Laboratory coat worn by Geoff Tootill

Laboratory coat worn by Geoff Tootill when working on the 'Baby' computer in 1948. Made by Bradford Dyers Association Limited, 1947. Labelled with the 'Utility Mark' of the Second World War Utility Clothing Scheme.

Geoff Tootill (1922 – 2017), computer scientist and electronics engineer, was part of the team that developed the ‘Baby’ computer at the University of Manchester in the 1940s. Baby was the first computer to execute a program stored in addressable read-write electronic memory. It was the precursor to the computers we use today.

When viewing this lab coat on display at the Science and Industry Museum, Tootill's colleague on the original Baby build project, Dai Edwards, said that he could explain the burn hole he observed on the pocket of the coat. He described how their boss Tom Kilburn had them all work at a fast rate with respect to doing mods and updates to things like timing circuits. So much so, that all the soldering irons had the earth removed and resistors and components were changed with Power On. There were hot soldering irons around and they all had burnt their own clothes with similar damage, so that use of a top coat was a wise move.

CC41 on the label of the coat stands for Second World War Utility Clothing Scheme, known as the Utility mark. The CC41 Utility mark indicated that the item met the standards of the Government's Utility regulations, and could be sold as a product of the Utility Scheme.