The British Snook Machine

This elegant thing (now in the Hunterian Museum) is a 1920s gas filled or cold cathode medical X-ray tube with a colimator extension of the anticathodeode.*

It was made by Newton and Wright in 471-3 Hornsey Road, where the Town Crier mural is.

Newton & Wright made tilting tables too:

They're invaluable in Pyelography, which, I discover, is a 'form of imaging of the renal pelvis and ureter'. 

Most of all they made Snook Machines:

I have no idea what a Snook Machine was, or how a British Snook Machine differs from a Foreign Snook Machine.  Or indeed whether one snooks with a snook machine or is snooked by a snook machine.

But now we know that there was considerable difference of opinion as to the respective merits of Valve versus Mechanical Rectification in Snook Machines.

And I know that  G.W.C. Kaye said on page 245 of Issue 2587, Volume 103, 1919 of Nature that 'MESSRS. NEWTON AND WRIGHT deserve great credit for their pertinacity in endeavouring to convince the British medical world of the particular merits of the Snook transformer'.

Newton and Wright were in the Hornsey road from at the latest 1905 until 1937. The company was then amalgamated and amalgamated until it became part of AEI.

There are many more images over at the Tumblr. 

* Proof that sentences don't have to be literary to be beautiful. Listen to the singing line in 'a colimator extension of the anticathodeode'. Pure poetry that is, lad.