My Name is Rogier and I am a Pedant

… though not a very good one.

There is more of Dan Cruickshank on TV than is absolutely required for a healthy society at the moment though his current show on Modernism is probably the best thing he has done. It comes directly after his trio of shows following the route across the country taken by the early UK pioneer of a colour film process – Claude Friese-Green which suffered because Professor Cruickshank cannot do people. My wife pointed out that he was so much more enthusiastic while wandering through the TURBINENFABRIK than he was talking to the characters related to the 1920’s films of the previous week. We were also much amused by his comment on the story from a Scottish zoo-keeper’s son regarding the escape of a polar bear into the penguin enclosure - “Aha – their natural food!” This reminds me of the time my company decided to provide an intranet-based portal to bring together disparate communities from across the world. The masthead for the page had a polar-bear and a penguin staring at each other across icy wastes which prompted some grumbling about the inaccuracy of such a picture. Of course the idea of the site was to bring together people who would normally be “poles-apart” and so was entirely apt and correct. Not like the “Company Stationary” link from the same page which is not something you want so see used in connection with the huge growth that we were experiencing at the time.

Dan in the Turbine hall made me think again of my own experience of factories. I do feel rather nostalgic for the noisy days of the high-tech assembly line. I worked on the systems to record the positions of the manufactured items across the floor – each of these was of very high value and had an individual serial number which was used to provide accurate information regarding its position on the floor. Because of this, I actually got quite a good view of the whole manufacturing process. Some of the electronic components were inserted by machine for manual soldering and these components had to be attached to bandoliers with the various items in the correct sequence so the floor began with a couple of long machines with hoppers for each type of component. In operation, these made a loud and rhythmic clicking, very like a complex jazz drum pattern – something that Stewart Copeland would understand. It was quite hypnotic and almost continuous – the defining sound of the whole place.

The most numerous of the circuit boards were made almost wholly automatically using a conveyor which took the items through various stages of component insertion, soldering and completion without them being touched by anyone. At the far end of the floor, the boards would be tested but this had to be done manually, taking the boards out of their storage boxes and placing them on the vacuum beds of the testers. The serial numbers of the main unit consisted of six digits and I can remember when this rolled over. I’m not sure that this meant we had made a million of them because I think they started at 200,000 some time before I joined the company but from my view of the function of these things and the fact that they supplied a national utility, it is entirely possible that there are a million or more of them out there each with a manufacturing cost in the hundreds.

The units also had to have a variant number which was another six digit number with three blocks of two to define the variant of the unit. We experimented with bar-coding these as well, even down to trying to get these and the standard serial numbers etched on the millimetre thick edges of the boards. Some of them did go out with small barcodes labels which due to space restrictions we had to reduce down to 4 characters. I worked out that by using base 36 – all the alphabetic characters and 10 digits, I could convert the six digits to 4 characters. Years later, an independent company with some of these units rang up asking for the algorithm used to do this conversion. We had to work the conversion out from scratch which I think was my first VB program. The variant was also etched physically onto the board but this was not readable by machine.

The whole atmosphere of the place was one of things being done, no feeling that progress was stifled by six levels of meeting before anything was produced. We did have legal requirements and process requirements for certifications but these never seemed to get in the way of the actual job of turning out completed items.