Onto Phari

5th April 1924

Sandy realises that there is no hope of fixing the oxygen sets: he has no option but to rebuild what the manufacturer Siebe Gorman had sent. In the following days, he and Odell weighed oxygen bottles at random and were dismayed to find some of them empty and others only half full. The apparatus they tested leaked badly but after a lot of hard work they did succeed in reducing the leak somewhat.

It was at this point that Sandy realises he would have to recreate what he had worked on in Oxford and Birkenhead before he left for India. His aim was to do away with the clumsy tubing, valves and flowmeters, to lighten the apparatus and to make it more reliable. He inverted the cylinders, as he had done in his Oxford laboratory, and began to fashion the simplified set he hoped would be less prone to leaks and failures.

It was a start but his workshop was limited and he was constantly irritated by the conditions he was trying to work under and the few tools he had to hand.