On page 426 of issue 937 Nicholas Valery wrote in the Comment section “ Britain's manufacturing industry today is the result of self-inflicted wounds through profit-taking at the expense of investment. Since the war, we have consistently spent only 4p in the pound on new tools and plant, against the Japanese, US and German figures of at least double this amount. This is what the Industry Bill is all about – and the National Enterprise Board ( NEB ) is our last ditch chance to rescue the remnants of our manufacturing industry. “ Expressing surprise at the opposition from Michael Heseltine to the bill championed by Tony Ben, Valery explained how it was necessary to combat years of industrial under-investment caused by lazy reliance on cheap colonial sources of materials and captive markets. “..we also import as much machinery as we export - and this is not because we cannot make these products in Britain, but because continuous under investment in this sector has strangled the industry's competitiveness ” The establishment of the National Enterprise Board was intended to emulate “...that enlightened state intervention that rebuilt the post-war wealth of the giant Zaibatsu corporation of Japan.”

50 years later, the U.K. Government is still struggling with the concept of economic policy based on state-organised investment.

Page 442 of issue 937 has an informative biography of Charles Lyell who's 100 year death anniversary was marked by John Sutton. Lyell was one of the last of the gentlemen natural philosophers who had independent means ( a Scottish estate purchased by his wealthy father) who was able to travel, research and write a book that was the “..most influential in the history of geology”. Principles of Geology was the first modern text book of geology and drew on the work of James Hutton and John Playfair to explain how the Earth had been modified over long periods of time. Lyell regarded the development of living things to part of geological evolution and was a friend of Charles Darwin. “..Lyell did not establish any new law of science, put forward any novel theory or make a make practical advances as immediately useful as those of Kelvin and Lister..he simply wrote a book; without doubt the most influential in the history of geology". Lyell was a skilled organiser of his own and other's knowledge.

The article ends with with an intriguing anecdote. “ One day in August 1836, on a steamer sailing to Arran, Mrs Lyell fell into conversation with a young man who was reading the Principles (of geology) which he had won as a prize in the chemistry class at Glasgow. She took him to meet her husband and thus Lyell met Lyon Playfair. Fifteen years later these men played key parts in the Great Exhibition; another 40 years later a scholarship funded by the profits of the Exhibition brought Rutherford to Britain and, in turn, supplied the key to the dating of crystalline rocks which is so critical to the geodynamic view of our planet first envisaged by Lyell.”

Page 454 of issue 937 reported that Margaret Thatcher was the new leader of the Conservative Party – illustrated by a photograph of her visiting CERN. “As Secretary of State for Education and Science 1970 – 74, there is no evidence that she paid any more attention to science spending, which is admittedly only 4 per cent of the DES budget ( but 10 times as high as the cost of school milk  when she took office)

 

New Scientist 20th February 1975. Vol 65 No 937.

Tucked away towards the back of issue 937 is a piece by Richard Lewis about the plans for a joint USA-USSR space project known as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project ( ASTP ) which involved launching American and Russian space capsules and docking them together in Earth orbit. The plan was to launch a Soyuz capsule from Baikonur spaceport and an Apollo command/service module from Kennedy Space Center seven and a half hours later. Because Apollo and Soyuz capsules had incompatible docking systems and different cabin atmospheres, it was necessary to design an adapter module that would enable the two spacecraft to dock. Soyuz used an Oxygen and Nitrogen atmosphere at 10lb/square inch, whereas Apollo used pure oxygen at 5lb/square inch, so the module had to function as a decompression chamber as well as an docking facility.

The one-off mission was lacking any significant scientific objective.“ While the event has a certain news value as an exhibition of detente, it has become technological irrelevant because of the development of the space shuttle, the new aerospace plan, which makes both space ships obsolete.” As a largely symbolic mission intended to pave the way to future space co-operation, it was expected that the most significant moments would be televised images of American and Soviet Astronaut/cosmonauts shaking hands in space.

