New Scientist 30th January 1975. Vol 65 No 934.

The Monitor section of issues 934 has two items, “The big hole that Skylab’s rocket made” and Do motor vehicles wind up the atmosphere?” that would today be regarded as belonging in Anthropocene studies. Quoting Science (vol167, p343) monitor described how Michael Mendillo of Boston University, Gerald Hawkins of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and John Klobuchar of the Airforce Cambridge Laboratories in Bedford Mass had detected a reduction in the electron content of the Ionosphere after the hydrogen-burning third stage of the Saturn 5 rocket, that launched the Skylab space station, dumped over one ton of water vapour per second into the F layer. The monitoring of radio signals from the ATS 3 satellite in geosynchronous orbit revealed a 1000km “hole” that stretched from Labrador to Illinois that lasted for 90 minutes before beginning to recover. The three workers suggested that the effect had not been noticed in the previous 12 Saturn 5 launches as the rockets had delivered their payloads into lower (parking) orbits.

Monitor also reported a paper from Nature vol 253, p254 that theorised an observed increase in the number of tornados in the USA in the previous 40 years could be caused by the energy imparted to the air between opposing streams of traffic on highways. The paper was written by John Isaacs, James Stork, David Goldstein and Gerald Wick.

Noting that air located between vehicles traveling in opposite directions would be rotated in an anticlockwise direction, the four scientists wondered if this kinetic energy could trigger larger vortices in conditions already favourable to tornado formation. Their mathematical model suggested that Americas two million cars and 600,000 trucks would produce more vorticity than the Earth’s rotation over one week of driving. Intriguingly, the statistics available to them indicated that there was a 14% reduction in the number of tornadoes on Saturdays, when the daily commutes to work were over and many trucks did not operate.

With the benefit of hindsight, the increased number of tornadoes might be explained by early onset climate change, combined with natural variability.

The Monitor section of issues 934 has two items, “The big hole that Skylab’s rocket made” and Do motor vehicles wind up the atmosphere?” that would today be regarded as belonging in Anthropocene studies. Quoting Science (vol167, p343) monitor described how Michael Mendillo of Boston University, Gerald Hawkins of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and John Klobuchar of the Airforce Cambridge Laboratories in Bedford Mass. had detected a reduction in the electron content of the Ionosphere after the hydrogen-burning third stage of the Saturn 5 rocket, that launched the Skylab skylab space station, dumped over one ton of water vapour per second into the F layer. The monitoring of radio signals from the ATS 3 satellite in geosynchronous orbit revealed a 1000km “hole” that stretched from Labrador to Illinois that lasted for 90 minutes before beginning to recover. The three workers suggested that the effect had not been noticed in the previous 12 Saturn 5 launches as the rockets had delivered their payloads into lower (parking) orbits.

Monitor also reported a paper from Nature vol 253, p254 that theorised an observed increase in the number of tornados in the USA in the previous 40 years could be caused by the energy imparted to the air between opposing streams of traffic on highways. The paper was written by John Isaacs, James Stork, David Goldstein and Gerald Wick.

Noting that air located between vehicles traveling in opposite directions would be rotated in an anticlockwise direction, the four scientists wondered if this kinetic energy could trigger larger vortices in conditions already favourable to tornado formation. Their mathematical model suggested that Americas two million cars and 600,000 trucks would produce more vorticity than the Earth’s rotation over one week of driving. Intriguingly, the statistics available to them indicated that there was a 14% reduction in the number of tornadoes on Saturdays, when the daily commutes to work were over and many trucks did not operate.

With the benefit of hindsight, the increased number of tornadoes might be explained by early onset climate change, combined with natural variability.

A third item in Monitor is Test driving the new Anglo-Australian Telescope reported on a talk by Dr Paul Murdin of the Royal Greenwich Observatory given at the Junior Astronomical Society. Dr Murdin was enthusiastic about the new telescope and showed a photograph of the globular cluster 47 Tucanae that he had recently taken. 50 years ago, the telescope incorporated the latest computerised controls, but also featured an observers cage in which an astronomer could view objects through an eyepiece.

