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.
New Scientist 9th January 1975. Vol 65 No 931
Before the internet made ‘doom-scrolling’ a thing, the New
Scientist issue 931 (9th 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 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 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 23rd January 1975. Vol 65 No 933.
Unlike today’s hyper connected world with fleets of thousands of communications satellites, the launch of individual satellites was a news item 50 years ago. Brenda Maddox wrote in technology review in issue 933 about the proposal to launch a geosynchronous communications satellite for Indonesia. ” Indonesia is about to become the first developing country top have its own national communications satellite.” Maddox described how satellites are a particularly useful for providing telecommunications to geographically large countries with a scattered population. Although the satellite would serve 130 million peoples scattered over 5000 islands, it would have needed special receiving stations to connect to the telephone system. Access to lower orbit satellites by individuals is a relatively recent development. In 1975 it would have been difficult to predict that mobile phone networks and constellations of satellites would enable people living in Africa to bypass the need to establish the type of telecommunication infrastructure that has grown up in Europe and the United States.
Without any detectable sense of irony, pages 216 and 217 of
issue 933 display a double page spread advertisement for BP chemicals.
Featuring a photograph of a newly designed 1,600 foot inflatable boom for
containing oil-spills at sea, the advertisement explains how the fabric for the
boom is a new BP product, Butaclor, that is designed to resist ozone and attacks
from oil and was manufactured by a process that won the Queens Award for
Industry. “…an increasing amount of BP oil will be flowing to BP chemicals to
keep you supplied with an even larger quantity of such essential chemicals.”
Presumably the copywriter assumed that there would be an
ever increasing number of oil-spills in the future.
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 6th February 1975. Vol 65 No 935.
6th 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.
Inventing Pandora's box by Martin Sherwood described the life and achievements of James Lovelock. “In some ways, Jim Lovelock – begetter of the Gaia hypothesis is one of the last old-style natural philosophers. A scientist who works from home because he believes that lack of security encourages creativity, he has invented-among other things-”a magnificent Pandora's box”, the electron capture detector gas chromatograph. Most sensitive of the analytic chemist's tool, it has been responsible for arousing concerns about pesticide residues and Freons in the stratosphere, and may yet help to show that, thanks to Gaia, our fears of pollution-extermination are unfounded”
James Lovelock was in some ways a real-life equivalent to the fictional Professor Calculus from the TinTin books by Hergé . Like Professor Calculus, Lovelock was an unusual combination of technician/inventor and scientist. His semi-detached relationship to academia was made possible, at one stage, by the patronage of Lord Rothschild and Shell who provided a small retainer.
Working from home presented some difficulties for Lovelock. For a time, he found it difficult to have papers published by journals because his rural address made him appear to be a 'crank', until an honorary professorship at the University of Reading gave him a “respectable” address. The analytic devices he continued to work on when he left university laboratories behind and used a converted barn at his Salisbury home, were so sensitive his family had to give up using domestic aerosol products.
 |
| Vela satellites were placed in high orbits to avoid the Van Allen radiation belt |
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 13th February 1975. Vol 65 No 936.
The main article for 13th 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.
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.
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 27th February 1975. Vol 65 No 938.
The cover photograph of issue 938 shops a scientist at work inside a particle accelerator,
illustrating the first a series of in-depth examinations of the state of high-energy physics (HEP) research. 'File 1' – Physics flowers but funds wither by Dr Robert Walgate described the trend to reduce funding of HEP in the early 1970s and went on to give a brief overview of the success of quantum physics, post 1932, and the development of particle accelerators in Britain, the USA and at CERN, followed by a more in depth analysis of HEP. “ John Adams, present director of building of the 300-GeV super proton synchrotron (SPS) at CERN, recalls four influences on the postwar development of HEP: first, after Manhattan it seemed clear to governments that HEP was no longer a subject for the ivory tower; second, the physicists had become accustomed to large-scale project engineering management – the kind of thing that was needed for the new accelerators; third, the applications of nuclear energy needed trained staff, and relevant university departments were accordingly expanded; and fourth, in official eyes the nuclear physicists (still not distinguished from the high-energy physicists ) had become important men – they got posts on scientific committees and could influence the flow of funds.”
The overall tone of the article is sceptical of some of the intentions and methods of high energy physics research. Walgate characterised the HEP scientists as divided into “races” and “tribes” clustering around increasingly expensive machines that were justified by the desire to gather ever more data in advance of theory.
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