Look to the West Volume VII: The Eye Against the Prism

271

Thande

Donor
Part #271: I Sell Here, Sir, What All The World Desires to Have...

“Gold Dolphin to White Gate.The progress in Barking Barking Six’s experiments...yes, indeed, but...this is important, White Gate...no, evidence of foe propagation...well exactly! I...yes, further investigation is required but...in theory yes...we need to speak to Orpington One Two...yes, agreed. Confirmation on whether Southwark-Uxbridge-Ealing protocol is appropriate will be with you within 24 hours...”

–part of a transmission to or from the English Security Directorate base at Snowdrop House, Croydon, intercepted and decrypted by Thande Institute personnel​

*

From: Motext Pages MS120A-C [retrieved 22/11/19].

Extraneous advertising has been left intact.


On the last day of the year 1999, the final day of the twentieth century, American breakfast motoscopy interviewed the near-centenarian Joe Gander, who was born on January 1st, 1900. Among other questions, Gander was asked what he considered to be the most significant event of the century with which his long lifetime was synonymous. The retired fisherman and veteran rejected many of the more popular choices, such as the invention of the threshold bomb, the rise and fall of Combine Societism, and the moon landing. Instead, he argued that the most significant event should be that which had changed the lives of the most people, and stated that in his view, this was the coming of electricity into the home.

We can argue that Mr Gander (who died in 2005) had particular personal reasons to favour this topic, as later came out in follow-up articles. Firstly, he was from a rural community in Cloudsborough, New England.[1] This was a part of the ENA which was isolated and oft-neglected, having formerly been a penal colony and obtained provincial status relatively late (though, contrary to some claims, Mr Gander himself was descended from free settlers, not convicts). This was emblematic of the kind of place which had been little touched by previous waves of modernisation in the home, and so the arrival of domestic electricity was more dramatic.[2] On a more individual level, like many nonagenarians Mr Gander had partially lost his hearing, and made the point that he would be unable to participate in the interview at all without his electric hearing aid. Finally, it was noted after the fact that Mr Gander’s granddaughter’s life had been saved by a new emergency operation that was only possible because domestic electricity had allowed the establishment of a modern local hospital.

Despite these points, however, we do not need to have lived Mr Gander’s life in order to argue that he made a worthy claim to the greatest event of the twentieth century. In order to judge just how important the rise of domestic electricity was for changing the shape of our multitudinous societies, we must first look backwards at the history of power itself.

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People of all nations and tribes have historically wanted a source of power for two reasons, the only two ways in which the theory of thermokinetics[3] states that energy (originally called ‘vis viva’) can be transferred: as heat and as work. Heat is defined as disordered motion, intensifying the movement of particles in random directions (whether they be atoms in a solid lump of metal or the luft molecules making up the air). Work, on the other hand, is defined as ordered motion in one direction, such as an expanding luft pushing down on a piston. As the Law of the Conservation of Energy states, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one state to another; the corollary Law of the Transfer of Heat adds that heat can only flow ‘downhill’ from a hotter to a colder region.[4] This means that no process can ever be 100% efficient. In practice, friction and other effects mean that any process focused only on doing work will always inevitably waste some transferred energy in the form of heat as well.

Sometimes this heat energy is an unwanted nuisance (as in the case of overheating engines), sometimes it is merely irrelevant, but sometimes it can also be an incidental advantage. Technologies such as the incandescent lightglobe operate by doing work in a deliberately inefficient way (in this case pushing surfinos across a filament), meaning that most of the energy transferred is ‘wasted’ as heat and light. In fact a lightglobe produces far more heat than the light that is its stated purpose, which can be advantageous when heating is also desirable (e.g. in lights used to illuminate henhouses) but is usually wasteful. For this reason, many scientists argue that the traditional lightglobe should be phased out in favour of more efficient alternatives, once these have become feasible to construct cheaply on a mass scale.

At the beginning of civilisation, and for much of the lifetime of the peoples of the world, the only sources of power were human and animal muscle. This did not slow down the civilisations of the ancient world, who were able to use these (not always willingly given) to build impressive wonders of the world such as the Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China. But these sources of power were always fundamentally limited, as well as being surprisingly inefficient compared to the ‘input’ (in this case, food). They naturally also ground to a halt when crises such as diseases or rebellions swept through a nation, which could set off a cycle of decline and worsening chaos.

