Fun Fact: My mother worked at the Blackburn factory from around 1961 - 1971 when we migrated to Australia. She was a valve tester and trainer. She is now 86 and still well and truly alive. I recently showed her this video and the look of bewilderment and amazement on her face was priceless.
My mum worked there for something like 30 years, and ended up working on the laserdisc product before retiring. I remember as a kid going to the Christmas party at the factory - they organized an annual party for all the kids of employees; music, cake, gifts. I also remember waiting for my mum at the gate so we could go home together. A different time.
Mi eterna gratitud a su señora madre. De sus manos salieron la fuente de mi pasión. Soy técnico y restaurador de todo equipo que opera con válvulas electrónicas al vacio.
Your uncle did a good job on this production. I'm now 70 and spent my working career as a freelance cameraman filming similar projects first on 16mm film and eventually video. I doubt many of my efforts will last like this one. Would love to see more of your uncles work.
I worked for many years in M Building (seen at 2'33") which became the Videodisc / Laserdisc manufacturing plant in 1981. The wire factory was in the next building, and it later became our tape archive for Laserdisc and CD master tapes. That all closed a few years ago. Interesting site to work at with a large machine shop and engineering department that manufactured many of the machines in this video. I did my engineering apprenticeship there. The site also made electrolytic capacitors, circuit boards for Philips products, delay lines for PAL TVs and tungsten lamp filaments.
Whew! "Good old days" huh!! LOL Everything was so very labor intensive back then. However, these are the shoulders we are standing on today! Thanks for sharing!!
The EL84 they mention in the narration is an audio pentode, able to deliver 4 W undistorted in a class A amplifier, and more than 10 W in a push-pull configuration. It was later replaced by the cheaper triode - pentode ECL82 in all consumer electronics, as the additional triode in the envelope allowed to build a single-tube turntable - the triode worked as pick-up preamplifier in the turntable or Mike preamp in the tape recorder, the Geloso. When I started my career, there were germanium transistors around, but they were too expensive for almost everything. I designed DC tube circuits - imagine the headaches with the feedback and the gain changes. The circuits were a royal pain to design, but the finished products were indestructible and had a fashion of their own. But in 1962, when this film was made, the fate of vacuum tubes was already sealed. The silicon transistor was rapidly spreading and the design of ICs was ongoing; in less than ten years the vacuum tubes will be consigned to the scrapheap of history. It may sound strange, but I miss that clunky and approximative world of the vacuum tube electronics. It seemed it has a soul; but certainly, it was warm... both literally and figuratively...
It looks to me as if the tube was actually an EL64 and not an EL84. Note that the plates were relatively short compared to the height of the glass bottle. I have handled many many thousands of tubes here in the States but I've never seen an EL64.
@@goodun2974 Very unlikely as there is no listing for EL64. Also the Miniwatt databook quotes the numbers 60 to 64 as being "All glass valves with 9 pin base", which refers to European 9 pin lock in base. The EF50 was the most common use of this base. Numbers 80 to 89 refer to American small button Noval 9 pin base.
@@johnrebus1641 , the printing on the glass must be smudged; I slowed the video down to 25% speed and it looks more like a 6 than an 8, but the resolution isn't great and I'm watching this on a phone.
The EL84 has remained popular in guitar amplifiers to this day. It is among the top tube types used in the power amplifier sections of guitar amplifiers, along with the 6V6, EL34, 6L6, 5881, KT66, 6550, and KT88, among others. Few guitar amplifiers use the ECL82 but I think that a small number do.
All of this delicate work and many of these tubes sold for far less than five bucks. It also surprised me how these workers did this without any magnification of the intricate connections. I will never forget the sacrifice and stalwart way the Brits fought the Nazi's in WWII ! I bet the rejection rate for those finished valves was very low. BRAVO BRITAIN !
Unbelievable, the genius of the designers of the machines that made the tubes and the incredible manual dexterity of those people who made the tubes by hand.
Apart from the amazing construction of the valves themselves I'm gobsmacked by whoever designed the machines that ran the processes as seen in the film.Just for the record I have a 53 yr old mains radio that contains Mullard valves -they still work! Something special looking at the heaters glowing...
If I checked, there may be some of the same tubes in the National and Hallicrafters radios from that era. There is just something about a tube set that a transistor radio can't duplicate.
This is absolutely fascinating. These kinds of old industrial films were incredibly thorough in their illustration of a particular industrial working. It is strange how this 60ish-year-old documentary will be of total relevance to any modern amp geek. The story ends with the company looking toward a bright future of even further industrial expansion. Yet from our contemporary perspective we know that the tube/valve industry died a slow death in the countries of this story's era, only to be revived by other nations taking advantage of a relatively niche market.
As a young student I worked at Mullard Mitcham, circa 1970, testing the much larger transmitter valves. It was great a time to be there, in such a busy department, even though I nearly electricuted myself, by touching the 400v grid bias electrode!
To mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the company, Mullard management decided to have a rose named after the company. Mullard's quest was simple, they wanted a world-beater, nothing less, so they contacted the renowned grower Sam McGredy IV in Northern Ireland. The naming fee of £10,000/$24,000 was a lot of money in 1970 and established a record fee for a new rose : Mullard Jubilee "Electron". To mark the occasion every employee received a "Mullard Jubilee” rose bush.
Fascinating! This film shows how the quality control ensures that those valves are made to the highest standards. Mullard valves have always been my favorite, simply because of their quality.
