THE1950s
0154 Government Research
The target, for my research at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE), was to produce a very fast power supply for a computer. I had always thought that a power supply would be made up just of a transformer and rectifier, giving a direct current in some form or other. But computer circuits need power supplies that are oscillating. These days you hear people talking about the speed of a computer as so many MHz or GHz. This is the speed at which the power supply -- hence the computer chip -- oscillates.
Because it was to be used for radar, utilising very short wavelengths, the target for my power supply was approaching the speed of modern chips, of around one GigaHerz -- which even now, 40 years later, is still seen as a very high speed. In those days it seemed impossible. What was even worse was the shape of the wave, for it wasn't a normal sinusoidal waveform. Instead it had to be a square wave! The key measure was, therefore, the rise time at the leading edge of the wave. It had to rise to its full potential in much less than a nanosecond. My superiors at the RAE believed it was possible, because another lab had already achieved this. The problem was that the other lab had used the tunnelling effect, which created a one-off avalanche of electrons and this process could not be reproduced on a regular basis. Hence it could not be used to provide a clock that the RAE, in its wisdom, said must do this in normal mode. Over the six months I was there I got closer every day to the requisite 0.1 nanosecond rise time, needed to get a genuine one nano-second square wave; since the form deteriorated into a sinusoidal form at lower rise times. Even now it requires sophisticated micro-miniaturisation to achieve this.
As I said, each day I sat down at my bench to review the results from the previous day. Then I proceeded to fine tune the one I had in front of me. I tried the whole range of transistors available. This was very soon after the transistor has been invented -- and most electronic circuits were still driven by valves. The result was nothing like fast enough. I guess the wires leading to and from the various resistors and capacitors probably would have limited its speed anyway. But, even so, I could produce a beautiful performance; it was just not good enough.
I was not really appreciated by the head of the lab, since he had not got a degree himself and had a big chip on his shoulder as a result. When I left he even said he would have never have appointed me if he had the choice! While I was there he tried show me up by giving me the few articles that had been produced about how transistors work. These were, in those days, very theoretical and contained a fair amount of quantum-mechanics. Nobody else in the lab understood more than a few words of them. Perhaps foolishly, I did translate the material for him -- which only confirmed his dislike of me. I have always had problems with weak managers!
In the lab there were about half a dozen of us working on several different approaches. Despite the antagonism of the manager, it wasn't bad environment. We worked with very high-tech equipment which dated very rapidly. I remember I had to use a high-speed oscilloscope which was the size of a large refrigerator. One day I plugged it in and it shorted out, blowing off the cover of the fuse box at the other end of the lab. We had our fair share of such accidents. Thus, one of my co-workers was trying to repair some equipment when he contacted 400 volts inside it . He shot his arm out at such a high speed that the piece of equipment, worth several thousand pounds, went sailing 30 feet down the lab! This technician was, though, rather accident prone. He foolishly tried to heat some ether by putting it in a beaker over a Bunsen burner. When it caught alight, with a pillar of flame reaching to the ceiling, he did the right thing and reached for the carbon dioxide extinguisher. Unfortunately so powerful was the pressure that the beaker blew off the tripod and scattered the flaming ether everywhere. Fortunately ether is not a very difficult fire to put out and this was accomplished with the rest of the carbon dioxide. But it was very exciting at the time!
The facilities at Farnborough were very good. It had its own excellent library -- which included classified documents on all its work and I was able to make full use of these. I had been classified to handle the top-secret material, but I then realised there were a number of levels to this -- and I was on the lowest. Rather ridiculously, however, one of my jobs was circulating the in-house reports of the progress the RAE was making. For this I was given all the performance data, for example, of the rockets. Thus, I was aware that Black Knight and Blue Streak had reached altitudes, in test flights, which were three to four times higher than had been reported in the press. Information at this level was meant to be restricted to the heads of departments, who were a number of levels of security clearance above me! I imagine the security services must have had kittens when, soon afterwards, I went up to Imperial College and started friendships with some senior members of the Communist Party!
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