Martin Fone's Blog, page 98

The Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab

Some children’s toys and games stand the test of time, others fall in and out of fashion, but some are so bizarre that, at least from today’s health and safety obsessed perspective, you wonder what the manufacturer was thinking. A perfect illustration of the latter is the Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab launched in 1950.

The Gilbert was the A C Gilbert Company, based in Connecticut, that had cut its teeth in the children’s toy market with the eponymous owner’s Erector set. Despite its risqué name, especially when in the hands of the target market of young adolescent boys, it was a wholesome enough toy, launched in the 1910s, a metal construction kit, much akin to Meccano who eventually bought the rights to it in 2000.

After the Second World War, America was all aglow with radioactive pride. There were no limits to potential uses for atomic energy and what better way of introducing the youth of America to its mysteries than by replicating the success of chemistry sets. And so, the idea of the Atomic Energy lab was born.

On opening the tan case of the first edition of the lab in 1950 the lucky recipient found that they had not one but four types of uranium core, a beta-alpha source (Pb-210), a pure beta source, probably Ru-106, a gamma source (Zn-65) a spinthariscope (a device for observing individual nuclear disintegrations), a cloud chamber with its own short-lived alpha source (Po-210), an electroscope, a Geiger counter, and some literature.

In an attempt to demonstrate that the kit was child-friendly, Gilbert included a comic featuring a popular cartoon character, Dagwood, who explained the principles of atomic energy and a manual entitled Prospecting for Uranium in the hope of enticing his customers to hunt for uranium for which the US Government were offering a bounty of $10,000. The 1951 version had the same contents, but they were arranged differently, and they all came in a red case.

The child had everything they needed to set up a nuclear laboratory at home and had the thrill of watching alpha particles moving at speeds of 12,000 mph in the cloud chamber. To add some spice, the marketing material suggested that children could play hide-and-seek with the gamma-ray source.  

 Recognising that radioactive sources degraded over time, the set even came with a form to request replacements of the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Cloud Chamber sources. It warned, though, that no request would be honoured without a completed coupon, which should be stored in a safe place. No such warning was given about the material itself.

Perhaps mercifully, the lab was not a commercial success. What did for it was not health and safety concerns or a minor nuclear explosion in some far corner of the United States, but its cost – it retailed at $40 – and children found it all too complicated. Although there were adverts for it in 1952 and 1953, these were from stores that were trying to rid themselves of redundant stock. And so a bright idea intended to capture the zeitgeist disappeared for ever.

Gilbert’s lab was not the first. That dubious honour probably goes to the Porter Chemical Company whose 1947 Chemcraft chemistry kits, selling at $10 and $25 respectively, included “actual specimens of Uranium Ore, while the more expensive kit also provided a “radioactive screen”.

Those were the days.

Swing, Brother, Swing

A review of Swing, Brother, Swing by Ngaio Marsh

This, the fifteenth in Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn series, originally published in 1949, weaves together a tale involving a magazine’s agony aunt and an eccentric member of the British aristocracy. Lord Pastern & Bagott, that is one character whom I shall refer to henceforth as Lord Pastern, has throughout his life appalled his family with his new passions, which have ranged from consorting with Yogi to naturism, has taken up with some gusto a love for syncopated music. He cuts a dash on the tympani and has secured a spot in a leading swing band, headed up by the wonderfully named Breezy Bellairs.

He is scheduled to take a guest spot in the band’s forthcoming engagement at the Metronome club and has even composed a special number, Hot Guy, Hot Gunner, to mark the occasion. The number involves a tableau in which the band’s accordionist, Carlos Rivera, is shot using blank bullets which Pastern has prepared and carried off stage on stretcher with a wreath on his chest. What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, Pastern’s stepdaughter, Félicité, known as Fée, is entangled in a love triangle with Rivera and cousin, Edward Manx, and has been seeking advice from the Harmony’s agony aunt, GPF (Guide, Philosopher, Friend), a magazine for which Manx writes. On the night of Pastern’s performance, she has fallen out with Rivera, Manx has assaulted him and wears a white carnation, the identifier of GPF, according to the latest missive she has received. Lady Pastern, appalled by her husband’s latest shenanigans, is persuaded to attend the nightclub and sits stony faced, showing her disapproval.