“ But the system is not without its weak spots. One was discovered while Murdin was riding the prime focus cage, high above the floor. A false fire alarm went off in an adjoining building, causing the air conditioning to shut down automatically. This resulted in the hydraulic systems shutting down, so both the telescope and the “cherry picker”, designed for such contingencies to get the observer out of difficulties, were immobilised. Murdin was stuck in the telescope until the power could be restored. As a result, until the systems are improved, a rope ladder is to be carried in the prime focus cage, so that in event of a fire the observer will be able to shin to safety, a starry-eyed Errol Flynn.”

 

Feedback (page 270) 0f issue 934 has an item covering a story that would run for many years. Baby milk men are still tuned in reports on the controversial use of radio to advertise the products of Nestle and Cow and Gate in African countries were semi-literate families were less likely to appreciate the risks of using formula baby milk where water supply hygiene was inadequate. Feedback noted that under pressure from health authorities the manufacturers had reduced advertising in Nigeria, only to increase it in Sierra Leone, where 30 second baby milk advertisements were being broadcast twenty times a day in English, two vernaculars and Krio. According to the senior paediatrician in Sierra Leone, Dr D.J.O. Robbin-Coker, the widespread introduction of milk powders was a major factor in the increase in infant malnutrition and gastroenteritis. . There was a consumer focused boycott of Nestle products in subsequent years.

 

New Scientist 16th January 1975. Vol 65 No 932

Some issues of New Scientist contain examples of the prevailing zeitgeist that are more redolent than others. Issue 932 contains two interesting insights into science and technology in the U.K. Dr Martin Sherwood’s article Do Graduates need careers? attempts an authoritative overview of the complicated pattern of population growth, university undergraduate growth and economic problems. Set against a background of economic crisis of energy price rises, looming 25% inflation and the culture shock of mass unemployment, the article has tacit assumptions that are different from today.

“With economic darkness heralded daily in the British press, and reinforced by the sound of household-name companies crashing around us, prospects for this year’s science and engineering graduates might seem grim” It should be made clear that what Sherwood meant by “household-names companies” is engineering and manufacturing companies and not retail chains such as Woolworths or British Home Stores. 50 years of progressive de-industrialisation have created a completely different mindset in British culture.

Sherwoods’s discussion of the value of “a year between school and university” is as meaningful today as it was in 1975, but the assumption that a school leaver might experience work related to an intended science or engineering degree by simply stepping into the nearest technology-based company now seems quaint.

Tokamak at the crossroads by Michael Kenward reports on the planning stages of the Joint European Torus (JET) thermonuclear energy project. It is a perennial joke that the generation of electricity by controlled thermonuclear energy is always twenty years in the future and the JET tokamak, although never intended to produce electrical power, has made valuable contributions to the design of later machines over its 40 year operating life. Dr Paul Rebut lead a team of 40 people at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy laboratory at Culham in Cambridgeshire who took 18 months to design the machine. The plan to confine the high temperature plasma to a D-shaped region within a “tight” torus was considered to be advanced at the time. Today the JET project at Culham is being decommissioned, but over the last 50 years it has contributed design ideas to the new ITER project as well as helping to give personal hands-on experience with operating a tokamak. The optimism evident in this New Scientist story 50 years ago is similar to the sense of anticipation of the Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) planned for Nottinghamshire in the next ten years.

 

The Monitor section pf issue 932 reported the imminent launch of the second ERTS satellite. When the programme of Earth Resources Technology Satellites (ERTS) started 50 years ago it was uncertain as to how much information to support agriculture, hydrology and land use planning could be gained from automatic satellites. “Judging from reports to date, Earth resources space technology is very much in its infancy, at the stage where people are still finding out what you can see from space by electronic imaging (space photographs have substantially better resolution but require manned spacecraft for their realisation).”

ERTS 2 used a pioneering multispectral scanner which used a moving mirror to sweep a path 920 kilometres wide as it orbited every 103 minutes. The satellite also had three vidicon cameras(red, green and blue), developed from the imaging systems used on earlier mariner probes to Mars.

