Post
by Richard Hull » Thu Jul 26, 2018 1:44 pm
I have many original photos given to me by Team members when I visited them in 1999 and again in the early 2000s. The team had only a single camera owned and retained by ITT. No personal photos with a personal camera were allowed as ITT considered the work company confidential. That camera was controlled by George Bain, project head engineer. The camera was a common era 4 X 5 speed graphic with a polaroid back. Bain told me ITT had all the images sent to the head office, but he knew for a fact that other team members were taking duplicate photos for use within the team and assumes some went home with some of the members. Bain noted that he would turn the camera over to one of the technicians and see a table full of photos drying but was given a stack of only ten or twelve to send to the office. Meeks told me that Farnsworth would often see them on a table, drying and purloin some of them. Pem had a small photo album with the obvious polaroids in them. Bain said they went through a lot of polaroid film packs. Thus, original, separate, individual, unique polaroids are out there taken of the same item at the same time. There were no negatives!! All photos taken within the facility were only original unique images.
Every now and then, the company would send an internal photographer from the N.Y. office's advertising dept. He used a normal negative producing camera to take photos of the Fort Wayne activities. These, of course, were never given to the team as they were developed back in New York. The biggest splash was an announcement that ITT was working with fusion which appeared in the Wall Street Journal in the early 60's. I imagine this was used to increase their stock value, which it did for a while. This boost according to Bain made New York very happy and Admiral Furth used this to get more funding as the 60's budgets got a bit bigger each year.
The image you have shown above was of the "pit" fusor which was Farnsworth's fusor. Farnsworth's fusor was tended to and worked by Bain, Haak, and Jack Fisher. I have already posted the same image some years ago here in Images du Jour from my original polaroid.
According to Meeks and Blaising, this giant was a beautiful piece of crap and never did much fusion until Hirsch came along and got the team on D-T mix. The team jokingly referred to this monster as the "warp core" fusor..... Impressive, but not a winner nor the best of the many fusors built.
There is much more that could be told, but...
Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
Retired now...Doing only what I want and not what I should...every day is a saturday.
