Sometimes it almost seems too easy to find idiosyncratic outbursts from Christopher Hinton, chief builder of early British reactors:
Thank you very much for sending me the photographs of the charge machine which you have built for Calder Hall A. It looks very nice and I only hope that it will work. If it does, it will be the first of its kind to be successful. Complicated machines were designed and built for both Bepo and the Windscale piles but neither of them has ever performed successfully and it has been found easier and more satisfactory in practice to use a long wooden broomstick!
Hinton, Christopher. 1955. Hinton to Grossmith, Oct. 26, 1955. AB 19/16. National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom.
