THE GREAT MULLARD MAGIC BLOG

As the new scion of Mullard, I have just received by e-mail a question as to whether or not SR Mullard was an unpleasant man to work with. Many had commented that Stanley was a ‘rough diamond’ with little formal education. Most of his bad press seems to stem from the contretemps between himself and CO Stanley in the days before CO was the owner of WG Pye. At this time, Mullard was looking for sales expansion and CO Stanley as the charismatic owner of the marketing agency ARKS, hit upon a grand scheme whereby a new magazine entitled Radio...

  Well, things were rubbing along famously but in 1925 Stanley decided that it was time to cash in his chips so he then spent the next couple of years wooing Philips and other shareholders alike to sell. Philips eventually stumped up £7 per share and the sale went ahead secretly in 1927 with all shares being registered in Stanley's name so the public didn't get wind of a major British manufacturer being taken over by a foreign company. This fiction was maintained quite successfully until 1938. With Philips now owning all of the shares in Mullard, change was looming...

The unreliable 'split-pin' PM series were swiftly replaced by valves having a new improved base. The base was characterized by having the same ebonite base but the inset pins were now tubular, having two slots in orthogonal configuration with electrode lead arrangements..outs being passed up the pin centre and connected by soldering at the tips. The bases now had a paint filled groove also labeled ‘A’ to denote the anode connection adjacent to the anode pin – This paint was applied by deft fingered young ladies but the process was deemed too labour intensive and so was discontinued in 1928,...

Well, using the recently developed Philips Azide technology for coating and preparing cathodes with barium oxide, the age of the dull emitter had dawned. Following technology transfer from Eindhoven to the Balham works, the production of the PM series valves commenced ( – PM for Philips – Mullard – geddit????.......) with the PM 3 and PM4 in 1925.     Original valve box images  by kind courtesy of Alan Wyatt of The National Valve Museum = see more at www.r-type.org  These early PM valves were very distinctive in having four brass pins, each with a single slot cut into them, set...

 Well, we are not going to discuss ‘Yus my dear’ Arthur Mullard but the dashing, First World War Captain Stanley R. Mullard who worked on the production of bright emitter thermionic valves for the Admiralty and a clever chap he was too holding six patents jointly with the Admiralty. Shortly after the end of the war during 1919, he left the Admiralty joining the Z Electric Lamp Co as their managing director. By mutual arrangement, valves were manufactured using Stanley’s patented technology and sold principally to the Admiralty and Post Office under the S.R. Mullard brand.When the Z Electric Lamp...