The gun goes off and Rivera is fatally wounded, but in true Marsh fashion it was not a bullet that kills him but a stiletto attached to part of a parasol owned by Lady Pastern. Was the stiletto fired from Pastern’s gun or was there some legerdemain on the stage once Rivera went down? There were enough people upset by Pastern, including some of the band members who resented his presence on stage, with enough opportunities to effect the substitution of stiletto for bullet.

It proves a tricky case for Alleyn, who was, of course, in the audience, on a table adjacent to the Pastern contingency, to solve with the able assistance of his colleague, Fox. Midway through the book, a darker tone is introduced to the tale, presaged earlier on, when narcotics, a familiar theme in Golden Age detective fiction, rear their head. There are some nifty pieces of misdirection and what initially seemed to be the motivation for Rivera’s murder and the likely motivation eventually prove to be far off target.

Although Alleyn identifies GPF and knows who killed Rivera and how, he is unable to prove it until he and his colleagues hear an unguarded conversation from the other side of a door. Although this wraps up the case, it is a pretty unsatisfactory conclusion to a book that seems to lose its way and becomes a very different mystery from that which it started out as.   

Marsh uses a series of letters and telegrams in the first chapter to set the stage for what is an unnecessarily complicated tale. There are some bright spots, though. Her love of all matters theatrical shines through and her characterisation of the lead characters is good. Pastern is painted as an exasperating fool, but lovably engaging. By way of an obiter, we learn that Agatha, Alleyn’s wife, is pregnant and Fox will be his godfather.   

It is an entertaining enough book but is far from being one of her best. In the States it goes by the more prosaic title of A Wreath for Rivera.

Midsummer Murder

A review of Midsummer Murder by Clifford Witting

I commented in my recent review of Patricia Wentworth’s Eternity Ring that I felt she had missed an opportunity in not exploiting the potential of Maggie Bell, an invalid who occupied her time listening into the village’s party line. In Clifford Witting’s second novel in his Inspector Charlton series, originally published in 1937, he wrings every drop of dramatic possibility out of a widow who spends her time recording the details of every resident of Paulsfield and noting them in a card index, the town’s Wikipedia.

The story starts in fine and dramatic fashion. It is midday on a Tuesday in July and the Paulsfield market is in full swing in the square to the accompaniment of a crescendo of pneumatic drills as workmen carry out some road repairs. Thomas Earnshaw is quietly at work cleaning the statue of Lord Shawford. Suddenly there is pandemonium as a bull breaks loose and then a shot. Earnshaw slumps down, shot in the head.

Despite so many people in the square at the time, no one saw anything. Meticulously Inspector Charlton, ably assisted by Sergeant Martin, works out the rough direction of the shot, but cannot determine why Earnshaw should have been shot or by whom. He receives some helpful suggestions, even following up an Irish lorry driver with a secret and guilty passion for toffee apples and assisting a shop owner to fix his new aerial so he can get on to the roof, but these all turn into dead ends.

Matters get worse for Charlton as a second man, a photographer who took a picture of Earnshaw at the moment of his death, is killed in the early morning in the square and then a man who turns out to have had a shady past is shot in his car. Although not killed instantly, he eventually dies in hospital. By this time Charlton had worked that the murderer, who seems to be the same person as the same gun and type of bullet is used in each attack, only strikes again when they are certain that their latest victim is dead, a key point that he plays on to buy himself time.

As Charlton gets nearer to the truth, he too comes under file, taking a wound in the shoulder. He orders Martin to let it be known that he has died in an attempt to force the murderer’s hand. The killer does strike again, but Charlton, who suddenly sees the light while lying in his hospital bed, is too late to prevent it. A bible and an arrangement of some letter tiles from a game akin to Scrabble spelling out the acronym ERICA confirms his theory.

