I remember him labouring to finish this book and being well aware that transistors would render the subject obsolete so few copies would be sold. He was the son of R.E.Neale, author of Meares & Neale 'Electrical Enginering Practice' in several volumes and other books. He, himself, aged 18 through his father's business connections wrote the instruction book for the Bassett-Lowke live steam 0-gauge 'Mogul' locomotive which after 40 years is back in production. I have the original first locomotive and have scratch-built a properly engineered live steam loco in this scale and many other smaller electric ones. He was particularly interested in amateur cine-film and wrote numerous articles as 'Centre Sprocket' because of some dispute over royalties with 'Focal Press' (who he thought were crooks) after writing 'How To Use 9.5' and "How To Add Sound" for them. In these cases he received about six copies and various foreign language editions. He also started 'The Boy's Book of Power' but from what I could understand he was much inconvenienced because one of his father's friends failed to return the part manuscript. I imagine he would not admit to losing it.

He was in a reserved occupation in WW2 with the Morgan Crucible Co. and later with Ilford Ltd. He would be pleased that somebody still wants his book and amused by your amazing collection of obsolete items or 'boffinry', maybe you are a 'boffinator'. (A 'boffin' was a man wearing a white coat working on the secret war effort.)

Thanks for your note. If people are interested in D.M.N. and R.E.N. then by all means post those paragraphs and any of this.

R.E.Neale appears in 'Google' in the heavy electrical engineering field. One other thing D.M.N. and others did was to obtain a pseudo colour effect with 16mm b&w film. Colour film was unobtainable or certainly very expensive as indeed most hobbies were in the 1950s. He had a clockwork Bolex camera I think, which had a hefty gearbox attached containing Meccano gears rotating a 3-colour disc taking consecutive frames with different filters. The projector had a complementary disc which, after being correctly phased, produced a sort of flickering colour effect. I think this certainly had to be 24 frames/sec. not the economical 16fps that, say, early UP Railroad colour film seems to be when rendered to video. See that train move! This must be before Ilford had experimental colour film because he would certainly have had samples to test (actually they never had colour cine film?). In fact Ilford never cracked the secret of colour film, one transparency roll film I was given to try was dreadful and not colour-fast but another emulsion seems to have been very good and permanent. My step-father thought his senior management was pretty hopeless but who does not wherever they work, they always know less than you? Meccano and the much bigger Dexion slotted angle were first choice materials for experimental mock-ups for the Ilford Film research department and elsewhere. The film manufacturers used a liquid detergent to wash film stock called 'Teepol' long before anything like it was in the shops but much weaker than the current detergents. He would buy a gallon bottle which was dispensed around and it was much appreciated compared with washing soda. I hope this is interesting ancient technological history.

Oh, the book about Ilford is 'Silver by the Ton'.