That is unbelievable! Who are the geniuses that designed those machines? They are simply magical. I wonder where these treasures are today. Hopefully in a manufacturing museum! Love the narrator’s perfect English.
I still use them in my guitar amp. The Mullard Blackburn ECC-83 is absolutely my favorite sounding valve, and super rare here in the U.S. I wish I could find more of them.
Not one tool maker, but an entire department (actually two departments, one for the valve/semiconductor department and a general one) dedicated just to production means for all of their sites world wide.
When I started servicing TVs in 1978 We paid 30 percent of the retail price, which was about 8-10 dollars, sold it for 30 dollars. Never realized how much work went into making a tube, I had hundreds of old and new tubes up until 1990 when they were obsolete and I threw them out.!!! What I would give to have them today, in fact, I wished I would've kept a lot of the older stock components from the 70s 80s even 90s... Hindsight.!!!
Highly skilled people to design and make the machines to complete this process. Cams and levers. Simply amazing. I use vacuum tubes in my amplifiers today (3-500ZG). Thank you for the video.
I own two EL-84 Blackburn Millard tubes that as a child we called them muddy tops from the almost liquid looking tops. They are the best of audio tubes in the EL-84 valves as British calls them. I have them in a SE stereo tube amp by Magnavox. Although not many watts those amps sound very quite and outstanding musical quality.
I had no idea the process was this complicated and this well-automated. The overhead associated with just maintaining all that machinery must’ve been staggering, especially in light of all the close tolerances required. And think of the brain power and initiative involved in making all this happen. And the labor costs. No wonder the transistor swept this all away so quickly-but being a tube amp designer, I say that with a healthy measure of regret.
We need all this back, here in America. I love that we have tube manufacturers overseas doin a bang-up job (I love my Sovtek 5881's), but we need some at-home tube manufacturing for guitar amps and hifi
@MichaelKingsfordGray Fascist greedy corporate entities bought off the government. The corporate sector support SLAVE labour in foreign countries. Slavery supports need to be jailed. we have laws against those that support slavery.
I'm amazed seeing the early robot automation, it would have been electro-mechanically programmed, very skilful design work. It would cost tens of millions to design each production line now, although easier in many ways with multi-purpose programmable robots. I worked on a project on the 90's where some 50's controllers were being replaced. The only things i can liken them to were telephone exchanges. They were basically early industrial computers.
23:46 that made laugh, precision processes everywhere and a gash hole made in the roof through a bit of gypsum. One would think they would have put a circular plate around it to finish it off.
A bit like I went to Jodrell Bank on a course and peeped behind an electronics cabinet to see a circuit board with wires attached and sitting in a cardboard box to insulate it from the cabinet shelf. Probably millions of pounds of astronomy gear and a cardboard box.
A bit like BT Openreach when the engineer came to install the full fibre broadband in my when they connected the fibre cable they had to open a hatch on the side of the pole to make the connection they had to move the copper connection board out of the way this connection board had a plastic carrier bag over it to protect it from the rain when i asked the engineer why this was the case she said most of these are like this i would have thought that they would have fitted a proper cover. thankfully the fibre connectors now used are waterproof.
This is why the old electronics had long life, you can feel hard work of people, when we look at old Radio, Amplifire glowing valves, I respect the people who gifted such precious equipments.🙏🙏🙏 I still have a Grundig Record changer with Sterio valve Amplifire of 1966 in beautiful original condition. this is absolutely fascinating video, younger generation must watch.
Around 23 minutes there was the one and only mention of the word 'transistor'. Its incredible to think that all this plant, machinery and employment would be obsolete in a decade or so. Mullard themselves weren't paying attention -- they made transistors but they were invariably germanium, they were labeled like valves and packaged and priced like them. (So, for example, you could buy a vacuum tube triode -- an EC92 -- or a transistor triode -- an OC71. The first letter was the heater voltage or current, other letters were the valve type and the first digit the base type. They kept this notation for transistors even though by 1961 silicon planar transistors were being made by the bucket full (and the planar process was being applied to made integrated circuits). Mullard probably didn't know what was going to hit them until it was too late -- a pity since it was a fine company.
While the O was probably chosen by Philips and several other European manufacturers not to clash with the valve coding, it became a coding on its own, without the historical meaning from the valve coding. Then, pro electron standardised on A, B, C and R as starting letters and the Philips group of companies only used the O on custom semiconductors and pre production types anymore (NXP up to this day). I'm not sure what you mean by "didn't know what was going to hit them" as they made vacuum technology up to around 2008. Their transistors from the AC, AD, AF, BC, BD, BF etc. series were widely sold. In the IC era, they specialised in LSI bipolar digital and mixed signal circuits. Mullard was the design centre within Philips for Teletext and CD chipsets, amongst others. They still make semiconductors up to this day, though most historic sites seem to have been consolidated into a few new ones and some activities moved to sites outside the UK.
Mullard did produce silicon transistors, apart from the early alloy types, there were high frequency types like the BF115. NXP (the successor to Philips) still make transistors and ICs.
I recently restored a circa 1962 Bush portable radio that has all the original Mullard transistors. The only components that had gone bad were the electrolytics and the detector diode. It's an amazingly sensitive set and very well made too.
@@mjouwbuis Many of the silicon based semiconductors you mention were made at the Mullard (Southampton) Plant where i did my apprenticeship - too late for valves though. Manufacturing went to the far east about the time i finished and the site now is a mixture of various other businesses. The EEB Dept (Electrical and Electronic Building) where many prototypes and other things were built is now a builders merchants (Jewsons i think) which i think i kind of ironic.
