whats good for america, oh wait, that's GM

So here is a real doosie for you. From the jungles of Brazil I give you Fordlandia! Unlike any place on earth. Looks like Henry Ford was thinking that maybe if his cars were getting popular he had better make sure he had a reliable supply of tires to shod them. Rubber at the time came straight from rubber trees and Malaysian rubber was the most widely available. The British and Dutch had a monopoly on the market and this was worrisome. The fact that he did not control the supply made Henry nervous and he stepped up research to find a source of his own. Talk about raw materials. This was still on the tree next to the river.

Situated nearly a thousand kilometres up the Amazon, his land, Fordlandia, was a tract of hilly barren hardly fertile land covering over 10, 000 square kilometres. Talk about doing it the hard way. The town was locally called Boa Vista, or simply “Dearborn in the Jungle.” What was unique for the time was that this was going to be a rubber plantation, with managed agriculture replacing the traditional tapping of wild rubber trees.

The agreement reached gave him whacks of land, local police support and no tariffs on Ford equipment and materials entering Brazil. The Brazilians in return received a 9 per cent share of profits after a 12 year period. Things looked OK for Ford, then.

Once the first steam shovels arrived the jungle was never the same. Fordlandia became a North American suburb, complete with paved streets, bungalows, movie theatres, swimming pool and a library. Almost all of the the workers were locals and this whole world was just too weird for them.

Things don't get better. Staffed by engineers and managers who had never left an office, the rubber plantations were a mystery to them. The crappy soil eroded, or washed away during the rains causing tractors to get stuck and insane delays of equipment and supplies. To make matters even more insulting was the ensuing dry season, which lowered the river so much that boats couldn't dock. Guess they should've read the tide book.

The agricultural theories that worked in North America (closely planted rows to maximize production) only contributed to the spread of plant diseases and blights. This is the Amazon after all.

Things were not really going well so Ford traded some land for a parcel up the river a piece and started as second operation at Belterra. But big picture the whole shebang was not going to work. Fetid water contributed to malaria outbreaks and the local workers didn't get living in houses, eating in cafeterias serving unrecognizable dished like hamburgers and ice cream, or working a standard North American work day, which did not take into account the midday heat. Work stoppages were common and civil unrest became common. Ford's insistence on no smoking or drinking didn't endear him to the staff and attempts to cultural-ize the locals with poetry readings, weekend dances and English sing-alongs were just too strange. Paydays saw boatloads of local booze hit the streets and several days of low or non existent production ensued.

Fordlandia lated through the Second World War when Ford quietly paid out a quarter million dollars to the Brazilian government. His overall loss on the experiment was $20,000,000. Anyways, one of the inventions that came out of the war was synthetic rubber.

The picture above is a Fordlandia bungalow.

Good neighbour.

Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer was born in new York City October 15, 1915. Known to the world later on his his life as Fred Friendly, he was a radio and TV pioneer. He started in radio in the early 30's in Providence, Rhode Island. This was when he became Mr. Friendly by the way.

He became quite an experienced radio producer by the Second World War and teamed up with another groundbreaking radio journalist, Edward R. Murrow, after the war to produce a series called I Can Hear it Now for Columbia Records. What was especially exciting for listeners is that they used as much genuine recordings as possible in the project. Actual battlefield sounds and commentary, as well as news broadcasts put the listener at the very centre of the action.
Friendly was fascinated by a new technology, magnetic recording tape, and went to great lengths to try and get original recordings. When none existed he made them up. What he really did was recreate them as accurately as possible. Not like nowadays. He did not, however, alert the listener as to what was fake and what was real.He was good at it, and many recordings still stump archivists.He did his homework though, reportedly asking heads of state for do-overs of speeches.

Already working for CBS and Columbia Records his first big splash came with NBC's "The Quick and the Dead", about the development of the atomic bomb. Gotta love that title. They had some snot back then too.

Back at CBS they noticed what he was doing and recruited him full time, and that's when he hooked up with Murrow to produce a radio show based on the Columbia Hear it Now records in 1950. In 1951 they took it to television and aptly named the show "See it Now" hosted by Murrow.

The show was mostly live and never shied away from tough news, taking on Joe McCarthy's commie hunting on prime time TV for example.

Always a pioneer, Friendly was at the birth of public access television and the burgeoning cable TV industry in the 60's. No MST 3000 without this guy.

Pretty tricky.

I am guilty of yet another right hand turn in delivering tonight's post. What was to be a short piece on rope tricks, the history of and a few crazy ass examples, rapidly morphed into a couple of lines about atomic bombs. What can I say? I'm a sucker for well documented insanity.

So whats the connection anyway? Well seems that there is a phenomenon called the "rope trick effect" that occurs when certain bombs are set off.

John Malik, a physicist, noticed this startling visual effect when looking over high speed photography of the nuclear tests in the 50's. When photographed just after detonation, the camera captured a "fireball" that looks a lot like a huge transparent marble, but what is too bloody weird are the series of spikes or long tendrils, the "ropes" that extend from the bottom of the fireball.

The ropes are actually the mooring cables being heated, followed by rapid vaporization and then expansion of the cables. Malik, being curious and artistic, tried different colours, with black producing the most pronounced effect, while ropes wrapped in foil or other reflective material didn't show at all, they just went phsst in a nano second.

Not surprisingly, surface or air detonations, or any that weren't held down by ropes didn't produce the rope effect.

tube steak

Back at it after a week off on helping my employer out. Had to fly over to a new office and get the staff started on the right foot. Good to be back at my own desk and cosy bed.

Saw a nifty little video on the CBC web site about a London designer who has recycled old London subway carriages into office space. He's plucked then from the scrap heap and dropped on top of existing buildings. You may have noticed a soft spot for trains on this blog and particularly the goofier side of transport, (remember trains sucked through rubber tubes don't you?) so I'd thought I would dig up stuff on the the London Underground.

Anyway, the 1840's saw what was to be called the Railway Mania in England. Railways were where it's at then and everyone was tripping over themselves to by a stake in some new railroad. Speculative investing in new railways was crazy. Now it turned out that many never got off the ground, were gobbled up by bigger companies or were simply bogus, but the rage over railways was here to stay.

No wonder, compared to other investments there was a buck to be made. And more important, there was a middle class to invest their earnings. Propelled by the industrial revolution the railways were in demand and tracks needed to be laid and locomotives needed to be built. Not only was there an insatiable need to move goods, people had to be moved to. England was rapidly urbanizing and workers had to get to their jobs.

So back to the London Underground. There has been attempts to link suburban train stations in the 1840's by using shallow troughs but these never took off. The City was simply in the way. No one wanted hundreds of homes and roads destroyed to get even the beloved trains into downtown. Some lines were constructed, most notably to connect Paddington Station, but these were basically trenches that were covered over.

Lets jump ahead a few years and have a look at the first real tube train. The tube train could only exist once deep tunneling could be accomplished safely (sort of for the time- the construction of some of the shallow trenches, the so-called "cut and cover" was crazy. At one point they dug through the Fleet Ditch Sewer system near Farringdon). By 1970 tunnelling shields allowed deep excavation to proceed and a tunnel was bored under the Thames near Tower Hill. This was barely a railway in the true sense, just one car hauled back and forth on cables, but it was a start.

More improvements and access to electric locomotives made subways practical, and the first one showed up, The City & South London Railway in 1890. It was powered by an electric locomotive and had some 5+ kilometers of track in service. The ride was no hell and for some reason, probably due to the dark tunnels, the carriages had no windows. Could not imagine a weirder little ride. Patrons called them padded cells.