The earliest example of using a source of power outside this paradigm is arguably the wind-powered sailing ship, which appeared in its crudest form in the Mediterranean as much as four thousand years ago. Although oar-driven ships using human muscle power were also in use (and rare examples of animal-powered ships, mainly in China) the introduction and refinement of sails meant that for the first time, people were tapping a supply of power from outside. For many centuries, however, this is the only confirmed use of such power. Human muscle power remained a critical resource for harvesting and processing the key crops needed for a civilisation to survive and prosper, which meant that a majority of the population was employed in agriculture. This was exemplified with Christ’s selection of commonplace activities of the time when prophesying the end of the age: “Then shall two [men] be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left. Two women shall be grinding at the mill; the one shall be taken, and the other left.”[5] In this example, the men harvested the grain from the fields, while the women used hand-mills to grind it to flour in order to bake bread. While the staple crops vary from place to place, this basic paradigm sums up why agriculture was so central to the existence of the majority of the peoples of the world for so long, with the muscle power of so many humans required to sustain the existence of their whole country.

It is no surprise, then, that it was to this simple and repetitive task of grinding (milling) grain to which external sources of power were first applied. It is very difficult to definitively say which nation was first to the windmill and the watermill (thus leading to a rich vein of Heritage Points of Controversy for the ASN!) Egypt, Rome, Persia, China and the Indian civilisations all appear to have played a role in developing, sharing and improving these technologies, which continue to be used in some form to this day. Both wind and water power ultimately stem from the Sun, and are therefore what are today called inexhaustible resources.[6] There are also multiple types of waterwheels and windmills, and they were used for purposes other than milling (such as drainage in Belgium), but this is certainly their most iconic use in what in Europe are called the Middle Ages.

In a stereotypical mediaeval village, the miller was an important man; maintaining and operating the technology that was the only way in which the local peasantry could convert their crops into a source of edible food. This was manifested in different ways in different countries. Miller is a common name in the ENA, yet almost absent in the British Isles. This is thought to be because a miller (muller)[7] in the Holy Roman Empire was respected and his sons would accordingly select that occupation title as their surname when surnames became used. German immigrants to the ENA would anglicise Muller to Miller. Conversely in England, millers acquired a reputation for being penny-pinching and dishonest thanks to their powerful position, and sons of millers would choose some other identifying surname such as a place of birth.

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Water and wind power remained the only sources of external power to do work, although of course people had long burnt combustible materials to produce heat. It was understanding the relationship between these two, that they both represented forms of energy, which led to the big breakthrough that followed the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century.[8] This was also the first time that European nations leapt ahead of other regions of the world in terms of technology; formerly, developments in wind and water power technology had been spread across many civilisations. The idea of using the expansion of hot steam to do work was an ancient one; famously, Hero of Alexandria (ca. 10-70 AD) produced a rotating steam-powered ‘aeolipile’, though this was a proof of concept rather than an item capable of doing useful work. (Hero also produced some devices powered by wind and heated air, but it is telling that today he has become ineluctably associated with steam specifically).

Ottoman and Italian inventors in the sixteenth century were still building similar, if more elaborate, devices such as wheels driven by jets of steam. However, these remained highly inefficient and impractical for any real-world use. An everyday domestic example of such a use from this period was in turning meat over a cooking fire automatically in great kitchens without requiring a human operator to turn a spit. Leonardo da Vinci designed a system driven by fan blades turned by the rising hot air and smoke of the fire itself, while the Ottoman polymath Taqi Addin described one driven by a steam jet. However, these remained only curiosities, with Tudor-era England (for example) mostly using animal muscle power in the form of treadmills with dogs in them hooked up to the spit.

The Scientific Revolution is frequently associated with the inventions (or re-inventions) of the telescope and microscope, but arguably its most influential device was the seemingly prosaic air-pump, first invented by Otto von Guericke in 1649. Yet the air-pump was considered important enough, a century later, to have a constellation named after it.[9] Not only did it settle the ancient philosophical argument over whether vacuums exist, it allowed new insights into the nature of just what air was, and began the rise of luft theory in chemistry. Interest in controlling how lufts flowed and were pressurised were a natural progression from this breakthrough. Of course, like every scientific and technological breakthrough, it could be used for evil purposes as well as good, and it is true to say (as some Sutcliffists have argued) that the phlogisticateur could not have existed without the air-pump.