Witting writes with some verve and wit and his characterisations are sharp and clear. The pace of the book, as often is the way, slackens midway through and for me both the motivation behind and the resolution of the crime are a little too obscure for me to make it a mystery that the reader has a reasonable chance of solving for themselves. There is a map of the square and its environs and it pays the reader to study it as much of Charlton’s investigations require a detailed knowledge of the lay of the land.

Charlton and Martin make an amiable pairing and their banter and repartee is more believable and less annoying than, say, Ngaio Marsh’s Alleyn and Fox. Witting delights in throwing the reader and his sleuth off the scent with a series of well executed pieces of misdirection and also skewering some of the conventions and rules dictated by his fellow crime writers. A point of interest is how many old revolvers, souvenirs of the First World War, still remained in circulation.

It was an engaging enough mystery but did not for me hit the heights of some of Witting’s other books. Congratulations to Galileo Publishers for rescuing it from obscurity.

A Cup Of Instant Coffee

Four out of five UK households, the British Coffee Association claims, buy instant coffee to enjoy at home. Although instant contains about a third less caffeine than freshly brewed coffee made from grounds, for many the convenience of pouring boiling water over granules in a cup without any waste to dispose of afterwards overrides any taste or strength considerations.

What makes coffee instant is the removal of all the water from the brewed product either by freeze-drying or spray-drying. Freeze-drying retains more of the coffee flavour but is a complex and expensive process. The concentrate is frozen to -40 Celsius and put into a drying chamber which is heated once a vacuum has been created. As the frozen coffee warms up, the frozen water expands into gas, leaving dry grains of coffee. With spray-drying, a process that takes less than 30 seconds, the concentrate is sprayed from a high tower in a hot-air chamber. The remaining water evaporates, as the droplets fall, and dry coffee crystals descend to the bottom.

The quest to find a convenient alternative to roasting, grinding, and brewing coffee beans began on March 6, 1771, when a grocer and self-proclaimed “coffeeman” from London’s Tooley Street, John Dring, patented his “compound coffee” (no. 984). Roasted Turkish or West Indian coffee, the patent reveals, was ground into a fine flour and then “worked with fresh butter and suet on an iron plate, heated with a gentle fire, till it acquires the consistence of a thick paste”. The paste was moulded into a cake. As well as plain coffee Dring offered a version flavoured with vanilla, cinnamon, and musk.

Dring had a thing about creating cakes from unlikely sources, patenting three years earlier a dried ink cake, (no. 906), bits of which were broken off and dissolved in water to become ink again. His “compound coffee” worked on the same principle, but was not commercially viable, the presence of butter causing the paste to go off quickly.  

In 1840 the Scottish company, T & H Smith, developed a “coffee essence”, a highly concentrated liquid prepared by percolation and quick evaporation to about a third or a quarter of its initial volume, to which was added a thick extract of chicory and a syrup of burnt sugar. One or two teaspoons of the molasses-like concentrate when added to boiling water was enough to make a cup of liquid said to taste like coffee-flavoured light molasses.

It was a forerunner of the more famous Camp Coffee, first made in 1876 by Paterson & Sons Ltd of Glasgow for the Gordon Highlanders ahead of their campaign in India. An essence of coffee beans, chicory, and sugar, the dark brown, syrupy liquid, when mixed with water or milk, made a sweetish drink. Camp Coffee can still be bought, its longevity due in part to its use in baking to give cakes a coffee flavouring. As a drink it had a mini revival in 1975 when the price of instant coffee doubled.

The American military’s first attempt to produce a concentrated form of coffee was less successful. “George Hummel’s Premium Essence of Coffee”, a combination of coffee, evaporated milk, and sugar concentrated and dried into a powder, was created at the start of the Civil by H A Tilden & Co. It came in a small, cylindrical tin, whose label boasted that “coffee made by this Essence preserves perfectly the real taste of the best Coffee and will have a more delicate and finer flavour, a finer colour and will be much more wholesome than pure Coffee”.

Fine words, though, do not a palatable cup of coffee make, with the troops who likened it to axle grease refusing to drink it. It was quietly dropped.

