Appropriating my high-frequency generator didn't bother me too much.
Nor did your unsymmetrical wiring and haywire peregrinations in and about the two of them annoy (too acutely) my sense of mechanical and electrical precision.
But the idea of your using the ##&&%!! spectrograph only once—just for pre-change calibration—makes me madder than mad!
Sincerely,
Tom Lionel,
Consulting Engineer
Thomas grinned boyishly and picked up the notebook on top of the high-frequency heater. It was Tom's, and the physicist riffled through it to the last-used pages. He found considerable in the way of notes and sketches on the cyclotronic spectrograph. Cut in size by about one quarter, the thing would be not only a research instrument of value, but would be of a price low enough to make it available to schools, small laboratories, and perhaps production-lines—if Tom Lionel could find a use for a mass spectrograph on a production line.
Thomas grinned again. If it were possible, Tom would certainly have it included on some production line, somewhere.
He looked the spectrograph over and decided that it was a fine piece of apparatus. So it wasn't the shining piece of commercial panel and gleaming meters. The high-frequency plumbing in it had the touch of a one-thumbed plumber's apprentice after ten days' drinking and the D plates were soldered together with a heavy hand. But it did work—and that's all he cared. The knobs and dials he had added were sticking out at all angles, but they functioned.
And the line-voltage ripple present in the high-frequency generator made a particular mess out of the spectrograph separation. But electronic heaters do not normally come luxuriously equipped with rectifiers and filters so that the generator tubes were served with pure direct current—the circuit was self-rectified which would give a raucous signal if used as a radio transmitter. That generated a ripple-varied signal for the D plates and it screwed up the dispersion. The omission of refinement satisfied Thomas. So it wasn't perfect. It would be by the time Tom Lionel got through with it.
And for the time being, Thomas would leave it alone. No use trying to make it work until Tom made an engineering model out of the physicist's experiment.
Smiling to himself, Thomas went to work in the laboratory. He ignored Tom's experiments and started a few of his own accord.