@MichaelKingsfordGray bullcrap, more corporate propaganda, the real truth is the blame belongs to the upper class who shifted production overseas in order to increase profits due to selfishness and greed, obviously.
Tom Tschritter yep and during the 80s when Thatcher wanted Britain to become a financial services centre... I guess the country became richer at the expense of our engineering
@@buffplums some greedy pricks became richer. The current UK will soon become a fascist country. Just like China, where you are jailed for your political views.
@MichaelKingsfordGray Not really. Manufacturers in all fields moved production overseas, less costly to produce items but still making their nice profits.
I have watched this three separate times and I still find it fascinating. And Mullard made great valves/tubes. I still use tubes in my guitar amps. So far in my opinion they still sound better than transistors etc. for music.
I wish we could get the old el34 tubes they made my marshall guitar amps loved them now we get made in china crap why cant the us and the uk get togeather and start makeing them at home sad
@@mariannwatt2678 , There would be enormous startup costs involved in making the necessary machinery again, because Russia and China are unlikely to sell or give up their tube-manufacturing machines. Also, getting the requisite chemicals and metals and adhering to EPA and EU regulations for chemical use and disposal would be difficult and costly. And finally the cost of labor in Europe and especially America is much higher than it is in China or Russia. There are a couple of companies in America and Canada that are manufacturing copies of the Western Electric 300 B triode that is much beloved by audiophiles, but that's a case where they can get $500 or $600 or more for a single tube.
Wonder how the factory made money? I remembered the ECC83 (12AX7) cost a dollar back in the late 60s. I built my own stereo amplifier using 1 ECC83 for phono stage, 1 ECC83 for line/ tone control and 2 EL84 output stage. This setup was for 1 channel. Interesting hobby back then. I am from Singapore.
It made money, but it didn’t rip everyone off for the max corporate dollar or pound it could. It was all about making a good product at a sensible price. Not like the evil fascist pricks that buy votes, like Trump, and the his evil mates.
I also built a amp with 2x2 El 84 back in the 90s. We also dreamed about building an amp with 2 El 34 per chanel but they needed an 500 V transformer for the anode voltage.
@@matneu27 I built one about 5 years ago to the original Millard design. weighs in at some 30kg, has 14 valves. Some parts difficult to obtain and not cheap!
Plenty of robots in this video, but they were run with cams, limit switches and timers. No microprocessors or PLCs in the mix. Real engineering, tuning with feeler gauges and not a firmware load. Great video!
From what I understand, No one makes a tube today that has the same quality as these. Maybe when it was the state of the art, they tried harder? Had better coatings and such? Suddenly, Paying $30 for a 50 year old, NOS 12ax7A tube doesn't seem unreasonable.
i would be careful with such claims, they are very hard to prove or disprove. If they were better, I would think it is because during this time, you could make real profit with those and there was competition. nowdays, only very few people use tubes and chances are they are not that critical. look at how many people think vinyl sonds better despite it having an obvious noise covering the signal. i suspect those people would buy crappy tubes without thinking and controling them.
@MichaelKingsfordGray That's just simply not true.People who run high end audiophile amps don't seek out Russian tubes, and especially for the preamp circuit, The Mullard and RCA black plates are preferred.
@@johannalvarsson9299 "Chances are?" The truth is, people who are really into their tube amps want the real, best versions, not modern copies. It's like saying modern violins are just as good as a Stradivarius violins. They are not.
Interestingly if people don't know, there is the Great British Valve Project who intend to start making audio valves again in Britain and are collecting machinery and getting it all working.
@@antoniograncino3506 , Much of it was likely either sold to China and Russia are scrapped for the metal content. Any of it that sat around too long in an abandoned building ( with broken windows, leaky roof, pigeons crapping on it etc) would have probably rusted to the point of being unusable.
That machinery is amazing, effortlessly churning out millions of valves. I have a D.E.R. valve with a pip on top and marked BBC which according to the information I have dates it as 1926 to 1927 but the incredible bit is that the tungsten filament is still intact and is very bright. It seems a pity to use it and burn out the filament, but it also seems a pity to not use it as intended. G4GHB.
This is the perfect example of a real life Rube Goldberg world. More fascinating than the valves themself, are the intricate machines they built to build the valves. Who could engineer such machines? I have a Dillon Super 1050 ammunition reloading machine that I thought was a complicated device. It looks simple compared to the machines shown here. Such an amazing video, um, I mean film.
Some of the assembly might be done the same way on basically the same machines. Although some of the original equipment likely would have been sold as scrap metal, some of the machines got sold from Britain and Germany and elsewhere in Europe, to China and Russia. Unfortunately it is quite possible that much of the machinery has not been maintained and kept up to speck and so even though some of the modern Russian and Chinese tubes might be made on the same machinery such as that shown here the tubes themselves might not be the same quality because of wear and tear on the machines plus perhaps lesser quality metals and chemicals being used for manufacturing the various parts of the tubes.
Similar probably, except it's in China and not Blackburn. I can't imagine valve manufacturing techniques have changed too much, except maybe robots might be involved now.
Amazing to think about how all that base was swept away by the transistor. Lots of women were employed there. They're good at delicate jobs. A young dude working there would've had a blast finding a date back then!