The tentative first steps with the ERTS satellites have evolved into a whole fleet of Landsat surveillance platforms which now monitor the Earth day and night. In the last 50 years the emphasis has shifted from supporting agriculture, oil exploration and mining towards environmental protection and measuring the effects of climate change.

New Scientist 9th January 1975. Vol 65 No 931

Before the internet made ‘doom-scrolling’ a thing, the New Scientist issue 931 (9^th January 1975) made that possible in print. Revelations about nerve gas and nuclear proliferation cast a shadow over the otherwise optimistic publication.  Writing in the comment section, Julian Perry Robinson reported that the recent publication of the patent for VX nerve agent agent described the process that can be used to synthesise the weapon. Surprisingly, the chemical formula had already been published by ICI, Beyer and the Swedish chemical defense laboratories 17 years previously. “VX is the most powerful of the West’s nerve gases, a milligram or so constituting a lethal dose. The two new patents give simple step by step recipes for making it in standard laboratory apparatus using commercial chemicals. No descriptions anything like as detailed have ever been published for VX.”

Robinson expressed surprise that the chemical formula for VX was ever declassified and patented. Anyone in the world can see the documentation of patents, unless they are made secret. He concluded by saying that the only good thing that would come from the revelations was that they might give impetus to renewed negotiations around an international treaty. 50 years ago, it was not a consideration that what we now call (euphemistically) ‘non-state bad actors’ would be interested in VX. It was an unspoken assumption in 1975 that the world order was defined by the relationships between nation states that could negotiate treaties. Terrorists were usually rebellious groups who were against their own government and were not trans- national as they are today. Robinson ends with “It is to be hoped that ratification of the Geneva protocol by the United States later this month will remove the final obstacle to serious negotiations”.

In an addition to the comment piece, the editor Bernard Dixon reported that the United States was looking for a chemical company to manufacture “ton quantities” of non-toxic chemicals which could be combined in artillery shells (after they were fired) to produce the next-generation binary nerve agents. Fortunately, the large-scale deployment of strategic quantities of nerve agents has not occurred.

 Page 91 of issue 931 a headline asks, “Will Canadian reactor sales lead to more nuclear bombs?” With the benefit of hindsight we can say, yes. Thomas Land reported that, under the Pierre Trudeau Pierre Trudeau administration Canada had decided that nuclear technology would be sold to countries that had not signed the nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty so long as there were safeguards “in the spirit” of the treaty. 50 years later India has developed a significant nuclear weapons stockpile using plutonium ultimately derived from a Canadian reactor. In response Pakistan has also developed nuclear weapons. Although Canada is a non-nuclear weapons state, it has created a situation where a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could result in the “exchange” of 200 warheads. Let us hope that never happens. The motivation was the prospect of $3000 million in exports.

An altogether more optimistic article by Dr R.S. Bhathak titled” Science museums can be Fun” describes how new science museums such as the Evoluon in Eindhoven were move away from the idea of displaying historical objects to a new concept of education by interaction. In a pre-internet age, a museum with an ever changing programme of interactive exhibits would be a useful addition to the slowly changing school curriculum with decades-old textbooks.

Page 66 of issue 931 has a useful reminder that generation of electricity by nuclear power does use fossil fuel because the mining of uranium uses machinery and vehicles powered by fossil fuels.  The article energy analysis of nuclear power has an interesting comparison of a coal fired station and a nuclear-powered station. Over their lifetime the coal powered unit would consume 2200 million tons of coal, versus 400 million tons equivalent for a nuclear station, “assuming that ore containing 3 per cent uranium provided the nuclear fuel.” In today’s terms, nuclear energy is not zero carbon.

Issue 931 has a two-page advertisement by the Digital Equipment Co Ltd proudly announcing that “Graphics computing is no longer a rich man’s tool”. For a mere £8,240 (£62,612 at Nov 2024 prices) you could buy a minicomputer that does graphs on a screen (as opposed to powering a paper plotter). You could buy approximately 225 medium priced laptop computers for the same cost now.

