wood frames were torn apart. (In 1934, a particularly bad winter caused nearly a crash a day.) Yet the Post Office saw the potential in this sort of delivery, and from this service grew the first commercial air companies. As infrastructure and technology for flying improved – as artificially –lighted “lanes” were created across countrysides, and the problem of aerial radio communication nailed down – a growing number of companies bid for airmail contracts and began creating their own fleets.

Modern readers may recognize the names of companies formed in those days: United and American Airlines are two survivors, and most adults can remember TWA and Pan-Am. Although the airmail contracts allowed for a commercial air company to get started, other opportunities for revenue – like passengers – were required for real expansion. In these days, a flight might carry only a handful of people. Even the larger planes of the pre-jet perio were carrying only 35 at most. In the 1920s, the appeal of air travel was largely in its novelty and speed. No one did it for comfort: in those days, passengers had to suck oxygen from tubes throughout the flight, and were constantly jostled amid turbulence. (The first stewardesses were required to have nurses’ licenses.) As the technology improved, however, the airlines strove to imitate the quality of service aboard Pullman coaches, with meals served on actual plates, and liquor on the house.

World War 2 propelled planes to greater heights, concentrating fifty years of advancement into five. The second world war was an air war, beginning with Stukas and ending with the Enola Gay. From the war came radar, legions of pilots, improved navigation, and steadily-improving aircraft design. More important, however, were the airstrips. In the 1920s, Pan-Am could only cover as much of Latin America as it did through flying boats – “clippers” in a more literal sense than its later landplanes with that name. Boats didn’t need airstrips, just a stable body of water and a dock. But the war had freckled the globe with airstrips, saw airlines other than Pan-Am work the overseas routes, and created interest in what lay beyond the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. When jets entered the picture and airlines began experimenting with an “air coach” model — carrying a lot of lower fares instead of a few expensive ones — air travel descended from the clouds of fancy into the real world, a miracle rendered mundane…like automobiles, electricity, radio, and trains before it.

Conquest of the Skies is outstanding popular history, uniting three areas of interest; the birth, growth, and evolution of various airline companies, including their involvement with the government; technical advancement; and the actual experience of flying, from the cramped quarters and head injuries of the 1920s to the cozy comforts of the fifties and sixties. I only wish it went beyond 1963, so Solberg could have documented the flight of the Concorde. While Solberg doesn’t footnote his text, the book concludes with an extensive bibliography.

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Tex

Posted on November 5, 2017 by smellincoffee

Tex
© 1979 S.E. Hinton
224 pages

Most of S.E. Hinton’s novels share a central drama: the main character is groping to find himself, usually in circumstances that don’t make it easy.  That Was Then, This is Now was built around the growing-apart of two friends who were like brothers, for instance, their choices straining and breaking their bond. In Tex,  another young guy with a penchant for making trouble is looking to the future.  The past has already taken away his mother in death, and his father — as the man is still sowing wild oats in the rodeo circuit. But the future threatens to take away his older brother Mason, who is desperate to get out of town and is on track for an athletic scholarship at several universities.   Tex loves two things: his horse, Negrito, and his best friend’s sister, Jamie.  But Tex and Mason’s poverty forces Mason to sell the horse, and Tex’ already rowdy behavior pushes him to the brink of expulsion and threatens the good left in his life.

I read every S.E. Hinton novel I could get my hands on in high school, and three of them —  That Was Then, This is Now; The Outsiders; and Rumble Fish — I have read so many times my copies are falling apart.  I could barely remember Tex, however, outside of a shooting, and Taming the Star-Runner is similarly lost to memory.  Although Tex’s climax is nothing like the big rumble of The Outsiders — it nonetheless drew me in instantly, with the tension between the brothers, and Tex’ hope for the future running aground against his own confused feelings

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Purim Ball: Admit no Livestock!

Posted on November 2, 2017 by smellincoffee

You know it’s gonna be a wild party when  they insist on “no livestock” up front:

The Harmony Club building was built at the turn of the 20th century by members of Selma’s then-burgeoning Jewish community. The lower floor housed businesses, while a men’s lounge was upstairs.  The building also contained a ballroom on the third floor.   In the late thirties, the building found new stewards in the Elks Club, but they closed it in 1960.  In 1999,  a man from Georgia named David Hurlbut purchased it and began restoring it; it has housed several businesses since then, in addition to his living space upstairs.  These days the ground level is occupied by a thriving restaurant called Charlie’s Place, as well as an bar where people drink Heineken and admire antiques. Hurlbut maintains a website with a virtual tour, but the interior photos are not current.  Also see this article from the New York Times about Hurlbut’s restoration.  There’s also an interview with Hurlbut on Youtube, in which he explains his desire to save beauty when he finds it, describes himself as a steampunk designer, and asks a question that involves the Federal government and the word ‘anus’.  
This photo was taken by me in 2010 and does not reflect recent restoration work, either on the building or on the street. The City of Selma has been beautifying the street (Water Avenue) to capitalize on its status as one of the longest historic waterfront streets in the southeast. 
Also, as part of this “Yesterday’s News” post, here is the most polite advertisement I have ever read. Or ever will read, I suspect. 

