THE GREAT MULLARD MAGIC BLOG — mullard

I had to laugh as I heard a member of the 'flat earth radio amateur society' chuffing on about dead pixels and the lamentable quality of modern OLED screens "Eeeeh, this never 'appened in t'olden days and the picture is no better either" he bemoaned.  I suppose in some ways he was right, after all, CRT screens didn't have pixels but we did have phosophor burns which were even more unsightly and we certainly had face blemishes.    Moving on to picture quality though, if our Samsung LED TV is anything to go by,  I have never ever seen a picture...

You know, this could be me, in my Rosebank school uniform, peaked cap, short trousers, sturdy satchel and a pair of Clarks shoes with a compass in the heel - happy days.... but it isn't. The little lad you see in this 1953 picture is the 5 year old  Norman Skentlebury at the Earl's Court Radio Show of that year.  He appears clutching a typical CRT of the era whilst being dwarfed by the giant model television tube on Mullard's stand because chaps, as we know, size is everything.

Just in case you thought Sebastian and his co-workers had to heft these long and wieldy tubes to remove the supernate, actually, no, they were placed on a rotating carrel that was tilted at such a rate as not to disturb the accreted phosophor film that sat on the inner face of the tube.  Here you see a laboratory coating system, however, the full size plant used a similar principle  - such fun!

Here we have a nice photograph taken at Mullards in 1952 of Sebastian Firkle who is laying the luminescent screen in a Mullard picture tube.  The screen phosphor was suspended in a liquid carrier and introduced into the envelope. After settling, the supernatant liquid was carefully decanted off leaving an even distribution of phosphor which was then dried under a gentle stream of cold air.

Even though the National Grid came on stream in 1947, the public electricity supply in the UK was a real hotch - potch of AC/DC offered at differing voltages - indeed my own parents came cropper of this in their flat at Arnold Place, Whetley Hill,  Bradford as one plug was DC yet another AC resulting in a prized radio going BANG - what a mess!   Little wonder then that 20% of all radios fittted with Mullard valves in the early half of the 1950s were fitted with battery valves.   The Mullard battery valve series comprised of five types...