Back-from-the-dead supplier of marked-up Chinese tat Maplin started life out as a supplier run by geeks for geeks, with a wide range of electronic music modules and later on projects which didn’t have any real use, but were technical curiosities.
Maplin sold a lot of Geiger counter kits in the years after Chernobyl. Mine is still in service, I vaguely seem to recall the tube was a ZP1401 with the thin mica window. It saved me a radon survey –radiation is a problem in the south-west with radon leaching out of granite underground. The Geiger counter reads lower in the basement than on the first floor my old house (Maplin’s tube was a mica-window type). Interestingly in 1996 Maplin magazine claimed that the prototype of this detected the Chernobyl cloud passing over Britain.
Another story behind the scenes was that during the testing phase of the Geiger Counter project, the normal background radiation readings rose significantly, these were recorded for prosperity on a printout.We later learned of Chernobyl, the world’s first major nuclear accident. It was detected here first at Maplin [^1]. The implication of this is that the radiation cloud passed over Britain, and not just contaminating the hillsides in Wales.
The dekatron display is a digital device with oddly analogue properties. Unlike seeing a seven segment display count up, you get a more visceral feel of the count rate from the spatial rotating effect. I’m not sure why Griffin and George used those, they ceased operations in 1973 so perhaps it was the best tech for the time. The more visual display was probably good pedagogically, some of this antiquated analogue technology wears its heart more on its sleeve and is easier to relate to.
I am happy to say I haven’t seen mine ever spin like the one at school. I used CMOS 4017 counters and fed the output into a mechanical counter purchased from HL Smith in London’s Edgeware Road. It’s taken many years to tick up these counts to 10 million. More recently I upgraded ti with a little counter that reports counts over a minute via an 868MHz short range device to a Raspberry Pi running rrdtool. The output looks ugly compared to an IoT cloud service, but after Pachube went down and became Cosm, which went down and became Xively, which went down and became LogMeIn which wanted to charge me for the privilege I figured I could live with ugly. I don’t do Cloud.
They also supplied laser tubes, I bought mine from their Hammersmith store when I was working at TV Centre in White City. Nowadays you get a laser pointer that runs off an AA battery. In the 1980s you got to play with high voltage power supplies and delicate parts. I fired mine up recently, it was gratifying to see that it still worked, although a cheap laser pointer easily has the edge in power.
There’s no poetry in a solid-state LED pointer compared to the glowing innards of a HeNe laser tube
Geeks nowadays get to play with robots and 3D printers, which are less hazardous to your health. One thing remains reassuringly true in geekdom – and that’s that nobody needs these things, they are done because they are technically unusual, and often a little bit challenging. I didn’t have a practical use for a laser at the time, and in the intervening decades still haven’t found a use for it.
So what went wrong for Maplin? The internet if the obvious answer – if you want Chinese tat then get it from Banggood, dealextreme, ebay or Amazon. If you want it sooner pay a markup to Ebay sellers to get it from someone who carries a little bit od stock here.
Private equity seems to pay a supporting role. Nothing good ever comes of private equity. If it buys the company you work for, start looking for another job, because private equity is better described as private looting, more commonly known as theft. Private equity loads up the companies they ‘rescue’ with debt rather than investing capital in it. This happened several times to Maplin:
But the repeated leveraged buy-outs of Maplin by private equity players was arguably where the rot first set in, leaving it with high debts and owners that wanted to milk the firm for all they could. Rutlands Partners has secured loan notes with Maplin north of £90m.
[^1]: I kinda suspect the AWRE may well have picked up Chernobyl at the same time as Maplin but they probably kept schtumm
Maplin was/is a strange place. Many years ago I bought two multimeters for a fiver from them on a special offer and they’ve been the most reliable bit of kit I’ve ever had :).
Re: Chernobyl. I’ve recently been watching a Euro drama ( Deutschland 86 ) and in one episode one of the East German agents was wandering about the office with a geiger counter and the dialogue went something like:
Agent A: “What are you doing”
Agent B: “The background radiation has been off the chart for days now. There must have been a nuclear accident somewhere east of us”
Agent A: “Don’t be stupid the Russians would have told us about it”
Agent C: “Er, guys, you may want to look at the news …”
> I bought two multimeters for a fiver from them on a special offer and they’ve been the most reliable bit of kit I’ve ever had 🙂
Blimey, a good multimeter should be like a good G clamp – they should be something your kids should still be able to use in decades time. The analogue MM I bought as a teenager, paying God knows how much to get 50kohm/V rather than 20k/V is still serviceable. As is the one issued ot me at the BBC though changing ranges is somewhat infra dig these days.
What I want is a decent autoranging bench DVM, so I don’t need to worry about batteries. Anyway, you were probably sold those multimeters by the old geek Maplin, before PE got to them…
Chernobyl is all the rage these days. Way back when in the late 1990s there was some citizen science project to collect people’s data but nothing came of it. Nowadays there’s safecast, but the entry ticket is $1500. I guess consistency and repeatability has a price.