In 1975 the Space Shuttle was expected to be operational in 1979, but development problems delayed the launch to 1981. The Space Shuttle was eventually launched into orbit on 12 April 1981, exactly twenty yeas after Yuri Gagarin's pioneering flight on Vostock 1. The choice of the Space Shuttle flight launch date was either a tribute to the historic Soviet launch, or an attempt to demonstrate superiority over the Russian space programme (not quite in the spirit of the 1975 ASTP mission).

The Apollo capsule was available because the Apollo 18,19 and 20 missions had been cancelled by 1971, partly as a public attempt at appeasing public disquiet over the cost of manned space flight and partly because the risk of disaster. However, political expediency dictated that the $243 million cost, including $45 million for the development of the single-use adapter module, justified the ASTP mission just four years later.

In February 1975, Richard Lewis was intrigued by the ages of the ASTP astronauts. “Middle aged males around the world can take heart in the fact that the average age of the five pilots (three in Apollo, two in Soyuz) is a substantial 44 years. Donald K. Slayton, one of the Apollo pilots, is 51. The “baby” of the joint mission is 40-year-old Valeri Nikolayavich Kubasov, flight engineer of the Soyuz spacecraft.”

50 years later, it is acceptable for astronauts to be even older than this, as long as they meet fitness standards. Also, it is no longer assumed that astronauts have to be male.

“Green light for Soviet space?” on page 438 of issue 937 attempted to discern the

The unused Soviet LK module

intentions of the Soviet space programme. Dr Sarah White and Professor Grigori Tokaty outlined the military background to the early Russian space programme. Commenting on the late start to their civilian rocket development, necessitated by their need to match the American strategic advantage provided by long-range bombers based in Europe, White and Tokaty also cited the deaths of important rocket scientists ( Korolyov, Isaaev, Yangel and Babakin) as a factor in the failure to match the rapidly developed Apollo project, they erroneously repeated the propaganda line that the U.S.S.R. had never been interested in the moon-race. In 1975 was not widely known that a Russian lunar module had been developed and tested, without astronauts, but the catastrophic failures of the very large N1 rockets made missions to the Moon impossible.

After Apollo 11 won the 'moon race' in 1969 the U.S.S.R. concentrated their efforts on space stations. Salyut 1 was built quickly with low quality engineering. The first crew to visit the orbiting module died when the docking mechanism damaged the hatch of the Soyuz capsule, resulting in a fatal decompression. Although unaware of the extent of the abandoned secret Soviet Moon plans, the article is sceptical about another technical development.

“ There is, however, still some confusion over what really went wrong with Soyuz-15 last August, when it failed to dock with Salyut-3 and returned to Earth after just two days in space. General Shatalov, the Soviet cosmonaut chief, claimed it was testing an automatic docking system being developed for Soyuz's “tanker” spacecraft (these will rendezvous with manned or unmanned Salyut stations to replenish their supplies and prolong their useful life in orbit). The system apparently worked to within 30 or 50 metres of the Salyut, but then each time something started to go wrong. According to Shatalov, the crew continued to use the automatic system so as to collect as much information on its malfunctioning as possible. Western space officials are dubious that this is the whole story.”

50 years later, automatic supply missions to the International Space Station are routine and the Soviet Union did pioneer this technology, but the idea, at the end of the article, that orbiting modules would need to be welded together in the future seems slightly odd. There then follows another article by Academician Boris Paton – director of the Institute of Electrical Welding attached to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, Kiev – Welding in space comes down to Earth. In the abridged version of an article that first appeared in Aviatsiya i Kosmonavtika, 1974/no 11, Boris Paton described metal welding experiments conducted in weightless conditions on aircraft that lead to the design of a Vulcan welding unit that could achieve metal cutting and welding with “electron beam, compressed ray, and fused electrode “ in space. Paton expressed the hope that the developments would eventually be useful on Earth.

