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Yeah, it's probably not working anymore. I think they put it into hibernation. Yeah.

The doors and a couple of spectrometers that were analysing what they were looking at. Right. So I did the doors, basically. When they fired the — because it's on the satellite — they have to keep it in a geostationary orbit. They're investigating and they've got to fire the rockets, and then they have to shut the doors so that the fumes from the jets, or whatever they're using, don't go in and wreck the instruments on board.

So yeah, that was the doors. I can't remember what the bit of the spectrometer work was that I was doing, but it's a long time ago. It's a long time ago, yeah.

But when it was up there, it all worked, so that was the main thing.

It was a stepper motor, and on the doors, to hold them closed, there were magnets, and there was another magnet underneath. And so when you press the button, that switches on, that cancels the other magnet, and the door flips open. And then you've got the stepper motor to shut it again. So yeah, it was simple.

So much of it, yeah. Yeah, I did a lot of that.

I got the motors and showed presentations of how the stepper motors work, because all the stepper motors — if they're running at full speed, you've got a lot of strength. If they're running at low speeds, they're pretty crap until they get up there. So at certain rates the power drops off, so they have to be in a certain range in order for them to work. And this was the electrical department — they didn't seem to realise these things. But yeah.

So I mean, I did simple things that worked. They actually used that word — those words — in the document.

Oh yeah, that's a lot of people.

When we had the Americans come over, they couldn't believe that that design was that simple. Their thing cost them, sort of, well, 100 times more — what they would have done. They said, "This is just, this is a very simple design," or something. Yeah.

Yeah. That's the main thing, isn't it? And of course, if you make a complicated thing, something goes wrong.

It's got heat shields round the motors and everything else, so it's got layered heat shields to protect the stepper motors and things like that — which you don't really realise. I think I don't know if I put six shields around it, but there was a...

All they are is just aluminium-coated tubes that go round, and there's gaps in between each one, so that the Sun's heat didn't burn the motors out. Just simple things like that.

Yeah — how do you test it? I guessed. It's probably overkill. Probably only needed two shields, and I put extra shields just to be on the safe side, because how do you test it? You can't put it — I mean, you could put it in front of something really hot to check the motors, but we didn't really have that facility. So we just did it like that and I said, "That'll be enough." And as it turned out, it was.

I worked in the department. We used stepper motors quite a bit for other jobs. So if you want to shut the door, you've got to drive it somehow, and because the power is limited on the satellite, you have to match the power. You can't just use a DC motor, because they don't actually stop. So you go click, click, click, click, click, done. And when it latches, the drive power switches off, and the door stays latched because of little magnets and things.

So yeah, it's — I'm not sure where I got the idea from, the magnets. But I mean, they're used quite a bit. And I found out that by putting another one there and powering that, it cancels out the other one, so it releases. And I had to do a little bit of testing and stuff on that in my office. I had the little doors going quite a lot.

But yeah, so that was it, sort of. Because we never had vast amounts of money at Rutherford for these — you had to keep it low cost. And you're also worried about weight as well. You don't want anything to be too heavy. The motors are a little bit more powerful than they really needed to be, but you can't guarantee that they won't degrade a little bit, so you've got a little bit of a safety margin on them. So that's how it went.

And what I was going to say — the team at Rutherford were quite pleased with it all.

We'd go to a team, and they — because I'm a mechanical designer, the doors are mostly mechanical. So when you're there, it's, "Oh, well, can you do a design for the doors?" And I said, "Yeah." And also, "There's this spectrometer inside — it's more how the pieces were held and where it gets fitted. Can you design that bit?" There might have been other bits, but I can't really remember.

So yeah, and you'd go to meetings once a month and report our progress. And then when it's up to a reasonable state — I'm not sure whether we made the dummy ones first and then they had testing them out and found that they were actually okay, and so we then fabricated the real ones. Or the dummy ones might have ended up as the real ones. I can't remember whether we made extras. But yeah, that's where it went,.

One of them was ATLAS, which was the big one. I did a little bit of electrical wiring and stuff on that one, I believe. But on the Compact Muon Solenoid, it was the end caps and domes. And I had to work with the Russians, because the Russians made the crystals, and they made the alveoli — so...

They made the crystals. Right. They made the alveoli. We couldn't even buy the material to produce alveoli as cheap as the Russians were doing. They made them — they made the material, they had a team of six ladies who cut it up, because you have to check the dimensions and everything — and they actually fabricated them in their place over there.

That's why the Russians were actually involved quite a lot, because we gave them work that they could get credit for. So that was good.

