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Kate Epstein on How Twentieth-Century Technology Theft Built the National-Security State" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Welcome to Peoples and Things where we explore human life with technology. I'm Lee Vincel. Ah, we got a good one for you today. A real good one. I mentioned this book in a recent episode with Julian Miland on the role of law in the video game industry, and I've been really looking forward to getting this episode out there. The book we cover today is Kathryn Kate Epstein's analog superpowers, how 20th century technology theft Built the National Security State. I guess that title also suggests that breaking the law is. Has been important for the development of technologies, and I totally believe that is, in fact, true. In Analog Superpowers, Kate examines how both the British Royal Navy and the US Federal government pirated a system of military sighting technologies invented by two British inventors, Arthur Pullen and Harold Isherwood. The inventors sued. Both governments invoked secrecy, citing national security concerns. Kate uses this story to investigate a tension in the heart of liberal capitalist nations, a kind of developmentalism that Kate follows David Edgerton in calling liberal militarism, in which the expansion of state capacity and military power sometimes trump supposed values like individual rights and free markets. One thing I love most about Kate's work is her serious archival digging and her high standards of analytical rigorous. As a young scholar, I was lucky to have mentors and older friends, people like David Hounschel, Stephen Usselman and Arwen Moen, who embodied a spirit of seriousness and gravity about what good evidence and robust logical inferences look like and what kinds of standards of excellence we should expect, most of all from ourselves and also from others. Kate's like that too, and sometimes I almost feel like she's from another age. An Old Soul is one of my favorite two worn out T shirts says. And thank God we have people like that around. Kate also writes some fascinating, probing and challenging essays for outlets like American Purpose, Liberties and Persuasion, including on topics like how our political identities and desires can lead historians and other scholars to bend or even just totally seemingly give up on the truth. I had a lot of fun talking with Kate, who is a peer, but also, as my words just now suggest, someone I look up to in various ways. And I'm excited to bring her to you folks, my brothers and sisters of the pnt. You should be excited too. Hey, y' all, get excited. Kate, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
- [04:36]
C
Thank you so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this.
- [04:38]
B
So Analog Superpowers is a neat book if you're explaining it to a stranger. What do you tell people what it's about? What were you trying to do with it?
- [04:46]
C
I was trying to write a sort of legal and technological biography, I would say, of a sort of cluster of systems, sort of ridiculously arcane on their face certainly today, but actually super important in their own time. These were systems for aiming the big guns of battleships and other other big ships, including battle cruisers in the early 20th century. At their heart were the most sophisticated analog computers of their day, analog as opposed to digital. And what really drew me into the story was knowing was interest in the kind of intellectual property issues that developed between both the British Navy and the American Navy on the one hand, and defense contractors on the other hand, as well as the questions of kind of national security secrecy that came up because this technology was incredibly secret and sensitive for reasons of national security. And also it was a chance to pursue an interest that I hadn't written about much in my first book but had started writing more about since, which is the nature of the sometimes called the hegemonic transition from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana, just kind of Anglo American relations more broadly.
- [06:24]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing you follow again what you rightly described as kind of like today an obscure, forgotten and very niche technology. But you manage to pull these Giant themes out of it in really great ways, including, yeah, this. This transition of power. So how did you. You wrote this earlier book on torpedoes. And so how did you get into this project? Was it knowing about the intellectual property thing and deciding to dive in, or what was the first kind of hook?
- [07:00]
C
It was actually the secrecy hook for me. So it is one of those kind of serendipitous things. I was actually. I was attending a seminar on national security law at the University of Virginia one summer at the recommendation of a historian who was like, you know, this might be useful for you. And one of the assigned readings, which I don't know that I ever would have read otherwise, was a law review article on the history of the state secrets privilege, which is. This privilege hasn't been in the headlines, like, as much lately, but there was a while there, maybe about 10 years ago, where it was in the headlines a lot. It's this privilege that allows that the US Government can assert to withhold evidence from both plaintiffs and a court on the grounds that disclosing it would endanger national security secrets. And the author of the article, who's one of the leading scholars of the state secrets privilege, is a guy down at the University of Texas named Robert Chesney. And there was this, you know, he was just going through kind of the precedents and how the privilege had evolved over time. And I saw this reference in one of the footnotes to this case called Pollan and for Pollan and Isherwood v. Ford Instrument Co. And I was like, what on earth are Arthur Pollan and Harold Isherwood doing in American legal history in the 1930s? Because I had actually learned their names when I was doing my first book. There's this wonderful, difficult, challenging, but really superb book by a historian named John Sumida which had placed Arthur Pollan's and Harold Isherwood's system for aiming the big guns of battleships kind of in political, economic context. And so I knew these names from, like, Pre World War I British naval history, and here they are popping up in 1930s American legal history. So I naively thought that I would write an article.
- [09:16]
B
Yeah, not a deep. Very like, yeah, yeah, I was.
- [09:20]
C
I was. I was tricked, horribly misled. And then it was going to be a book just about, like, the American story, which, you know, as I started digging, I was like, well, this isn't an article, but I think it's a book like, just on kind of the. Kind of the story of pollen and Isherwood's invention in the United States, which I realized actually went back to World War I, but then. And I was just going to like have kind of like deal with the British side early and then move to the American. But then the more I dug into the British side, I was like, oh, I think I need to do this too. And what really fascinated me on the British side was when I started finding that the British government had actually asserted the British equivalent to the state secrets privilege in when Pollan and Isherwood tried to recover compensation for the theft of their system by the British government. And so in Britain it was then known as crown privilege. It's now called the public interest immunity. But very similar issue arising of these two defense contractors argue that the government stole their system and infringed patents. They want to recover compensation. And both governments say so sorry, like you can't have the evidence that you want to try to prove your case. And so that was what it's really for me. Like the. It's the law, the political economy that really kind of suckered me.
- [10:57]
B
Was law a big part of your. Your first book or was it.
- [11:00]
C
It was, yes. But it know if I could. I'm still proud of my first book, but there are some things I would do differently about it now.
- [11:09]
B
Sure.
- [11:10]
C
If I, if I could go back in time in one is that I. I really only kind of realized that legal history was like a thing pretty late in the process of, of researching it. And what, what really kind of like I stumbled bass ackwards into that book, which was my dissertation. I was just like flailing around for a topic. I did not have a burning desire to learn more about torpedoes. And someone was like, hey, you know, haven't seen much on torpedoes. Go figure. And I was like, all right. I was in the military history program, and I was like, this. I had meaning of life questions. And I was like, maybe this is like a manageable vehicle. And so I started doing it and was really not quite sure, like, what my thesis was, but actually what my kind of eureka moment was actually reading these incredibly tedious contract negotiations between the US Navy and its lead torpedo supplier. And I was like, oh my God, they're arguing about intellectual property rights. And then I was like, now this is interesting to me. And so that was. Yeah, so there's a lot of stuff on kind of IP and national security secrecy in the first book. Okay. But I did a lot. I think I didn't like, do enough reading in like the law review literature. And so like, I was much more intentional for the second book than I had been for the first book.
- [12:43]
B
Right on. So I remember bumping into you at the business history conference. I think it was the last one.
- [12:49]
C
Yes, Providence.
- [12:50]
B
Yeah, Providence. Right, Indeed. And we bumped into each other in the elevator and I was like, so where. What conferences are you going to? And this like induced like, I don't know, existential something or other in you because you're like, I don't know. I think about myself. So I wonder like how. Yeah, like in terms of like subfields, like how do you kind of think about your work and who, who are the different audiences you're writing to?
