An instrument which totalises the events detected over a time period is known as a scaler. This colloquial name comes from the early days of automatic radiation counting, when a pulse-dividing circuit was required to "scale down" a high count rate to a speed which mechanical counters could register. This technique was developed by C E Wynn-Williams at The Cavendish Laboratory and first published in 1932. The original counters used a cascade of "Eccles-Jordan" divide-by-two circuits, today known as flip flops. Early count readings were therefore binary numbers and had to be manually re-calculated into decimal values.