Finland’s Magnetic Island: Jussarö, A Danger to Shipping

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Coastal geology & environment, Regional History, Travel

Its been called a ghost town but the island’s massive concentration of iron ore under the sea⧆ exerts a powerful magnetic pull on passing ships and boats. The island of Jussarö is one of some 40,000 (and counting) islands off the coast that form Finland’s vast archipelago⌖.

(Image: julkaisut.metsa.fi)
(Source: Abandoned Spaces)

The “ghost town” tag comes from the closure of the island’s iron ore mining works in 1967☯ due to a decline in the world price for the mineral (‘Jussarö’, www.en.jussaro.net) …leaving the landscape scattered with the remnants of old industrial buildings abandoned to nature.

⇑ Hanneke Wrome (Image: alchetron.com)

Compass interference, a danger to shipping
The dense concentration of iron ore deposits within the island has been known to make the navigation equipment of passing vessels in the Gulf of Finland go haywire. The magnetic force emitted by the island tends to make ships malfunction and their compasses point in the wrong direction. Historically, a consequence of this has been a large incidence of marine accidents and shipwrecks in the vicinity. In 1468 the Hanseatic League cargo ship ‘Hanneke Wrome’ (or ‘Vrome’) was caught in a storm and wrecked near Jussarö island with the loss of over 200 lives and a vast quantity of expensive fabric, barrels of honey, gold coins and jewellery (‘Finland’s abandoned iron ore mine’, Abandoned Spaces, Bojan Ivanov, www.abandonedspaces.com). Perhaps the most famous shipwreck, known as “Jussarö I”, is a early 16th century ship belonging to the fleet of Swedish king, Gustav I Vasa (‘Jussarö Island’, www.visitraseborg.com). Given this hazard, Jussarö has been a haven for pilot stations and lighthouses (the island’s earliest pilot station dated from early 19th century).

⇑ Sundharu lighthouse

Raseborg’s teeth “ship trap”
Several smaller islands and islets south of Jussarö collectively known as Raseborgs gaddama (Raseborg”s Teeth”) are particularly prone to shipwrecks. This area is known to have caused disturbances in navigation as early as the 17th century. In 1751 Swedish naval cartographer “Jonas Hahn was able to explain the phenomenon by the high iron content in the underwater rock formation in the area”. The Sundharu lighthouse was stationed on one of the skerries here to try to counter the danger (‘Finnish cases: Four case study areas. Case 1 – Jussarö ship trap’, www submariner-net.eu).

When the mining activity ended, Jussarö was taken over by the Finnish Defence Forces and used for military training and urban war simulation. After the army left in 2005 the island came under the administration of Metsähallitus, a state-owned authority in charge of national parks, wildlife and forestry. The main activity today is tourism with day-trippers regularly commuting from the mainland.

Postscript: The island’s 13th century footnote in history
Jussarö first gets a mention in medieval Danish documents, appearing in King Valdemar II’s Survey (or “Court Rolls”), a document compared to William the Conqueror’s Doomsday Book record. The ‘Survey’ of Valdemar II of Denmark (reigned 1202–1241) was a land register of Danish settlements and their populations, c. 1231 (Nils Hybel, The Nature of Kingship c.800–c.1300: The Danish Incident , (2017)). Jussarö is included in the royal survey apparently because it was on the Danish route map (www.en.jussaro.net).

(Source: nationalparks.fi)

𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨𓆨
⧆ the largest deposits of iron ore in Finland
⌖ Jussarö itself lies within the Ekenäs Archipelago
☯ the second time iron ore mining operations had been abandoned on Jussarö, previous it was mined, sometimes using Russian prisoners, from the 1830s to 1861

Shinkansen, Japan’s Pioneering VFT and National Icon

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
New Technology,, Regional History, Sports history
Tokyo ‘64 (Source: glacerie123.com)

A symbol of modernisation
1964 was a bumper year for the Japanese. In October of that year two events helped the country finally break free of the persisting shadow of an an ultimately inglorious and painful World War II experience. Japan’s capital Tokyo staged the XVIII Summer Olympic Games and Japan launched its iconic high-speed train service, the Shinkansen (meaning literally “new trunk line” or “new main line”), popularly called the “Bullet Train” (弾丸列車 dangan ressha) because of the similarity of the initial (0 series) design of the nose✲. Together, the Olympics and the Shinkansen’s arrival symbolised the fulfilment of “Japan’s recovery from the devastation of war and the beginnings of Japan’s stratospheric rise as an economic superpower” (Braser & Tsubuku)⌧.