There is little need to recount the history of the development of the first steam engines, which every child in every nation learns in school. While each curriculum will naturally emphasise the contributions of scientists and inventors in that country—and those contributions certainly exist—we in England can rest in the comfortable assurance that we know our foreign friends are making hollow arguments. It was here, on the shores of this sceptered isle, where the biggest eearly breakthroughs were made: from Savery to Newcomen to Watt and beyond. The genius of a steam engine is in the conversion of heat, disordered motion, to work, ordered motion in one direction. In the earliest ‘atmospheric’ engines built by Newcomen, this was achieved simply by building a fire to raise steam within a cylindrical container sealed by a movable piston at the top. The steam would expand and push up the piston, which would be connected by a pivoted seesaw mechanism or ‘beam’ to the desired equipment. In other words, as the piston rose, the other side of the beam would be pushed down to do work. Cold water would then be admitted to the steam cylinder to make the steam condense, meaning the piston then fell down again and pulled up the equipment on the other side. This cycle represented one ‘stroke’ of the engine, to be repeated about twelve times a minute. Newcomen’s engine was stationary, intended primarily to do the work of pumping water out of mines. It was highly inefficient and required constant supervision, but nonetheless it changed the world.

Later improvement by James Watt did away with the complex and inefficient water spray step in favour of a separate condenser component. Watt’s engine was both far more efficient and would work continuously providing it was supplied with fuel. This engine remained used primarily for stationary purposes, driving pumps and looms in manufactories for example; we must concede that the development of mobile engines for transport purposes owes something to developments in France and Russia, though we should note that Tarefikhov was, in fact, English-born. The Jacobin Wars proved the usefulness of steam engines for both factories and vehicles on land and sea, and this was embraced in all countries other than those which tried unsuccessfully to stand against the tides of history.

The world had changed. Previously, those who built waterwheels and windmills had looked for an alternative source of power for a tiresome, necessary task which already existed—that of grinding grain. Now, for the first time on a large scale, engineers found themselves with more power than potential uses for it—and began swiftly to work on the latter. During the Watchful Peace era, nobles and wealthy self-made men retained much political power in Europe and the Novamund, with the trend decidedly sliding from the former to the latter. For that reason, developments in steam technology in this era typically focused on manufacturing and transport: new kinds of looms and other machines, new steam mobiles, railway locomotives and so on. Little attention was paid to potential domestic uses—after all, the majority of people were still living in poor conditions, often exploited as workers for those very factories. It would be more than thirty years until Gordensen’s theories, i.e. that by certain compassionate policies and high pay a corporation can create a reliable customer base in the form of its own workforce, would be constructed.

It is true to say that, as before, wealthy nobles (and some of the industrialists themselves) enjoyed novelty creations in the home. This was, after all, the era of the Automaton Mania in fiction, and there was renewed interest in building elaborate mechanical animals or people that would carry out tasks for amusement. There were also automated fountains, music boxes and the ancestors of the stroboscope, among others. However, these rarely required a source of power as great as that of steam, meaning there was no reason to put up with the disadvantages of having a steam engine on site (soot, noise, fire risk etc.) In practice such amusements were often powered by elaborate clockwork mechanisms and coiled springs, as they had been for years before steam engine development. The centre of development of such mechanisms was unquestionably the Kingdom of Swabia (part of which became the Bernese Republic following the Popular Wars).

Such springs, as found in a smaller form in wind-up watches, are important as they represent an early example of storing power for later use. This idea was fairly obvious from the start (after all, everyone was familiar with the idea of stockpiling food) but means of doing so were rather less so. Springs were successful enough that wind-up mechanisms were still used well into the twentieth century for uses such as auto-pianos and grooveplayers.[10] The concept was eventually applied to steam power as well, in the form of designing a vehicle with a reservoir of stored steam (or later compressed air) without an engine. This could be topped off with fresh pressurised steam at refuelling stations, the disadvantage being that a vehicle could become stranded if its driver miscalculated. On the other hand, they also lacked the risk of a boiler explosion. For this reason, ‘fireless motors’ were popular for public transport systems in cities, remaining in use for trams into the twentieth century.[11] One of their most important uses was in steerables (and some early, failed heavier-than-air aerodrome experiments). Steam engines were too heavy to be practical on a steerable balloon, but a steam reservoir hooked up to propeller blades, used only sporadically for course corrections and emergency get-aways, was another matter. Such a fireless motor was used by the steerable on which John Byron made his famous aerial attack on the Palais Rohan during the Popular Wars.[12]

