THE GREAT MULLARD MAGIC BLOG — mullard blackburn

I say, we are now on the home straight here with the final episode in our tale of a globetrotting 1950s newspaper reporter's visit to Mullard Blackburn: -  In the Grid Department, the grid backbones were being fed through a machine from reels and the tungsten wire, fitted on to a spool was wound around these backbones.  The grids, up to now all bound together in one continuous strip, were later cut into single units and connections welded to them in readiness for assembly in the valve base.  The next part of the tour included the Glass Factory where I...

Today's episode.......... In the components factory, cathodes are cut, trimmed and shaped and one automatic machine was capable of reeling off 2500 cathodes per hour and when one considers that only one or two are needed per valve, this level of production represents a lot of valves. At the end of each bench I noticed a squared sheet headed Quality Control Chart where defects can be recorded every fifteen minutes.  This scrutiny in the search for the ideal, I found, was the forte of the entire works with 100 people in the factory doing nothing else but inspect the product...

Here we go again - a long newspaper article this -  And so to the technical side, valve production is in three parts - metal components come from the components factory; glass pieces and bulbs from the glass factory and filaments and fine wire from the wire factory.    Most fascinating of all was the wire factory where I saw how a tungsten bar two feet long was drawn down and stretched until it was 100 miles long to a thickness of 1/10 that of a single human hair. But that's not the end of the wonders as the wire...

The Blackburn Times factory tour article continues apace........ In yet another section of the works, I found older men who were still learning - highly skilled scientists experimenting with processes on the secret list, all aiming for even speedier and better methods of production.  In glass walled rooms filled with weird apparatus was a complicated array of tubes and taps and of course acid carboys,  It had been assembled to discover new materials for valve making.   The Laboratory housed 40 scientists working in a series of areas, subdivided into sections: Analytical; Electrical; Metallurgical; Physical & Glass Research.  Here too...

And so the story continues....... In the sick bay, first impression was of the cleanliness of the well equipped rooms.  The Sister presiding told of how she and her four staff had dealt with 70 patients before 10 o clock that morning.  Apparently, all manner of cuts, burns and sores are tended at the sick bay.   If an employee chances to be troubled by lumbago or gout then there's a Physiotherapy Deartment with it's modern heat treatment. But Mullard is really quite a healthy place, possibly fittest in it's "baby" section -- the Training School.  Here, there is full...