(Source: JapanRail Pass)

Planning for the Shinkansen started in the 1950s and had its origins in the realisation that Japan’s conventional rail network was reaching capacity and not up to the demands of modernisation. The country’s geography, climate and population needed a faster, modern network. A VFT was identified as imperative for a land mass that stretched over several islands north to south for thousands of kilometres. Construction (and operational) challenges were manifold and extremely formidable – a mountainous country subject to earthquakes, typhoons, heavy rain and snow and flooding (Hood).

The original rail service, the Tōhoku Shinkansen connected the three principal cities on Honshu island, Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka. The impact on intra-Japan rail travel was immediate and dramatic. With the sleek “whiz-bang” new train reaching speeds of up to 210 km/h⍟, the journey between Tokyo and Shin-Osaka was cut from 6 hrs & 30 mins in an conventional train to around 4 hrs & 10 minutes in the Bullet Train! (in 1965 it was reduced again by a further hour)✪.

Two symbols of Japan (Source: National Geographic)

An accident-free record
As impressive as it is, the Shinkansen’s most impressive attribute is not its rapid speed, but its peerless safety history over a period of 57 years. The Shinkansen service has not suffered a single casualty or even one injury in the totality of its trips. The only blots on the perfect record in this time have been two derailments (one in an earthquake and one in a blizzard) (Glancey).

The JRG 6 (Source: JapanRail Pass)

Rail privatisation
Originally the Shinkansen train network was built and operated by the Japanese government (Japanese National Railways), but in 1987 it was privatised, coming under the ownership of six Japanese Railways Group (JRG) companies. Today they runs nine separate lines, smoothly criss-crossing the densely-populated Honshu and Kyushu islands and extending to the northern island of Hokkaido, it’s spotlessly clean carriages carrying an average of around 150 million passengers a year (JapanRail Pass). The network has two types of Shinkansen trains – Kodama Express and the limited stop Hikari Super Express train.

N700 series (2020) (Source: cnn.com)

Personifying Nihongo efficiency
The latest iteration of the Shinkansen, the N700 train with its aerodynamic duckbill-nose completes the Tokyo–Osaka journey in 2 hrs & 25 mins⌽. The N700S (Supreme) has the advanced capacity to continue operating during earthquakes. Punctuality is also the Shinkansen’s strong suit – the average delay for the railway’s fleet of trains is less than 60 seconds (Dow). The Shinkansen’s efficiency represents “an elegant solution for shuttling workers from one dense city to another” and doing it rapidly, workers living “in distant, relatively undeveloped areas can commute to Tokyo (for instance) in two hours” (Pinsker)〥.

Local dissenters to the “love affair” with the Shinkansen
The Shinkansen has been a change agent for Japanese economy and society, a potent symbol of the nation’s development. Research indicates that those urban hubs with a Shinkansen station experience higher population and higher employment growth rates (Sands). Not everyone in Japan however is 100% behind the Bullet Train companies’ unbending “full-steam ahead” approach. There have been pockets of local rural opposition pushing back against JRG’s relentless land acquisition process. Residents along the routes whose quality of life has been adversely affected by Shinkansen’s noise and vibration have also been vocal in their complaints (Hood).

Japan’s Maglev prototype (Source: ft.com)

Eye on the future
Not resting on the laurels of the Shinkansen series’ cutting-edge technology, research has been happening since 1962 on a linear motor railway system. In the 2000s JR Central commenced testing a Maglev train prototype, the Linear Chūō Shinkansen, which can reach a speed in excess of 500 km/h – this service is slated for introduction in 2027 (Nippon.com).