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Despite the picture presented here, there was one important precedent set for later domestic improvements: steam boilers were used not to do work but to heat homes, usually the large stately homes of the wealthy but sometimes also the factory buildings operated by the less heartless industrialists in midwinter. Pipework and distribution radiators were accordingly improved at this time through trial and error. England was unquestionably the centre of such developments, though they also took place elsewhere. Following the Popular Wars and the Inglorious Revolution, the focus of such systems was shifted. The new Free Hospitals (some of which were former stately homes seized by the People’s Government) benefited considerably from steam heating, and there was demand from the public to bring this into their own homes. The beginnings of Civic Steam therefore lie here in England, but the fact that the Populists also abolished municipal governments hampered its rollout, and the first working systems were rolled out in Paris in the 1840s.[13]

It should be made clear that Civic Steam was never as popular or widespread as every fictional depiction of the mid-nineteenth century makes it appear. Filmmakers know that featuring a domestic steam appliance in a scene is an easy way of dating it to an earlier era, so this has become a remarkably overused trope. The biggest problem for Civic Steam, other than the potential for accidents such as boiler explosions and scalds from ruptured pipes, was in distribution. Systems generally used a single central boiler and a network of pipes to circulate steam through a variety of locations, losing its heat to warm them and then returning to the boiler to be re-heated. What worked for a stately home, a Free Hospital or one of the large ‘Anthill’ Wyndham-built tenement blocks,[14] would not work for the scattered houses of a rural village. Even if buried (itself a costly proposal), pipes lost too much of their heat between the boiler and the target house. For this reason, Civic Steam was usually only seen in large and/or wealthy cities. Probably the most iconic English Civic Steam system was that of Liverpool, an already wealthy city which grew wealthier under the Marleburgensian regime. Parts of this system have been preserved for heritage purposes to this day, and the Lime Street Steam Museum remains a popular tourist attraction.

The rollout of Civic Steam was also highly influenced by the character of the city in question. Places with many traditionalist nobles generally opposed such projects, while those with many commoners with political power favoured them. For this reason, Germany’s biggest steam system was not in Dresden, but in Frankfurt. Cities also paradoxically often had an advantage if they had been damaged or subject to political upheavals during the Popular Wars, meaning there was less of a problem with demolishing old buildings in order to lay the boilers and pipe systems. Cities such as Birmingham in England, Turin in Italy and Stockholm in Sweden became noted for revolutionary new Civic Steam systems in the 1850s for that reason.

The original purpose of Civic Steam had been to heat buildings. We should not denigrate this purpose; home heating saved many lives which illness would otherwise have claimed, and improved the quality of life of our ancestors. It is easy for us to take it for granted when we have always lived with it. It also led to a drive of interest in insulation technology, once companies and municipal providers figured out how to use thermometers to measure the heat consumption of a particular house and charge its inhabitants accordingly. Urban myths abound of crafty home-owners who were allegedly able to tap their neighbour’s steam pipe and obtain heating paid for by someone else; evidence for these stories is, sadly, thin on the ground.

Yet, as noted above, the presence of a new power source tends to encourage the ingenious (and profit-seeking) among us to figure out alternative uses for it. Once again, England led the way, although it was the ENA and UPSA that often refined English ideas into more profitable ones. We should note that in the UPSA, where coal and therefore steam were more expensive, compressed-air systems developed by the Priestley Aerated Water Company took their place in major cities such as Buenos Aires (sometimes supplemented by luft systems). For patent reasons, the PAWC used one of its subsidiary names, the Priestley Tonic Company, in this regard and stamped that name on pipes and boilers. Meridians began to use the word ‘tonica’ (Spanish for ‘tonic’) to refer to the air as a nickname, later applied to any power supply, including electricity. This even managed to survive Societist rule and lives on to this day as a remnant of their culture.