If the cost of computing has fallen enormously in the last 50 years, some things never seem to change. Page 86 of issue 031 has EEC notebook.in which Tony Benn is lambasted for his anti common-market views. “…it was inevitable that Benn, Wigg and Co would make a last desperate attempt to shore up the structure with the finest xenophobic, reactionary-provoking, gut-reacting subject in the whole anti-EEC dogma – the issue of “sovereignty” of the British Parliament…..the EEC Commission is nothing more than a supranational civil service. Though it has the capability to instigate new legislation, when the crunch comes, legislative decisions are made by the Council..it cannot pass any measure if any single country among the Nine  objects.”

If a high-profile person, with a ability to argue with this level of conviction, had been in charge of the remain campaign in the 2016 referendum, Britain might still be a member of the E.U.

The Monitor section of issue 931 has two closely related items about the search for a vaccine against cancer. Featuring the work of R. Laufs and H. Steinke in Germany and Robert Gallagher, Robert Gallo and Zaki Salahuddin in America the page concludes “Even if it turns out that leukaemia and perhaps other cancers are the result of infection with a contagious agent, epidemiological evidence indicates that these diseases are not contagious in the usual sense, otherwise cancer would be much more common than it is.” 50 years later the search for a cancer vaccine continues.

Sometimes it feels that history, although not moving in circles, moves forwards in time in a spiral, with the rotation along its axis revisiting things that are similar to the past. An opinion piece on page 87 of issue 931 by Peter Laurie posits that faith in the tendency of developments in information technology to improve society is naïve. Starting his historical overview of information management by government with the role of the Church of England during the time of William of Orange, he described how circular letters to Bishops would set of what the government wanted to be promoted in Sunday sermons.  

When the power of the church was eclipsed by newspapers and broadcasting, the control of the flow of information became influenced by a complicated ecology of diverse financial interests and government. “It is not by accident that the Post Office physically handles every broadcast in Britain between studio and transmitter: the government has not forgotten the General Strike, which it won largely by having control of broadcasting while the TUC had only newspapers.”

Differentiating between direct censorship and self-censorship by the internal culture of newspapers, Laurie took a swipe at the National Union of Journalists who he blamed for restricting contributions to print media by non-NUJ members and by implication denying the public a range of opinion. Heaping Government, unions, newspaper owners and broadcasters into one rather disagreeable heap does sound rather like modern conspiracy theorists.

Laurie concluded with: “Consideration of all this makes one wonder what will become of the technologically possible dreams of “free” neighbourhood television, or of telephone clubs using electronic exchanges, which will tend to bypass this elaborate and at times top heavy machinery of control.”

50 years later, with the internet dominated by tech billionaires, algorithms, disinformation and ‘troll farms’ the answer is rather complicated.

New Scientist 2nd January 1975. Vol 65 No 930.

The cover price of 20p (£1-52 after 50 years of inflation) is not the only difference between 1975 and today. The majority of articles in the publication are not written by journalists, but by experts working for institutions or within industry. Writers include a professor of biochemistry at McMaster University, the director of hardware and quality assurance at International Computers Ltd, a research fellow at Middlesex University, a research assistant at at UCL and a researcher at Exeter University.  A profile of the Soviet environmentalist Alexander Vinogradov was written by Boris Belitzky, a science journalist at Radio Moscow.

While the access to writers who were directly involved in research might be advantageous for a publication, the possibility of an article suffering from a partial view would have had to have been countered by the ten-strong editorial team. Another interesting difference between today and fifty years ago is that now every hospital trust and university has a communications department which would be involved in the contacts between staff and editors. Half a century ago hospitals and universities were much more under the control of doctors and academics.

