old bits found in skips (dumpsters)
old bits found in skips (dumpsters)
other wonderful old stuff I have acquired...
an early 1950s valve music synth (sounds absolutely horrible, like a stylophone without the style! ) found phsically broken, but electrically functional on a rubbish dump.
a tea-chest of chemistry equipment originally addressed to Sir Edmund Hillary in Khatmandu and used on a himalayan expedition. It has a newspaper cutting about a yeti sighting pasted inside the lid. Found that in a building that was being demolished, and didn't notice the labels until i got home.
A ballistic galvanometer (ammeter with a tiny mirror on a silk thread instead of a needle) about 100 years old pulled out of a skip at the siemens factory in hollinwood manchester, relatively uninteresting, unless you note that the last terraced house in the row is within the factory grounds, and used to be the house & Lab of Sebastian di Ferranti in 1896, who started the electrics giant. So amost certainly belonged to him. Actually thinking about the dates, it's very possible that the alternator design with the zig zag rotor, that is now found in almost every car was developed using that meter. Phew.
Oh plus the car mentioned in the "our cars" section, found next to a skip!
I've had heaps of computer hardware out of skips, so much so, that the old MD of the computer repair company i worked for used to regularly ask me if I had certaiin things, usually him on the outside and me inside the scrap skip. Sadly most of the really good (and now collectable) stuff I had was revived and re-cycled.