Lost Word Of The Day (2)

Team players are what modern businesses require, employees who are prepared to sublimate their individualism for the good of the cause. After all, there is no I in team. There is no place for auturgy, a noun that appeared in the 1650s to denote self-action or independent activity.

Lost Word Of The Day

Today I have become an airgonaut to take a well-deserved holiday. Used to describe someone who journeys through the air, airgonaut made a brief appearance in 1784 only to disappear into the horizon, never to be seen again.

Death Came Softly

A review of Death Came Softly by E C R Lorac

One of the many things to admire about a Lorac murder mystery is her deep sense and love of the countryside. Death Came Softly, the twenty-third in her Robert Macdonald series, originally published in 1943, is set in the depths of Devon. Eve Merrion, after the death of her husband, has decided to rent a large Italianate house, Valehead House, replete with 41 rooms if you include the bathrooms. She has fallen in love with the gardens and the planting and has ambitions to tame it and bring it back to its former glory. Lorac is at her best in describing the beauty of the property and its place in the countryside, lingering over descriptions of the various flora to be found there, almost allowing the reader to smell their aroma and wonder at their forms and shape.

Eve has invited her father, Professor Crewdon, to live there, and the complement of the household is completed by his private secretary, the nervy and nosey Roland Keston, the Carters, and Eve’s live-in servants, the Carters. When the action begins Eve’s sister, Emmeline (Emma), has joined her, as well as two house guests, the traveller and writer, Bruce Rodrian, and the poet, David Lockersely. Emma is envious of Eve’s wealth, having to make do on the salary of an officer in the Indian army, but loathes the countryside and the atmosphere of the place.

One of the Professor’s eccentricities is that he likes to sleep in a cave that is within the house’s grounds. After returning unexpectedly early from a trip to London, as is his wont, he spends his first evening asleep in the cave. Two of the occupants of the house were out on the misty moor that night, Lockersley who was late returning and Keston, who went out to find him. Rodrian was away in London talking to a director about film rights on his book. Eve is worried about Lockersley, but her relief that he has returned safe and sound pales to insignificance when she learns that her father has been found dead in the cave, apparently overcome by carbon monoxide fumes from a charcoal burner.

Was it suicide or was it murder and, if the latter, as the Professor had returned unexpectedly earlier, the murderer could only have been one of the house occupants. The plot is complicated when it is discovered that the Professor had liquidated some of his assets to purchase uncut diamonds, thinking that have something highly valuable and portable in a time of war would be sensible. The diamonds are missing. Does this suggest that he was murdered so that someone could get their hands on the jewels?

Even though this is a murder, there is something calming, tranquil about the case and the way that Lorac chooses to write about it. Poisoning by carbon monoxide is a gentle death, the victim slipping silently into the arms of Thanatos, perfectly in tune with the idyllic surroundings of Devon and with the gentle, empathetic investigative style of Macdonald. A violent death would just simply jar with the atmosphere Lorac has lovingly created.               

With so few potential suspects Lorac does well to keep the suspense and mystery going as long as she does. There is much methodical, painstaking enquiry, much of it off stage, a significant red herring, and a recreation of the murder method which seems ingenious if a little implausible. The vital clues as to the identity of the killer are to be found in an offhand remark early in the book and a discarded cigarette. The motivation is a little harder to detect, although there are clues in the text which pays the reader to take their time over.

It is not a classic, but there is still much to admire in a writer much underrated and so in tune with the pastoral side of the English countryside.

The Dishwasher Or The Kitchen Sink?

In these cost and energy conscious times, should we ditch the dishwasher and return to the kitchen sink? There is no easy answer. The economics of running a dishwasher start to swing in its favour if it is fully laden, a point at which, claim Compare the Market[1], it uses as much energy and water as does running the hot water tap for six to nine minutes or filling four to six washing-up bowls.