- [13:15]
C
Yeah, I guess I'm sort of a magpie. Like I, I have a foot, I guess in a bunch of different subfields just because the, the kind of historical questions that interest me just don't confine themselves to particular subfields. So I would say yeah, one foot in business history and the bhc, which I don't go to every year. And I actually hadn't been for a while, but I got to that like when it was in Philly back, I don't know, like 2015 or so. And I'd really liked it and I really liked it again in Providence. So that's one, that's one that I go to. I go to Schaeffer more often probably Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Okay. And I've been to SHOT a couple times. I haven't really been involved in the History of Science Society. I did once a kind of presentation that was cross listed between shot nhss. I really like the American Society for Legal History. The couple times that I've been like, kind of like the BHC is just like a lot of smart, interesting people working on questions that I am really fascinated by. And then I don't really go anymore to smh, the Society for Military History.
- [14:47]
B
But that's where you started.
- [14:48]
C
That's where I started, yeah. But I've, I've like, like Mae west said I was. I was Snow White, but I drifted. So. Yeah, I drifted.
- [15:01]
B
What kind of. So where. What are the archives or what are, what are the source base for this book? Like what are your. What was the main research you did for it?
- [15:10]
C
So it was a bunch of different things. I would say. The archives that I probably spent the most time at were the National Archives. Actually the, the downtown D.C. branch. They have most of the, the Navy papers up until World War II. I think it's a similar break for the army, which I didn't do much at all with for this book. But so I Did a lot in kind of the Navy Archives. You have to do this stuff. Not enough naval historians do it. You actually have to go into the Bureau records. You can't stay at the level of the General Board or the Secretary of the Navy because that's not where the real action was happening. I say, I mean, some real action was happening there. But you have to go deeper if you want to understand the evolution of the policy. And I did a lot of time at the pro, the Public Record Office, the British National Archives, which holds all of, you know, Royal Navy's records, the. The Treasury's records, which actually, for complicated bureaucratic reasons, provided the legal forum that Pollan and Isherwood sued in at Foreign Office. Some other stuff. Churchill Archive center in Churchill College England, Cambridge. Excuse me. Which is just a really rich collection of, well, the Pollen papers quite centrally for me, but also British scientists and naval officers, all sorts of good stuff. And then back on the American side, actually, one of the things I did, which I had not done for my first book because it just didn't occur to me was to think there's probably a documentary trail behind a published patent. And indeed there is. And those records are held out at Kansas City, the Kansas City branch of the National Archives. They're amazing. They're incredibly rich. It's not just the patents, the process of negotiating the specifications and the claims, but also actually the interference. Interference files, which are interferences, are basically priority disputes in the American system. And then I also did a lot for this book that I didn't do for the last book with legal files. So like case files, so not just seeing the published court ruling, but also like the motions, the briefs, sometimes transcripts of hearings, which are wonderfully rich. And I also did a lot more with the Department of Justice files this time which are held out at the College park branch of the National Archives.
- [18:02]
B
A lot of digging. I think that just did there.
- [18:06]
C
A lot of digging. That's awesome. Yeah, I like archives. I think they're really important and I really enjoy the process.
- [18:14]
A
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- [18:42]
C
Experian. That's great.
- [18:44]
B
I wanted to ask you about a couple of the kind of big themes before we kind of like get into the heart of it. So one thing that you're doing in your book and you talk about is that there's a kind of, I think you call it a chasm between kind of like IP history and national security history.
- [19:02]
C
Yeah.
- [19:02]
B
And you had this wonderful line that I didn't write down in my notes, but I sent to a friend which was about actually, maybe I have it right here. Yeah. You say this chasm is explained, probably to be explained by the fact that legal historians do not pay much attention to war and national security and that military and diplomatic historians do not pay much attention to law.
- [19:25]
C
Yeah.
- [19:25]
B
And so, yeah, explain, explain this, you know, kind of explain this gap chasm and you know, and what you're trying to do. Do with it in your book.
- [19:34]
C
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I mean, I think that there are exceptions, but I do stand by that as a kind of generalization. And so, yeah, most of the, I think when people write about intellectual property in particular, they just, and there's a really rich literature on the history of intellectual property by legal historians, but they don't really consider like the quite distinctive context of national security secrecy. Yes. And there's one book by a guy named TH o' Dell called Inventions and Official Secrecy on kind of that, that intersection in the uk. There's nothing like that book on the American side. Like there's, there's things that kind of touch on that intersection in the US but no one has kind of like tried to do it systematically on the American side the way o' Dell did. And Odell, it's a really solid book, but it's also, I mean it's a huge topic and it was kind of like the first stabilization and there just hasn't been much follow up. I remember talking with a historian of radio, which is a very good historian, and radio is like a quintessential dual use technology at the turn of the century and the Royal Navy had its fingers like really deep in Marconi and radio technology. And I said, did you find anything about secret patents? And he said, what are secret patents? And secret patents are a special category of patents that were created in Britain that basically allowed the government to withhold publication of a patent on national security grounds. And so that's just like, I mean, to me that's like awesome. Just as for just the questions that it raises, patent literally means open, so how can you keep one secret? This is clearly a rich political, economic vein to go exploring. And so I just don't think most legal historians of IP are thinking about kind of the distinctive context, as I say, of war and national security. Conversely, I think that certainly there are diplomatic historians who think about law and who think in different contexts. I mean, that like, Mary Dujack would probably be like at the top of that list, who's written a lot about kind of law and US foreign relations and not actually really particularly in the context of international law. Although, of course, a number of diplomatic historians have written about international law, but they don't look at IP specifically. And in fact, the only book that I, I can think of that really does is Christopher Beecham's Invented by Law, which. And he's not a foreign relations guy. I mean, he's a legal historian. It's a terrific book. But he's looking at kind of the transatlantic journey of Alexander Graham Bell's patents. And diplomatic historians are not military historians. And military historians, I think, are just incredibly parochial when it comes to thinking about law.
- [23:02]
B
Yeah.
- [23:03]
C
And often, you know, we'll kind of gesture in the direction of broader context, but it's, it's. The gestures are often quite superficial and, you know, you really need to dig deep if you want to be taken seriously. And I don't know that if I am taken seriously, but I did dig deep on the law stuff, so.
- [23:26]
B
Yeah. And so the other thing I wanted to. I think that sets up the other thing I wanted to ask you about, which is this kind of notion of liberal militarism.
- [23:37]
C
Yeah.
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B
And. And you know, it seems like an irony that these very liberal countries like the United States and UK have also have these giant militaries. Maybe it seems like an irony. And yet there's, there is kind of like a fundamental tension around secrecy here. Right. I mean, is that part of what you want to say about liberal militarism?
- [23:57]
C
Yeah. So that concept I owe to David Edgerton, well known historian of technology, and he's written a lot about it. There's actually my favorite statement of his on the subject is from the New Left Review, although he also has. He developed it in England in the Aeroplane and in subsequent work. And it's meant to be kind of jarring. Jarring in the same way that, like the concept of a secret patent is jarring because we just kind of so often imagine liberalism and militarism as kind of, you know, in tension with each other. And he's saying, no, actually these can complement and strengthen each other in some Some interesting ways, and I think he's right. But I also think that, and this is, this is his argument, which I think I've taken developed, is that the liberal form of militarism is quite distinctive. It's, and it's about a switch from manpower intensive war to capital and technology intensive warfare.
- [24:59]
B
Nice.