The Comment section of issue 930 is a half-page piece by the editor Bernard Dixon about the energy crisis and economic turmoil caused by inflation and scarcities. Before global warming was identified as a threat, the drastic oil price increases of 1973 as well as the perceived future shortages of oil and pollution by toxic combustion products were the main reasons to to seek energy efficiency. In his editorial Dixon announced "New Scientist will be holding a conference in London to examine the technical and political possibilities for greater self-sufficiency for Britain, in food, energy and raw materials". Half a century later new houses are being built in the U.K. without solar panels and with heat insulation standards that are the lowest in Europe. Many solar panels are imported from China.

Today we are concerned by the addition of Carbon Dioxide to the atmosphere and the resulting global warming, but the energy crisis of the 1970s was seen mostly in terms of the need to extend the post-war boom in industrial production. The lack of awareness of climate change is illustrated by two items in issue 930.

Firstly a job advertisement from the Open University Energy Research Group for a job vacancy for a research officer (£2400 -£2900 pa) to assist with research into "a selection of novel sources of liquid fuels such as oil shales, liquid hydrogen and oil from coal."

Secondly, the 'patents review' section has a review of German proposal (BP 1 371 269) to create drinking water in the Sahara and in Arabia by using natural gas. "The gas escaping from oil wells is frequently burnt off because it is uneconomical to collect, store and transport." The German patent states that water created by burning the hydrogen in in natural gas could be collected and purified into drinking water. Almost as an afterthought the item mentions that the energy from burning the gas could be used for local electricity generation.

New Scientist carried advertisements in the 1970s. Just inside the cover is a full page advertisement for Hoechst inflatable buildings, to be used mostly as warehousing. The value of the pound was falling at a disturbing rate. Inflation was 19% in 1974 and would reach an all time peak of 25% in 1975.  Using the slogan "how we beat inflation by inflation" the copy offers inflatable air halls as a quick and easy way to avoid the increasing cost of building materials. Apparently the price of the electricity needed to keep these structures inflated was not a problem in 1975. The fabric used was Hoechst's brand Trevira. "PVC coated fabrics made from this are waterproof and rotproof, but most important, airproof. So all you have to do is inflate, and there's your building."

Ironically, the 'technology review' section has an item about the challenge of setting safe exposure levels to vinyl chloride, used in the manufacture of PVC. the new standard in the U.K. was to be 50 parts per million compared with the U.S. standard of 1 part per million. Exposure to vinyl chloride gas has been associated with liver cancer.

In a strange echo of more recent times, an item about the use of roof beams made from high alumina cement (HAC) in 1170 schools raised the issues of how testing and remedial action was to be paid for.  At the time of printing 433 schools had not been tested and 241 were affected or closed. "The Inner London Education Authority is in a fortunate position because it has the back-up of the Greater London Council's (GLC) Scientific Branch which has the necessary equipment to test for conversion in samples of beams. Other local authorities have to contract out the testing to independent consultants. At £20/test ( £151-97 at 2024 prices ) the cost of this work can be considerable." The perceived need to save taxpayers money by building low quality school buildings is more than reminiscent of today's reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAC) fiasco. 

The GLC was abolished in 1986, but even if it still existed it is difficult to imagine that, after 45 years of privatisation, a local authority would be allowed to have their own Scientific Branch. A pervading assumption behind most of the output of New Scientist in the 1970s was that government had a responsibility to oversea many aspects of science and technology - that governments should actually govern by providing itself with the resources needed to make peoples lives better. Inside the back cover of issue 930 is a full page advertisment for the National Research and Development Corporation (NRDC) which invested by direct funding by the taxpayer in new inventions and designs that would contribute to the British economy. After mergers with other departments the organisation was privatised in 1995. Today countries such as India still have a commitment to direct government involvement in the development of technology.

The letters page of New Scientist is interesting. In issue 930 J.H. Burton from Cheshire wrote in response to John Tinker's article "The end of the English landscape". The issue of farming, conservation and landscape is a huge subject that cannot be covered here, but I admire Mr Burton's admonishment of Jon Tinker's use of extrapolation from statistics of current trends. "To illustrate the dangers of extrapolation it is only necessary to consider that, according to figures published by the Federal Populations Commission, by the year 2020 all the population of the U.S. will live in California, own power boats and suffer from venereal disease."

Point taken.