@@gravelydon7072 whilst true the ratio of valve to transistor is so massive in favour of transistor so as to make valves a micro niche thing now. I do prefer the sound of valves and use an SET headphone amp but I really am in a very small minority. 99% of portable audio listeners simply listen via their phone.
It is a function of demand though. It used to be that hospitals and the military depending on valves for everything they did. It was life or death. Today, you get a better, warmer sound if you use better NOS tubes in your guitar amp. That's just not as critical.
At 5:23, it's an EL64, not EL84. I have handled many hundreds perhaps thousands of different tube types but I have never seen an EL64 here in the States.
I seems to remeber the model number of some of those valves. I had a Marshall 50W amp in the early 70s. Just think they were expanding the factory, and it mjust all have come crashing down with the transistor and the icu chip
That's an amazing video, and explains why so few valve/tube makers still exist who do quality (as opposed to quantity) work on tubes. It's much more involved than I thought. I have many tube amps, so I hope quality makers will remain in the business! Very sad to see great companies like SED leaving the market.
Checked out a toolmaker job at an outfit near me and during the tour I saw a room with the unmistakable custom desks for assembling vacuum tubes. This is in the American midwest in 2020 and I was surprised. It seems this company stsrted making tubes for the U.S. military back in the WWll days, and apparently some American weapons systems still use these tubes, and they retain the ability to build them in house to this day.
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Fun Fact: My mother worked at the Blackburn factory from around 1961 - 1971 when we migrated to Australia. She was a valve tester and trainer. She is now 86 and still well and truly alive. I recently showed her this video and the look of bewilderment and amazement on her face was priceless.
@@cattnipp maybe they didn't film her reaction.
My mum worked there for something like 30 years, and ended up working on the laserdisc product before retiring. I remember as a kid going to the Christmas party at the factory - they organized an annual party for all the kids of employees; music, cake, gifts. I also remember waiting for my mum at the gate so we could go home together. A different time.
Mi eterna gratitud a su señora madre. De sus manos salieron la fuente de mi pasión. Soy técnico y restaurador de todo equipo que opera con válvulas electrónicas al vacio.
Wow I didn’t realize how much work is involved in making valves! This is why all those old Marshall amplifiers sounded so great 😀
thank you this is truly a precious and historical film
Many,many, ladies, doing the intricate and fine details.
11:54 "Inspectress"!!
Made by my uncle. He went on to do hundreds of educational and industrial films for Mullards and Phillips.
Would you uncle be okay with his amazing style being used in classic British comedy? ua-cam.com/video/tQWPR9TM0Gk/v-deo.html
That's so cool
Your uncle did a good job on this production. I'm now 70 and spent my working career as a freelance cameraman filming similar projects first on 16mm film and eventually video. I doubt many of my efforts will last like this one. Would love to see more of your uncles work.
I worked for many years in M Building (seen at 2'33") which became the Videodisc / Laserdisc manufacturing plant in 1981. The wire factory was in the next building, and it later became our tape archive for Laserdisc and CD master tapes. That all closed a few years ago. Interesting site to work at with a large machine shop and engineering department that manufactured many of the machines in this video. I did my engineering apprenticeship there. The site also made electrolytic capacitors, circuit boards for Philips products, delay lines for PAL TVs and tungsten lamp filaments.
Very interesting! Thank you.
Thanks for sharing and best of luck!
You had tapes for CD mastering? Presumably U-matic PCM1630 format? I have equipment for those, believe it or not.
I did work experience in 1981 from high school Brownedge St Marys Bamber Bridge.
This video was recommended to me a couple of days after I ordered a matched pair of Mullard valves for my preamplifier.
Whew! "Good old days" huh!! LOL Everything was so very labor intensive back then. However, these are the shoulders we are standing on today! Thanks for sharing!!
Those similar workers today are now checkout operatives in supermarkets.
The EL84 they mention in the narration is an audio pentode, able to deliver 4 W undistorted in a class A amplifier, and more than 10 W in a push-pull configuration. It was later replaced by the cheaper triode - pentode ECL82 in all consumer electronics, as the additional triode in the envelope allowed to build a single-tube turntable - the triode worked as pick-up preamplifier in the turntable or Mike preamp in the tape recorder, the Geloso.
When I started my career, there were germanium transistors around, but they were too expensive for almost everything. I designed DC tube circuits - imagine the headaches with the feedback and the gain changes. The circuits were a royal pain to design, but the finished products were indestructible and had a fashion of their own.
But in 1962, when this film was made, the fate of vacuum tubes was already sealed. The silicon transistor was rapidly spreading and the design of ICs was ongoing; in less than ten years the vacuum tubes will be consigned to the scrapheap of history.
It may sound strange, but I miss that clunky and approximative world of the vacuum tube electronics. It seemed it has a soul; but certainly, it was warm... both literally and figuratively...
It looks to me as if the tube was actually an EL64 and not an EL84. Note that the plates were relatively short compared to the height of the glass bottle. I have handled many many thousands of tubes here in the States but I've never seen an EL64.
@@goodun2974 Very unlikely as there is no listing for EL64. Also the Miniwatt databook quotes the numbers 60 to 64 as being "All glass valves with 9 pin base", which refers to European 9 pin lock in base. The EF50 was the most common use of this base. Numbers 80 to 89 refer to American small button Noval 9 pin base.
@@johnrebus1641 , the printing on the glass must be smudged; I slowed the video down to 25% speed and it looks more like a 6 than an 8, but the resolution isn't great and I'm watching this on a phone.