Postscript: To transfer technology or not to transfer technology?
Japan’s success with the Shinkansen has spawned imitators. China’s vaulting high-speed train ambitions—while denying charges of intellectual piracy by copying the Shinkansen—has seen it have to resort to reliance on German and French as well as Japanese VFT technology for its own high-speed train. Consequently some Japanese railway insiders have criticised the technology leak to China, lamenting that when you put high technical ability on display (as Japan has with its crown jewel train), it gets copied. However there’s no consensus on this point within Japanese government and business. Central Japan Railway Co (owner of Shinkansen and Linear Train Technology) have actively participated in the development of US high-speed trains on an ongoing basis, proponents of this approach argue that by not exporting the Bullet Train technology to countries with large markets, Japan risks losing out to competitors who’ll get in first…the Overseas Rapid Railway Project’s Katsunori Ochiai summed up the gains from exporting: “If the new Japanese model Shinkansen and linear trains are adopted in America, the market for manufacturers of the carriages and signal systems would be greatly expanded.” (Shimbun).

Shinkansen technology transfer’ first export overseas was to Taiwan, successfully helping to develop the Taiwanese High-Speed Rail system.

Taiwan HS Rail (Source: construction-post.com)

ゅ⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯⌯ゅ

✲ a blue snub-nosed design with white livery

present maximum operating speed of the Shinkansen clocks at 320 km/h

✪ another pioneering first for the Shinkansen: the first dedicated high-speed railtrack in the world

⌽ the N700 series has reached 332 km/h in trials

〥 the network’s efficiency and speed comes at a price – a typical ticket will set you back about $US130 (2014), unless you are subsidised by your employer (Pinsker)

<ほのぱ ほのぱ ほのぱ>

Articles and sites consulted:

’Japan’s Transfer of Bullet Train Technology A Mistake. China, Of Course, Has Copied It’, Sankei Shimbun, Japan-Forward, 18-Aug-2017, www.japan-forward.com

HOOD, Christopher P. “The Shinkansen’s Local Impact.” Social Science Japan Journal, vol. 13, no. 2, 2010, pp. 211–225. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40961264. Accessed 26 June 2021.

SANDS, BRIAN. “The Development Effects of High-Speed Rail Stations and Implications for California.” Built Environment (1978–), vol. 19, no. 3/4, 1993, pp. 257–284. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23288581. Accessed 26 June 2021.

‘How the Shinkansen bullet train made Tokyo into the monster it is today’, Philip Brasor & Masako Tsubuku, The Guardian, 30-Sep-2014, www.theguardian.com

‘What 50 Years of Bullet Trains Have Done for Japan’, Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic, 07-Oct-2014, www.theatlantic.com

‘Japan’s Shinkansen: Revolutionary design at 50’, Jonathan Glancey, BBC, 15-Jul-2014, www.bbc.com

‘The Shinkansen Turns 50: The History and Future of Japan’s High-Speed Train’, Nippon.com, 01-Oct-2014, www.nippon.com

‘Five things to know about Japan’s Shinkansen: The trains that always run on time’, Aisha Dow, 11-Nov-2016, https://i.stuff.co.nz/

L’Aérotrain Experiment: The Rise and Fall of a French Hovertrain

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
New Technology,, Regional History, Science and society

Before the Maglev (magnetic levitation) very fast train (VFT) system was developed—which we can observe today in commercial operation in Japan, China and South Korea—there was the Aérotrain prototype in France✳. Its story starts in the early 1960s when France was faced with a need to revitalise its declining railway sector. In 1963 aviation engineer Jean Bertin pitched his Aérotrain concept for a VFT mass transit system to France’s public transport czars. Over the next two years the government created a state company to study the Aérotrain while Bertin developed his 1:20 scale model train into the full-scale prototype.

Bertin’s invention was a Tracked Air Cushion Vehicle (TACV), a hovertrain riding on a cushion of air atop “a simple reinforced concrete track or guideway”∆. The Aérotrain design borrowed from the lifting technology of hovercraft vessels and from the arliner’s turbo fan. Both the ‘wheelless’ vehicle and the T-shaped track were radical designs at the time. Bertin’s intention was to come up with a simpler and cheaper alternative to the Maglev trains then in experimentation (‘France’s Aérotrain’, Ian Brown, Google Sighting, 10-Oct-2013, www.googlesighting.com).

