New Stuff - v - Old Hat

From a very early age I tended to be intrigued by the search for answers to the questions "why?" and "what if?"  When I was older the best part of five years training in the science and art of Marine Engineering simply served to consolidate that tendency.  I have been very fortunate that my subsequent choice of employment has been such as to encourage me to ask the questions and try to provide the answers.  For me it was always "New Stuff".  It was invariably exciting and the rewards, when things went right, were generally more than satisfying.   Now, of course, all that is "Old Hat" except for nostalgic meanderings or when things are unexpectedly revived (as we shall see).

On retirement from the Royal Navy in 1965 there was a choice of joining the Nimrod Project based with the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Harwell or of joining a company affiliated to Ludwig Pallman KG, a German organisation specialising in the manufacture of equipment used in comminution - a form of milling.  Luckily I chose the latter because the Nimrod Project, development of a technique for providing electricity by means of nuclear fusion, was terminated within a year or two.  Comminution flourished!   The routine, bread and butter, activity was in the milling of heat labile materials such as polyethylene, polymethylmethacrylate and PVC.   The exciting stuff was in the development of techniques for handling a wide range of other materials.  During four years with the company we dealt with sodium cyanide for steel hardening processes, copper furnace slag for the production of sintered metal bushes, gelatine and casein for the pharmaceutical industry,  cattle skulls for an abattoir, whole, plucked, chickens and dog biscuits for the petfood industry, wood offcuts for the chipboard industry and logs to produce wood-pulp for the paper industry.  It was varied, interesting and sometimes high pressure work.   In May 1968 the main factory caught fire during the night shift and burned to the ground taking with it all our records and equipment designs.  It engendered a transport problem too because the factory was right alongside the main east coast rail link and the train service between London and the North-East had to be diverted for two days until the shell of the building was demolished and the threat to main line removed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The fire was a disaster because we were the sole contractor engaged providing polyolefin powders for resale to manufacturers and it was imperative that production started again as soon as possible.   First on the agenda was the re-design the milling plants, six to a block as shown on the left.  This would provide a datum for the height of the roof-ridge and thereby establish the span of the new factory that had to be built to house it.   Components of the original plants were distributed throughout three floors of the old factory so here was an opportunity to make a much more compact assembly.    With a bare six feet six to each level of the gantry the overall height of the plant was  effectively halved.   When the profile of a building was added to the plant elevation the manufacturers of the steel framing for the factory were slightly dubious.   The new plant demanded a clear span of 120 feet - the largest that the company had ever produced.   That they did a great job is attested to by the fact that the factory still stands over thirty years on and has been extended twice in that time.    Production trials on the new plant began in October 1968.  In the space of six months land had been acquired, factory designed, planning permission obtained, factory built, mains services provided, plant designed, constructed, installed and commissioned.    Recently it has taken over a year to get planning permission for some simple changes to a local property.   Does that reflect a quantum leap in bureaucracy or a quantum reduction in industry?
Early in 1969 I  joined a team developing heart-lung machines and was based at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children.    So began an association with medical physics that was to last almost thirty years.  On the right are shown two views of a type of heart-lung machine that was in use at GOS in the late 60s.   By today's standards they are pretty crude but they worked very well and were capable of sustaining whole body perfusion for up to five hours.
With the exception of the tubing sets all parts of the machine were re-useable and this required an obsessive attention to cleanliness and sterility by the technical staff.   By 1972 money had been obtained to purchase a ready-made heart-lung machine from an American manufacturer.    Development work therefore came to an end and I had to turn "why?" and "what if?"  to other directions.
An interest in the physics of sound meant that 1972 saw the  design of  a Sound Synthesiser.  The prototype instrument is shown on the far left.  Practical Electronics agreed to publish the design providing that it was made in modular form and equipped with a keyboard.   The resulting instrument is shown on the front cover of PE for February 1973 and the series ran for a total of thirteen months.   Publication resulted in some unexpected and not entirely welcome ramifications.  The most nerve racking was the requirement to join a lecture circuit and for four consecutive years there were talks at the International Audio Fair and at various colleges and other venues in the Home Counties.   Sound synthesis proved to be a hugely popular subject and audiences for the talks, particularly at the Audio Fair, were standing room only.  Then there was the fan mail - hundreds of letters from as far afield as Australia, South Africa, India - even Russia - asking for further information or clarification.
Dealing with the fan mail proved to be quite time consuming but brought its own rewards in due course.   A further ramification was that the Editorial staff at Practical Electronics wanted to capitalise on the interest in sound synthesis and so they commissioned a second synthesiser.  The details were thrashed out during a meeting in the editorial offices.   Prime amongst these was that the instrument had to be cheap and geared commensurately to the skills of younger constructors.  A sketch was made of how the instrument would look and I began the process of translating the sketch into a practical reality.    The heat was really turned up when, a month later, a "Do Not Bend" envelope was delivered containing the draft front cover, shown top right, of the new instrument.   With the copy deadline two months before the proposed date of publication there were a great many midnight hours expended to get the prototype up and running.  Eventually it was done and, if anything, the Minisonic was more of a hit than its predecessor.  When it was introduced at one of the Audio Fair lectures it led to an approach by a group of musicians, keenly interested in electronic music, who wanted to know if the circuitry could be given a sufficient degree of sophistication to turn it into a professional instrument.   This led to a re-design of some of the circuits and a tightening of component tolerances which eventually resulted in the instrument shown bottom right.   It was called the Minsonic2 and full details for its construction were included by Practical Electronics in a one-off publication called "Sound Design".    Quite a number of Minisonic2s were made commercially before the company went into administration.   Its demise may perhaps be linked to the development of the "single-board computer" which occurred at that time and which heralded the appearance of the first PCs.  Remember the Commodore Pet, Acorn and the BBC Computer and the Apple IIe?  Like many analogue instrument fans whose noses were put out of joint by the onset of the digital age I figured if I couldn't beat them I should join them.  A course in Microprocessor System Design at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology did the trick and thereby hangs another tale.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An interesting postscript to the synthesiser story is that, in January 2004, contact was established with a member of the professional staff at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.   Dr Julian Bunn is undertaking the construction of a Minisonic2 and is publishing his experiences on the Internet.  You may follow the course of construction by visiting:                                                                                 http://pcbunn.cacr.caltech.edu/jjb/Synthesizers/Minisonic2

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