THE1950s
0170 RAE (Royal Aircraft Establishment), Farnborough
I suppose one of the major turning points in my life was leaving home. I was so excited about getting the job at Farnborough that I never considered the implications of this. Accordingly, I woke one morning, in my sunny bedroom, and looked out over the fields behind our house; and only then realised that this was the last time I would ever do that! It was a terrible feeling. There was suddenly an immense loneliness in the pit of my stomach. I had never thought of it as such before, but it suddenly felt like being cast out of heaven into something approaching hell.
Thus it was I made my way down to Farnborough, a long journey compounded by the fact that I had to change trains in London. When I got there, I was accommodated in the RAE hostel. In reality it was a series of huts from the last war, but equipped with individual bedrooms -- albeit they were shared by two people. There were separate ablutions, TV room etc. I guess it was more like an RAF camp than anything else. Indeed, my roommate for much of the time was in the RAF. He operated the high-altitude chambers to which pilots were exposed before being allowed to pilot high flying aircraft. These were used to give them experience of explosive decompression; in case they had blow out! Even though he was in the RAF, he led a civilised life like myself, with no bull at all, and he was paid considerably more than I was!
I happily went to my assigned post in the Royal Aircraft Establishment, to find that not merely was I not working on rockets, or rocket engines, but I was actually working on electronics!
To do the job I had to sign the official secrets act, and had been positive vetted (MI5 had made discreet inquiries about me from on neighbours. The RAE itself was a very secure establishment with guards on the gate who checked all identity cards. It was also very security conscious. It was at a time when Britain had its own ballistic missile programme, with its research vehicle ‘Black Knight’ placed on top of a very large first stage, ‘Blue Streak’ to form our national ICBM – capable of carrying nuclear warheads. While I was there I saw, in one of the hangers, the first Blue Streak. It was a spectacular sight. However, such was the culture of secret that it was a long time before any of the other people in my lab admitted they had seen it. They knew it was top secret!
The RAE in fact worked on wide range of projects. One of them was the crucial element of nuclear devices, the triggers. I never went into that section, but those who did said that you were greeted at each of the first two doors by armed guards looking through a peep hole and demanding different passwords -- which were changed each day. All the labs had an impressive array of very sophisticated locks on their doors. Inside the labs themselves all the equipment was covered by dust-sheets until used; and the each had a safe - to bank vault standards - to lock away documents at night.
After all my study of rocketry, I found myself in an electronics lab; which looked pretty much like the physics lab at School, only larger and with a spectacular array of electronic test equipment. I well remember representatives from Solartron, then the providers of oscilloscopes for most of Britain, coming and making a great presentation to win our business away from Tektronix, the American leaders in the field. It ended up with them proudly explaining that we wouldn't have to pay import duty on their equipment -- only to receive the rejoinder that as a government research establishment we didn't pay any on Tektronix either!
Not merely was I not working on rockets, but I wasn't even working on avionics. The lab was, instead, commissioned to produce the first digital radar. This was nothing to do with the perceived overall mission of the RAE, since radar was supposed to be the responsibility of Malvern. However, scientists in another part of the building were also working on new radar technology, albeit an analogue system, which was very successful in the field. We, of course, knew about this. Despite the official secrets act - rumours abounded within the building Thus, we were not a little amused when Chapman Pyncher, the scientific correspondent of the Daily Express, boldly explained that radar had been defeated by the use of 'window'. This was made up of small sheets of aluminium, which were thrown out of the plane to blind the radar. Conventional radar found it very difficult to penetrate through this snowstorm. This had been true for a couple of decades. We thought Picher’s report was hilarious, since the real development had recently been a new radar which was able to penetrate such window. The story had, presumably, been released by the government confident that they were now able to defeat window!
I, therefore, found myself working on one of first computer circuits. The way the RAE worked was that new equipment, in our case radar, was split up arbitrarily into its component parts. The people developing the radar itself were told that they would have to work to a certain power supply and we, developers of power supplies, were told that we had to meet a certain spec. This was totally arbitrary and quite often this meant that both sides faced impossible tasks -- but with the complexity it was the only way we could work.
As I have said, my job was developing the power supply. My training, though, started with winding transformers. This consisted of winding thousands turns of very fine wire around a former. I used to wire one in the morning, then test it in the afternoon by switching on the current. It was something at which, being congenitally ham-fisted, I was less than successful. The number of times I saw the insulation around the windings start to bubble, as the transformer broke down, was countless.
Anyway I was moved on to power supply itself, and others produced the transformers for me! These power supplies, along with all the circuits we were developing, were made on ‘bread boards’; essentially Bakelite sheets which had a row of metal pegs along each edge. To these pegs were attached the various components and the wires connecting them together. Accordingly, my daily task was to solder on the various components to a slightly changed design and then - the following morning - test it. This was my daily routine, of which more elsewhere.
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