“A underscore” logo (Photo: Société des Amis de Jean Bertin)

Exporting the hovertrain
By 1966 Bertin & Cie had built its first Aérotrain test track (6.7km-long) at Essonne, south of Paris. Interest in Bertin’s hovertrain concept was international, Britain designed its own version, the RTV-31 Tracked Hovercraft, and constructed a test track in 1970, in the US, Rohr Industries contracted with Bertin’s company to do the same. Bertin developed several prototypes, the ultimate bring the Aérotrain 180 HV, a 25.6m-long hovertrain seating 80 passengers and attaining a world record speed for overland cushion vehicles (430.3 km per hour).

RTV-31, UK (Source: Geograph)
Photo: www.grandsudinsolite.fr

Technical issues
L’Aérotrain prototype presented Bertin with a series of design challenges — the system would require new elevated guideways for every implementation; the craft when passing other trains or entering tunnels experienced sudden changes in air pressure; the Aérotrain’s gas turbines operated with giant propellers which generated tremendous noise, necessitating a reduction in speed in urban areas (making it unattractive to some interested authorities) (‘Aerotrain’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).

Photo: www.grandsudinsolite.fr

Aérotrain, not the people’s train?
Although the technocrats in the state apparatus were favourably disposed to Bertin’s Aérotrain—especially DATAR (Delegation for Territory Planning and Regional Action)—its acceptance was not universal within France. Technical difficulties like the noise levels turned . many Parisians away from the vehicle. With such a “cutting-edge” special project, a perception grew that Aérotrain travel was for the elite commuter, not the average French worker, “(serving) only a rarefied strata of society”⟴ (Guigueno, Vincent. “Building a High-Speed Society: France and the Aérotrain, 1962-1974.” Technology and Culture, vol. 49, no. 1, 2008, pp. 21–40. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40061376. Accessed 20 June 2021).

180 HV Aérotrain Expérimental

Cost was increasingly a factor working against the Aérotrain, the system, requiring a dedicated track would be costly to implement. The 1973 oil crisis (also see End-note) and the imposition of new strictures on state spending didn’t help, leaving the Aérotrain Company in financial difficulties (Guigueno). Public authorities were increasingly reluctant to fund the Aérotrain project.

SNCF (Photo:www.france24.com)

The modern versus the traditional
The bureaucracy and SNCF (French National Railway Company) had its own agenda, which deviated from the objectives of Aérotrain. Transport planning in France was committed to a policy of maintaining the efficacy of “traditional modes of urban transport”, heavily investing in Aérotrain ran counter to that. The influential SNCF saw it as a “competitive threat to the traditional railway” (Guigueno).

Pres. Giscard d’Estaing (Photo: Multimedia Centre)

The lethal blow came in 1974. French president, Georges Pompidou, who had been a moderniser, died. His more conservative replacement, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, coming down on the side of traditional technologies terminated the Aérotrain project just two months into office. The reasons for Giscard’s opposition to the project are not certain, Guigueno speculates that perhaps the president was reacting to Aérotrain’s unpopularity with the Paris suburbs and their representatives. The recently-approved Cergy—La Défense link for Aérotrain engendered scepticism from locals due to delays and cost overruns and was also canned by Giscard. Giscard whose previous ministerial job was controlling the nation’s pursestrings probably thought Aérotrain was too much of a financial risk at the time (‘Transport That Never Was Part 1: Aérotrain, a hovertrain in Paris’s western suburbs’, Fabric of France, 18-Feb-2020, www.fabricoffrance.com).