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Grunt

Posted on November 2, 2017 by smellincoffee

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War
© 2016 Mary Roach
285 pages


I’ve never given much thought to the idea of military science. What might it involve? The chemistry of better weapons, the psychology behind successful strategy gambits? The science encountered here, in Mary Roach’s Grunt, is similar to that performed on the early astronauts and the materials that would take them itno space. What happens to the human body under these conditions? What kind of material is optimal, based on these variables? What if this situation happens? If that sounds plodding, you don’t know Mary Roach. Her books mix comedy and science, and achieve the comedy both by zeroing-in on subjects that are taboo (dead people and feces, say) and through Roach’s droll delivery. Here she plagues military researchers and servicemen by investigating the labs where combat-ready clothing is engineered, watches seamen struggle to escape a sinking submarine simulation on scant sleep, reviews the progress of artificial limb-building considers the virtue of applying maggots to a flesh wound, and plays with a TCAP system so soldiers in the field can communicate without destroying their hearing. The experiments conducted to improve men and materials (or in the case of submarine crews, to tax them further on less sleep) are typically interesting in themselves, but Roach adds offbeat appeal by sharing weirder studies. (One study indicated that polar bears were fantastically interested in menstrual blood, but not by blood drawn from veins. This is apparently a polar bear thing, as black bears were equally bored by drawn blood and menstrual blood.)

Interesting as ever, but — as usual — not something to read with lunch.

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The Dragon Seekers

Posted on October 31, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Dragon Seekers: How An Extraordinary Cicle Of Fossilists Discovered The Dinosaurs And Paved The Way For Darwin
© 2009 Christopher McGowan
272 pages

Ancient bones and magnets were both known to antiquity, but not until the 19th century did their importance begin to be realized.  Attribute that to a quickly-developing worldview that regarded these things not as curiosities to be put aside with a pat explanation, but mysteries that needed to be solved – and mysteries, that once poked in to, transformed our understanding of the world. The quickening pace of fossil discoveries and the rising interest in placing them accurately, were essential in shifting the western understanding of the universe from one small, young, and personal, to one incomprehensibly vast, ancient, and cold as clockwork. 

The “dragon hunters”  driving these discoveries were not pre-Victorian Jack Horners;  long before the days of science funded by governments and pursued by microspecialists,    all that was needed for discovery were simple tools and insatiable curiosity   — or at least an interest in selling fossils to tourists.  That brought together a mere villager, a clergyman, and a lawyer into the same company as natural historians – and that shared company was literal.  The people of this book were not separate actors, but corresponded and worked together;   in one chapter, a young Charles Darwin accompanied Charles Lyell along with two other fossil-hunters, and together they met another fossil hunter (Mary Anning, the villager) to poke around together, and are nearly trapped in a cliffside cave when the tide comes in.  Together, they argued about what these things in the rocks meant.

While general audiences strongly associate Darwin with the theory of evolution, this chronicle of discovery makes it clear that the  general idea of evolution predated Darwin,  and was ventured by some theorists as ‘transmutation’.   What caused transmutation was then unknown; the fossils discovered here spurred speculation. (Darwin’s  contribution was identify the mechanism of natural selection that spurred speciation.)  Some wondered if perhaps the Earth didn’t regularly shift from cold to tropical epochs and back again,  with the life on Earth following them; perhaps one day these ancient lost creatures would return, like bats at dusk and wild geese in autumn.  That was a little easier to sell than the idea that these strange beings had simply ceased to be, that Creation had chapters untold to men before.  Although the discovery of these bones did not force a shift of worldviews the way Charles Lyells’ Principles of Geology and Darwin’s Origin of Species did,  they did open the door to those inquiries given how poorly they fit in to the previous understanding.

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I Contain Multitudes

Posted on October 27, 2017 by smellincoffee
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes WIthin Us and a Grander View of Life
© 2016 Ed Yong
268 pages

For much of the 20th century, microbes were equivalent with germs – invisible threats that needed to eradicated.  As we move further into a new century ,however, there is some small and growing popular appreciation that microbes play  important roles in human biology.  Microbes aren’t bit players, though, they’re the actors, the support staff, the conductors, and even the orchestra.  That has been amply illustrated by books like 10% Human, which  demonstrated how thoroughly vital microbes are to ordinary physiology.   I Contain Multitudes looks more generally at microbes and their hosts as dynamic ecosystems that are constantly changing.

