Right... We are now entering the last development of the pumping room and where we keep many our wireless sets and various other scientific instruments.
This electric pump was the last to be installed on the site, in 1937. It is a 114 h.p. Crompton Parkinson electric motor that drove a 18 inch diameter Gwynnes' centrifugal pump in the basement below it through a vertical shaft.
Its purpose was to cope with increasing storm surges from the new housing estates and increased drainage to the sewers. It pumped to holding tanks only.
When the pumping was in commercial use, this electric pump was always the last to be started in the event of a storm surge, because the cost of electricity was so high and the electric motor was quite inefficient.
The majority of the sets here were all made by Pye of Cambridge and if we were to look out of the window of the museum and over the River Cam we would see the factory where they were actually built.
In the room various exhibits of domestic and scientific electrical equipment can be seen such as electronic recorders, rocking microtomes, portable dynamos, dial thermometers, x ray microanalysers, thread recorders and scale indicators, most of them Cambridge Instrument Company models.
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The Cambridge Instrument Comany
There is also a fine example of a fifties telephone switchboard and an Ericcson telephone set from 1923 retrieved from a whaling station in the Falklands.
You can see damage inflicted by Argentinian bullets in the conflict.
NEWMARK ANALOGUE COMPUTER
Our Newmark dates from 1960 and was used to solve differential equations. The computer consists of a stack of five main modules- a control panel, an amplifier, a type 5000 null voltmeter, a type 3731 electronic function multiplier and a type 3720 cyclic reset generator. A problem panel and potentiometer strip plugged into the control panel at the bottom.
It's a beast of a thing when placed next to a modern PC! This is due, no doubt, to thirty years of progress in electronics and also because the Newmark is an analogue computer, using continually - varying voltages to represent quantities, rather than a digital computer (like a PC) which uses two voltage levels to represent '0' and '1', and calculates quantities in discrete steps.
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Boiler House