The Walls Around Us

YOUR ARTICLE ABOUT THE BALLOON frame (“Who Invented Your House?,” by Ted Cavanagh, Spring 1999) offers a fine history of this wood-saving approach to house building in America. However, there’s another technique that’s even more parsimonious: the board-and-batten house of the California coast.

Your 1941 photograph of balloonframe construction shows walls of vertical two-by-fours spaced about 16 inches apart; in the same picture there’s a similar wall that’s a little farther along, already covered with sheathing, probably one-by-eight boards placed diagonally. These would be covered with a finish such as shingles or stucco on the outside and plastered or drywalled on the inside. A board-andbatten wall uses only the one-by-eight boards (or one-by-tens or such), with battens that are usually one-by-twos or -threes. The boards are placed upright edge to edge, with a batten over each joint. No other materials are added on the inside or the outside; the boards and battens are both structure and finish. Floors are made by simply nailing horizontal ledgers to the boards and then adding joists.

There probably aren’t any houses being built this way anymore. Codes discourage them, and there’s no way to hide wiring or insulation in them. Older board-and-batten houses still exist and are in use, although as one owner told me, they creak whenever the wind blows. Their thin walls are easily twisted, causing board to rub against board in noisy complaint, sometimes loud enough to discourage sleep.

John Wiebenson
Wiebenson & Dorman Architects
Washington, D.C.

The Walls Around Us

YOU OFFERED AN EXCELLENT TECHNICAL and historical description of balloon framing, but it failed to touch on one serious life-safety problem. With no fire stop from the basement to the attic, fire would quickly spread vertically up the fluelike walls to the roof area. It was not uncommon for Chicago firefighters to respond to an alarm in a balloon-frame building and find fire in both the basement and the attic.

Gerald K. Power
Deputy District Chief, Ret.
Chicago Fire Department
Orland Park, III.

The Walls Around Us

IN THE CONTENTS-PAGE REFERENCE TO the article, you say: “Most American houses are built by a quick, simple technique that is virtually unknown in the rest of the world: balloon framing.” I believe balloon framing has become obsolete in America. Houses are now commonly built using the technique of platform framing. In platform framing the two-by-fours or two-by-sixes for the walls extend for only one story of the house. A platform is then built atop these two-by-fours or two-by-sixes to form the floor for the next set of walls.

Kenneth L. Bergman
Spring, Tex.

Ted Cavanagh replies: Mr. Bergman is correct. The common name for light wood framing today is platform framing. It is also called western framing. It is a variation on the balloon frame, the main difference being that the second floor is a platform supported by eight-foot stud walls. This slight shift in the balloon frame has had a rather remarkable consequence. Today almost all of us live in rooms of uniform height, because lumber comes in uniform eight-foot lengths.

In response to Mr. Power’s point, today all light wood frame buildings have horizontal fire stops at the midpoint in each stud space on every floor. It is often said that Chicago’s great fire of 1871 was made worse by the large number of balloon-frame houses in the city. Of course many “fireproof” buildings were destroyed in the fire as well.

Bee Business

PRIOR TO AND AFTER WORLD WAR II , my father was a beekeeper and part owner of a bee and dairy supply store. He sold bees and honey as well as bee supplies. Mother raised and sold queen bees. I remember staying up all night as a young boy to turn the handle on an extractor like the one shown on page 14 (“Bee Tech,” by Roger A. Morse, Spring 1999).

As I studied the exploded view of a hive on page 12, I realized that it omits one of the most important parts of a modern beehive, the excluder. An excluder is an absolute necessity to keep the drones and the queen from passing from the brood chamber to the comb honey super. Bees do not keep their brood and their food supply separate except because of the excluder. It is about the thickness of the inner cover and is made up of evenly spaced parallel wires so that only a worker bee can pass through from the brood chamber to the comb honey super.

James W. Brashier
Alpharetta, Ga.

The Shipwrecked Navy

YOUR ARTICLE “THE GHOST FLEET of Mallows Bay” (by Donald G. Shomette, Winter 1999) brought back memories. When my family lived in the Washington, D.C., area many moons ago, one favorite family pastime was the Sunday afternoon auto ride. Sometimes we would drive down the bank of the Potomac. This was before National Airport was dredged up out of that river and before the Pentagon was erected on Roosevelt Field. Farther down, in one of the inlets of the river, we could see rows of wooden ships tied up and apparently abandoned.

When I asked about them, my father, who had had three brothers in the World War I Navy, would reply that the ships were decommissioned minesweepers waiting for a buyer. He would say, “If you had ten dollars, you could probably have one.” As a young lad I would wish I had that ten dollars. As an older lad I have wondered what happened to those magnificent ghosts. Now, thanks to you, I know.

Perry Mason
Topping, Va.

A Store Point

I. BERNARD COHEN POINTS OUT IN his enlightening article “Father of the Computer Age” (Spring 1999) that Howard Aiken “steadfastly opposed the use of a single store for both instructions and data, which became a central feature of post-World War II computers.” While most computers did follow the single-store principle, it is interesting to note that the twostore design is far from dead. A good example is the family of PIC microprocessors made by Microchip Technologies, of Chandler, Arizona. These and many other micros use an architecture that completely separates the instruction flow from the data flow, which is what Aiken espoused.

Time has a strange way of dealing with people and events, though. The single-store concept is widely known as the von Neumann architecture, for John von Neumann, although historical evidence on the concept’s actual origin is far from certain. And since all data and all instructions must flow through the bus that connects this memory to the processor, this bus is sometimes called the von Neumann bottleneck. But the two-store concept is called the Harvard architecture, ignoring Aiken completely.

William J. Eccles
Professor of Electrical and
Computer Engineering
Rose-Hulman Institute of
Technology
Terre Haute, Ind.

Money Talks

AS AN EX-HUGHES AIRCRAFT EMPLOYEE of 27 years, I found the article on Howard Hughes in your Winter 1999 issue, by T. A. Heppenheimer (“Howard Hughes the Innovator”), a definite cut above the usual show-biz garbage published about Hughes. One event not mentioned: The synchronous satellite program at Hughes started when Don Thompson, a brilliant though unbalanced engineer (he later committed suicide), walked into the office of the general manager and vice president L. A. (“Pat”) Hyland, put $15,000 of his own money on Hyland’s desk, and announced that Hughes Aircraft should get into the satellite business and that he was willing to put his own resources behind it. Harold Rosen, formerly of Hughes Aircraft, whom the article credits with introducing the communications satellite as we know it, always tells this story when interviewed.

G. Gwynn Jumper
Belfair, Wash.

Not at Anchor

I ENJOY YOUR MAGAZINE GREATLY , but I would like to point out a usage error. In Frederick Alien’s “They’re Still There” column in the Spring 1999 issue, he describes the ship Kinsman Independent as being “at anchor” in Buffalo while unloading grain. Unless the grain elevator was afloat in the harbor, the ship could not be at anchor. A ship is at anchor when its anchor has been dropped and is holding it to the bottom of the harbor; the ship is then free to move about its anchor at the whim of wind and current to the extent allowed by the length of the anchor chain. The Kinsman Independent was surely moored at a pier or wharf. A moored ship is held in place by mooring lines or cables that allow for little movement of the ship—mostly on the vertical, to allow for tides, where there are tides—and is usually reached from the pier by a gangway. A ship at anchor has to be reached by boat or helicopter.

Capt. Charles N. Galvano, USN, Ret.
Associate Professor
Naval Postgraduate School
Monterey, Calif.