Nice film about English Electric Valves

[McMurdo]

Nice film on youtube about the former EEV company, lots of TV, radar and transmitter references.

https://youtu.be/Ycr8EJUpKw0

[Andrew Sinclair]

Very interesting. Thanks for posting.

[whiskas]

Very interesting and good quality copy too.
Thanks for the link!

[Craig Sawyers]

Decades ago, I was developing a large screen projector based on a copper vapour laser.

To keep costs low, I bought an awful laser (developed by a long defunct US company). The pulser was hybrid semiconductor and valve, and the thing that fired the discharge pulse was a hydrogen thyratron that was totally shot. And the idiots who had developed this device powder coated the whole laser body - leaving insulated gaps that gave me a nasty RF burn.

EEV stepped up to the plate, and visited to work out what was needed. They supplied a serious ceramic bodied thyratron that saw that awful laser through until we eventually acquired an Oxford Lasers unit - which was a much more serious affair. It is a mark of this company that they still exist https://www.oxfordlasers.com/

Anyway, that is really a story of the superb service of EEV sometime in the mid 80's. And the quality of Oxford Lasers

Craig

[Radio Wrangler]

Some odd pronunciation in that film. The presenter is obviously from a non-technical background, but if so, why wasn't he guided by EEV?

Mik-ro-wave
Dielectic heating - no "r" which gives away that he read a word familiar to him.
Waveguides referred to only as 'pipes'

Microwave cookers were mentioned, so this puts it a bit later than the trade test films of BBC2.

Just wondering who the target audience was.

David

[Paul_RK]

Thanks from me too - good after all these years to see something of what was going on mostly at Chelmsford, with a few moments' footage of workers streaming out of the slightly ramshackle-looking EEV Lincoln where I spent my days in the first half of the '80s occupied with the receiving end of various radar systems, chiefly with S- and X-band oscillators and mixers. Our little corner of the operation amounted to four assembly workers, a couple of chaps in the adjoining machine shop, Norman the foreman, and two technicians and me holed up in a screened room engaged in development and testing.

Paul

[GrimJosef]

Originally Posted by Craig Sawyers

... I was developing a large screen projector based on a copper vapour laser ...

EEV stepped up to the plate, and visited to work out what was needed. They supplied a serious ceramic bodied thyratron that saw that awful laser through until we eventually acquired an Oxford Lasers unit ...

I spent the first year of my PhD research sharing lab space with the chap who was developing what went on to be that Oxford Lasers unit. Its success was critically dependent on the quality of the EEV thyratron. The devices were the best in the world at what they did, not least because of the company's willingness to work with us on hardening them against the abuse they sometimes had to deal with (the laser ran extremely hot so as to produce significant copper vapour pressure over the ceramic boats of liquid copper which sat in the bottom of it, but controlling the temperature with sufficient precision to keep the vapour pressure 'just right' was one of several challenges to the stability of the vapour discharge). Every failed thyratron went back to Essex for an expert post-mortem.

Cheers,

GJ