TGV Hi-Speed Train (Photo: EURail Pass)

Replacing a revolutionary VFT with a conventional VFT
Aérotrain’s misfortune was TGV’s good fortune. The Giscard government switched from Aérotrain to TGV¶, a rival turbo train design inspired by Japan’s Shinkansen, as the preferred provider for France’s inter-city high-speed rail service. In 1981 TGV became the VFT carrier for the new Paris to Lyon link. Essential to TGV’s triumph over Aérotrain was SNCF’s strategy of “develop(ing) TGV as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for the traditional rail service” (Guigueno)❂. On the matter of infrastructure TGV was a full circuit in front of Aérotrain. The TGV was a better fit with its huge advantage over Aérotrain in compatibility with existing railways in France, and it could extend, beyond the high-speed network, over much greater distances (‘Transport That Never Was’).

Abandoned Aérotrain test track near Orléans: section of Saran—Ruan monorail still in existence

Aérotrain’s eclipse was devastating for its inventor … Bertin, already stricken with cancer, died several months later, aged just 58. In 1977 the Aérotrain project was abandoned, bringing an end to the Gallic hovertrain dream.

End-note: The hike in the world oil price after 1973 posed an acute problem for the TGV prototype, being as it was powered by gas turbines. Sagely, the company switched its prototype to all-electric trains to overcome this, and stay cost-competitive with Aérotrain (‘Transport That Never Was’).

______________________________
✳ the Aérotrain’s levitation anticipated the magnetic floating effect of the later Maglev train (‘1963-1980 The Aérotrain’, Alex Q. Arbuckle, www.mashable.com)
∆ Bertin understood that by compressing and enclosing air under the vehicle, “it was possible to produce an air cushion over which the craft could glide with minimum resistance and power” (Kaushik Patowary, ‘Aerotrain: The High-speed Train That Almost Revolutionized Transport’, Amusing Planet, 19-May-2020, www.amusingplanet.com).
⟴ Aérotrain #02 prototype and the small cabin-sized Tridim for instance are personal-type vehicles, not mass transit vehicles
TurboTrain à Grande Vitesse
❂ Britain followed a similar path to France, the experimental RTV-31 ended up in the dumpster, superseded by the more conventional APT-E tilting high-speed train

The Hitler Diary Forgeries: The Bonanza Scoop and a Need to Believe?

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Creative Writing, International Relations, Literary & Linguistics, Regional History, Society & Culture

Hitler-Tagebücher, the discovery of diaries, hitherto unknown, claimed to be written by Adolf Hitler, the most talked about man of the 20th century, who wouldn’t want to find out more about a scoop with such history revising ramifications?

The news, when it surfaced in the early 1980s, certainly caused quite a sensation internationally. After eminent historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (Lord Dacre) declared the diaries legit on a first sighting (though later he walked that back a bit), newspaper editors in Germany and the UK unhesitatingly bought the ruse. Rupert Murdoch, after forking out £250,000 to buy the serialisation rights from Der Stern magazine for the diaries, ordered their immediate serialisation in the Sunday Times.

Trevor-Roper: his damaged academic reputation never really recovered from the humiliating affair

With everyone so enthusiastically “gung-ho” about them, the spoiler was that the diaries were fakes, the work of one Konrad Kujau, an East German petty crim and recidivist forger. Kujau’s “Hitler Diaries” were acquired by a ‘Naziphile’ journalist with a bent for Third Reich memorabilia, Gerd Heidemann❶, who was the go-between in selling the diary rights to Stern for somewhere in the region of $2–$3 M. In the transaction Heidemann purloined something considerably north of a tidy sum for himself.

Gerd Heidemann, subsequently jailed for fraud for his part in the forgeries ▼

An incredible lack of credibility
On the face of it the Hitler forgeries had the hole-ridden texture of Swiss cheese. The German Federal Archives eventually pronounces them “clumsy fakes” after two weeks of commotion, described as a “14-day historical mystery-thriller, in which experts changed their minds, Jewish leaders were horrified at an apparent attempt to whitewash Hitler”❷ (Schwarz and van der Vat). There was a “thoroughly incomplete vetting of the diaries” (McGrane). In the flurry of activity as interested parties competed for the diaries, no one thought to test the ink, paper and string of the supposed ‘personal’ seals of the Führer (when three volumes in the form of small notebooks were eventually examined it was shown that they dated from after WWII – Kujau used modern paper which he stained with tea to give it an aged appearance!). Nor did they think to scrutinise the text of the diaries more closely – if they did they would have detected the plagiarism, Kujau copied (word for word) large chunks of a book on Hitler’s proclamations and speeches by Max Domarcus (McGrane).

