Your N.E. house-tour assistant
William (“Willit’’ ) Mason, M.D., has written has a delightful – and very handy -- book rich with photos and colorful anecdotes, called Guidebook to Historic Houses and Gardens in New England: 71 Sites from the Hudson Valley East (iUniverse, 240 pages. Paperback. $22.95). Oddly, given the cultural and historical richness of New England and the Hudson Valley, no one else has done a book quite like this before.
The blurb on the back of the book neatly summarizes his story.
“When Willit Mason retired in the summer of 2015, he and his wife decided to celebrate with a grand tour of the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley of New York.
While they intended to enjoy the area’s natural beauty, they also wanted to visit the numerous historic estates and gardens that lie along the Hudson River and the hills of the Berkshires.
But Mason could not find a guidebook highlighting the region’s houses and gardens, including their geographic context, strengths, and weaknesses. He had no way of knowing if one location offered a terrific horticultural experience with less historical value or vice versa.
Mason wrote this comprehensive guide of 71 historic New England houses and gardens to provide an overview of each site. Organized by region, it makes it easy to see as many historic houses and gardens in a limited time.
Filled with family histories, information on the architectural development of properties and overviews of gardens and their surroundings, this is a must-have guide for any New England traveler.’’
Dr. Mason noted of his tours: “Each visit has captured me in different ways, whether it be the scenic views, architecture of the houses, gardens and landscape architecture or collections of art. As we have learned from Downton Abbey, every house has its own personal story. And most of the original owners of the houses I visited in preparing the book have made significant contributions to American history.’’
To order a book, please go to www.willitmason.com
#Great New England houses
Llewellyn King: Remembering an engineering giant
Richard Morley
WEST WARWICK, R.I
People often ask me who are the most interesting or most influential people I have met. It is easy to say Margaret Thatcher or Bill Clinton, but sometimes the real history makers are never known outside of their specialty. One such was Richard Morley (1932-2017).
A mutual friend took me to meet Morley at his home, in Mason, N.H., about 23 years ago. We spent a delightful afternoon there. He let me move a pile of earth from one spot to another with a backhoe operated by a personal computer.
I didn’t realize that I was in the presence of a great inventor, a member of industrial royalty, who had moved technology a giant step forward and sped up the automation revolution.
Morley did that in 1968 when he and colleagues at General Motors perfected the programmable logic controller. With the PLC, automation had arrived for the car industry and much else.
If it is moved, stored, welded, shaped, collated and shoved out the door, a series of programmed controllers ordered all that. In fact, for everything manufactured, PLCs are at work translating the blueprints into products.
They are everywhere, from the factory floor to advanced farms, to city water plants, to oil and gas drilling. They occupy a part of the modern world known as operational technology, or OT.
Vital though OT is, it gets less attention than its big sibling, information technology, or IT.
Matt Morris, managing director of security and risk consulting at 1898 & Co., the consulting arm of Burns & McDonnell, the big architecture, engineering and construction firm, told me, “IT is the ‘carpeted space,’ and OT is the ‘uncarpeted space’ ”
In other words, much of industry’s heavy lifting is done by OT, while IT has taken over all of the other more obvious functions of society, from accounting to airline reservations, from doctors’ offices to designing aircraft.
IT is king, but that is only part of the story.
Regarding cybersecurity, OT and IT differ, but both have their vulnerabilities. When we say cybersecurity, we mostly mean IT. OT is different, and the threats emanating from attacks on it are usually more strategic and harder to identify.
Attacks on OT aren’t necessarily as immediately detectable as those on IT. They can be very subtle but also highly destructive and expensive.
The classic example of what can be done to OT was provided not in an attack on the United States but by the United States in 2007 (and revealed in 2010) when the nation’s cyber-warriors were able to slow down or speed up uranium-enrichment centrifuges in Iran. The Iranians didn’t know that their operating systems had been fooled surreptitiously. Their engineers were at a loss.
Now, 1898 & Co. is taking a bold step into the world of critical infrastructure resiliency with the creation of a new service aimed at offering full-time, proactive cybersecurity at critical infrastructure sites, like utilities, embracing IT and OT.
The company and its parent have enormous experience in utilities and other critical infrastructure, including oil rigs, refineries and water systems. Through a program they call “Managed Threat Protection and Response,” their aim is to take critical infrastructure defense and response to new levels. The capability is an addition to its existing Managed Security Services solution.
To implement this, the company has set up its program in Houston, far from its home base in Kansas City, Mo., to be near the customers — much critical infrastructure has links to Houston — but also, as Mark Mattei, 1898 & Co. director of cybersecurity, told me, to avail itself of the talent in the area.
The company is opening up a new horizon in cybersecurity, focusing on OT.
With IT, you would want to throw a switch, avert or stop the attack as fast as possible. But with OT, a more measured response might be called for. You wouldn’t want to shut down a whole plant because one pump had had its controller attacked or bring down part of the electricity grid because a single substation had evidence that it was malfunctioning because of an attack in one component.
The more one learns about cybersecurity, the more one appreciates the unsung heroes who take on unknown enemies 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
We are on the threshold of something big in defending critical infrastructure. I am sure that Richard Morley would have approved of this new approach.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
White House Chronicle
InsideSources
Sign for “Uncle Sam's House,’’ in Mason, N.H.
— Photo by Craig Michaud
Editor’s note:
Mr. Morley lived on his farm in Mason, N.H., for over 40 years, where he worked out of a renovated barn.