When I joined the Electronics Division, I was fascinated to find that a handbook of useful data was in widespread use in the laboratories and I came to covet one of my own.
Even today, I don't know the official mechanism to acquire one of these handbooks nor when it were first published but suffice to say that I did eventually acquire a copy for myself, which I kept for many years after I left EKCO although with the passage of time my copy went missing.
What fascinated me about the book was how concise and simply laid out it was and the goldmine of information contained in such a small journal -- the Greek Alphabet being particularly useful for solving 'crosswords'.
I was particularly pleased therefore to have a copy sent to me by Pat Heath (who unlike me had kept his copy safe) and I have reproduced what I think are the pertinent pages, which can be found by clicking on this link (useful data).
I have purposely not reproduced the 'log tables' or the 'Sine, Tangent, Cotangent or Cosine' tables nor have I reproduced the common weights and measures, fractions and time comparison tables since all of these are in common use and widely available although it was useful to have these in the handbook at the time since it saved having to search out and look in other standard handbooks -- especially when in the middle of doing calculations.
The issuing of this small handbook to staff is yet another illustration of how forward thinking the company was by ensuring that staff had information at their fingertips some 40 years before the Internet.
