The Polaris Missile incident.
By August 1982, the Managing Director and I had left Scanray, Scandinavian X-Ray(UK) and formed a partnership to develop high definition Microfocus X-Ray systems. We had a £40,000 loan from the British Government to be paid back, at 16% interest, over two years. Which we did.
To get the loan we had to match it with our own money. Sandy and I didn’t have £20,000 for our half. We talked about it and took out a second mortgage on our home. In 1982 that was an awful lot of money. As can be imagined, it was a stressful but exhilarating time.
We’d formed a joint venture company with Ridge Inc in Georgia. Originally from Oak Ridge Tennessee, Ridge Inc was a spin-off from the 1940s Manhattan Atomic Bomb Project. We were off to the United States.
We had a small office in Silbury Boulevard, Milton Keynes, but the electronic development and assembly were done in the back room of my house in Flitwick, a pleasant place with French doors to the garden. I had a desk with a BBC Acorn Atom computer, a workbench with tools, oscilloscope and other electronic test equipment, and a drawing board for electronic and mechanical design work. Hardware parts were subcontracted out to local machine shops. The room was also used to assemble the system which comprised a control panel, vacuum equipment, an electron gun with beam focusing and deflection coils, and a 160,000 Volt generator. Simple!
The problem was, I couldn’t switch the thing on, I didn’t want to irradiate my family and my neighbours. Fortunately, I had friends in the oil and gas pipeline inspection business, who rented out an old disused chicken-farm in Greenfield, close to Flitwick. It was a desolate place of dilapidated sheds dimly lit by a few low wattage light bulbs with small slit openings for ventilation. I could test my equipment there, and it had a mobile darkroom for developing radiographs. One problem! I had to use the place from midnight to seven in the morning when no one was there. To create a safe distance between me and the radiation from the machine, I used long cables on the control panel. This resulted in a lot of walking to set up the radiographs.
Then fortune smiled. A book supplier had a warehouse flood, and my friends were paid to store thousands of books for insurance assessment.
It occurred to me that using the radiation transmission factor for wood, which is what paper is made of, I could calculate the shielding properties of books. And so, I built a nice safe radiation room with a floor space of 2.5 x 2.5 metres and walls 2 metres high by 1.5 metres thick all out of books and saved myself a lot of walking. Thus, in typical underfunded British Heath Robinson fashion, in a henhouse filled with water damaged books, the revolutionary high-definition X-Ray machine for America was tested. On 10 September my partner and I flew to Atlanta. So started a relationship with Ridge Inc as intriguing as anything from ‘Dallas’, the famous TV soap from the 80s. But that’s another story.
On my return from the States, I started on a new system for Rolls Royce Aero Engines. By mid-November, I was back in the chicken-farm, not a pleasant working environment on cold winter nights by myself in the dim light with chill winds blowing through the slits in the walls.
One day at home the phone rang.
“Mr Butler?”
“Yes”
“This is Mr Todd, from the Ministry of Defence (MoD). You’re on a list as you have a Government loan. We need a special X-Ray source to investigate a problem with the Polaris missile. We believe you can help”.
We spoke for a while to ensure the equipment could do the job. Satisfied I could help, I asked if he would send the part to me.
“No I can’t do that” he replied, “I will bring it to your factory personally “.
MY FACTORY! I tried my best to get him to send it, but he was adamant. If there was a chance of an order, I had to let him bring it. I explained I could only do radiation testing in my ‘factory’ after midnight. I thought that would put him off, but he agreed and asked me for directions. I set the test date for the coming Friday, and I told him to bring a warm coat.
It sounds fanciful, the MoD calling me for help with the Polaris missile. However, five months earlier I’d been cleared to enter the Nuclear Submarine base at Faslane Glasgow. I was there to present a proposal for a radiation-proof door for the base’s NDT facility. Some months before that I’d made Scanray’s initial presentation, at Vickers in Barrow-in-Furness, for the NDT facility for the new Trident nuclear submarines. I’d done a lot of interesting MoD related work including supplying equipment to the Bomb Squad.
On Friday, I went to the chicken-farm early to get ready for the test. My friends prepared a mobile darkroom with new chemicals and made a lightbox available for viewing radiographs. It was a cold November’s day, so they gave me an electric poker to heat the developer tank.
In the evening I went home and had a hot meal and a nap, at 23:00hrs I was back at the chicken-farm. I set about the impossible task of making the place look professional. I straightened all the books in the walls of my radiation room so it didn’t look like it might collapse at any moment. Fortunately, the shed was so dimly lit you couldn’t really appreciate the splendour of the place. This was going to be embarrassing. Towards midnight I sat in my car looking into the black night down the lane towards the junction of the main road. It was now bitterly cold, and a congealed drizzle slid down the windscreen of my car, and I kept the engine running to keep myself warm. At twenty past midnight, the man from the MoD had not arrived, I felt guiltily hopeful he’d decided not to come. Then, at half-past midnight the beam of a car’s headlights swung into the lane and up the hill. I jumped out of my car, waving a flashlight, so he didn’t miss me and drive off into the night. He saw me and swung into the drive. The chicken-farm was in total darkness, so I shone my torch through his now open car window.
“Mr Todd?” I asked with the uneasy feeling that maybe we should be identifying ourselves with some cryptic pass-phrase. He confirmed, and I led him into the shed by torchlight. If he was dismayed at the place, he didn’t show it. In truth, without shining my torch into his face, I couldn’t judge his expression.
He gave me the part, and I went to work. I took the shot and disappeared into the dark-room, hoping he didn’t fall over anything in the gloom of the shed. How would I explain having a part of the Polaris missile and a dead MoD man on the floor with a broken neck in a chicken-farm in the dead of night?
I developed the film, praying that the developer was warm enough to do the job. I dunked it in the stop bath, fixed it, washed it, hung it on the line and played a hairdryer over it to speed the process. In the low red light, the film looked totally black, there was no way to know if it was good or bad. I came out of the darkroom, and we put the film onto the lightbox. Mr Todd inspected it for a while with me peering over his shoulder. After some time, he slowly shook his head.
“This is terrible. This is absolutely terrible” he said.
I was devasted, I’d brought this poor unfortunate all the way from where-ever to this desolate chicken-farm in the middle of the night, and I had failed him.
I apologised, “I’m so sorry for wasting your time” I felt awful.
“Oh, no” he replied “The radiograph is fantastic, I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the problem, I just had no idea it was so bad. That is what’s terrible. I have to get back”.
I guided him back out to his car, he thanked me profusely, and he was gone.
I never heard from Mr Todd of the British Ministry of Defence again, and I had no way of contacting him. That one radiograph gave him enough information to solve his problem.
I certainly never got an order or got paid for my efforts, but I was content in the knowledge that I had done my bit for Queen and Country.
That’s X-Ray development for you.