Forthcoming TV – ‘Masters of Invention’

[KEITH BEAUMONT]

On KEITH BEAUMONT Said:

In 1956 I made the Aqualung featured in Practical Mechanics. from ex RAF Nitrogen tanks x2. The Demand Valve was converted from a Calor gas valve. Tubing was all ex RAF. It worked quite well down to about 50ft, but had a habbit of suddenly giving you a mouthful of water.

Keith

..I’m impressed – that’s a pretty cool project to have completed..

Could you do an article for the magazine? 😁

[Clive Foster]

On Clive Foster Said:

Looking at Michael’s sample issue I’m impressed by the amount of “stuff” advertised.

As Michael says modern magazines are pale shadow of the norm in the 50’s and 60’s. The decline started to become noticeable in the 1970’s and by the mid 1980’s the DIY et al magazines where quite obviously different…

Clive

Judging by my small collection of Practical Mechanics, the decline in stuff advertised was evident in 1961.  And the mag was clearly struggling to attract readers.  Not long after rebranding as “Practical Mechanics and Science”, and a sharp price rise, the magazine failed in 1963.

Beware rose-tinted views of the past!   Here’s what was in the October 1961 issue:

• Power From the Waves – a system installed in Mauritius.
• A Talking Light – the appearance of the maser and laser.  Then new and exciting, not now.
• A forced air blast convector heater.  (Cheaper and safer to buy a manufactured heater now, and probably then too.)
• A Fishing Rod rest.  Mild-steel, very heavy, and considerably inferior to a commercial product.  Can’t imagine many being made – wood being lighter, cheaper and easier to work.
• An Enprinter. A fixed ratio photographic enlarger.  Aluminium sheet, brass studding, sheet of flashed opal glass, 75W enlarging lightbulb etc. Quite a lot left unspecified: seems the builder had to sort out the lens and lens barrel himself.  May have been built in some quantity because home developed black and white photography was very popular back then.  Not today: colour did for most home film developers, and then digital did for film.  Not a useful project now.
• Part 8 of LBSC’s 3½” Evening Star.   LBSC on top form.   Still good.
• Science Notes.  Very dated!
• A Radio Controlled Model Shooting Brake.  Could have been popular.  Functionally very simple by modern standards, but quite challenging to DIY in 1961.  The builder has to make a valve transmitter, receiver, pulse decoder, and then interface it to a 3 motor control system.   I guess few readers had the skills needed to model the Shooting Brake and do the electronics.  Unlikely to be made today.  Sophisticated RC modules are cheap and abundant.
• Satellite Communications.  ‘A commercial system will be operating within 10 years’   Exciting news in 1961, now very little interest in Satellites apart from Amateur Radio.
• A transistor record player, ‘for cats and squares’.   An electronics project, with some appeal in the age of the Dansette!  Commercial deck and motor.  Zero appeal today.
• A key for a Yale lock.   Shows how to reassemble a Yale lock to match a home made key when the real key is lost.  Interesting rather than practical!
• Anti-gravity.   Psuedo-scientific wishful thinking.
• Making a Tiara.  In my experience ladies aren’t impressed by DIY jewellery unless skilfully made.   And they like men to spend real money on them.   Limited appeal then and now.
• Aids to Accurate Focussing.   Useful to photographers doing close-ups with pre-1960 cameras.   Much less so as manufacturers improved their on-camera focussing aids after 1960.
• A Geiger Counter.  Another electronics project, this one requiring an expensive Geiger-Muller tube.   Doubt many were made – not much radioactivity to detect in the UK.
• Bedtime Listening.  A risky modification to a high-voltage valve radio allowing a pair of surplus headphone ear pieces to be connected in place of the high-voltage side of the audio transformer, and embedded in a pillow.
• Letters to the Editor: Q. How can ping-pong balls be coloured?  A.  Iodine.   Modifying an electric shaver to reduce wear on the foil shears by weakening the springs.  I guess the writer had a soft beard and hadn’t realised his idea wasn’t universal.    And a snotty letter from the GPO’s Public Relations Officer, drawing attention to Regulation 48 of the (Statutory) Telephone Regulations 1960  (H.M.S.O. price 2s. 3d.) These regs require anyone linking to a telephone to get prior approval from the Postmaster General.   No bureaucracy in 1960 then!

Apart from LBSC, none of these articles require a lathe!

WW2 gun-cameras feature in a couple of issues.   £2 13s 0d plus 2/6d post and packing got the customer a surplus 16mm movie camera, and 24 feet of film cost 5/- plus 1/6d p&p.   24 feet because these cameras only recorded when a fighter’s guns were firing, and – unlike Hollywood –  pilots only had enough ammunition for about 15 seconds shooting.   Gun cameras were needed because excited pilots were highly unreliable, often claiming ‘kills’ they hadn’t made.   Many pilots claimed multiple kills, when only one wreck was found on the ground, or none at all!    Not because they were dishonest, but because air combat was extremely confusing.   The camera got closer to the truth.

How useful is a 24V movie camera with 15 seconds of film in it?  Not much.  Fun to tinker with.

WW2 surplus was an experimenters playground – prisms, lenses, radios, tools, test equipment, and other wonders.   Not necessarily cheap though.   A gun camera with film cost 41 times the Practical Mechanics cover price, roughly £240 in today’s money.   As £240 buys a reasonable digital camera today, there’s no point in us modifying a WW2 gun camera.

By the 1970s WW2 surplus was thin on the ground and 30 year old technology was less relevant.  Many opportunities faded away.  As we shall never see the like again, we have to adapt to what’s going on now.  Whilst old magazines made sense at the time, technology and people move on.    No future in living in the past.

The TV programme is oddly based on retro tempted by modern.  Happy to see a traditional wooden toboggan being made, but not when they added lights!   Bling!   Spotting the mistakes is fun though!  I suspect half the problem with telly is caused by the edit where some arty type removes all the techy stuff he doesn’t understand.

Dave

[Nick WheelerParticipant @nickwheeler]

So sixty years ago the content of a ‘technical’ magazine was a random collection that the mildly curious looking for some entertainment might have found interesting? Doesn’t sound any better different to today’s magazines to me….

[Mick B1Participant @mickb1]

Back when the kids were young, I used to like Tim Hunkin’s ‘Secret Life of Machines’.

The one that especially made me chuckle was when he made a fax machine out of 2 lathes, photocells and welding torches!

😀

[Author]

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