The EL84 has remained popular in guitar amplifiers to this day. It is among the top tube types used in the power amplifier sections of guitar amplifiers, along with the 6V6, EL34, 6L6, 5881, KT66, 6550, and KT88, among others. Few guitar amplifiers use the ECL82 but I think that a small number do.
I have 4 of them in my amp right now. RCA NOS that my grandfather had in his garage. I have Mullard tubes in an old radio he left me as well.
All of this delicate work and many of these tubes sold for far less than five bucks. It also surprised me how these workers did this without any magnification of the intricate connections. I will never forget the sacrifice and stalwart way the Brits fought the Nazi's in WWII ! I bet the rejection rate for those finished valves was very low. BRAVO BRITAIN !
Unbelievable, the genius of the designers of the machines that made the tubes and the incredible manual dexterity of those people who made the tubes by hand.
Excellent video. It is no wonder that original Mullard valves are so sought after. Craftsmanship at its FINEST.
Apart from the amazing construction of the valves themselves I'm gobsmacked by whoever designed the machines that ran the processes as seen in the
film.Just for the record I have a 53 yr old mains radio that contains Mullard valves -they still work! Something special looking at the heaters glowing...
If I checked, there may be some of the same tubes in the National and Hallicrafters radios from that era. There is just something about a tube set that a transistor radio can't duplicate.
This is absolutely fascinating. These kinds of old industrial films were incredibly thorough in their illustration of a particular industrial working. It is strange how this 60ish-year-old documentary will be of total relevance to any modern amp geek. The story ends with the company looking toward a bright future of even further industrial expansion. Yet from our contemporary perspective we know that the tube/valve industry died a slow death in the countries of this story's era, only to be revived by other nations taking advantage of a relatively niche market.
@ Robi - silly person: this technology was traded to Chinese and Russia for access into their markets
Please wake up
1/2023: Absolutely fascinating. I loved every minute of this. A great education for me. Thank You.
We LOVE MULLARD!! Fortunately I have some of these wonders...the rest can rest.....
I wanted a tube for our TV, i seem to remember i went to Waltons in Wolverhampton. They seem to have racks of valves for sale, would be around 1980.
As a young student I worked at Mullard Mitcham, circa 1970, testing the much larger transmitter valves. It was great a time to be there, in such a busy department, even though I nearly electricuted myself, by touching the 400v grid bias electrode!
ouch, that must have hurt!
To mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the company, Mullard management decided to have a rose named after the company. Mullard's quest was simple, they wanted a world-beater, nothing less, so they contacted the renowned grower Sam McGredy IV in Northern Ireland. The naming fee of £10,000/$24,000 was a lot of money in 1970 and established a record fee for a new rose : Mullard Jubilee "Electron". To mark the occasion every employee received a "Mullard Jubilee” rose bush.
I remember the Mullard rose. There was a large bed of them in Corporation Park
Back then the goal was an acceptable yield of the highest quality.
Now the goal is the highest yield of an acceptable quality.
@Teknogod17 You probably bought ones made in China and labelled Mullard.
From China, No jobs here.
Fascinating! This film shows how the quality control ensures that those valves are made to the highest standards. Mullard valves have always been my favorite, simply because of their quality.
That is unbelievable! Who are the geniuses that designed those machines? They are simply magical. I wonder where these treasures are today. Hopefully in a manufacturing museum! Love the narrator’s perfect English.
My dad worked at the Belmont factory just outside Durham City. They made the actual screens for televisions. He worked there for over 30 years
A fantastic archive of British electronic engineering, many thanks for posting this.
My old 1950s Pye radio still has it's original Mullard valves , still working beautifully .
I still use them in my guitar amp. The Mullard Blackburn ECC-83 is absolutely my favorite sounding valve, and super rare here in the U.S. I wish I could find more of them.
I have some ecc83 here in Philippines
the machines that was DESIGNED to make the tubes is OUTA THIS WORLD! no computers n just a pc of paper, n a compass, n ONE SMART TOOL MAKER!
Not one tool maker, but an entire department (actually two departments, one for the valve/semiconductor department and a general one) dedicated just to production means for all of their sites world wide.
@@mjouwbuis Correct. And Blackburn engineers built most of the machines in this video.
Thanks. And all this was going on back in 1963 and i was an apprentice.
When I started servicing TVs in 1978
We paid 30 percent of the retail price, which was about 8-10 dollars, sold it for 30 dollars. Never realized how much work went into making a tube, I had hundreds of old and new tubes up until 1990 when they were obsolete and I threw them out.!!!
What I would give to have them today, in fact, I wished I would've kept a lot of the older stock components from the 70s 80s even 90s...
Hindsight.!!!
In the 60's I would buy them for about 2 shilings.
@@who-gives-a-toss_Bear ...if I only knew...shame to throw all that history away.
They're probably worth a fortune now, depending on the models of course
Highly skilled people to design and make the machines to complete this process. Cams and levers. Simply amazing. I use vacuum tubes in my amplifiers today (3-500ZG). Thank you for the video.
Was the 3-500ZG made by Eimac? If so, Eimac's headquarters was San Bruno, California (by San Francisco airport). It's now home to UA-cam. 😁
I own two EL-84 Blackburn Millard tubes that as a child we called them muddy tops from the almost liquid looking tops. They are the best of audio tubes in the EL-84 valves as British calls them. I have them in a SE stereo tube amp by Magnavox. Although not many watts those amps sound very quite and outstanding musical quality.