And that was said — well, we could make crystals, but we couldn't make them cheaply enough. So what we did is, we ended up with how to secure the crystals in place, and on the back of the crystals there's a light detector. And at Rutherford, our department made — well, I drew up the electronics. The electronics — not electrical — and drew up the electronics cards to receive the signals. Because when the beam hits into the crystal, it makes it glow a little bit, and we've got detectors at the end that picked up that glow, and then they analysed it all.

So yeah, it was — and that's actually a small part of the rest. A lot of the rest, as you go out, is shielding and stuff because of the radiation levels. But the end caps and the middle circular piece was the main detection system, on CMS.

Off hand, I don't know. A lot. Yeah, a lot.

That's it, yeah. It gets split apart, some goes to the circular part, and the rest go to the end caps, which then, with their light detection, detect what's been happening in one of the collisions. And they know which crystal it is because they're all numbered, if what I mean.

But they're all — they know which one, which crystal, did which one.

Oh yeah, the burst is very, very short. So yeah, but they did detect stuff, and things were working well. Fine.

Yeah, I can't remember dates like that.

When I retired, I wasn't working on it, and when I left I was working on other stuff anyway. Because basically, like the crystals one — I did that, devised how to assemble that. I made trolleys, because they're heavy, each one, quite a bit. And so I had to — I got these trolleys to work, and I had a system where you could — because at one time we were going to assemble them at Rutherford. But they decided not to do that, because transporting fragile crystals from Russia to CERN, then to England, then back to CERN, was expensive.

So they said, "We'll get them assembled at CERN." Right. So the Russians stepped in, and one or two other people went out there — the electronics people and stuff — to assemble them all. So that went on, yeah.

I was out there, sort of, discussing things. But then I got involved in another project. One of our chaps — I mean, you haven't got any info on that.

It was another project, and they had to assemble pieces into another large detector, which was pretty light. And so I made the support structure to hold it, and how to assemble the bits that they wanted to assemble and fix it and stuff like that. So yeah, that was another one.

But then, I think, towards the end, I was working on something else anyway. Because I'd do my bit, and then other people can put it together and carry on with it and get it into a state enough that they can do that, and then I can go and do my little invention stuff somewhere else. So yeah.

Yeah, well that was probably that stuff then, and then we would be looking at some other stuff. And when they started looking at gravitational waves and things, we were looking at how to assemble something.

There was also some stuff I did to try and do a beam stop for the beam, because the beam goes through water and material to stop — to actually stop it. And I worked on some of that for a little while, but I've got nothing on that either. It's all — because you work so far, and then you hand it over to someone else to either test it or carry on. So yeah.

I probably did a lot more, but probably some of it is best forgotten anyway.

I could have, but why would I want them? — I don't need them. That's it. It's working. That's it. I'm done.

You're saying that — I used to keep a record of all my drawings in little A4 folders up on the shelf in the room. And they were trying to get British Standards accreditations and things, and some of the bosses came round and said, "Oh, you've got drawings and that. Do you mind if I take your file?" And they took the file, and then they could develop the next version from what I'd actually drawn. Because probably they weren't as practiced, and they didn't — couldn't use Medusa — the draughtsmen in there. But because they had a drawing to follow, they could copy it.

So, it's only a paper copy. They probably made digital copies, but it's a pain looking through and finding the stuff. Whereas I had all mine in little folders. It was only like a bookshelf full of all the drawings that I had done and kept.

Because I also worked on — oh, Christ, what was that? It was — I'm not sure whether it was a satellite or something, but it — no, like, when — some of the early stuff I did on the planes — the big plane, right? We did work to try and map the temperature of the sea. Right. Long before anybody was worried about it. And I designed and did some of the detectors that went on that.

And they used to fly on Hercules. They put the instrument under the nose cone underneath — they had a spot for the instrumentation — and they used to fly the Hercules at a certain height, measuring the temperature of the sea at certain points.

Our big aeroplane.

It's an army one.

No, this is after SOHO.

Yeah, because SOHO — the reason you got all those materials is that the people who were doing it wanted to publicise it. It's a PR exercise, so they get money for the next project, if what I mean. Some of the other projects were just standalone projects, and you would have to come up with another idea to get money for the next one. So yeah — but I mean, I worked there for a while. I'm just trying to remember. It almost came back a while ago, but it drifted off again.

Oh! It was a project for Germany. I did liquid nitrogen pumps. Cryogenics.

Mostly — I designed the pumps and got them — I mean, I shipped them out there. We tested and pressure-tested at Rutherford. Didn't take any pictures. But then shipped out there to go on a project in Germany. It was on one of their cyclotrons or something, in order to cool the stuff down.

And that worked quite well. And some of the little physicists in there were a little doubtful — they said, "That'll never work." But it did. And there it goes,. It doesn't always have to be really complicated.

They were probably firing a beam round, flashing it together and seeing what comes off. But the detection system needed to be cold. So yeah.