The English drive for new steam usages was driven by the social forces unleashed by the Inglorious Revolution, the decline of the nobility, the rise in the public dignity of the working classes, and the concomitant near-collapse of domestic servants as a class. Many people from both formerly rich and poor backgrounds were unenthusiastic about performing tedious domestic tasks such as washing clothes themselves, and, (perhaps mindful of the recent craze for fiction in which Automata had done it for them), inventors began developing ‘travail-reducing engines’ for use in the home.[15] Early travail-reducing engines include steam-heated clothes irons and presses, steam wands for cleaning and sterilising surfaces and boiling-water taps that could be used in lieu of fire-heated kettles.[16] It should be obvious that these early machines, from the 1850s and 1860s, are closely tied to the idea of ‘hot steam is circulating around the home, let us make use of it as hot steam’, rather than as a generalised source of power. It was not until the 1870s that the steam turbine migrated from the factory to the home, steam-driven fan blades used to turn devices such as rotary washing machines and dryers or to provide power to sewing machines.

In some places where Civic Steam was not practical, it should be noted that steam appliances were still sometimes sold—supplied with adaptors so they could be run off the engines of stationary steam mobiles. Though steam mobiles remained more expensive than horses in many places, they were frequently bought not only as a wealthy man’s toy, but also to pull agricultural equipment or transport cargo from place to place. A few seaside towns (or inland ones on canals) even powered steam appliances with the engines from immobile boats docked alongside houses. It remained rare for individual homes to have their own dedicated stationary steam engine, but the relatively widespread use of steam mobiles meant this usage was possible. Typically, in a model later repeated with the rise of Photel, one or two people in a village would own the mobile, but would rent out the use of its engine to power a communal appliance such as a washing machine or clothing press.

In the 1890s, a few home devices with electric motors began to appear, such as some advanced stroboscopes which required a more constant rotation speed than a direct drive from a steam turbine could provide. However, it is important to recognise that at this point in history, few imagined that electricity would ever be distributed from a central power station to the home. Rather, it was envisaged that Civic Steam would be used to run an electrical turbine in the home which would then provide a supply of electricity (continuous channel electricity, to be precise) to any home electrical appliances using it.[17] At this point the electric pressure shift [voltage transformation] problems of distributing electricity were well known, which seemed to make the idea of widespread electricity distribution unrealistic. It would not be until the years immediately following the Pandoric War that the development of SC electricity in the ENA changed the paradigm. Far from being unfeasible, the electricity network was able to reach those parts which Civic Steam (and its rival, Civic Luft) never could.[18] Eventually, electricity would reduce steam power distribution to a novelty, although steam turbines would remain the primary means by which energy from combustion (or later carytic paradox power) was converted to electricity.

The history of how electricity came from its humble beginnings to dominate the world is also the history of how civilisation changed in the first half of the twentieth century. It is an ineluctable part of the story we more often associate with the grand clash of ideologies. Let us not condemn Mr Gander for his views. He is right to argue that without that great breakthrough, the mastery of one of the four fundamental forces of existence, the twentieth century as we know it could not have existed. In the second part of this article, we will consider the rise of electricity and the death knell of the old world of Civic Steam...














[1] I.e. northwestern Newfoundland.

[2] While the earlier waves were more comprehensive in TTL than OTL, this would also apply to OTL examples; for example, a Scottish Highland farmer in the 1950s might be living life little different to his ancestors of a century before, whereas a London man about town might have had a gas-lit home long before the turn of the twentieth century.

[3] ‘Thermokinetics’ is used here as an inclusive term taking in both what we would call kinetics and thermodynamics as two facets of a broader subject. The reason for this is that in OTL, kinetics had its birth within scientific academia, while thermodynamics was originally associated more with engineering—then often regarded as a sooty-handed workman’s discipline beneath the notice of academic physics, a prejudice not fully corrected until the second half of the nineteenth century. In TTL, in part due to the destruction or reform of many traditional universities with a new focus on engineering concerns after the Jacobin Wars, this division does not exist in the same way.

[4] I.e. the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics respectively, but those terms are not used in TTL.

[5] Matthew 22:40-41, here based on the King James Version translation.

[6] Inexhaustible / exhaustible is the energy buzzword dichotomy used in TTL, rather than OTL’s renewable / non-renewable or sustainable / unsustainable.

[7] Actually müller of course, but the Motext can’t handle that.