I had no idea the process was this complicated and this well-automated. The overhead associated with just maintaining all that machinery must’ve been staggering, especially in light of all the close tolerances required. And think of the brain power and initiative involved in making all this happen. And the labor costs. No wonder the transistor swept this all away so quickly-but being a tube amp designer, I say that with a healthy measure of regret.
not on sound quality it didn't, we have to be grateful for the transistor, without it ICs would never have been invented
We need all this back, here in America. I love that we have tube manufacturers overseas doin a bang-up job (I love my Sovtek 5881's), but we need some at-home tube manufacturing for guitar amps and hifi
@@TheChadPad and transmitting tubes…
@@dennisyoung4631 idk anything about those unfortunately. I’d like to! Tubes are cool!
Brilliant engineering when machinery was designed and built in the UK unlike nowadays,before computers took over
@MichaelKingsfordGray Fascist greedy corporate entities bought off the government.
The corporate sector support SLAVE labour in foreign countries.
Slavery supports need to be jailed. we have laws against those that support slavery.
Amazing mechanical/relay automation. They must have had lots of engineers to build this place. Very impressive.
I'm amazed seeing the early robot automation, it would have been electro-mechanically programmed, very skilful design work. It would cost tens of millions to design each production line now, although easier in many ways with multi-purpose programmable robots.
I worked on a project on the 90's where some 50's controllers were being replaced. The only things i can liken them to were telephone exchanges. They were basically early industrial computers.
Wow that was amazing - the guys who designed and built those machines were amazing and in 1961
Always impressed with the quality and meticulous work they did
Someone finding this rare video is as amazing as the content itself!
In my life first time I have seen such mfg. process. Many valves are replaced in my radio services business. Thank to Mullard factory.
Until now I'm still using radio and TV tubes for repairing. Amazing video for mallard factory
23:46 that made laugh, precision processes everywhere and a gash hole made in the roof through a bit of gypsum. One would think they would have put a circular plate around it to finish it off.
A bit like I went to Jodrell Bank on a course and peeped behind an electronics cabinet to see a circuit board with wires attached and sitting in a cardboard box to insulate it from the cabinet shelf. Probably millions of pounds of astronomy gear and a cardboard box.
Bill hahah yeah probably an essential mod that someone did years ago and it got forgotten about hahah
A bit like BT Openreach when the engineer came to install the full fibre broadband in my when they connected the fibre cable they had to open a hatch on the side of the pole to make the connection they had to move the copper connection board out of the way this connection board had a plastic carrier bag over it to protect it from the rain when i asked the engineer why this was the case she said most of these are like this i would have thought that they would have fitted a proper cover. thankfully the fibre connectors now used are waterproof.
This is why the old electronics had long life, you can feel hard work of people, when we look at old Radio, Amplifire glowing valves, I respect the people who gifted such precious equipments.🙏🙏🙏 I still have a Grundig Record changer with Sterio valve Amplifire of 1966 in beautiful original condition. this is absolutely fascinating video, younger generation must watch.
Around 23 minutes there was the one and only mention of the word 'transistor'. Its incredible to think that all this plant, machinery and employment would be obsolete in a decade or so. Mullard themselves weren't paying attention -- they made transistors but they were invariably germanium, they were labeled like valves and packaged and priced like them. (So, for example, you could buy a vacuum tube triode -- an EC92 -- or a transistor triode -- an OC71. The first letter was the heater voltage or current, other letters were the valve type and the first digit the base type. They kept this notation for transistors even though by 1961 silicon planar transistors were being made by the bucket full (and the planar process was being applied to made integrated circuits). Mullard probably didn't know what was going to hit them until it was too late -- a pity since it was a fine company.
While the O was probably chosen by Philips and several other European manufacturers not to clash with the valve coding, it became a coding on its own, without the historical meaning from the valve coding. Then, pro electron standardised on A, B, C and R as starting letters and the Philips group of companies only used the O on custom semiconductors and pre production types anymore (NXP up to this day). I'm not sure what you mean by "didn't know what was going to hit them" as they made vacuum technology up to around 2008. Their transistors from the AC, AD, AF, BC, BD, BF etc. series were widely sold. In the IC era, they specialised in LSI bipolar digital and mixed signal circuits. Mullard was the design centre within Philips for Teletext and CD chipsets, amongst others. They still make semiconductors up to this day, though most historic sites seem to have been consolidated into a few new ones and some activities moved to sites outside the UK.
Mullard did produce silicon transistors, apart from the early alloy types, there were high frequency types like the BF115. NXP (the successor to Philips) still make transistors and ICs.
I recently restored a circa 1962 Bush portable radio that has all the original Mullard transistors. The only components that had gone bad were the electrolytics and the detector diode. It's an amazingly sensitive set and very well made too.
@@mjouwbuis Many of the silicon based semiconductors you mention were made at the Mullard (Southampton) Plant where i did my apprenticeship - too late for valves though.
Manufacturing went to the far east about the time i finished and the site now is a mixture of various other businesses. The EEB Dept (Electrical and Electronic Building) where many prototypes and other things were built is now a builders merchants (Jewsons i think) which i think i kind of ironic.
The quality and complexity (of the product) is just extraordinary..!!
What a fascinating documentary.
Amazing Video and very interesting
document.
My very thanks for author.
Excellent historical footage.
At 17:00, makes one appreciate the little 12AU7 a lot more when we can see what it takes to make one.
