OT Things to do in London

[Jethro_uk]

testing

[Dave Plowman (News)]

You're not going to get to Greenwich, then. ;-)

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Care to recommend any?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

He wants to be remembered to them?

[Andrew]

homosapiens ?. I expect there will be quite a few in Brighton.

[Andrew]

does the science museum still demonstrate its van de graaff generator ?.

[whisky-dave]

I'm after buying one can;t find a decent one though for demo purposes at a reasonble price under £200.

[Marland]

The machine I remember that made a very Big Bang when it discharged was the impulse generator there was a notice to warn nervous people that they may want to leave when it was demonstrated. I?m of the age that visiting the children?s area and queuing to go use the automatic door demonstration because it was such a novelty.

There was a rather sanitised ?coal mine? as well which would now be more history than science.

GH

[Bob Eager]

The last time I was there, I was taken round the ground floor at 7.45 a.m. Unfortunately we didn't have time to stop and look, but it was very strange with no people apart from the very occasional cleaner.

[Andrew Gabriel]

It was a Marx Generator. It was fired every 2 hours while the museum was open. It was taken out of service when one of the capacitors blew up. In a conversation on Usenet many years ago when I was asking about it, Culham Laboratory offered replacements, but I think the Science Museum didn't want to run it anymore. They will have it in store - they are a national archive and are forbidden from disposing of anything.

If you want to know what a Marx Generator is, they are relatively simple - basically charging up a bank of capacitors in parallel, and discharging them in series. A search on Youtube will find many very substantial/spectacular home-made ones.

Oh, that rings a very vague bell at the back of my mind.

I can recall lots of models of various different machines in display cases, each with a button to press to see how it worked.

[Andrew]

Hiding something in a store that the public will never access, is no different from 'disposing' of something :-(

Whereas according to Sir Humphrey, losing vital documents can always be blamed on the floods of 1953. :-)

[Andrew Gabriel]

Too true. I worked on GEC 4000 series minicomputers for many years at the beginning of my career. Rutherford Labs gave serial number 1 to the Science Museum when they retired it. In 1998, I suggested to the Science Museum they might want to display it for its 25th anniversary. They couldn't find it - they found the paperwork for it and its set of manuals, but it's buried somewhere in their warehouses. I'm not sure they were particularly enthusiastic of the idea anyway, and if they were, I suspect it would have been found. They did assure me it would not have been disposed of.

[Marland]

May well be in their Wroughton store near Swindon which is in some old hangars on a former RAF station . They used to open them occasionally but AFAIK haven?t done so for a while but I believe there is a plan to to replace the Hangars with a new building that will make it possible to have the open days again. Some of the items are quite large such as the Lockheed Constellation Airliner but many smaller items are stored there as well.

GH

[Jim K..]

Franco manca sourdough pizza :-):-)

[Jim K..]

Gulp... how different?

[Jim K..]

Although if we all bought him a pint that could easily turn out to be very amusing...