- [25:00]
C
And one, that's him, where I think I've come in is, is to say that there's a way, and if you're going to do technology intensive warfare in a liberal society that has commitments to liberal norms of property and contract, even if those norms are observed in the breach sometimes, but that they have rhetorical and ideological power, then you're going to want to procure your advanced technology, at least in part from the private sector to avoid statism and a command economy. But when you procure it from the private sector, that's going to raise tensions around secrecy. And if you're investing as the state during the R and D phase, rather than buying a finished product off the shelf, it's also going to raise questions about who owns the intellectual property rights. So what I got interested in is liberal militarism as Edgerton develops it. You know, the principal targets, victims of it are actually overseas. And so like if there's a quintessential example, I think, of liberal militarism for, or expression of liberal militarism for Edgerton, it would be colonial air policing. What I'm saying is actually you're getting liberal militarism actually directed against defense contractors in the kind of metropolis, not just on the periphery. So I think I'm sort of switching the geographical location.
- [26:39]
B
Oh, that's interesting.
- [26:40]
C
And the expression of the liberal militarism.
- [26:43]
B
Yeah, you had this wonderful, I hate to hop ahead to the conclusion, but you had this wonderful line in there that in this book the targets of the secretive national security state were defense contractors and the civil liberty under threat was property rights. And I should have contextualized that by saying we have this whole literature on this earlier period and kind of illiberal movements by the US state. But it's usually like, you know, red scares and you know, and kind of activists being put down. And it's like, well, they're also like taking away the liberties of these like property, intellectual property owners. Right?
- [27:17]
C
Yeah. And I was like, I mean, I'm a little uncomfortable with that. But I also don't know how else to read the evidence. And you know, because I think for, you know, the left, broadly speaking, you know, property rights are not seen as a civil liberty in the way that freedom of speech, freedom of assembly are seen as civil liberties even though they once were kind of in the liberal tradition. And there are good reasons for that. Yeah, that kind of shift. That shift.
- [27:52]
B
Yeah.
- [27:52]
C
But at the same time I do think that there's also a reason to kind of restore that older continuum and to think about actually property as a civil liberty. And you know, I think there's also good reasons to think about defense contractors is not particularly sympathetic.
- [28:12]
B
Right. That's what you say there. I was going to bring that up. That was great.
- [28:14]
C
Yeah, particularly. And particularly when we're thinking about, you know, like Raytheon and Lockheed, like, you know, they'll be okay. You know, the, you know, the military industrial complex has not been horrible for them, but there are actually a lot of like smaller and medium sized firms that are involved. And the military industrial complex can actually be pretty horrible if you're, and it's, you know, what happened to Powell and Isherwood, you know, they, they, they got royally screwed in my reading at least, and it was really quite traumatizing for them.
- [28:56]
B
Totally. So let's go there now. I mean, before we kind of hop into the narrative, I want you to kind of like you had some great stuff in the early parts of the introduction, like setting up for readers who don't know military history or geopolitical history of the era. You're writing about how important battleships were.
- [29:13]
C
Yeah, right.
- [29:14]
B
Like, so tell us a bit for a second about battleships and like the place they have in the world during that period.
- [29:19]
C
Sure. So they were kind of where it's at, you know, before, before aircraft carriers and intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombing kind of long range bombers. You know, they're how you kind of projected combat power on and across the world's oceans. They had enormous symbolic power. And so like the illustration I give is, you know, Roosevelt moves the, the US Fleet from the west coast to Pearl harbor to send a message to Japan. Like that, that's the communications tool, so to speak. And they're just kind of, I mean they're, they're technological marvels. As I say, I'm, I did not get into this because I'm kind of a gearhead, which is why, why some people are drawn to naval technology and.
- [30:15]
B
That or trains or whatever. Right.
- [30:17]
C
But it is hard to not develop a kind of like, not admiration but just an appreciation of just like how phenomenally complex these things were while still keeping in mind that they, you know, were dealers of death. But, but you know, Phenomenally complex, very expensive. So they cost, you know, a British like dreadnought, the famous British battleship. I should know this figure off the very top of my head. I want to say like 1.6, 1.7 million pounds, which in dollar terms you multiply that by five at the exchange rate of the day. So you add this up and like a single battleship is like an appreciable percentage of, of a national budget. And so there's also, they represent huge opportunity costs at a time when there's rising demands for, for what we would now call welfare spending. So these are really. Yeah, I mean really quite central or ought to be quite central I think, to any study of kind of national political economy. Yeah.
- [31:25]
B
And there was this central technology at this point of transition that we referred to earlier. Right. This kind of like handoff between the UK and the US in terms of national dominance.
- [31:39]
C
Yeah, they were, I mean they had kind of battleships, you know, kind of took a while to emerge in their, what we would think of as almost like their classical kind of late 19th century, early 20th century form. But, but, yeah, but they were battleships and actually battle cruisers. The, the vessel behind me is HMS Invincible, which was a battle cruiser. Yeah, they were, I mean, the premier kind of asset, I guess you could say, within a navy. They were under threat from all sorts of directions, not least the advent of the torpedo, but they still kind of reigned supreme, I think. And funnily enough, I actually think they reigned more supreme in the public imagination than they did in the imagination of many naval officers who kind of understood that there were some real challenges to the supremacy of the battleship. But. Yeah, but hugely important and at their primary weapon system was their guns. And that's where my guys come from. Yeah.
- [32:55]
B
Well, you're doing great. This is beautiful. So I mean, you start the book with a really nice description of kind of like setting up what it would be like to fire a six inch gun from. From a beach.
- [33:07]
C
Yes.
- [33:07]
B
You know, and how we have to. You'd obviously have to lead the ship that you're. And you even set up a nice high school math problem people can solve. But then you like say like, all right, well now let's put this gun on a ship.
- [33:21]
C
Yes.
- [33:22]
B
That's moving all over. This is not a simple, you know, problem of how to aim the gun in such a dynamic environment where both ships are moving all over the place.
- [33:34]
C
Exactly.
- [33:35]
B
So set us up then. Like your guys are Arthur Pollan and Harold Isherwood. What do they do to try to deal with this issue?
- [33:43]
C
Yeah, so they also kind of, I think, got sucked into it by accident and didn't realize what they were getting themselves into. Pollan had relatives, they were both civilians, but Pollan had relatives in the Royal Navy. And he got interested in what becomes known as the fire control question, the question of how you control the fire of naval guns. Round about 1900, and Isherwood was an engineer at the company that Pollan served as the managing director of, the Linotype Company. And Linotype is actually a really interesting story in and of itself, but it was for printing newspapers and very complex, very precisely engineered machinery in its own right. And Linotype also produced scientific instruments as well. So they had actually this kind of fortuitous placement in a way. If you're going to get interested in naval gunnery, that's actually not a bad place to be at when you get interested in it. And they started Pollen, I suppose, in some sense, had the advantage of not being burdened by knowledge of what anyone else was thinking about it. So he sort of decided to start from scratch, which to him meant, you know, let me try to understand the mathematics of the relative movement of two ships. And he brought in Isherwood at a very early stage to start studying this problem. Pollan was not sort of technologically inept at all, but Isherwood was the engineer and designer.
- [35:34]
B
Were they doing this in their free time or was it.