Nice, I just purchased "new released" EL84 tubes for my very first tube amp the Dynaco ST-35.
Cool history!
At 2:28 I swear there's a bloke on a hoverboard. I used loads of valves back in the sixties so thanks for a great video.
When Britain was a engineering nation unlike now where we make sod all
@MichaelKingsfordGray bullcrap, more corporate propaganda, the real truth is the blame belongs to the upper class who shifted production overseas in order to increase profits due to selfishness and greed, obviously.
Tom Tschritter yep and during the 80s when Thatcher wanted Britain to become a financial services centre... I guess the country became richer at the expense of our engineering
@MichaelKingsfordGray Bull Shit.
@@buffplums some greedy pricks became richer.
The current UK will soon become a fascist country.
Just like China, where you are jailed for your political views.
@MichaelKingsfordGray Not really. Manufacturers in all fields moved production overseas, less costly to produce items but still making their nice profits.
If you have any more videos like this, please do upload them. 😃
Exceptional film of the valve process. I wonder where all the automated machines ended up?
I have watched this three separate times and I still find it fascinating. And Mullard made great valves/tubes. I still use tubes in my guitar amps. So far in my opinion they still sound better than transistors etc. for music.
I wish we could get the old el34 tubes they made my marshall guitar amps loved them now we get made in china crap why cant the us and the uk get togeather and start makeing them at home sad
@@mariannwatt2678 , There would be enormous startup costs involved in making the necessary machinery again, because Russia and China are unlikely to sell or give up their tube-manufacturing machines. Also, getting the requisite chemicals and metals and adhering to EPA and EU regulations for chemical use and disposal would be difficult and costly. And finally the cost of labor in Europe and especially America is much higher than it is in China or Russia. There are a couple of companies in America and Canada that are manufacturing copies of the Western Electric 300 B triode that is much beloved by audiophiles, but that's a case where they can get $500 or $600 or more for a single tube.
Wonder how the factory made money? I remembered the ECC83 (12AX7) cost a dollar back in the late 60s. I built my own stereo amplifier using 1 ECC83 for phono stage, 1 ECC83 for line/ tone control and 2 EL84 output stage. This setup was for 1 channel. Interesting hobby back then. I am from Singapore.
It made money, but it didn’t rip everyone off for the max corporate dollar or pound it could.
It was all about making a good product at a sensible price.
Not like the evil fascist pricks that buy votes, like Trump, and the his evil mates.
@@who-gives-a-toss_Bear The CEO was also not paid 1000x more than the workers, not more than 10x the lowest wage, I would bet
When the tubes (valves) were made in large quantity, the production costs were much lower. The setup costs play a large part of producing such items.
I also built a amp with 2x2 El 84 back in the 90s. We also dreamed about building an amp with 2 El 34 per chanel but they needed an 500 V transformer for the anode voltage.
@@matneu27 I built one about 5 years ago to the original Millard design. weighs in at some 30kg, has 14 valves. Some parts difficult to obtain and not cheap!
This is a really great video
AMAZING and to think they did this without robots and computers
I see plenty of robots doing tasks in this vid.
Brian Cullen in my factory is, we are hoping to make it fully automated because we have a few workers and we have started to make them to robots
They did all this to build robots and computers
Plenty of robots in this video, but they were run with cams, limit switches and timers. No microprocessors or PLCs in the mix. Real engineering, tuning with feeler gauges and not a firmware load. Great video!
@@Albee213 wage slaves to capitalism. not much has changed unfortunatley. At least they were actually making something useful and world class quality
A work of art.
From what I understand, No one makes a tube today that has the same quality as these.
Maybe when it was the state of the art, they tried harder?
Had better coatings and such?
Suddenly, Paying $30 for a 50 year old, NOS 12ax7A tube doesn't seem unreasonable.
i would be careful with such claims, they are very hard to prove or disprove. If they were better, I would think it is because during this time, you could make real profit with those and there was competition. nowdays, only very few people use tubes and chances are they are not that critical. look at how many people think vinyl sonds better despite it having an obvious noise covering the signal. i suspect those people would buy crappy tubes without thinking and controling them.
@MichaelKingsfordGray That's just simply not true.People who run high end audiophile amps don't seek out Russian tubes, and especially for the preamp circuit, The Mullard and RCA black plates are preferred.
@@johannalvarsson9299 "Chances are?" The truth is, people who are really into their tube amps want the real, best versions, not modern copies. It's like saying modern violins are just as good as a Stradivarius violins. They are not.
@@Qingeaton prove
@@Qingeaton the think is i am open to change my mind. show me evidence and i am going to.
Interestingly if people don't know, there is the Great British Valve Project who intend to start making audio valves again in Britain and are collecting machinery and getting it all working.
Good for them. I wish them well.
@@vancouverman4313 Yes, I keep looking to see how they are going on.
I was wondering what become of all the marvelous machinery in that factory.
@@antoniograncino3506 , Much of it was likely either sold to China and Russia are scrapped for the metal content. Any of it that sat around too long in an abandoned building ( with broken windows, leaky roof, pigeons crapping on it etc) would have probably rusted to the point of being unusable.
Unreal!! 😳 I had no idea these modest tube types were so complicated!
What an interesting bit of footage. Thank you
That machinery is amazing, effortlessly churning out millions of valves.
I have a D.E.R. valve with a pip on top and marked BBC which according to the information I have dates it as 1926 to 1927 but the incredible bit is that the tungsten filament is still intact and is very bright. It seems a pity to use it and burn out the filament, but it also seems a pity to not use it as intended.
