2011 © Hector MacMillan | Terms & Conditions

Hector MacMillan Technician Playwright Luthier Honorary President: Scottish Society of Playwrights

Honorary Fellow: Association For Scottish Literary Studies

“If we investigate only by physical and chemical means, we can only get physical and chemical answers.”

Sir Alister Hardy, FRS

Biog 1956 - 60 Technician


A main attraction of CERN was the nature of the new international co-operation there; open research, pursuit of knowledge, results freely available to the world. In a 'cold-war' era fuelled by Pontecorvo spy-incidents and Los Alomos Project paranoia, this seemed to offer a sane outlet for energies.


The bulldozers still working on site at Meyrin, the electronics team was at first housed in wooden workshops behind the terminal building at Cointrin Airport. My first assignment was the design and construction of prototypes for a range of stabilised power supplies that went on to be standard use with much of experimental circuitry at CERN. Later I worked on a Current Integrator for use with the Synchro-Cyclotron machine, aimed at measuring down to the millionth of a milliamp level. Typical of such projects, it involved making components that weren't commercially available, learning along the way about engineer's lathes and the electrical properties of interesting new materials like Teflon.


The biggest project, with Dr H.I. Pizer, was to build and test a transistorised control-drive for the Tuning Fork, the heart of the Synchro-Cyclotron. Given that the massive Tuning Fork [engineered in the Netherlands] would be a very expensive item to replace, that I was working on the only spare, and that transistors could be unpredictable when irradiated, it proved an interesting experience.


The education that resulted from working at CERN wasn't restricted to technical matters. Being part of an international team greatly improved awareness of other cultures and languages, while at the same time providing the opportunity to observe, quite closely, a number of individuals who were world-leaders in their field; scientists such as Cockroft, Oppenheimer and Heisenberg. Though unaware of it at the time, all this was 'grist-to-the-mill' of the future playwright.


Back