As the prototype was completed I went to a secure location that had armed guards, and German Shepherds guarding the entrance, and the first time I had the wrong pass and couldn't get in. We fitted the nose cone Radar and connected cables through the shell of the device so that they terminated in a connector on the surface. This we connected to the test equipment and simulated the electronics in the plane carrying the device, to make sure that the system responded to commands.

After that I tested the entire system at high and low temperatures at an English Electric test chamber. It had to be tested at -40 degrees and + 40 C. I had to work in the room at these temperatures. Outside the room waas a guard with a bath of hot water in case the cold got to us. We were dressed like Eskimos. When I had finished the testing a week later, the Company sent a truck to pick up the bomb. Now we had been very careful with security always and I was surprised to see a rickety old wooden sided truck back up to the device and slide it on board and cover it with a tarpaulin. Then off the driver went, probably stopping for lunch at a pub on the way, and people not at all curious about his old truck. That's the British idea—hiding things in plain sight.

I was now near the end of my engineering training (five years part time) and received an HNC in Electronics Maths and Telecommunications. I was 23 years old, and qualified to design most anything electronic.

I could have stayed in the military field, as I had an offer from RAF Cranwell to teach airmen Electronics, and my own Company wanted me to continue on as a full engineer.  But I wanted to change from military electronics to something more peaceful. I decided to emigrate to Canada for several reasons, not the least was increased pay, and within six months found a Job in Toronto  that was to design equipment to help people get better rather than to kill them.

Medical X-Ray

A medical X-Ray Company I interviewed with, had a problem with a new product they were launching. The designer had left them to take a job with Ottawa (Govt) but left them with a product that didn't function. It was a system for Angiography. The President interviewed me and asked me if I could fix it. I looked at the schematics and realized what was wrong, and he hired me on the spot to be the only Electrical Engineer in the Company.  The controller for the system is on the right with the service door open.

I had a couple of technicians and a draftsman, and within a week I had made the changes and the product worked. here are the managers at Picker X-Ray. As usual I was taking the picture.

Inventions

I invented several major medical systems during the ten years I was with them. The Canadian government funded the projects to the tune of $20 million (2018 dollars).

The first project was to design a dedicated Chest X-Ray system that could make very short exposures to stop heart motion from obscuring details in the lungs. At the time the shortest exposure that could be made was manually set by a timer to 1/120 second and that was enough time for the heart to go through one cycle, blurring the image.. And when the exposure was made automatically – as a digital camera does today – there were large errors in the exposure dose and the patient could overexposed as much as 75%, and the film was sometimes too dark to read. So my job was to design an X-Ray generator that could make an accurate exposure of just a few milliseconds.

Click on these symbols at top of page

to move forwards, and this

to move backwards