- [35:36]
C
Yeah, yeah, doing it in their free time. They don't have a firm. This is just like it's a side gig, as it were. And what they realized from a very early stage in studying the mathematics of relative movement is that this is a calculus problem, not an algebra problem. And the reason they arrive at that conclusion and the reason it matters is because it makes the mechanics of working out a system to solve these problems a heck of a lot more complicated. But so basically, what they realize is, and here's a bit of technical stuff, but not much I hope, is that ships are moving relative to each other at a certain range, which is the distance in a certain bearing, which is the angle between them and those ranges. And bearings are changing at a rate in the same way that a car is moving at a rate or a speed. And if those rates were constant, that would be lovely because then you'd be dealing with the equivalent of speed, and you would basically just be able to use multiplication and division. But what Poll and Anisha would realize very early on is that those rates are changing from instant to instant. So it's like, I always thought of it like I'm not like math is not intuitive for me. And so I actually thought back to high school physics. And to me, it was like the difference between speed and acceleration that you learn about in physics class. And the reason you take physics at the same time as calculus is because acceleration is differentials and integrals and not calculus. So what Pollan and Isherwood realize is that from a very early stage, they're going to need some sort of instrument that can solve for instantaneous and infinite time differentials and integrals, not just essentially a straightforward clock which can run, basically change the range or the bearing by a constant amount per second. So that becomes the kind of the task that they set themselves is to build some sort of system that can do this. And they also realized very early on that they want a degree of accuracy and precision that no one else was thinking in terms of at the time. Naval officers were thinking about fire control, but they were generally quite happy to make do with sort of rough and ready methods to engage in what we would now call data smoothing. So basically to pretend that instantaneous change wasn't really instantaneous, but Polynous would say, no, that's not going to work. To hit under challenge the challenging conditions of relative movement that are likely to arise in combat, you're going to need maximum precision. That gets them interested actually in gyroscopes because they want to work with bearing readings that have not been corrupted by yaw, which is the kind of corkscrewing motion that a ship makes as it moves through the water.
- [38:47]
B
I hadn't read about Sperry in a long time. Like Thomas Hughes, his famous.
- [38:52]
C
Exactly.
- [38:53]
B
Technology.
- [38:54]
C
Exactly.
- [38:55]
B
I think it's his first book.
- [38:56]
C
I think it might. I think that's right, too. Yeah. And, yeah, so this is gyroscope stuff also Donald McKenzie's inventing accuracy.
- [39:05]
B
Yeah.
- [39:06]
C
And that was actually really helpful for me is to. Because mackenzie develops this concept he calls gyro culture, and that's really. Is kind of pollen and Isherwood are very like. Lots of people are getting interested in gyroscopes in the early 20th century, and they're like right at the cutting edge of that. And then they also get really interested, actually in telecom because they realize you're going to need very quick transmission of data, both kind of to the system in the bowels of the ship that's going to perform the calculations and then back out to the turrets and the guns. So there's actually an electrical engineering kind of component to what they're doing, and not just a mechanical engineering component.
- [39:51]
B
So they end up creating what, in retrospect, we would call an analog computer. Right. Can you tell us a bit about this? Like what. What is this thing?
- [40:00]
C
So this thing is. It's actually. There's a picture of the kind of pirated American version of it in the bottom cover of my. The bottom image on the COVID of my book. But it was a system basic. It was a computer that solved calculus problems, that solved the equations governing the relative movement of two ships. At its heart was something called by various names, a mechanical integrator, a disk and roller drive, a variable speed drive. These were well known in the art. There's some that are regarded by computer historians as kind of landmarks in computer history. One was Lord Kelvin's harmonic analyzer for predicting the tides. Another was Vannevar Bush's and Harold Hazen's differential analyzer at MIT in the late 1920s. And basically the way they work is you put a. A ball in contact with a rotating disk and then you have the ball drive an output shaft. And because the ball is actually, or any point is moving faster, the farther away it gets from the center of a rotating disk, you can actually mimic a changing rate. Okay. Basically you create. The reason they're called analog computers is because they create an analog. A mechanical analog. In this case, you can also have electrical analog computers, a mechanical analog of the changing rate. And so Isherwood interconnected four of these integrators. He actually overhauled Kelvin's design. Kelvin was on the board of the Linotype company. Okay. So they knew him. But Kelvin's design suffered from a problem known as slippage. I don't. This may be too much detail, but it was basically, the ball would jump from point to point on the surface of the disk when you wanted it to kind of roll perfectly. And Isherwood found a way to basically minimize that problem, and he did it. And this was quite a feat without the use of servo mechanisms, actually. So, yeah, it's kind of like imagine. I always think it's a very sort of Victorian steampunk. Yeah, yeah, totally vibe to it.
- [42:35]
B
There are several steampunk fans who are listeners of this. So they're in heaven right now.
- [42:41]
C
So, yeah, so. And it kind of, from the outside, it looks like this really goofy, like sort of a strange oven. It's just like this. It's literally a black box. So I say in the book, it's actually looks like a black box. It is a black box. And actually Pollan's initial Wood's ambition was to create A black box technology that could function without human intervention and without reference to the outside world. Once it had been initialized with data. So it was actually regarded in its day as a form of what we would now call artificial intelligence. One observer refers to it as a machine that uses intelligence. Because once you initialize it with data about range and bearing and courses and speed, it can go on spitting out predictions of the target's future location without being adjusted.
- [43:35]
B
That's amazing. So these guys got this cool system they built.
- [43:40]
C
Yes.
- [43:40]
B
Now they want to sell this thing.
- [43:42]
C
Yes.
- [43:43]
B
And that turns out not to be so easy. Right.
- [43:46]
C
It turns out not to be so easy. So one that I sort of. In my sort of technical description of what they did there, I kind of compressed the actual historical development of their system. So they call it a system, which is actually quite a. Is almost a term of art for them. And what they mean by that is that there's a combination of both mental labor and material embodiment. And to me, it's actually very similar to what we would now call the distinction between software and hardware.
- [44:22]
B
This comes up in the book. It's really fascinating that they're already thinking basically in that way, and the software part of it is as important to use it.
- [44:31]
C
Exactly. And they actually have the software part, which is basically. It's algorithms. It's the equations that govern relative movement. They have that pretty well figured out by themselves. They've recognized the need for a gyroscope. They've recognized the need for something that can cope with instantaneous and infinite time, not just finite periods of time, basically, before they approach the Royal Navy, which is in 1904. But they have no way of actually building a physical embodiment of these ideas without financial assistance from the Admiralty, the department that controls it. So they kind of face a conundrum about what to do. And I go through kind of what the legal landscape would have looked like to them. The problem with the patent system is that it favors basically the hardware aspect of invention and not the software aspect. So they're worried that they won't be able to take out a patent. That kind of covers what they regard as the true scope of their invention, which is mental as well as material. There are these things called pioneer patents. Beecham's book, Invented by Law is very good on these. Pioneer patents were also sometimes known as master patents. They allowed people basically to cover the mental as well as the material. The problem is, as Christine McLeod has shown, you had to carry out, basically a publicity campaign to establish yourself as A heroic inventor in the minds of the public and the Patent office and a publicity campaign is not compatible with national security secrecy.
- [46:30]
B
Great.
- [46:31]
C
So then there's also. They can't get a Pioneer patent. They could take out secret patents, but secret patents don't allow you pioneer scope. So secret patents cover the national security secrecy part, but not the true scope of the invention part from their perspective. So what they settle on, which has its own risks, but they think it's kind of the least bad option under the circumstances, is what we would now call a development contract. But there wasn't any such thing at the time. The British government was accustomed, if it was dealing with the private sector rather than developing things in public arsenals, it was accustomed to buying a finished product off the shelf. It was not accustomed to being approached, being basically told, hey, we've got a cool idea, but we need some help in the R and D space.
