Lawrence Johnston

[19&41]

One of the scientists responsible for our entry into the nuclear age. A feat accomplished using the electron tube architecture that we work to restore and preserve.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/202 ... _220805.nl

[William]

Thanks, Rex, that was an interesting read.

Bill

[TC Chris]

And he's standing in front of a Quonset hut. There were a couple WW II villages of them where I grew up. Temporary housing. The city moved a few to the fairgrounds and one (with a wall between one end and the other to keep boys and girls separated) was used as the ice-skating warming house. Coal stove sitting in the middle. The guy who ran it sat at a PA system in the boys' end. He played music on 78s over re-entrant horn loudspeakers. You can imagine the fidelity.... He had a microphone and would run up the mic gain when he saw somebody misbehaving on the ice--"cracking the whip" or going the wrong way. They would get a warning. Then back to the music.

Chris Campbell

[Firedome]

Interesting read. There's an obscure audio industry connection here, believe it or not. Luis Alvartez also developed an inexpensive radiation detector in the early '50s during the Cold War era. He knew, through his various electronics contacts, of William Rayment of Sargent-Rayment, a San Francisco radio maker since the mid 1920s of high quality TRF then SuperHet radios for consumer use, and later receivers for Navy ships during the WW II era. Post-WW II the S-R Co. became an early tube Hi-Fi and later for several years an early stereo mfr of excellent reputation, mainly distributed on the West Coast. He contracted with Rayment to produce the detector, called the "Gard", to sell to the public during the '50s nuclear hysteria era (don't we all remember diving under our desks, like that would have helped! lol), but the "Gard" sold rather poorly and it was phased out by around 1959, and S-R itself went belly up in 1961. I wrote an article about all this published in 2005 in Vacuum Tube Valley issue #20, after interviewing Mr. Rayment several times between 2002 and 2004. A rather unusual side-story from the audio industry of those times.