Microbes had the planet entirely to themselves for most of Earth history, and long after plants and animals have seemingly taken over, they’re still in control.  Microbes are present in the oceans,  allowing coral to flourish and fish to find their way in the dark; they’re within insects,  often a vital part of their maturation process; they’re in human babies from the word go, receiving them with their mother’s milk. (Actually, a lot of human milk seems to feed not the baby, but microbes inside the baby, which then secrete something that the baby digests. Thus even breast-feeding mothers employ bacterial wet-nurses…)   That’s only part of the story, though.

Previously,  people thought of the immune system in military terms: our white blood cells were soldiers on guard, watching out for any intruders. Yong suggests we appreciate our immune system more as a park ranger, one that monitors the status of its microbial wards,  encouraging and protecting some and weeding out or barring others.  He suggests further that our immune system in doing this is working more on the ward-microbes’ behalf than on ours, for microbes too contend with one another.  They’re constantly jostling for space, and humans unwittingly participate in the battle:   with every meal, we alter our micro-biome.  In the name of healing, w occasionally carpet-bomb our bodies — but the body is its own ecosystem, so dependent on microbes that many illnesses  should be viewed as a mismatch of populations than an invasion.

It is as grave a mistake to regard microbes as an easily-manipulated friend, says Ed Yong, as it was to regard them as an implacable enemy who must be hunted down and killed.  Although symbiotic associations are rife in nature, and abound in our own bodies,  they are not relationships.  Many microbes live inside us, and we depend on many of them as they do on us – but we are not ‘friends’. Instead, like nation-states working together, we merely enjoy a collusion of interests, and occasionally that collusion lapses.   In the macro world, for instance, tickbirds that ride on large mammals and groom them for ticks occasionally nip their rides, too. Further, no one has ‘a’ population of microbes; the pool of microbes in our guts and in our orifices fluctuates widely from hour to hour,  depending on our activities.

Reading this book made me marvel, literally. The image Yong conveyed of the dynanism of our bodies made me think of the sun — an ongoing nuclear explosion that is maintained by the sheer weight of its ingredients. The contests inside us for dominance, the side effect of these material struggles on our brains and feelings, boggles the mind.

Note:  I read this book much earlier in the year, but never posted my review for reasons which escape me. I decided to publish this week given that I’ve been in a science mood.

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The Disappearing Spoon

Posted on October 25, 2017 by smellincoffee

The Disappearing Spoon
© 2010 Sam Kean
400 pages



A massive poster of the periodic table is as elemental to the image of a science classroom as the rows of graduated cylinders and microscopes,   but there is considerably more to that table than other reference materials —  like  a table of statistics about planet volumes,  orbital velocities,  and composition, for instance.   The periodic table’s peculiar shape, its neat columns and rows,  are not only orderly in themselves but speak to cosmic order;    elements which are very near each other in terms of their number of protons, neutrons, and electrons are worlds away from one another in their physical characteristics – and the reverse. The Disappearing Spoon is a human history of the periodic table, built on the author’s suspicion that every element had a story worth telling associated with. Perhaps it was discovered on accident; perhaps it consumed generations,  or lead to the collapse of armies and the failure of expeditions to the South Pole.    Many of the stories here address the elements’ discoveries, including rivalries to isolate them first – rivalries between men and nations alike.  The stories cover a lot of ground between them, and include as much history and literary references  as they do chemistry.    All in all, it’s great fun…but despite the title, there’s no Matrix jokes.  Turns out the disappearing spoon is made of gallium — just pop a gallium spoon into a cup of tea, and it melts away.  



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She Can’t Say No to a Soldier

Posted on October 23, 2017 by smellincoffee

A few months back I posted a collection of oddities from my hometown newspaper throughout the 20th century,  mostly to illustrate how local papers have radically changed in their offerings. From time to time I see little curiosities I like to share — usually just via email.  I’ve been saving a few with an idea of making a “Yesterday’s News” feature here, with funny or intriguing pieces of old papers offered. Today I spotted something in that vein that reminded me of an old song…

From the July 16, 1941 edition of the Selma-Times Journal. The caption reads: “Barbara Dillon has yen for men in uniform, and is dating draftees these days. She’s  member of Atlanta’s ‘I Want to be Drafted’ club, girls’ group providing dates exclusively for service men.’

What comes to mind is Joan Merril’s  WW2-era “You Can’t Say No to a Soldier“:

“You can’t say no to a soldier, a sailor, or a handsome marine
You can’t say no if he wants to dance —
 if he’s gonna fight, he’s got a right to romance
Get out your lipstick and powder
Be beautiful and dutiful, too
If he’s not your type, then it’s still OK
You can always kiss him in a sisterly way..”