There are added benefits, proponents of the dishwasher claim, not least that it is more hygienic and efficient as it uses more concentrated detergent, steam, and powerful jets. However, a study published in Pediatrics (March 2015)[2], found that “in families who used hand dishwashing, allergic diseases in children are less common than in children from families who use machine dishwashing” leading to the conclusion that “a less efficient dishwashing method may induce tolerance via increased microbial exposure”.   

Getting the best out of your dishwasher requires some thought. The optimal arrangement for stacking dishes, an article in Chemical Engineering Journal (January 2015)[3] revealed, is to place plates in a circle, as the rate and firmness of the flow of water is not constant throughout the chamber. Carbohydrate-soiled plates, requiring the full force of the dishwasher’s waterflow, should be in the centre, while protein-soiled ware benefits from being on the outside where the slower waterflow causes the proteins to swell, making cleaning easier.

For safety reasons, knives and forks are placed with the blunt ends upwards, while non-stick pans, chef’s knives, and wooden items have no place in the dishwasher. Nor do sponges and dishcloths, which when regularly sanitised, according to research published in Nature (July 19, 2017)[4], teem with a higher percentage of pathogen-related bacteria than those that have never been cleaned. And as for cleaning a toilet brush in one, a revelation which sparked a recent furore on Mumsnet, well..!

Although the first dishwasher was produced by Joel Houghton in 1850 and a commercially viable one was developed by Josephine Cochran in 1886, it took until the 1970s for the dishwasher to establish itself as a modern kitchen essential, with three-quarters of German and American households owning one by 2012. Britons, though, were slower to embrace it, but, even so, ownership has risen from 18% of households in 1994 to 49% in 2019[5], a figure which rises to 56% where there are children and drops to 29% in single households.

The dishwasher has become one of the more useful devices found in a kitchen.

[1] https://www.comparethemarket.com/energy/content/how-much-does-a-dishwasher-use/

[2] https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article-abstract/135/3/e590/75461/Allergy-in-Children-in-Hand-Versus-Machine?redirectedFrom=fulltext

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1385894714010870

[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-06055-9

[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/289151/household-dishwashing-in-the-uk/

The Mysterious Mr Badman

A review of The Mysterious Mr Badman by W F Harvey

A subgenre of the world of crime fiction is the bibliomystery, a rather loose category which involves a book or a collection of books, libraries, bookshops and the like as the central fulcrum of the action. This rare piece of crime fiction from the pen of William Fryer Harvey, a writer who has fallen into obscurity but is best known for his short stories in the macabre and horror genre, which was originally published in 1934, and has recently been resuscitated as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, falls into that category.

The action opens when Athelstan Digby, on holiday, looks after a bookshop for an afternoon and is surprised when three odd individuals, a vicar, a foxy looking man, and a whistling chauffeur come in separately and enquire after a copy of The Life and Death of Mr Badman by John Bunyan, published initially in 1680. There is not a copy in the shop, but one soon appears, in a pile of books given by Diana Conyers to a young boy to dispose of. Digby buys the book and when looking through it discovers a letter. The shop is broken into, the book and letter are stolen, and the foxy man, who turns out to be the vicar’s servant, is found dead, seemingly having committed suicide.

What was the significance of the book and the letter? Who were the three individuals enquiring after the book? Was the death really suicide? Digby sets out to uncover the truth, aided and abetted by his nephew, Jim Pickering, and in part by Diana Conyers with whom Pickering falls in love. The tale shows its age as incriminating evidence showing that a senior politician had allowed personal considerations to cloud their judgment was grounds for resignation and could bring the government down. Who could imagine it?! A change in government and policy direction could be lucrative for certain shadowy investors. Now, that is more realistic!

There is a darker, national threat hidden in the letter. Having alerted the Home Secretary, Sir Richard Mott, who is Diana’s stepfather, that he is incriminated in the letter, Digby, whose occupation as a blanket manufacturer comes in handy, manages to piece the mystery together courtesy of the hairs of a mountain goat, some wood shavings, and a sleeping bag. Of course, he manages to thwart the plot, albeit not without running some personal danger along the way. There are the usual thrills and spills, including a kidnap plot that has Pickering, a practising doctor, convinced that he has been seriously injured.

