End of Summer Reading Review
The last three books before the start of class...
His Majesty’s Airship by S.C. Gwynne, Scribner, 2023
His Majesty’s Airship caught my eye from the new release table at the library. It’s a very well-written popular history of R101, one of two airships built under the U.K.’s Imperial Airship Scheme in the 1920s. The book gives a good overview of the development and challenges of rigid airships, from the Zepplin company’s initial efforts through to R101, which finally attempts a trip from the UK to India in 1929 but crashes in Northern France. Gwynne touches on the technical side enough to explain the story, but the book focuses on the personalities of the key players involved and the evolution of the idea of airship travel. This helps the book move along smoothly while being very engaging to read. The scheme developed two airships, R100, with private sector leadership using existing technology, and R101, by the government, attempting to use newer technology, such as Diesel engines, different structural configurations, and a host of other inventions. The story pulls two threads- the generally problematic history of rigid airships and the development of R101. Comparisons with R100 were very limited, which was unfortunate as R100 seemed to be more successful.
Woven in the story of R101 are three themes still relevant to those working in naval and commercial marine design today. The first theme is how to determine the level of acceptable risk from innovation in an aquistion program. One could argue that R101 added far too much, similar to many recent Naval shipbuilding programs. The second theme is the difficulty in designing a human organizational structure where negative information can rise and be understood rapidly enough to be actionable in a large acquisition effort. There were plenty of signs that R101 was not ready for her first voyage, and the probable cause of her loss was identified as a hazard during inspections. Still, the project structure did not allow such information to be acted on before the first flight took place, with tragic consequences. This chain of events is similar to countless other engineering disasters, such as the Space Shuttle Challenger. This theme of negative information reach continues to be a problem faced by modern acquisition programs today, even if the results are often cost overruns or performance downgrades vs. hydrogen explosions.
The third theme is the one where I had the most difficulty with the book. This theme addresses the question of when to give up on a technology, especially one where much effort and money has been expended. I find this an incredibly challenging question to answer and one still very relevant today. Gwynne takes the shallow approach here - constantly (to the point of annoyance, in my view) implying that all involved are clearly stupid to continue to push on with large airships. Gwynne logically points to the growing horrible track record and clear risks from hydrogen. I think this is a view that only makes sense from hindsight. Contemporary airplanes went through rapid development and started out being very dangerous to their occupants. There is no doubt the majority of rigid airships either crashed (often with spectacular hydrogen explosions) or were damaged in service. However, to a concurrent observer, some rigid airships were successful. The Italian Norge reaches the North Pole in 1926, the British R34 crosses the Atlantic in both directions, as does the R100, the Graf Zeppelin circles the globe, eventually traveling over 1,000,000 miles, and the USS Los Angeles serves successfully for eight years. Hence, I don’t think it is as clear to those in the story (compared to today’s viewpoint) that this concept is fatally flawed vs. a technology in development. Deciding to abandon rigid airships in the 1920s strikes me as far more difficult than making that call in the late 1930s. Many countries waited until the 1930s to give up on large rigid airships, as at that point, airplanes had advanced significantly, and large rigid airships were clearly stuck. Indeed, the story of the technology is more that airships devolve into niche applications without vanishing. For example, in WWII, the U.S. Navy operated 154 non-rigid blimps for convoy patrol, minesweeping, and other duties. This is an interesting parallel to many questions in the marine space today- When should we give up on once-promising alternative green fuels (LNG?) What happens if companies and governments have extensive sunk costs into them? Overall, this is a well-written, extensively sourced, and highly entertaining book and one that any engineer will be able to find engaging parallels to engineering today.
One Jump Ahead: Escape on the Vyner Brooke by AJ Mann, Edited and self-published by Harry Nicholson, 2020.
I came across this book when reading a review of The Steep Atlantick Stream, which will be republished this fall. AJ Mann served on the SS Vyner Brooke at the time of the fall of Singapore in 1942. He survived the vessel’s sinking and escaped, eventually to Australia, through a long and very difficult ordeal. In 1952, he recorded his recollection of this escape in a typewritten manuscript. The manuscript stayed within his family until a family member gave it to Harry Nicholson. Nicholson, a writer himself, turned it into the present book. Nicholson frames the original manuscript with background on AJ Mann’s career, first within the Royal Navy and then as a civilian, before presenting the manuscript and ending with his research on what happened to those mentioned in the story. Nicholson then self-published the resulting book, which is widely available on Amazon (though probably not in your local library). Overall, Nicholson has done a great job providing context. Mann’s post-WWII diaries are included and are hard to read today- he served as a customs inspector in East Pakistan, and his entries show general contempt for the region and its citizens.
The manuscript itself is highly engaging and equally painful. It starts with SS Vyner Brooke being pressed into an auxiliary naval service it is ill-suited for and then being used to evacuate Singapore. During this evacuation effort, it is sunk from the air. Mann is unaware of the Bangka Island massacre, which would be perpetrated against a group of survivors from the sinking. Owing to his position in the water and the tides and currents, he misses landfall on Bangka Island and survives a harrowing ordeal, making his way towards Australia. It’s a fairly classic shipwreck story, with very limited food and water (see also the excellent and recently-published The Wager for an even longer tale of suffering). However, in addition to the reader’s investment into AJ Mann’s story, the book provides a unique portrait of the exact moment the UK/Netherlands facade of colonial power comes crashing down. The various survivors, towns, and cities Mann encounters and moves through are brought to life through his writing, all in chaos, flux, and transition. A constant undercurrent in the story is the role of the colonized Malaysian and Indonesian people, who must answer the question of how much help to give their former rulers, who are becoming starving and powerless in front of their eyes, and how to position themselves for the arrival of the Japanese. Mann doesn’t dwell on this aspect directly, but the variety of responses he receives from these communities shows the difficult position they are in as they try to survive this transition themselves. There is no escape over the horizon option for them, which is important to remember when thinking about conflict in similar waters today and what allies can and cannot be expected to do. Between this and The Wager over the summer, I think I am done with shipwreck stories for a while, but this is a good read for sure.
The Power of Story by Harold R. Johnson, Biblioasis, 2022.
I’m a big fan of storytelling, and I try to approach lectures and presentations from a storytelling viewpoint first - humans seem hardwired to understand stories. It’s one of the reasons I’ve resisted going to full flipped classrooms or moving lectures online. It’s too easy to lose the story in the flipped model. For students trying to understand a new discipline, especially in the entry-level courses I now teach, the story connection is powerful. It provides a scaffold for the students to approach the work of learning. Yet, in all the guidance on teaching or structuring lectures, we rarely dwell on storytelling or explain how to use it effectively. I was excited when I heard about this book, as I hoped it would focus on storytelling from a First Nations oral tradition perspective.
The book was very different than my expectation of it. There is a bit of storytelling approach here, but not much. Harold Johnson was a published author, lawyer, prosecutor, logger, sailor, and member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation. The book’s focus isn’t on storytelling per se but more on the stories we are currently telling ourselves and an alternative view of how we can proceed with our own lives and the organization of society. The book is organized as one long monologue crafted from a discussion around a fire he held one evening. The discussion was prompted by a visit from a group of people who wished to learn more about his storytelling and his view on the importance of the stories we tell ourselves. This was prompted by his previous work, Firewater: How Alcohol Is Killing My People (and Yours), which I have not read. The stories are engaging, tracing history back to the difference in becoming an agricultural-based society vs. a hunter-gatherer society. Not all I agreed with, but I found it entertaining enough for the 187 pages of the book. My dominant conclusion from the book was a deepening of my belief in the power of story, though I am no closer to understanding how to use story better in a classroom setting.