[Radio1950]

Very common in Australia in the 1950's thru to the 1980's.

Useful for general work after you got the hang of the control, and often used for soldering directly onto the chassis, and for PL259 coax plugs etc.

There were at least two tip types, one for general work. and a smaller round "pointy" tip.
Original transformer was 3.3 V, I think.
A lot of hobbyists like me just bought the iron, complete with special cord, and wound their own transformer from an old valve receiver transformer core.

What this iron lacked in thermal mass (ie it doesn't have a large tip) was made up by the large heating capacity.
If the element jammed, sometimes the steel barrel and tip went red hot.

Workshop "larks" used them to light cigarettes.

On balance, there probably wasn't an equivalent iron anywhere which had so much heat in an easily handled tool, as they were quite light and relatively small, and heated very quickly.
Later, there was a Miniscope also, which was OK, but by then, other decent temperature controlled smaller irons with conventional elements were becoming available.

The "Rolls Royce" scope irons had stainless steel barrels.

These scope irons did have one drawback to catch the unwary, like me once.

The iron pulls about 30 - 40 amps, and the tip circuit can induce destructive currents into semiconductor circuits and the like via leakage.
Also, if the tip is loose in the barrel, there can be incidental high currents floating around the circuit where you are soldering.
I once burned out the secondary side of an IF transformer like this.

I think the original scope transformer secondary was floating and not earthed. I may be wrong.
If I remember corectly, those of us who wound our own, earthed the barrel side, and marked the cord terminal accordingly, to reduce problems with leakage currents.

I had two Scope Irons, one with a long cord, and a Miniscope.
I probably have some spares around here somewhere.

You can still buy a variation of this Scope Iron, and parts, from Warren and Brown AUS.