Recording video in the 1950s

[ppppenguin]

The BECG now has the other known surviving fragment of VERA. This is the operator control panel as shown in the photo. If you look at Dimbleby's report on VERA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56V3QPpyOO8&t=2s and carefully compare the features of the control panel with my photo it's 99%+ certain that they are identical.

Lucien had told me he had this panel but I didn't know where it was. Last week we moved a lot of kit from his store in Suffolk to our museum in Lincolnshire. I'll report on the major kit, such as the Harris Sigma transmitter (BBC1 analogue, Crystal Palace, several tons) in a separate thread. I happened to spot this panel and guessed what it was. Pure luck really, the store is large and chaotic. I also found various books and papers that I'd given to Lucien decades ago and didn't expect to see again.

Surviving VERA bits:

Spool - at BECG on loan from BBC Archives
Spool - At Media Museum, Bradford
Tape head - At Media Museum, Bradford
Control panel - BECG
Metal label - BECG

This last is quite emotional for me. A few weeks before he died when he was very unwell, I visited Lucien and he said he had something for me. He gave me this small metal label. It says:

V.E.R.A
CONTROL PANEL
MARK 1/1

I was speechless. I didn't know he had it. Apparently he had removed it from the control panel (as mentioned above) and attached it to one of his toolboxes.

I want to display the spool and the label at our open days on 25/25 May. The spool is mounted in a wood and glass display case. I will probably put the label in with it. I'll write an explanatory sign for it. It may well be headed "VERA - a heroic British failure".

PS: I've no idea why the picture is upside down. I routinely re-orientate pictures (using Irfanview) so they don't rely on their metadata to get them the right way up when posted to a forum etc