Now, the sequence of events then are really very confused, and they cover the years from about 1950 to about 1952. Husband was given a contract to make a design study of this telescope. My specification was perfectly straightforward, that it should be a paraboloid with a mesh of four, with a bowl... a reflecting bowl with a mesh of four inches, and that it should be rotatable, so that it could be moved to any part of the sky. So the beam could be directed at any part of the sky. Husband got his father to – who was then the Professor of Engineering in Sheffield – to make a sketch of what was possible. And in fact that... the original of that sketch is hanging in the room from which I'm speaking at the moment. It shows quite a marked resemblance to... with many... much imagination of what eventually evolved.

Now, the various estimates as to how much was this was cost... this would cost, began to increase. I think first of all it was somewhere in the order of £100,000. Then various modifications, which I put in, and which Husband put in, increased the cost, until in 1952 I finally applied to the DSIR for the construction of this radio telescope at a cost of £300 and... I think it was £330,000.

Well, now, now this was in 1951. In 1951, I submitted this application with what became known as the Blue Book. And compared with the glossy and expensive publications, which would accompany such an application today, this was a book, which we had stencilled on... ourselves, on paper, and contained a number of chapters by myself and by Clegg. I wrote on what it would do, Clegg wrote, and I then had JG Davis working with me, and he wrote on the possibility of control mechanism. Now, this Blue Book... a few copies still exist, and it must be rather precious, I think, because we circulated about two dozen copies, which we had hand stencilled at Jodrell Bank, and got somebody to bind. Now, I do not know the exact proceedings, which went on behind the scenes, after DSIR received this application. The plain fact is that I was asking for a very, very large sum of money. And I do not want to constantly repeat this figure, but any sums I might mention now, compared with today's prices – I'm talking about 2007 – you have to multiply by a factor of something between 25 and 30, just to allow for the official index for the increased cost of living and so on. So in asking for £330,000, in 1951, it was the equivalent to asking for several million pounds today.