A bit like Diamond up there now. I don't know what they do on that, but if I was still there I might be doing bits for Diamond, you never know.

Oh, Diamond is the latest Rutherford synchrotron-type thing. And they do a lot of testing and stuff on human matter and seeing what it all shows up. Find things out. And it's built at Rutherford. They've built more accommodation, because they get lots of foreign students coming over from Switzerland, Sweden, and probably Russia, and everywhere, to get some time on that — to test their theories. So yeah. All good fun.

Rutherford's still going strong. It's actually much bigger than it was when I was there. It tends to get linked with Harwell.

Yeah. Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Yeah. It's — I don't know, like, maybe you don't think about it at the time, but obviously you've worked on some interesting stuff, isn't it? One, you're going into outer space, like looking at the Sun. And the other one down to the tiny invisible particles that you can't see.

They said they found — what they expected — they needed to find a lot more than one.

When they first said, "No, that's the Higgs boson" — they made a lot of fuss about finding that one. But the Higgs boson is the particle that draws all matter together and makes it — you'd expect to find a lot more. And they probably did. I lost touch years ago. 2012, they say they found it. So I assume they've found more.

And it keeps going. Some person messed up his maths one time, and he said he found a particle that's travelling faster than light. But he actually made a miscalculation. That was an Italian. And there was a bit of fuss about that.

They're talking about CERN now — it's opened up — to other universes. A little strange, perhaps. Because all it's doing is sending particles, smashing them into each other — and you might get some strange results. Because the trouble is, you're not destroying them — you're breaking these particles up and they decay into something else pretty quickly. And they've actually got to go somewhere, because you can't create or destroy matter — so you can convert it into something else. And then when it goes, you convert it into these other things.

So people come up with a lot of strange theories. Which, is fine.

But I enjoyed it. It paid my bills, and it was fine. And it was easy, basically — it was a half past eight to five job. I could come home in the evenings and not be stuck. Now and again, meetings overran and I'd have to stay a bit late. And of course, when I went to CERN or anywhere, I was away for a week or so.

But I mean — I could have actually stayed out there for months. Which, would not have been that good for the family, because you kids were growing up pretty quick. So yeah, I chose that lifestyle. I was earning enough, could get by, and I enjoyed the work. It was fun.

When I started, I didn't really know. When I started, I was working in the tool room, and I was going to perhaps convert to being a tool fitter. And then I got made redundant from there. I trained as a capstan lathe setter. But then I got the job — I applied for the job at Rutherford and got that. And I was basically an engineer to fix the stuff that was wrong.

And because I'm small, I could crawl round the synchrotron, fixing the target stations. And I had radiation badges on. One day, my badge fell off, and I went and had a cup of tea, and went back and found the badge, put my badge back on. And I got put on — what do you call it — I couldn't go into high-radiation areas for another three months. Because my readings went high. But of course, I wasn't actually wearing it — it had fallen off. I didn't tell them that.

But they said, "Oh yeah, there's a real high dose there." It might have been a month or a week or something. So they made sure the radiation levels came back down. They made sure that you didn't have any problems. You're going to get all sorts of problems with too much radiation. Even a little is not great, but there you go.

But yeah, so I initially did that, and then there were jobs going in the drawing office. And I thought, "Oh well, that'd be good." So I went in the drawing office, and basically there's several drawing office areas and you just moved to certain places.

In the beginning, I had no idea what I was drawing. I was still learning. Towards the end, I got quite good at doing it. And I noticed some of the new people who came in — they couldn't make the first step to start their drawings. Putting the pen on the paper and getting going is the hardest thing — you need to figure out the idea. And then try to distil that into a drawing.

There were lots of people, much better draughtspeople than me. But —

Probably some just did what they were told and drew a really nice drawing. But you could throw them a bit easily. But yeah, that's how it is.

And then it's the same as every other place — there's nice people, and lots of nice people, and I found most of them fine,.

36?

Oh, I don't know, but I retired at 60.

Yeah, something like that. Because me and Mum — we had that little bungalow —

Prefab, yeah. Back in 1970-something then.

I've got no drawings. I didn't want them. They fill the place up.

That is true. But no, I'm afraid I've got no drawings. They've probably still got them at Rutherford, haven't they? They'd probably still have them — or they're archived.

Oh, it'd be confidential. They wouldn't want that necessarily open. They would have to censor anything that they displayed, that thing.

They tried that, and they got in a bit of a mess. It was microfiche at one time. But of course, to do any of it, it all costs money. Rutherford at one time wasn't flush with money. It depends who was in government. The funding goes — so if the funding's tight, things all get tight, and if the funding gets loose, things get a bit better. But yeah, so it's always a little difficult.

And I couldn't draw it from my head these days.