- [47:23]
B
We need capital.
- [47:25]
C
Exactly. And so what Pollan and Isherwood did, and I went through the archives on this very carefully, is to basically negotiate with the Admiralty a definition of their invention which is basically what they would have gotten or is comparable to what they would have gotten in a Pioneer patent, which is to say these guys have done more then just.
- [47:54]
B
The core.
- [47:54]
C
Of their invention is not going to be any particular reduction to physical form. It's their kind of. It's the algorithms, it's the software, it's the way they've conceptualized the problem and pointed the way towards a variety of possible physical reductions to material form. And so that gets written into this contract that they negotiate in 1906. And for complicated reasons I get into, in the book end up signing in 1908.
- [48:23]
B
And so then you have this character Frederick Dreyer show up this naval officer who kind of creates a knockoff that. Yes, yeah. A piece of piracy that takes the idea. And I mean, one of the fascinating things, not only in that when you first introduced Dreier, but kind of follows through the book is it's liberal militarism, it's liberal capitalist economies, but these are also navies that are very. Have their own traditions and like. And the fact that he. Dreier is a kind of insider.
- [48:59]
C
Exactly.
- [49:00]
B
Is part of what creates a problem for them. So I wanted to hear, you know, tell us a bit about Dreyer's story and the knockoff. I also, I mean, you talk about rigor throughout the book, but this is one of the chapters where you're like, you need methodological rigor to like to spell this out. So what was particularly required rigor to kind of get at this story.
- [49:21]
C
So Dreyer first and then to the rigor. So Dreier. Dreier's a complicated guy. He was a very able gunnery officer in terms of what was required to be a good gunnery officer in the Royal Navy. Not, not an idiot at all. And essentially operating within the tinkering tradition, I would call it, within the Royal Navy, which was quite a distinguished tradition. They got lots of good kind of incremental improvements to technology from officers who had kind of a technical bent to them. And you got to remember these guys are like, the Royal Navy is like hyper technological. I mean, it's got like, when you think of all the technology that's on a ship, like, it is super technological. And so Dreyer kind of starts tinkering with fire control, but without going like too much into the blow by blow, he gets kind of. He gets interested in the question and pulled into. But also probably pushing himself into basically developing a kind of on the fly system to compete with Pollan's and Isherwoods in trials at the end of 1907 and early 1908. And Pollan immediately insinuates that something untoward has occurred, that his ideas have been pass to Dreyer in some way, which indeed they had been. And this basically violates the contract which says it's his ideas are part of his invention, not just the reduction to material form. And I think Dreier, who up and my read of him is that up until that point, like, he had never had delusions of grandeur. He was like, content to work within this tinkering tradition. But once pollen starts making insinuations, he. His hackles get up, he digs his.
- [51:32]
B
Heels, honor kicks in.
- [51:34]
C
Yeah, he gets really defensive.
- [51:36]
B
Yeah.
- [51:37]
C
And so far, I mean, I read him as, and this is attested to by people who served with him, whose descriptions survive, that he was not a man who liked having his intelligence or competence question.
- [51:53]
B
Well, I mean, it really is an honor tradition in the naval circles. Right. I mean, earlier, and I don't know when duel starts, but, like. Right.
- [52:01]
C
It is an honor tradition. But that said, like, there's a lot of officers who are like, really jazzed about what Pollan and Isherwood are doing and, like, have no problem with the concept that, like, the Navy might have something to learn from civilians.
- [52:13]
B
Yeah, yeah. No, I just meant him being questioned in that way.
- [52:16]
C
Yeah, absolutely. But it's more. It's wrapped up even more in that honor tradition is what I'm saying. For him and for some others who think like him is like civilians, like what do they know? They're a bunch of mercenaries, basically. Right, exactly. We're noble public servants. And so I think that what the uniform represents, both as a symbol of honor, but also in Dreiser's mind conferring some sort of expertise that no civilian could ever have, is not true of every naval officer, but is certainly true of Dreier. Absolutely. So anyway, to sort of fast forward, Dreier, as you say, ends up producing a knockoff system in cooperation with an engineer named Keith Elphinston who worked for a British instruments firm named Elliot Brothers Elliot's. And Dreier denied any credit to Elphinston, just as he denied any credit to Pollan and Isherwood. And Dreiser's version of the story became not that he had pirated Pollan and Isherwood, but that actually Pollan and Isherwood had pirated him. And that becomes the kind of, because of his insider position, he's very good at ingratiating himself with powerful patrons. I imagine him as a guy who kissed up and kicked down that, that becomes kind of the official institutional memory of the Royal Navy. And Pollan's left kind of on the outside pounding the doors saying, hang on so, and then that side with the kind of rigor question is that you have essentially two competing historical narratives, each self interested. And so the question becomes, you know, does one of these have more evidence to support it than the other? And my judgment was that yes, one of them does. That was also the judgment of an expert independent commission that reviewed some, although not all of the evidence. I saw much more than they saw.
- [54:43]
B
That's great. I mean, I think that, you know, this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently is just like how people's self interested stories tend to be kind of ideological in nature. Right. And just in expressing the interests of where they sit in the world. It's not like radical to say that, right?
- [55:00]
C
No, no, yeah, yeah, no, I agree. It's kind of like, I mean, everyone's got an angle, I've got an angle, you know, totally. But, but then I, I also, I, I'm, I, I reject the notion at the same time that like we can't in some way distinguish between things that are closer or farther from being supported by evidence. Call it truth, if you will. And, and I do think that it's, I, I, you know, I don't, if you, if you take that perspective to its logical conclusion, then, you know, the book I've just written, the books that any historian writes are just kind of ideological in nature and, you know, don't correspond to any sort of evidentiary base outside the historian's own mind. And I think they do.
- [55:54]
B
No, I think it's really important, actually. I mean, I've been dealing with writing about the 90s, and you can just see the kind of gap between what people in the Clinton administration are saying, for instance, and what it actually looks like is happening in the economy that you can get at from all these other things, sources. And it's like you. It is our job to, like, point this out, folks. Like, we, you know, I think so. I mean, that's at least how I understand my job.
- [56:16]
C
Yeah. And it's. I don't know. And you can think about it. There's this. I'm actually. There's a line that Virginia Woolf has, which I'm actually misquoting, although I actually do think my misquote is better than her original, which is wordier. That truth is made up of a variety of error. And so you really want to, like, study as many of the angles as you can. But, like, I also have my own authority and judgment as a historian, for better or worse. And I think some of these angles comport better with some sort of externality than others do.
- [56:53]
B
Right on. And so bring the U.S. get the U.S. i mean, I want to say. I say this with not too many books on this podcast, but this is an incredibly deep and rich book, and so there's no way in hell we're going to cover all of it. And, you know, it's like, I'll bring in my friend and mentor Steve Usselman at some point to talk about his book. There's no way you're going to cover regulating railroad innovation in a single interview. Right.
- [57:16]
C
Yes, that is.
- [57:17]
B
But, like, bring the US So. I mean, get the US Involved. They end up being pirates, too.
- [57:22]
C
Indeed they do.
- [57:23]
B
Yeah.