▲ Some of Kujau’s handiwork (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

Then there’s the handwriting which didn’t match, an oversight not immediately picked up on. Initially Kujau produced some 27 volumes of the ‘lost’ diaries…the sort of money these fetched was irresistibly tempting, suddenly Kujau ‘discovered’ a whole new vein of Hitler writings, a further 35 diaries and a third volume of Mein Kampf, alarm bells still didn’t ring❸.

Likewise, the simple fact that there had been absolutely no previous record of the diaries’ existence, in an area of historical research which has been so inexhaustibly and copiously trawled for decades, somehow escaped all of those with their eyes on the prize. Another clue missed was Kujau’s careless labelling of each volume ‘FH’ in Gothic letters rather than ‘AH’. The editors of Stern fatally failed to press Heidemann to divulge his source for the diaries, the employee only giving up the name of the known fraudster when the jig was virtually up. The catch-up forensics, when they came, quickly verified the bogus nature of the ‘documents’.

Konrad Kujau (got four-and-a-half years jail for his crime) ▼

Clarity comes with hindsight
Self-recrimination for such egregiously bad judgement followed. With hindsight Lord Dacre reproached himself for being seduced by the find of such a historical treasure…”I should have refused to give an opinion so soon” (Schwarz and van den Vat). 30 years on, Felix Schmidt, one of the three editors-in-chief at Stern ❹, reflected that the very thought that Hitler kept diaries triggered “a kind of collective insanity in the upper echelons Stern’s editorial offices”, adding that “delusional secrecy” and “illegitimate mystification” about the affair prevailed.

(Source: Business Insider)

There was in such an intoxicating atmosphere “simply too much money at stake for anyone to come to their senses”.(McGrane). Clearly the newspapers were blindsided by the dollar (and Deutschmark) signs dangling before their eyes, hence their inordinate haste to rush in where cooler and wiser heads would have proceeded with great caution❺.

Postwar German generation
A persuasive argument for why the participants were so easily duped comes from Die Zeit editor Giovanni di Lorenzo, who attributes their ready acceptance of the flimsy evidence for the diaries‘ authenticity to generational fixation with Hitler of those who lived through the Nazi era. This fascination, Lorenzo concludes, would have been unimaginable to later German generations (McGrane).

PostScript: Hitler Diaries on the celluloid screen
The celebrated hoax has been translated twice to the screen, the first a 1991 British mini-series based on Robert Harris’ book Selling Hitler with the same title (Alexei Sayle is a comfortable fit as the cheerful and uncomplicated ‘Conny’ Kujau). The second, a satirical German-made film, Schtonk!, released in 1992.

▲ Dictator diarists, courtesy of their ghostwriters

⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯ ⌯⌯⌯

❶ Heidemann’s devotion to Nazi memorabilia extended to purchasing the late Field Marshal Göring’s yacht

❷ in the diaries Hitler is incredulously depicted as being almost blissfully unaware of the atrocities committed against Jews

❸ Kujau sold his first faux Hitler diary to a collector in 1978

❹ all three summarily sacked for their failings

❺ the Sunday Times especially should have been treading warily given it had been scammed before in 1968 when it spent $250,000 trying to get its hands on the equally fraudulent “Mussolini Diaries”

୭ ˚ ୭ ˚ ୭ ˚

Bibliography:

‘Diary of the Hitler Diary Hoax’, Sally McGrane, The New Yorker, 25-Apr-2013, www.thenewyorker.com

‘Hitler Diaries proved to be forged — archive’, Walter Schwarz and Dan van den Vat, The Guardian, 07-May-1983, www.theguadian.com

‘The Hitler Diaries: How hoax documents became the most infamous fake news ever’, Adam Lusher, Independent, 05-May-2018, www.independent.co.uk