That last line always amuses me. But, there are dissenting views about saying no to those boys in uniform! From the same paper, a few weeks later:



“Private George W. Morrow stubbornly refuses to ogle beauties June Reichbacher, left, and Jean Perry. They ankle past St. Louis home where George sits on leave contemplating 15 mile hike discipline handed him and Camp Robinson, Ark, buddies by Lieut-Gen Ben Lear for yoo-hooing at shorts-clad girls in Memphis.”

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Energy Myths and Realities

Posted on October 20, 2017 by smellincoffee

Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Debate
© 2010 Vaclav Smil
232 pages

Nothing lasts forever, including coal and oil. Regardless of their environmental impact (as noxious fumes or released greenhouse gases), ultimately humanity will have to transition away from fossil fuels for want of supplies. Vaclav Smil warns in Energy Myths and Realities, however, that a shift to renewable energy is a long-term project, not something that can be done in a mere decade. In this brief on the intersection between science and public policy, Smil analyzes the prospects of various energy alternatives, and takes apart viral hopes and hysteria.

Immediately after the Fukushima disaster, Germany announced that it would be abandoning nuclear power and replacing it in toto with renewable energy. The fact that certain economic realities have instead forced the planning of new coal power plants is not surprising; historically, every transformation of the energy sector has taken decades, and at the early stages there’s no way of knowing which application of a technology will prove the best. Smil is therefore not optimistic about the prospects for an all-electric automobile fleet; it would require supporting infrastructure (networks of charging stations, for instance), and such an increase in energy that only doubling down on coal and oil could meet. Because wind and solar are still struggling to make inroads into the energy market, they can hardly be relied on to supply a greatly expanded electric fleet. An expansion of coal and oil to power these new cars would thus only transfer the pollution. The right approach to the cars themselves is still being tinkered with, from fuel cells to hybrids. A more recent approach, used by the Chevrolet Volt, is to use gasoline as a generator inside the car, recharging the battery.

Smil is more dubious about biofuels, which he argues are both inefficient and disruptive to food markets. He is ambivalent about wind and solar, either, at least at the national-grid scale proposed for them. In certain locales and markets, they can make sense and pull their weight, but the chances of their supplanting coal and oil in terms of reliability and affordability are remote in the extreme. Smil is more hopeful about hydroelectric (when geographically possible) and nuclear energy, though the latter has a serious public relations problem. Even so, there’s a chance for revival: even in Japan reactors are coming back online, with more scheduled for the future. In addition to analyzing the prospects for various alternatives, Smil also addresses popular misconceptions relating to energy, from peak oil to nuclear energy too cheap to meter.

Ultimately, the author says, the world will move away from fossil fuels, particularly oil; economics and technology may expand our current capacity, but it is a finite resource. He does not expect any drama, however, — neither a sudden peak oil global collapse, or a sudden leap forward into the bright and happy carbon-clean future.

Related:
Book review by Bill Gates

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Lockout

Posted on October 19, 2017 by smellincoffee

Lockout
© 2016 John J. Nance
412 pages

Something very strange is happening at 35,000 feet. A lost and unresponsive Airbus is feeding false data to its pilots, assuring them that they’re halfway over the Atlantic and nearing New York, but any glance out the window tells the crew they’re headed across France and seemingly towards Tel Aviv. The Airbus is carrying an ousted Israeli prime minister, who did everything he could to push Israel and Iran over the brink of war while in office. In DC, three intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense are scrambling over one another’s toes and endangering innocent lives trying to figure out what’s going on and what to do next. If the Airbus continues on its present course, it could very well pass over the border of Iran and trigger a nuclear war between the mullahs and the Israelis. Such is the story of Lockout, in which a couple of pilots and their passengers become the unwitting collateral damage of one or more black ops projects.

Confession: I didn’t realize aviation thrillers were a genre. I’ve seen plenty of crisis-on-an-airplane movies course — Air Force One, Taken, Flightplan, Nonstop, etc — but didn’t imagine that kind of drama could be rendered in books. Well, John Nance has certainly proven me wrong. Lockout’s narrative takes readers through diplomatic intrigue, technical puzzles, street chases, counterespionage schemes, jet combat, and ordinary “whodunit” questions. The author, a Vietnam pilot turned airline pilot, doesn’t shy away from putting his technical knowledge about jet aircraft to work; the key problem of the story is that computer controls over the Airbus have ceased to function, and manual control systems…well, those are soooooo 1980s. Restoring control of the plane to the pilots involves descending into the pit of the electronics bay and figuring out the power and wiring relays down there enough to interrupt the automatics without reducing the plane to a falling airframe. Admittedly, characters working through circuit logic with one another might not reach a large audience, so these scenes are only part of the ensemble of mystery. The main plot takes place over a matter of four hours, as several on-the-ground mysteries converge into the one — a plane that delivered where it shouldn’t have been, whose electrical work doesn’t match Airbus specs, who had intelligence agencies looking for it before they even knew it was in trouble, and which might provoke World War 3. For fans of thrillers and airflight, this is a fun one.

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