- [57:24]
C
So, yeah, One of the kind of fascinating parallels to me is that they pirate pollen and Isherwood in almost exactly the same way as Dreier did in almost exactly the same stages. So part of what was so distinctive about pollen's and Usher Wood's approach, as I explain in the book, was that they took bearings and bearing rate as seriously as they took ranges and range rates. And you might look at that and think, well, that's obvious. That's the math. They're interdependent. But actually, first Dreier and then the American Navy thought that you could basically just Go straight to ranges and range rate without taking seriously the bearings and bearing rate, and both of them come up. Both Dreyer and the American Navy first come up with systems that don't account for the bearing rate, and then they realize, oh, no, we actually do need to account for the bearing rate the way Pollen and Nisher would have. And it's the bearing rate, essentially. To actually achieve artificial intelligence, you have to put. Make them mechanically interdependent. And both Dreier and the American Navy, as their second step, figure out how to make them mechanically interdependent so that the kind of. There's kind of multiple rounds of knowledge transfer from pollen and Isherwood to the. To the American Navy. I trace them. But the upshot was that the US Navy did a much more competent job of pirating pollen initiat wood than Dreyer had done. Dreyer. It was kind of like, it's like a, you know, it's like a cheap knockoff purse. Like, it doesn't look like the real thing, right, but it kind of like has some of the same functionality on the surface, but it actually, when you dig down, it doesn't. The American system. The kind of lead pirate on the technical side was a guy named Hannibal Ford, not to be confused with Henry Ford. And he was a go back to Sperry. He started out as a Sperry employee and then spun off, pun intended, his own firm. And he was, by kind of all accounts, a very talented engineer. But his secret sauce was that he had Pollen's initial previous intellectual labor. And so his design. I went through it quite carefully, you know, whether it would actually count as patent infringement, I don't know. It's. That's a kind of. That's a legal judgment, I think there's no question but that he took design inspiration from the way Isherwood had overhauled the Kelvin design. So, yeah, so that's kind of the American story. And it's a. It's kind of. In many ways, it's a variation on an old story, which is that you're an inventor, you think you've got something cool, but you need to disclose it in order to get anyone to pay you for it. And that moment of disclosure always opens up the risk of being pirated. And that's like Mario Biagioli has written about this wonderful historian of IP and science. And. And that's exactly what happens to Pollan and Isherwood. It's like they got to show the Navy something to get the money, and the American Navy takes what they are shown and basically uses it to pirate.
- [61:00]
B
So one of the stories you tell over a couple different chapters in the book is kind of how US IP and secrecy systems change over time. And one of the first chapters you kind of deal with this. You talk about how there were kind of barriers to the US importing other naval technologies. Like this is a general problem. And you had this wonderful sentence, you say, in effect, the United States inability to import British legal technology blocked its import of British naval technology. So just spell that out for us. What did the British have that the US didn't at that time that would have allowed, maybe allowed technology transfer to go more smoothly?
- [61:41]
C
So in a phrase, what the British had that the U.S. didn't have was secret patents. So during World War I, after the U.S. eventually entered the war in 1918, they were, the Americans were very keen to kind of get their hands on like whatever British naval technology they could. The British were ahead of the US Navy technologically as a general rule. The British were in kind of a dilemma. They wanted the Americans to have some stuff insofar as it would help the British win the war, but they also, everyone has one eye on the post war world and they don't want the Americans to get so much that it actually erodes Britain's position. So one of the things that they kind of within that dilemma, one of the other things they're thinking is that they also want to make sure that the Americans keep secret the things that the British think should be kept secret. And that's the kind of the interest of the British government. Meanwhile, British firms want to make sure that they have secure patent protection in the United States for any technology that's approved for transfer to the US and so here you have this tension between firms that are capitalists that want to make money and for that they want to make sure they've secure IP protection in the US and the British government, which doesn't care, at least in the first instance, about the same capitalist motives, but really wants to make sure that the stuff it gives to the United States doesn't go to Germany. So they have an interest in national security secrecy. So the problem becomes that, well, in Britain this would be easy to solve, relatively easy to solve, take out a secret patent. The US patent system doesn't have secret patents. And the reason it doesn't have secret patents is because the patent laws are a little bit different than they are in the uk. And there is a provision. Well, for one thing, there's a provision in American patent law that says as soon as A patent is issued, it has to be published. That provision is in British patent law. And the other provision in American patent law is this system of interferences, which are quite technical, but basically are priority disputes. So basically, the patent laws say that the U.S. patent Office, whenever it gets a new patent application, has to search the prior art. And if there's a conflict over priority between the new patent application and another pending application or already issued patent, declare an interference. And in the interference, the laws say the interference is governed basically by liberal norms of due process. Both sides get to see each other's stuff. And so that is totally incompatible with national security secrecy. Basically, if an interference is declared on a patent application that the US Navy would like to have kept secret, there's nothing it can do to stop the other party from seeing the file. And the US Navy, and particularly the Bureau of Ordinance, which handled fire control and guns, they're constantly tearing their hair out saying, we gotta have secret patents, we gotta have secret patents. But they can't. These are the shoals of US Patent law, which secret patents founder on. And the British say, well, that's a problem. You can't guarantee the secrecy of the stuff we give you while also satisfying the IP demands of the firms that have built this technology. The most important one that I look at is Vickers, which is really big British armaments firm. And so that's what I mean when I say it's really. They can't. The US Navy would love to get more British naval technology, but it can't adapt its own legal technology, its patent system, to provide the security that the British government is looking for. And so that's what I meant when I wrote that sentence. And what ends up kind of breaking the log jam in the case of this one piece of Vickers technology that the US Navy really wanted was, like, absurd. It's that the Royal Navy is like, hey, this Ford fire control computer seems really cool. And they don't realize that this Ford fire control computer is actually pirated from the Polynusha Wood fire control computer, which they kick to the curb in favor of dryers.
- [66:37]
B
So, yeah, no, there's some delicious ironies in this book, for sure.
- [66:40]
C
It's really dumb, but there you have it.
- [66:44]
B
So I think that one of the things I want to kind of direct listeners to is I think that one of the moves you make throughout the book is that you're taking these things that we kind of know of as post World War II, Cold War history and shifting them earlier. Right? I mean, so you have a couple chapters about the military industrial complex. And you're showing like that thing is already well underway in this kind of interwar period. Even the whole literature on secrecy. I mean, you can think of Alex Wellerstein and others who've written about Cold War secrecy and nuke stuff. You're saying, as we've already been talking about, there's all these secrecy issues in these earlier periods. Yeah, but why don't. I mean, just to kind of give this kind of discussion a kind of cap. Why don't we talk about the World War II story briefly and kind of like US reform. So there's like a. There's a state secret reform that goes on right. During this.
- [67:41]
C
Like, I don't know if I would call it a reform. It's really that they try. Well, continue the question. I'm not sure what you meant by reform.
- [67:49]
B
Yeah, well, I mean, there's a. There's a change and. Yeah, I mean, I wanted to hear about that. There's also this continuation of British military knowledge, like, coming over and there's this papering over of the piracy of Pollan and Isherwood earlier. So there's a lot going on in this kind of World War II moment. So why don't we kind of like.
- [68:11]
C
Yeah, yeah. So there's a couple of things that I try to unpack there. One is to show that, as you kind of alluded to just a moment ago, that kind of US Nuclear secrecy has this. It doesn't like spring forth fully formed like Athena from zeus's head in 1940s. In the 1940s, it actually is built on precedents and in some cases, like the same people, most importantly this guy Robert Lavender, who basically cut their teeth on naval contracting cases. And so one of the things that I think is interesting about kind of shifting the focus from the nuclear moment to kind of the naval moment, the long naval moment we might call it, is that the naval stuff makes the political economic dimensions of government secrecy much clearer, I think.
- [69:10]
B
Yes. Nice.
