Are you solvent?

Thirty‐one years ago, hung‐over after the annual company dinner, I was taken next morning, with a handful of keen and dedicated colleagues, to experience what the future held. We entered the rickety portals of one of the innumerable small factories on the periphery of Birmingham, who were, at the time, printing money. In the dim machineshop, piece‐workers in bib and brace overalls, were bending tubing on primitive apparatus installed before WW2. Next door, their handiwork was suspended in vaporising degreasing tubs (one could hardly call them baths); and then the ultimate — in a newly prefabricated annex, built under government licence, the tubular configurations passed before a Ransburg disk and paint appeared on their surface. Within minutes after stoving, asbestos surfaces were clipped on, they were tissue wrapped and boxed.