[8] This is somewhat misleadingly phrased. The theoretical underpinnings of heat and work were not understood until well after the Industrial Revolution was in sway; in fact the earliest thermodynamics textbooks from OTL still use the ‘caloric’ theory which regarded heat as an invisible liquid rather than a vibrational motion.

[9] The southern constellation of Antlia; strictly speaking this was after a later air-pump invented by Frenchman Denis Papin.

[10] Many early gramophones in OTL were also hand-cranked, intended for sale to people without electricity at home.

[11] These also existed in OTL from the 1870s onwards, but the earlier refinement of steam technology in TTL means they appear rather earlier.

[12] See Part #132 in Volume III.

[13] In OTL Paris in the 1870s was noted for an extensive network of compressed air distribution for power purposes (using pneumatic power rather than electricity to run clocks, trams, beer dispensers...) Though very inefficient, this system is probably the closest OTL can offer for a pre-electricity power network of the sort explored more extensively in TTL.

[14] This should not be pictured like a post-war block of flats from OTL Britain but more like the tenements of Edinburgh and New York City in OTL. They have the same purpose, of cramming in as many people as possible into one location for housing purposes. Though associated with Wyndham and the Regressives, the plans actually began in the final years of Thomas’ Government as an attempt to fulfil promises about obtaining housing for thousands of people dispossessed by the Inglorious Revolution.

[15] Referred to as ‘labour-saving devices’ in OTL, where they are associated with the United States but for similar societal reasons.

[16] This is a relatively recent innovation in OTL (first becoming popular in the 1970s), but ironically was around long before the electric kettle in TTL.

[17] Continuous Channel or CC electricity is what we would call Direct Current or DC. Alternating Current (AC) in TTL is referred to as Switching Channel (SC). (Channel refers to current rather than static electricity, which is called classical electricity in TTL).

[18] Civic Luft refers to town gas systems. Sometimes they are operated by the same companies as Civic Steam in TTL, sometimes by rivals; there is only overlap in the question of heating systems, as otherwise Civic Luft is most useful for cooking, which steam alone cannot easily supply.
 

Skallagrim

Banned
On the last day of the year 1999, the final day of the twentieth century
I'll be the annoying bastard who points out that this is not how centuries work, and that the last day of the 20th century was December 31st, 2000. (The last day of the year 1999 was the final day of the 1900s, though.)

More seriously, I'll be the impressed and interested reader who is -- once more -- wowed by the attention to detail. And who, in this instance, wonders at the peculiarly universalist approach of that "history of power". One would assume it to have a Diversitarian slant, but its starting assumptions are really, really at odds with the principles that a Diversitarian historiography would presumably entail...

Once again, the Diversitarians (appear to) reveal themselves to be far less committed to their propped-up priciples than they'd have us believe. Has the great ideological commitment, at the time of this writing, actually become a bit of a dead letter? A principle to which people pay lip service, but which is no longer living and breathing, as it were? You have to wonder.
 
this was the coming of electricity into the home.
lightglobe operate by doing work in a deliberately inefficient way (in this case pushing surfinos across a filament),
First thought:. But, but, but.... Electricity and electronics are all about moving electrons. They can't have totally different names.
Second thought: duh, of course they can. 'electricity' LONG predates 'electron', and the 'flow of electricity' is actually opposite to the 'flow of electrons', due to a wrong guess early on.

Clever, clever @Thande !!
 
I'll be the annoying bastard who points out that this is not how centuries work, and that the last day of the 20th century was December 31st, 2000. (The last day of the year 1999 was the final day of the 1900s, though.)
It's an Heritage Point of Controversy. So they can work either way and be both be the end of the millenium at the same time, you nasty Societist
 
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HEM? I'm guessing perhaps His English Majesty's government? And it's always nice to see Cloudsborough still existing after all this time when it comes to *Americana!
 

xsampa

Banned
The survival of bits of Meridian culture into the present is eerie. Only a few words in a lexicon or a dance (there was a reference to one of Alcaeus’ successors trying to destroy tango but failing)
 
Portugal will probably have its chance to prove the viability of its social model during the Black Twenties. I don't expect much :/
Is Portugal going the way of Spain? By which I mean under the threefold eye. The fact that it’s called the Iberian Crisis leads me to think while Spain is the origin the whole region is going black
 
Portugal will probably have its chance to prove the viability of its social model during the Black Twenties.