G4GHB.
I'd recommend a Variac and slightly lower mains voltage to preserve the filament.
@@jamesplotkin4674 It's a 1.8 Volt d.c. filament. I understand under voltage can be as bad as over voltage.
Now I want to see the tube (valve) factory of today!
She is ambidextrous!, yes folks, i confidentially said she and it feels so good👍
WOW !! OMG !! La bulbófora en todo su esplendor.
This is the perfect example of a real life Rube Goldberg world. More fascinating than the valves themself, are the intricate machines they built to build the valves. Who could engineer such machines? I have a Dillon Super 1050 ammunition reloading machine that I thought was a complicated device. It looks simple compared to the machines shown here. Such an amazing video, um, I mean film.
I sing through a "12AT7 China" at the moment :) Looking toward Mullard. The video is superb!
I wouldn't doubt it if alot of these tubes are still in use today or NOS 🤟
Absolutely fascinating video. I would like to see how the process is done today for comparison. 💯
Some of the assembly might be done the same way on basically the same machines. Although some of the original equipment likely would have been sold as scrap metal, some of the machines got sold from Britain and Germany and elsewhere in Europe, to China and Russia. Unfortunately it is quite possible that much of the machinery has not been maintained and kept up to speck and so even though some of the modern Russian and Chinese tubes might be made on the same machinery such as that shown here the tubes themselves might not be the same quality because of wear and tear on the machines plus perhaps lesser quality metals and chemicals being used for manufacturing the various parts of the tubes.
Similar probably, except it's in China and not Blackburn. I can't imagine valve manufacturing techniques have changed too much, except maybe robots might be involved now.
Unimaginable hours building those machines. ...then came the transistor...
The time we could be proud ,,, made in England
Amazing to think about how all that base was swept away by the transistor. Lots of women were employed there. They're good at delicate jobs. A young dude working there would've had a blast finding a date back then!
"It is a story without end." Very shortly after this film was produced the end came. "Mr. Valve, meet Mr. Transistor, he's a solid chap from Japan."
Tube radios are still in use. Same with tube amplifiers which have a better sound quality.
@@gravelydon7072 whilst true the ratio of valve to transistor is so massive in favour of transistor so as to make valves a micro niche thing now. I do prefer the sound of valves and use an SET headphone amp but I really am in a very small minority. 99% of portable audio listeners simply listen via their phone.
So many women responsible for so much sonic joy!
Amazing. Thanks for uploading this.. :)
Excellent. Imagine if this were done today in the UK. The price of valves would cost even more than NOS prices.
It is a function of demand though. It used to be that hospitals and the military depending on valves for everything they did. It was life or death. Today, you get a better, warmer sound if you use better NOS tubes in your guitar amp. That's just not as critical.
Take a look at the Great British Valve Project who intend to start making valves again under the Brimar name.
@@bill-2018 I would just bet they will be setting the standard when they get it done.
Who would have guessed that some of these tubes (the models that vintage stereo and guitar amp guys want) would be worth a fortune now?
Yep new old stock tubes buying is risky
As a kid I threw away thousands of these tubes on a job once. Lord only knows what they were and how much they would be worth today.
At 5:23, it's an EL64, not EL84. I have handled many hundreds perhaps thousands of different tube types but I have never seen an EL64 here in the States.
I seems to remeber the model number of some of those valves.
I had a Marshall 50W amp in the early 70s.
Just think they were expanding the factory, and it mjust all have come crashing down with the transistor and the icu chip
Fascinating piece of social history.
I went there for work experience in high school. 1981 in the Engineering and Maintenance department. Think it closed in 1988. I was in Australia then.
Ah - the nostalgia. ❤
Fascinating stuff.
Awesome!!! And informative, unusual for UA-cam haha
Back when the West was still in the upwards trajectory.
I'm increasingly convinced that the outcome of the WW2 changed everything.
Those complicated mechanical machines are masterpieces of engineering. Now they call them robots...
This video explains why Mullard tubes (NOS) sell higher on Ebay. Obvious quality workmanship.
Iwish that mullard factory works again to product tubes
Excellent Work
Actually most vacuum tubes where made for military and telecom. 50 million were made a year.
That's an amazing video, and explains why so few valve/tube makers still exist who do quality (as opposed to quantity) work on tubes. It's much more involved than I thought. I have many tube amps, so I hope quality makers will remain in the business! Very sad to see great companies like SED leaving the market.
Checked out a toolmaker job at an outfit near me and during the tour I saw a room with the unmistakable custom desks for assembling vacuum tubes.
This is in the American midwest in 2020 and I was surprised.
It seems this company stsrted making tubes for the U.S. military back in the WWll days, and apparently some American weapons systems still use these tubes, and they retain the ability to build them in house to this day.
thank god for the transistor
"Inspectress"11:52 how quaint.
Fantastic !
really interesting processes
There is a Dalek at 2:30 !!
I noticed that, a prototype dalek. Mullard on Skaros.
Had to rewind to be sure I saw that right, but I confirm 100%!
They went to all this trouble and expense, then some bugger invented the transistor....
hahaha! may he rot in hell
Plural, I think. Bardeen and Brattain, if memory serves.
Addendum: Shockley, also.
15:35 “GERROUT !” Haha ... sounds like someone being teased and she’s shouting lol 😂
I wonder how many of these valves (Especially the sub-miniature valves) were used in military avionics?