That's why you would take pictures, but you didn't always take pictures.

No, that was it as far as I can remember.

And of course, some of the other projects — I just didn't take pictures. I suppose you don't — I mean — people, it's not like phones existed then with a camera on it. It was different those days, wasn't it? You had to have camera film.

And to get official photos — if you saw some of them, they've got the official Rutherford stamp on the back. Because you booked a photographer, and he would take a picture. And we did that — for the PR exercise. But when we went to CERN or wherever, you could show that, and everyone goes, "Ooh."

The crystals is a CMS one. Yeah, that was my one — the crystals were mine. The crystals and the alveoli — the Russians made them, but that was my design.

Yep, it's my fault!

But yeah, because in the beginning — I mean, it's more complicated than that. A team in Switzerland were working on the end caps, and they came up with such a complicated end cap. It would have cost an absolute fortune. Every single crystal would have been different.

Yeah. Still here.

Every single crystal would have been different, which means each alveola would have had to have different pockets for the crystals. That means different moulds and everything.

And they said, "Oh, we can't do all this." And I'm not sure why, but our team — that's John Connolly, and I can't remember the other chap's name — said, "Oh, well, we'll have a go at doing an end cap." And so I got the job of trying to come up with an end cap design.

So my first design — I think I had seven different alveola sizes. And they said, "Oh no, that's still far too many." So I went back and said, "Well, do this and that" — you get, because as you change the design and alternate, you get slightly bigger gaps — and gaps in your detectors — than you would if you tried to cover every single thing. But it wasn't much.

So I came into this meeting one time and I said, "Well, all the crystals are the same. And all the alveoli are the same. So you could put any crystal in any alveola pocket, and you could put any alveola in any position on the end cap."

And they said, "We'll have that." So that's how we went.

And of course, the Russians started making crystals, and the six ladies were all right. So yeah, they were fine.

And they helped me out, which is why we started measuring and verifying that it had worked. And one of the things was — we actually put it together — not with the crystals, we used brass pretend-crystals — to actually destroy it, to see how much load it would take to break.

Because there were the end caps, and — oh Christ, what was his name? — Len Denton — Len Denton did the end caps that went onto the base plate that held it all up. But the crystals are all there — once you've bolted them on, they are self-supporting, as it were, from the bolts and the fixings at the back.

So it all — and you could put them anywhere. It made life easier for everyone putting them together, because if one went wrong, you could actually take it out and swap it for a good one. Whereas if they're all interlocking and different sizes, you have to take half the detector apart to get out the broken one. So yeah — keep it simple.

No idea. It's been a long time. But it might still be going. I would imagine that they've moved on to another project to look for something different. But they look for the same thing, but in a different manner, if what I mean. Because basically they're just smashing atoms together and seeing what comes out. And they say, "Oh, this is an up particle, that's a down particle," and so on.

Yeah, and why not? That's fine. Because one of the physicists — we were talking — and I said, "If you've got an ice cube, and it's got 12 volts in that ice cube, and I get a big hammer, and I smash the ice cube, you get lots of little bits — but each one's got a little voltage in it. How do I know if that's a new particle and not just part of the original ice cube?"

He said, "That's what we're doing it for."

They don't know exactly what they're finding — which is perfectly fine. But they get funding for it, and we get other developments. The web and all that — this stuff. So we get spin-off technology come out of it.

Yeah. And of course, electronics have got smaller and better. A lot of this is driving that thing — same as the space race stuff and everything. It's how things move on. And who cares if there's a boson and a down boson,? Life goes on.

But I just thought — doing meetings, writing reports and things — that's my worst part of the job. And it appears that I was better at it than all the other clever sorts. But anyway — they would come up and chat to you afterwards and start digging and probing, and say, "Oh, what about...?" So they'd glean information from that — which is fine, because that's part of my job. I don't try to keep all this stuff to myself. Good to put it out there, as they say.

Oh yeah. What's that? Is that Rutherford or something else?

Yeah. But the department was all about checking the atmosphere and what's changing and things like that. This was long before anyone started spouting off about global warming and everything. So people were aware of it a long time ago — they just couldn't do much about it.

Yeah, 'cause you get a solar flare and it knocks all our satellites and electrics out. But that's not what's causing the warming — the Sun influences it, and our orbit changes. We've got a lumpy orbit. So when we get close to the Sun, we start warming a bit more than normal. Because over the years, we've had three ice ages. And at the moment, technically, we're still in an ice age, 'cause we've still got ice on the polar caps.

It's normal. It's just that of late, they've found that the warming has speeded up a little bit. And that's the concern — because if it speeds up faster than plants and stuff can adapt to, we will have problems.

If you think of anything else, let us know if there's anything I can do. But I haven't got any more stuff here as far as I know.

All right. Bye.