Torpedo juice: Legendary, illegal WWII liquor drunk in Alaska and the world

> The terms cleanliness and hygiene are often used interchangeably, which can cause confusion. In general, hygiene refers to practices that prevent spread of disease-causing organisms. Cleaning processes (e.g., handwashing) remove infectious microbes as well as dirt and soil, and are thus often the means to achieve hygiene.

> Home hygiene pertains to the hygiene practices that prevent or minimize the spread of disease at home and other everyday settings such as social settings, public transport, the workplace, public places, and more. Hygiene in a variety of settings plays an important role in preventing the spread of infectious diseases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene

It does seem like hygiene controls are going to be concerned exclusively with infectious disease, while cleanliness is going to prevent broader contamination of anything toxic.

Specifically, they didn't want to waste 1-10 torpedoes for testing, which maybe that can be defensible, but it became utterly indefensible when every single submarine came back from patrol with reports of "we launched a spread of 4 torps, 2 hit the hull of the enemy ship, zero detonations".

The lost value in un-sunk enemy shipping, the number of dead seaman that should have come back victorious, the number of subs that got sunk after an attack utterly failed, all were individually prices that dwarfed a single Mk14 torpedo, and together had a measurable impact on war performance.

All because the bureau of ordinance basically refused to hear any feedback.

Nearly every single component of the torpedo was unfit for service. The magnetic exploder didn't work. The contact detonator was nearly incapable of working because of the physics of torpedo impacts in a way that meant getting a perpendicular hit, which was considered optimal, actually was less likely to detonate. The depth keeping system was calibrated incorrectly, due to module integration mistakes, and ran 10 feet deeper than it was supposed to in some cases.

It's actually kind of common for US military procurement to produce a somewhat failed piece of equipment initially, but it usually gets modified and iterated on and improved to the point of being very respectable hardware in short order. The refusal of BuOrd to hear feedback is the real problem here. Their insane delays in fielding and responding to feedback cost real US lives. Once the torpedo was fixed up, the American sub fleet in the pacific ran roughshod over Japanese supply and utterly crippled their abilities to maintain control over the island chains.

The reason BuOrd gave for refusing to double check their work as these scathing reports came in? You see, the navy was struggling to produce enough torpedoes to meet requirements, so we can't waste a couple for testing. Instead, HUNDREDS of outright non-functioning torpedoes were sent to the bottom of the pacific, completely wasted, with almost no hope of actually working, because they were never tested.

The entire situation should be required reading for anyone in management, anywhere. Textbook case of penny smart, pound foolish.

See, the early hard drives used in Soviet computers required a lot of manual maintenance, which included cleaning the heads with ethanol. They also topped out at ~5Mb.

In late 80s these were gradually replaced with imported Western hardware that offered more storage for less. In some places, the engineers in charge of servicing those things got creative and used such upgrades as an excuse to up their ethanol quota. After all, if a 5Mb HDD needs N ml of ethanol to service daily, it stands to reason that a 20Mb HDD needs N*4, right?