BBC Nationwide 21st February 1975

 New Scientist 13th February 1975. Vol 65 No 936.

The main article for 13^th February was Promises, promises:health for sale. “Some over-the-counter remedies and health aids are a boon, but many are useless or promoted in misleading terms. Where does UK protection fail, and what's to be done?”

Dr Donald Gould's piece on the proliferation of supposedly health-improving products examined the proprietary medicines industry and its increasingly television-lead advertising campaigns. While acknowledging that non-prescription medicines such as pain relievers, indigestion tablets and some skin preparations reduce the demands on NHS GPs through responsible self medication, Gould described how many products were promoted in misleading advertisements. In 1975 there were over 50 acts of Parliament governing advertising practice including the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 and the Medicines Act 1968 as well as a Code of Standards of Advertising Practice, administered by the Proprietary Association of Great Britain (PAGB) and British Code of Advertising Practice administered by a committee of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which worked with a staff of 12 until Shirley Williams organised an expansion funded by a surcharge on press advertising expenditure, intended partly to make the ASA better known.

“His Lordship ( ASA chairman Lord Drumalybn) acknowledges that at the moment the man in the street is ignorant of the machinery designed for his protection, but, astonishingly, it appears that the brand managers – the advertisers themselves – are hardly better informed. In 1972 the British Market Research Bureau asked a number of brand managers whether the advertising industry had a code to regulate the content of advertising. A large majority said “Yes”, but when asked who controlled press advertising 32 per cent were straight “don't knows”, and the rest suggested various possibilities from the Press Council to the Newspaper Publishers Association , with only 16 per cent correctly identified either the CAP committee or ASA as the body involved. A survey is planned to establish the extent of the ignorance that has to be dispelled.”

Despite the proliferation of regulation of proprietary medicine advertising, including the pre-broadcast vetting of television commercial, the “ad men” either found ingenious ways round the definitions of wrong doing, or simply ignored the rules. According to Gould, the Phyllosan (“fortifies the over forties”) simply ignored the rule “that a full, varied and properly prepared diet needs to be supplemented by vitamin or mineral products.”

The Phillips Tonic Yeast advertisements cunningly stated that “if you're lacking these essential vitamins, Phillips Tonic Yeast could give you the extra vitality to cope with life” without mentioning that you would have to be so ill as to need hospitalisation or living on a near starvation diet of maize to need the product.

Beecham's Pills avoided the rule that no advert should state that laxative medicine needed to be taken on a regular basis by saying “Take Beecham's Pills at bedtime.” leaving the audience to jump to the conclusion that they were needed every night.

Gould wrote that that Ironplan contravened the rule the advertisements should not cause anxiety resulting from the belief that a viewer might suffer from a disease without the consumption of a product or suggest that its consumption might lead an individual to not seek medical attention for a disease. (“The kind of iron therapy doctors prescribe most” “Start a course of Ironplan before you get too low.”)

Fear and emotional blackmail seem to have been behind some advertisements. There was no evidence that vitamin E can be absorbed through the skin, but that did not stop advertisers from stating that you might delay the onset of age related wrinkles by spreading their cream on your face. Senatogen Junior Vitamins ran the shameless copy “You can't follow your child to school. We can.”, implying that it would be negligent to allow your child to face the dangers of infection at school by simply providing good food.

50 years later the internet is awash with 'influencers' pedaling any amount of unnecessary health and beauty products as well as wellness programmes that suggest support for mental health. A friend in need is a friend indeed.

Today fibre-optic cables bring the internet and television to millions of homes but in 1975 the technology was new. Page 384 of issue 936 has a report of a new cable connector device than was designed for engineers working on sites such as tunnels and voids. The device, developed at the Canadian Bell Research centre comprised two sections, a lower piece with a V shaped channel and an upper locking shell with wires which press the two cut ends of fibre optic cable together. No patent number was given and the initial report is attributed to the first 1975 issue of Electronic Letters. 50 years later optical devices abound and optical computers are an emerging technology.

