Dear Francis Hope its not a state secret!
I have a good memory. I only know this first hand from someone involved. My source was a photographer where I worked in a darkroom, after leaving school, in 1957. He had just left the RAF. A few years later I spoke with another ex-RAF photographer who was involved and confirmed the technique. Later still I met Williamson inventor of the "williamson shutter". Much beloved in those days by City and Guilds theory examiners. His "venetian blind" shutter was the only thing capable of working on such a big lens. As far as I remember the lens required a shutter a couple of feet or more across. Photographs from the USAF part of the tests appeared in Life magazine but I can't remember the year. I had the pictures pinned on my wall sometime in the late sixties. I am fairly certain that the lens was made by Wray and I think only one was ever made. I assume the reciever back at base was little more than an adapted wire picture machine. There is nothing on Google about the Williamson Shutter. Its advantage was that it did not distort like focal plane shutters at the same time revealing the centre and edge of the portions of the lens equally. Unlike a focal plane shutter it went next to the aperture. When I visited him in his workshop he was repairing a shutter which was about 12 inches across. Assuming the front and back elements were bigger than the aperture/shutter section the whole lens would have been massive. He had a workshop in what was then the jewellery quarter in Birmingham where there were lots of small engineering businesses. Some of these did subcontract work for camera manufacturers. The Birmingham Bellows Company is probably the last to survive. Williamson obviously did other work for the RAF as this link shows. http://licm.org.uk/livingImage/WF117A.html Yours Bob Croxford >In the fifties the RAF experimented with a truly cumbersome piece of >equipment. Using a massive Wray lens in a Canberra aircraft << >Is this information available? I'd be interested your source. thanks Francis Ware >> =============================================================== GO TO http://www.prodig.org for ~ GUIDELINES ~ un/SUBSCRIBING ~ ITEMS for SALE
