Robley Evans describes how he built a vacuum furnace at Cal Tech.

Weiner:

Well, we'll get to that another time. I know that by the time you left, you had a vacuum furnace and a number of things.

Evans:

Yes. Those were built in the shop there. My first vacuum furnace I built with my own hands at Cal Tech. That was a crummy little thing when you look back to it, but it was the old sealing wax and string business. You got an iron plate and got a piece of a U-bar and welded some end plates on it, and strapped it down with baling wire, and put sealing wax around the edges for a seal. And I got an old transformer from the power company’s scrap yard, tore it apart, took off the secondary and wound my own low voltage higher current secondary out of one inch by 16-inch copper busbar by hand and with wooden spacers, and all that. No, we did it all ourselves. There was very little expense there.

They had a very nice vacuum head electroscope that I designed, and that Julius Pearson built in the Cal Tech machine shops. Millikan’s typical way of handling that was, when I wanted that instrument and showed him the designs and my reasons for it, he said, “Come with me,” and we went to the physics shop at Cal Tech where his instrument-maker Julius Pearson was the head of the shop. He introduced me to Julius Pearson and said, “Make anything he wants.” And Millikan turned around and walked away. That was it.