Page 383 CCD cameras arrive on the scene reports on the first video cameras using charge couple devices (CCDs) to be commercially available later in 1975. Built by RCA the new cameras had an array of 160 000 elements and a resolution comparable to 2/3 inch vidicon tube. The units were intended for surveillance/monitoring and were short of contemporaneous broadcast standards. In 1975 the technology to use digital signals did not exist, and the output of the new CCD cameras would have been immediately converted to an analogue video signal. “The cheapest of the CCD elements is priced at $1500 and the cheapest CCD cameras are $3000. Nevertheless RCA says that the volume of sales should build up quickly, so the CCD elements will be selling for about $30 in the 1980s.”

Unlike today's New Scientist, issue 936 has 16 pages of classified advertisements and a double page advertisement for the new Hewlett-Packard HP-55 pocket calculator. Retailing at £226-80 ( £1723 at Dec 2024 prices) the calculator boasted 86 pre-programmed functions, 20 memories and 49 program steps. 

Vela Satellites were placed in high orbits to avoid the Van Allen radiation belt

New Scientist 6th February 1975 (continued)

 Pages 313 to 315 of issue 935 features Cosmic gamma-ray bursts by Dr Andrew Fabian and Dr James Pringle. “ Transient phenomena are becoming a natural aspect of high-energy astrophysics. In recent months short bursts of gamma rays have been observed from a number of space platforms, leaving theorists perplexed- although not altogether tongue-tied – as to their origin”

In 1975 mysterious bursts of gamma rays lasting about ten seconds emanating from space were mysterious as no known astronomical objects were known to be located at their points of origin. The open question was made more intriguing by the accidental nature of their discovery. The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty forbade the atmospheric (surface) testing of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, and five Vela satellites were placed in Earth orbit to detect gamma rays from any clandestine explosions. As soon as the satellites registered gamma rays the events would have been taken very seriously.

Although the satellites were launched one week after the implementation of the treaty it was ten years before the detection of the Gamma ray bursts was revealed. “R.W. Klebesadel, I.B. Strong and R.A. Olson of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory announced the discovery of the first 16 cosmic gamma-ray bursts in 1973. Since then another eight or so have been reported, as well as other sightings of several bursts by detectors on OGO-3, IMP-6, OSO-7 and the Apollo16. This last system, in the Apollo 16 command module, was designed for determining lunar surface composition by by fluorescence techniques.”

By triangulating from the arrival times of the gamma ray bursts at different satellites, it was initially determined that they emanated from beyond the solar system and the burst that was detected by satellites as well as the Apollo 16 astronauts orbiting the moon was traced to region away from the plane of the Milky Way and close to the Small Magellanic Cloud. From the perspective of 1975, the mystery surrounding gamma ray bursts was compounded by the lack of data. The success of triangulation from the arrival times of bursts at the positions of different satellites was limited by timing errors, which resulted in the search zones 15 degrees wide. Theories ranged from comets plunging into neutron starts, through star quakes and super flares, to nuclear holocausts resulting from global warfare on alien planets.

 

New Scientist 6th February 1975. Vol 65 No 935.

6^th February 1975 was something of a watershed moment in Earth Science and its relationship to the public. Not one but two articles in New Scientist that week featured James Lovelock. The first, co-authored by Lovelock with Dr Sidney Epton, outlined the  Gaia hypothesis, and the second written by Martin Sherwood was a profile of “Jim Lovelock” and his wider scientific and technological achievements.

The Quest for Gaia has the useful sub heading “Do the Earth's living matter, air, oceans and land surface form part of a giant system which could be seen as a single organism? Could man's activities reduce such a system's options so that it is no longer able to exert sufficient control to stay stable?”