- [69:11]
C
Than nuclear secrecy does, because the government is. It's all. It's the game, it's the dominant force in nuclear power, whereas in naval there's this really rich ecosystem of contractors. Now, that's complicated by the fact, as you mentioned, Alex Wellerstein, he has this wonderful article called Patenting the Bomb about the use of secret patents on the atomic bomb, some of which were held by firms that the government contracted with. And he shows this was actually quite important to Vannevar Bush, the head of osrd, to have some sort of private sector involvement in the bomb project. But the kind of, the question of ownership doesn't come up that way in the, it doesn't come up in the nuclear context until really Wellerstein shows in his book Restricted data until the 60s and 70s, when you get kind of the diffusion of centrifuge technology. But the guy who actually was the chief legal advisor to the Manhattan Project under OSRD was this guy Robert Lavender, I mentioned, and Lavender was a naval officer and he was actually the Navy's chief patent expert by the 1930s. And he's the guy who the Navy sends to the critical hearing when Poll and initiatives sue the US government for patent infringement in the 1930s. And he lays out basically what is going to become the state secrets privilege in a 1953 Supreme Court ruling. But this is, I call it the proto state secrets privilege because it hasn't been formally established yet. But that's what Lavender's arguing. And so I argue in the book is that you can find, I mean, I document a few instances of what I say is naval information, naval knowledge as being treated as born secret. And that's born secret is a concept from nuclear secrecy. It's the language applied to the Atomic Energy act of 1946. Wellerstein's book is kind of the classic statement on this and what it means. But I'm saying there's earlier examples of this in the naval context. And when I'm, when I say that the political, economic dimensions are much clearer in that context. What I mean is the tension between the private property claims of defense contractors and the secrecy claims of the government.
- [71:50]
B
Right. So that's one great. Yeah, yeah.
- [71:52]
C
That's one thing I was trying to move earlier. And then as you say, also in the final chapter of the book, I talk about this second round of technology transfer from Britain to the US in a wartime context, the so called Tizard mission.
- [72:10]
B
Well, I think we can kind of, if we go to the conclusion. I wanted to talk to you about like, kind of like how, you know, like what are the kind of the take home messages. And one of the ones is one of the big messages I think is related to this second technology transfer moment. Well, both of them, which is just that the US isn't a kind of catch up development.
- [72:30]
C
Yes.
- [72:31]
B
Is it a kind of catch up development story as you tell it? Right. I mean, to me it is.
- [72:36]
C
Yeah. And I know I'm gonna get pushback on that argument, but I think it's right.
- [72:43]
B
Yeah.
- [72:44]
C
I think that, I think it's actually like pretty well I don't think I raise any hackles by saying the US is still a developing country.
- [72:53]
B
Right, right.
- [72:54]
C
I don't think that's at all new. In a way that's like Frederick Jackson Turner. That's like not a new argument. But there have been people who have said to me the most important and kind of power and just incredibly deeply researched is Richard Franklin Benzel's work on kind of the political economy of American industrialization. And he's I think, fantastic. I'm like, look, it's not an industrially mature power, it is industrializing. And I've written about this in other contexts as well that like the US is still hugely dependent on British capital up until World War I, into World War I. It is not suddenly, it has not displaced London until 1916. But I think the part that people seem to be uncomfortable with is saying that it's catch up development, that there's like a geopolitical dimension to the development. And I guess I find their surprise a little surprising just in the sense that there's usually the geopolitical dimension to development. And so like I'm not sure why we should see like Japan and Germany and Russia as developing and developing clearly with an eye on geopolitics in the late 19th century and not see the US as having an eye on geopolitics.
- [74:28]
B
Right. And imitating British power in a number of ways. The naval thing is one. The naval, Yeah.
- [74:37]
C
I mean I have an article as well in Modern American History saying it's also the merchant marine, it's financial services.
- [74:44]
B
Yeah. Mary Bridges.
- [74:45]
C
Mary Bridges, I know you just had on. Yes, o' Mary, I know. Has done a lot of work on the kind of the flow of almost like British financial technological knowledge to the United States. And so one of the things I. So I'm trying to push the nuclear secrecy story farther back, but I'm trying to push the special relationship story farther forward.
- [75:10]
B
I see. Yeah.
- [75:11]
C
In a way. And to say like the special relationship, like to the extent that it exists, it's a World War II story. And so I've pushed back in the book and in other writing against the notion of a kind of rapprochement between the US and the UK beginning in the late 19th century, which I don't want to dismiss out of hand, there is a warming, but it's really important not to lose sight of the very intense continuing elements of rivalry in that relationship. And I think the way the rapprochement story gets told tends to lose sight of the continuing dimensions of rivalry that's great.
- [75:55]
B
And I mean, the other thing. Yeah, other things you see in the conclusion that you kind of like. I mean, we could talk about who's afraid of history, but maybe we can say that.
- [76:04]
C
Yeah, yeah, sure. Happy to.
- [76:06]
B
Yeah. I mean, you end the book with this wonderful sentence. Institutions and nations that decline to engage in rigorous scrutiny of themselves and the world are preparing for failure. That's like a big mic drop line if I've ever seen one. Yeah. So what led you to end the book that way?
- [76:24]
C
A few different things. Gosh, where to begin? It's partly about what I. Partly just about the history that I've related in the book. In some ways, although I think the Americans were kind of ruthless, thieving bastards in exactly the way that we accuse the Chinese of being ruthless, thieving bastards. And, you know, I don't want to say that that's a virtue necessarily, but I will say I do think that the American naval officers who were stealing whatever they could get their hands on were doing it with the best interests of the service in mind. Like, they really just wanted to get the best stuff and they didn't care about foreign intellectual property rights and going after it. Whereas I think the Royal Navy clearly had motives other than the best interests of the service that complicated its acquisition of fire control technology. And specifically I. The decision making and Dreier's role in it was just deeply corrupt. Like, I don't know what other words you would use for it. I mean, there was.
- [77:43]
B
There was a kind of not invented here thing to like the. Do you know that phrase?
- [77:48]
C
Well, I know the phrase, but what would be the application in this?
- [77:52]
B
Well, just the dryer is here and one of ours.
- [77:55]
C
Oh, yes, exactly. Exactly, yes. We're not comfortable with these two civilians.
- [78:02]
B
Who have the best shit.
- [78:03]
C
Who. Who have the best shit. Exactly. And so, in a sense, it's really functioning. The Admiralty is functioning like a cartel and quite a predatory cartel. And. And so I think that. I think that in that sense, actually, the US Navy's thievery compares favorably to the Royal Navy's thievery. And I also think that you can find parallels to that in kind of the state of military history today. I think the US Navy, from my perspective, is not interested in getting the finest historical scholarship that it can. The British Navy is not interested in getting the finest scholarship that it can. There are basically military history cartels in both countries, and I am, I think it's fair to say, substantially Persona non grata in those cartels, I think, because I'm fundamentally perceived as a threat. And I think I've got better shit.
- [79:16]
B
Yeah.