It is a marvellous romp of a book, entertainment for entertainment’s sake, with a plot that takes itself not too seriously, but clever enough to satisfy the reader’s demand for a mildly perplexing mystery which at the same time puts a smile on their face. The opening sentence puts the reader on notice that Harvey will inject as much whimsical humour as he can, and he clearly has fun with the names of some of his characters that include Olaf Wake, Euphemia Upstart, and Kitchener Lilywhite. And, of course the Badman in the title refers not only to Bunyan’s book but the rogue who is masterminding the plot.

Sadly, Harvey died three years after this book was published, but I am keen to explore some of his other works, particularly The Misadventures of Athelstan Digby which was published in 1920. The search is on.

In the meantime, this encounter with Mr Digby is one I shall remember for some time.

Four Strange Women

A review of Four Strange Women by E R Punshon

Bobby Owen’s promotion to Inspector and his transfer to Wychshire, his reward after a bit of string pulling by Lady Markham after his success in Murder Abroad, turns out to be a bit of a poisoned chalice. The chief constable, Colonel Glynne, is in a pickle as he suspects that his daughter, Becky, and possibly his son, Leonard, as well as the daughter of the chairman of the police committee, Hazel Hannay, might be involved in some skulduggery. Bobby Owen, to earn his spurs, has to get to the bottom of a mystery which expands as he digs deeper.

Originally published in 1940 and reissued by Dean Street Press, Four Strange Women is the fourteenth in his Bobby Owen series and a powerful, macabre, and at times melodramatic tale it is too. The book starts off with Lord Harry Darmoor making a late-night visit to Owen’s flat to tell him of the strange deaths of two young men and his concerns over the safety of Billy Baird. Darmoor has his fiancée, Gwen Barton, one of four women, along with Becky Glynne, Hazel Hannay and Lady May Grayson, who crop up with remarkable regularity as the story progresses. Baird, naturally, is found dead in a burnt-out caravan in the woods of Wychshire as Bobby arrives in the county.

The three young men and their deaths have remarkable similarities, all reported to have changed, to be under the influence of women, to have spent lavishly on jewellery that has disappeared from public view, and to have died in mysterious circumstances in what looks like suicide. Added to the mix is a picaresque street singer who specialises in Welsh language songs and a chauffeur who has vanished into thin air having stolen some jewels from his employer.

This is a dark, brooding, atmospheric book which lurches into the Gothic, the bizarre, and the melodramatic in equal measures. Owen begins to realise that there is a malign influence behind the personality changes in the three victims, whom he begins to suspect have been murdered, and that as well as having a serial killer on his hands the culprit is a woman. But which one?

By the time investigations get underway in earnest, Colonel Glynne has removed himself from the scene having conveniently signed himself off sick, Bobby is on his own and shuttles around between Wychshire, London, and Cardiff. There is a welcome return for the Cut and Come Again club, now said to be under new management, and a risqué club offering a mix of quasi-Satanic ritual and a dash of nudity, giving a new meaning to a petting club. Olive, Owen’s fiancée, still in London, makes the occasional appearance, offering her wisdom and female intuition as a sounding board.

While Owen is convinced that he can piece everything together and has a shrewd idea who the culprit is, what he lacks is evidence that would stand up in court. This is provided, in the most part, by a written statement from one of the male characters, by the time he is able to act upon it another has taken revenge in a ghoulish and innovative way. This is another book that raises the dilemma of whether someone who has rid society of a dark and manipulative force of evil deserves to suffer the fate that legal justice demands. The dilemma is resolved neatly, and the reader finishes the book with the sense that justice has been done.

The plot is unconventional and bizarre and Punshon does a fine job in keeping the reader guessing as to who the culprit is until almost the end. I had it down to two and, in a sense, I was right on both counts. Punshon creates some fine set pieces although the pace does drag in the middle as the conscientious Owen plods through the evidence and tests theories and alibis. Once he is on the home straight the pace picks up and the overall result is, in my opinion, one of Punshon’s best and most intriguing tales.