In 1975 It had been long believed that distinct ecologies had populations of species that were adapted to the geological and climatic conditions of their environment but James Lovelock suggested that this was a two way process, with living organisms collectivily combining micro-forces to effectively engineer the atmosphere and the oceans as well as maintaining them within ranges of temperature and salinity that are favourable to life. The article is careful to refer to the Gaia concept as a hypothesis and not a theory, as no planetary scale experiments are possible, although it could be argued that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels that we worry about now are a kind of accidental test with unpredictable results.

The Gaia hypothesis remains controversial today. Opinion ranges from enthusiastic comparison with the Copernican revolution in astronomy to dismissal of Gaia as new age mysticism, but for the majority of scientists in the middle James Lovelock's work has given a tremendous impetus to Earth systems science.

Lovelock was clear about the complexity of earth systems and the challenge of understanding their exact functioning. "Gaia is still a hypothesis. The facts and speculations in this article and others that we have assembles corroborate but do not prove her existence but, like all useful theories right or wrong, Gaia suggests new questions which may throw light on old ones.” Lovelock then went on to describe how the oxygen produced by photosynthesis, early in Earth's history, would have been toxic to the majority of living organisms. The availability of oxygen subsequently made possible the evolution of more complex life. From the perspective of 1975, the capacity of humans to create a pollution problem as damaging as the 'great oxidation event' seemed quite trivial by comparison, but Lovelock had a warning for the future. “If one showed a control engineer a graph of the Earth's mean temperature against time over the past million years, he would no doubt remark that it represented the behaviour of a system in which serious instabilities could develop but which had never gone out of control. One of the laws of system control is that if a system is to maintain stability it must possess adequate variety of response, that is, have at least as many ways of countering outside disturbances as there are outside disturbances to act on it.”

In one eloquent paragraph James Lovelock explained that the need to maintain biodiversity was not to meet an aesthetic ideal. The survival of humans depends on the continued functioning of Earth systems which have complexities that we may not understand.

Pages 313 to 315 of issue 935 features Cosmic gamma-ray bursts by Dr Andrew Fabian and Dr James Pringle. “ Transient phenomena are becoming a natural aspect of high-energy astrophysics. In recent months short bursts of gamma rays have been observed from a number of space platforms, leaving theorists perplexed- although not altogether tongue-tied – as to their origin”

In 1975 mysterious bursts of gamma rays lasting about ten seconds emanating from space were mysterious as no known astronomical objects were known to be located at their points of origin. The open question was made more intriguing by the accidental nature of their discovery. The 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty forbade the atmospheric (surface) testing of Nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, and five Vela satellites were placed in Earth orbit to detect gamma rays from any clandestine explosions. As soon as the satellites registered gamma rays the events would have been taken very seriously.

Although the satellites were launched one week after the implementation of the treaty it was ten years before the detection of the Gamma ray bursts was revealed. “R.W. Klebesadel, I.B. Strong and R.A. Olson of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory announced the discovery of the first 16 cosmic gamma-ray bursts in 1973. Since then another eight or so have been reported, as well as other sightings of several bursts by detectors on OGO-3, IMP-6, OSO-7 and the Apollo16. This last system, in the Apollo 16 command module, was designed for determining lunar surface composition by by fluorescence techniques.”

By triangulating from the different arrival times of the gamma ray bursts at different satellites, it was initially determined that they emanated from beyond the solar system and the burst that was detected by satellites as well as the Apollo 16 astronauts orbiting the moon was traced to region away from the plane of the Milky Way and close to the Small Magellanic Cloud. From the perspective of 1975, the mystery surrounding gamma ray bursts was compounded by the lack of data. The success of triangulation from the arrival times of bursts at the positions of different satellites was limited by timing errors, which resulted in the search zones 15 degrees wide. Theories ranged from comets plunging into neutron starts, through star quakes and super flares, to nuclear holocausts resulting from global warfare on alien planets.