- [79:19]
C
I think the research in this book is orders of magnitude larger than a lot of previous writing. Not all previous writing. I mean, I have tremendous admiration for John Sumita's research. There's a historian named Nicholas Lambert for whose research I have tremendous respect, and there are a couple of others, but by and large, I do not think the standard is as high as it should be. And I guess the. So that's, that's partly the context I'm thinking. I was thinking about when I wrote those lines, but then also I, I'm kind of, I think part of what the other thing that was going on is, you know, to switch my bird analogies from Magpie. I mean, like, I'm. I'm kind of an odd duck between various worlds, I guess, in that, you know, I do come out of military history. I was in the program at Ohio State. Jeffrey Parker was my supervisor. Wonderful supervisor. I did the grand strategy seminar at Yale, the infamous grand strategy seminar. So I'm a native to that world. And I do think that the study of hard power and military history is incredibly important. I do think that there is a spurious ideological prejudice against it in the academy, and I don't think that prejudice is defensible. That said, I also have no patience for military historians using that prejudice as an excuse to avoid looking in the mirror. And so there's a whole genre of writings about, you know, we gotta bring war back into the academy.
- [80:59]
B
Oh, yeah, sure, yeah.
- [81:00]
C
And yeah, I mean, in principle I agree, but not at the cost of quality control. Like, I just. There's got to be some sort of standard, you know, that isn't about politics. It's, you know, is the, is the, is the work good or not according to scholarly standards. And you know, I don't, I don't like it when work with left wing politics I don't think is up to snuff. And I, you know, military history is coded and somewhat problematic, but I think the understandable ways is kind of small conservative or right wings. And I don't like shitty military history either.
- [81:39]
B
Right, right. You know, well, you had a nice essay. I mean, I'll point listeners to. Called Historians Killing History. Or maybe it was another one that I read this morning. Yeah, it was another one that I read. I can't remember the title of it, but you were talking about like both 1619 and the 1776 Commission.
- [81:58]
C
Oh, yeah, that was one called the Purple Pill.
- [82:01]
B
Yeah, that's right.
- [82:01]
C
That's the essay.
- [82:02]
B
Yeah, exactly.
- [82:03]
C
Yeah.
- [82:03]
B
Yeah. And I think that was just a nice example of, like, two different, you know, kind of like diametrically opposed political positions, both kind of simplifying historical narrative for different end.
- [82:15]
C
Yeah. And in weirdly complementary ways, actually.
- [82:18]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I liked how you went into it.
- [82:21]
C
Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I just think there's gotta be. And I suppose, like, you know, I think that's true in politics as well. Like, it's just like, I don't know, there's gotta be some rules.
- [82:32]
B
Totally.
- [82:32]
C
You don't get to bend the rules just because, you know, someone's on your team or not on your team.
- [82:37]
B
Well, I mean, I think that, you know, my friend Eric Hounschel and I talk about this a lot. I mean, I think there is a kind of that discipline and rigor in these words that we've been throwing around in the earlier conversation. They have a form of moral self work to them. Right. I mean, they're about, like, questioning ourselves.
- [82:56]
C
Absolutely.
- [82:57]
B
Yeah. And so, I mean, I think that, you know, I understand earlier kind of STS critiques of objectivity and neutrality in these things, and, you know, I get it. But it's also like, if you don't have kind of. Kind of standards and habits that involve, like, pushing yourself and questioning the way you come into a situation thinking about it.
- [83:17]
C
Yeah.
- [83:17]
B
You're in deep shit. Yeah, it's kind of, you know. And so.
- [83:20]
C
Yeah, yeah, no, I'd like, I. I feel that we ought to dwell somewhere between the binary extremes and the kind of extreme critiques on both sides. The kind of really hardcore, kind of positivist critiques of postmodernism are too extreme. But it's like, yeah, we do need some standards. And then the postmodernist critiques are like, let's not be naive about the role of self interest. And that's a really important insight. But also, like, we do need some standards.
- [84:03]
B
Right, right, right.
- [84:05]
C
And we can't all just be, like, eating the texts of our own tales. Sort of. So.
- [84:11]
B
So what's. Do you have a next project or. I mean, this is pretty new. So are you, like, taking a break or.
- [84:17]
C
Yeah. Like cocktails with little umbrellas in them. Exact. No, I think. I'm not exactly sure. I'm leaning towards actually doing a book on the Norden bomb site, which I'm not totally committed to in my own mind yet. But the Norden bomb site is this very famous piece of technology from World War II, and it involved some of the same elements as the naval fire control systems I wrote about in this book. Basically, it's an analog computer and a gyroscope group. And Norton was also a Sperry employee. And there's also a British bomb site story which actually Paul and Nisher would play a small part in. And so there's just. I've. There's a lot of archival material that I've identified which I'd kind of like to sink my teeth into. So I think that might be the next.
- [85:17]
B
You're a gyro culture person.
- [85:19]
C
I guess I am. I mean, because torpedoes have them too.
- [85:22]
B
I know, I know.
- [85:25]
C
So, yeah, I know, I know. I promise you that I did not, as a. As a young girl, think I want to be a gyro culture person. That is my ambition in life. Yeah.
- [85:37]
B
No, no, what you were saying earlier about, like, you know, you didn't start off as a battleship girl. Like, I'm the same. With my first car book, I hated cars.
- [85:47]
C
Not a car guy.
- [85:48]
B
Yeah, not at all.
- [85:49]
C
That's funny.
- [85:50]
B
No, no, it was regulation and, you know, it was like the.
- [85:54]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [85:55]
B
It was the nerdy state power stories that interested me. And only, you know, then by teaching about cars and writing about cars, I came to appreciate them as aesthetic objects and things. And I appreciate them much more now than I did before grad school. But it was not like, you know, like a car fetish, the way some people get into it.
- [86:14]
C
It's an interesting thing, too, because sometimes, like, I wish I were more of a gearhead and like, I wish I had more of a technical background. Like, one book I really admire is David Mendel's Between Human and Machine, which deals with some of the same technologies that I do. And Mendel has serious technical chops. He's an inventor and an engineer. And so I think there's things that just he gets that I can get up to a point, but I have to grind. I just would spend hours studying patents to try to understand them. And I strongly suspect Mendel takes about, like, five seconds, you know, to understand some things that take me, like, five days to understand. And Mendel, like, to his great credit, also has a real historical sensibility. But I do think that, like, one advantage I have relative to some people with more technical chops is that precisely because it doesn't come easily to me. Like, I have to actually explain it to myself.
- [87:16]
B
Totally. I feel the same way about myself. And, like, the auto testing stuff is like, I have to break it down into kind of dumb language for myself to get it. And then that actually is helpful.
- [87:26]
C
Exactly. And I think also it's helpful to like, also actually in some ways be motivated by like, the bigger picture questions. So which I think serves as a, like, I do think the details and the weeds are really important. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I also think, like, you can't live down, like you do have to pop back up and ask bigger questions as well. And those are the ones that I think I'm probably more excited about.
- [87:51]
B
Kate, this has been so much fun. Thank you for this great book and thanks for coming on the show.
- [87:56]
C
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure.
- [88:06]
B
I hope you enjoyed this episode of our podcast. You can reach us with questions, comments and suggestions@leaveinselmail.com or by following me on Twitter tsnews or on YouTube peoplesthings our podcast is distributed by the New Books Network, the leading platform for academic podcasts. So that you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Peoples and things, like most things in this world, depends on the work of many people. I want to thank my brother Jake Vincl for writing the music for the show. I want to thank my buddy Juliana Castro for designing the logos for the podcast. You can check out her work@julianacastro.co Jo Fort is the producer for the podcast and Mandy Lam is the production assistant. This podcast and Other Peoples and Things programming are produced in affiliation with Virginia Tech Publishing and supported by the center for Humanities and the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. For information about other podcasts from Virginia Tech Publishing, visit Publishing vt. For the entire Peoples and Things team, I am Lee Vincel and most importantly, I want to thank you for listening.
- [89:39]
C
Thanks, Sam.