I was offered a job as photographer and electronics engineer at Tetronics in Faringdon Berks. It was a new venture, backed by the local lord of the manor -Robert  Heber-Percy.  Joe Tylko, recently from the NPL  ran the unit passionately. We had a special plasma power source, a bit like a giant welding transformer, but much more controllable, capable of 35KW output.

Being in a little village we had to arrange with the electricity company when we could use it.

We had a couple of mechanical engineers John Thorpe and Clive Davies who designed and developed the nozzles to produces the plasma discharge.

 

Sadly not many photos remain of the amazing things we did there. We developed plasma rock drilling for boreholes. This had the advantage of sealing the surface of the bore, so wells for water would not be contaminated by minerals dissolving in the water as it rose.

 

Other work included plasma deposition of gold onto electrodes for pacemakers which would not be rejected by the body, making submicron particles of titanium diboride which was a catalyst used in the oil industry and a plasma device fitted to the front of a train to clean the tracks for better grip.

Today Tetronics main business is using plasma in waste recovery, see the website below.

 

One very cold winter morning a parhelion or heliophore appeard in the sky around the sun. At its best 5 suns were visible in the sky but it had faded by the tme I found the camera.