Portgual is just a military dictatorship by now. The Jacobins were overthrown decades ago.

Is Portugal going the way of Spain? By which I mean under the threefold eye.

Probably, the Pyrenees are the border of the civilised world or something like that.

The fact that it’s called the Iberian Crisis leads me to think while Spain is the origin the whole region is going black

Probably not the whole region. Navarre, Catalonia and the Balearic republic seemed to be doing okay, culturally speaking, in the microstates update.
 

Thande

Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone. You probably all know this, but just a reminder that Look to the West Volume IV: Cometh the Hour is now available for purchase from Amazon. There's already been one very kind review from a reader on here (I don't know who as it's under their real name) so thank you to that person, early reviews are really good for boosting the visibility of a book on Amazon.

I’ve been re-reading parts of this TL, and I’m struck by the similarities of the Dashwoods to the great Metis leader Louis Riel. Similar to Joseph Dashwood in that Riel wanted an independent state towards the end of his life (earlier, of course, he wanted and got negotiated the formation of province of Manitoba). And, of course Louis Riel was executed by the Canadian government, but that didn’t stop him from, even at the time, being viewed as a martyr by many. And similar to Freedom Dashwood in that Louis Riel had some unusual theological views, calling himself the Prophet David towards the end of his life.

Was that intentional?
Kind of. It's one of those cases where I deliberately avoided researching the OTL events in too much detail at the time so it didn't become too much of a copy. But it was certainly a vague inspiration, though I wasn't aware that Riel also had those theological views.

I'll be the annoying bastard who points out that this is not how centuries work, and that the last day of the 20th century was December 31st, 2000. (The last day of the year 1999 was the final day of the 1900s, though.)
But as in OTL, only mathematicians and Cubans care :p Or, as @Tannenberg says, it's a Heritage Point of Controversy...

More seriously, I'll be the impressed and interested reader who is -- once more -- wowed by the attention to detail. And who, in this instance, wonders at the peculiarly universalist approach of that "history of power". One would assume it to have a Diversitarian slant, but its starting assumptions are really, really at odds with the principles that a Diversitarian historiography would presumably entail...

Once again, the Diversitarians (appear to) reveal themselves to be far less committed to their propped-up priciples than they'd have us believe. Has the great ideological commitment, at the time of this writing, actually become a bit of a dead letter? A principle to which people pay lip service, but which is no longer living and breathing, as it were? You have to wonder.
Thanks for your kind words and speculation. There is certainly a valid point in suggesting that the application of Diversitarian principles is often halfhearted and a lip service - but I'd argue this kind of history of invention is fertile soil for a Diversitarian attitude. After all, it's arguably one of OTL's closest things to a Heritage Point of Controversy; who invented the aeroplane/had the first powered flight, for instance? The English-speaking world says it was the Wright brothers, the Brazilians say it was Santos-Dumont... Who invented the lightbulb? America says Edison, Britain says Joseph Swan, the Soviets say it was Aleksandr Lodygin...

Lightbulbs.jpg


First thought:. But, but, but.... Electricity and electronics are all about moving electrons. They can't have totally different names.
Second thought: duh, of course they can. 'electricity' LONG predates 'electron', and the 'flow of electricity' is actually opposite to the 'flow of electrons', due to a wrong guess early on.

Clever, clever @Thande !!
Yep. I debated this one, because at first I thought electron came from elektron (the Greek word for amber, from which 'electricity' derives), but turns out it's actually a portmanteau of electric + ion, and the coinage of the term 'ion' is quite a way after TTL's POD and it would involve different people. So, given the use in TTL of the monist theory of electricity in setting terminology, I've gone with surfom and defom for negative and positive ions respectively (from 'surfeit' and 'deficit' + 'atom'). Electrons and protons become surfinos and definos as they are smaller than atoms, using the same -ino Italian diminutive suffix as 'neutrino' from OTL. (Of course, this will require them to be named by Italian scientists, but I wanted to keep the familiar echo from OTL particle physics).
 
There's already been one very kind review from a reader on here (I don't know who as it's under their real name) so thank you to that person, early reviews are really good for boosting the visibility of a book on Amazon.

That was me! And I should be the one thanking you, for all the effort you're putting into this TL.
 
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