British Civil Defence Instruments
The United States manufactured approximately 500,000 geiger counters. Britain manufactured about 20,000 of each of its major types, and is second after the U.S. Some instruments were also manufactured by other countries in smaller numbers.
The American instruments dating from the Kennedy administration era were designed to use low voltage transistor electronics, and the batteries are still available today. However, most British civil defence instruments retained until 1982 or later were manufactured from 1953-7, and required high voltage batteries which became obsolete after portable valve radios were superseded by transistor ones.
All British civil defence instruments were jointly designed by the Home Office and the Ministry of Defence, and were also a military issue.
Read more about this topic: Civil Defense Geiger Counters
Famous quotes containing the words british, civil, defence and/or instruments:
“If we were doing this in the Falklands they would love it. It’s part of our heritage. The British have always been fighting wars.”
—British soccer fan. quoted in Independent (London, Dec. 23, 1988)
“At Hayes’ General Store, west of the cemetery, hangs an old army rifle, used by a discouraged Civil War veteran to end his earthly troubles. The grocer took the rifle as payment ‘on account.’”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“What cannot stand must fall; and the measure of our sincerity and therefore of the respect of men, is the amount of health and wealth we will hazard in the defence of our right. An old farmer, my neighbor across the fence, when I ask him if he is not going to town-meeting, says: “No, ‘t is no use balloting, for it will not stay; but what you do with the gun will stay so.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The universe appears to me like an immense, inexorable torture-garden.... Passions, greed, hatred, and lies; law, social institutions, justice, love, glory, heroism, and religion: these are its monstrous flowers and its hideous instruments of eternal human suffering.”
—Octave Mirbeau (1850–1917)