History - Of dekatrons, and ships and kings and sealing wax.

[Richard Hull]

This post is one of those Alice in Wonderland posts that points you to a website that tells of the insane nuclear detection instrument frenzy of the 40's and 50's.

I collect older detection gear. I prefer neon glows for readouts. Give me columns of NE-2's in decade ladders, nixie tubes and dekatrons.

I attach an image of a recent acquistion produced by Oak Ridge Atom Laboratories. Simple, crude and yet effective circa 1959-61 time frame. The timer on the left side reads to 100ths of a minute and is a simple "Veeder Root" type counter with a synchronous motor that starts when the count lever is depressed. I am counting a small crystal of uraninite.

I cleaned this rig up and replaced all the ancient paper-foil caps within it with modern electrolytics and tantalum components as a preventative measure.

I acquired two other GM rigs with this one, but both have major issues which I look forward to tackling. The restoration of these old-timers is a passion of mine.

I found a cool website that attempts to catalog all manufacturers and many of their survey type instruments, focusing in on the 40's-70's time frame. It is well worth putting in your favorites bin as much rich history is to be found there.

They discuss how the "cutie pie" got its name; an area of great contention and many campfire tales. Some say that at first sight, those who were used to lugging around cumbersome 1940's survey units exclaimed, "Hey, that's a real cutie pie!" Others insist that it is based on the ions charge collection over a 2 pie radian angle. Q X (T)wo X pie.

Other gems lay hidden at this site, including a 34 printed page history of 50's and 60's GM counter ads telling you how "you, too, can strike it rich" with their counter for only $69.50! Many micro-firms rose to prominence and then fell to obscurity during the "U boom" years. Many startups sought to cash in on the boom by supplying marginal instruments to folks they were exhorting to cash in on those $10,000 government bonuses. ($10,000 then, would buy a nice home and have enough left over for a new car!)

Check it out at..........

http://national-radiation-instrument-catalog.com/

The "catalog" logs most of the ads and all of the manufacturers they have with instruments. The "histroical" leads you to the old ads.

I have found one manufacutrer they didn't have. Baird Atomics. I have two counters from those folks.

Richard Hull

[Jon Rosenstiel]

Great post, and the link is a real gem. Thanks,Richard.

Jon Rosenstiel

[Dan Tibbets]

Pictures look alot like the counters used at my college in the early 1970's

Dan Tibbets

[Larry Upjohn]

Richard;
My highschool physic teacher was a physics professor at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. We got to do many of our labs in the school teaching labs. Our teacher gave us a tour of the schools light water reactor for training nuclear power engineering officers. He demonstrated pulling the control rods from the reactor core (graphite and lead shielded as I recall). For our lab excercise we had to take readings on just such a counter as you show here. It may have been the same type of instrument but my memory fails at that level of detail. I was just thinking about the type of neutron detector that was attached when you posted this thread. Great minds and all that I guess.....Anyway it was a formative moment in my science education. Look forward to seeing your other resurected instrumentation. More later, Larry Upjohn.

[MSimon]

My favorite from that era was a HP counter (I think) with 10 neon lights for each decade.

You could actually read the frequency without hetrodyning with a BC-221.

[Richard Hester]

I have an old Baird-Atomic scaler gotten through Fleabay. It weighs a ton, and sports a row of nifty dekatrons in front. I worked with loads of these things in my physics lab at school. Most likely they've all been junked, or sold off to someone who can appreciate them.

[Dustinit]

I'm quite partial to the nixi tubes which incidentally got its name from
neon indicator experiment number 1.
Strange how that name stuck.
Dustin.

[Richard Hull]

I have decided to create a post within this forum on restored items and give tips and images of instruments there. As it fills up, I will create a new one with the same name but with a following number advanced by one. Others should also contribute their images as well. It will be in the form of a FAQ.

There is already a post for Neutron instrument restoration and image identification here so this new FAQ is limited to GM counters, Ion chambers, proportional counters.
For tips on the neutron counter search, search on the word "identify" in subject only in this forum. An example is

viewtopic.php?f=13&t=5387&hilit=identify#p33831

You will find many neutron counter type in this manner.

My new post is an effort to keep all GM and other counters at one location and post.

Help feed this series of postings.

Richard Hull