This looks like the setup to pressure test the oxygen bottles using water rather than a gas. Using a gas would create a bomb like effect if there was a defect present and the tank ruptured. Using water under pressure will do the same job but will not have the compressed and stored energy that a gas would have. You get a bang, a big crack and a spurt of water rather than a big bang that destroys the facilty and anyone in the way!!!

Still a practice used today for testing pressurized gas containers like Scuba tanks, oxygen bottles , propane cylinders etc.

These look like the "low" pressure bottles that were used for military aircraft - around 300 psi charge rather than the 1800 psi "high" pressure ones used today on aircraft. The reasoning was simple - a bullet or failure of a 300 psi bottle would cause much less damage than the same hit to a high pressure one. The ones I have seen were all painted a bright yellow - and I still have one somewhere in my parents stored junk out at the farm where we used it for a compressed air tank conected to a small air compressor.

I'd guess "atomic [sic.] welding machine" should be "automatic welding machine" in this caption.

[Atomic welding is correct. Short for atomic hydrogen welding. - Dave]

When I went to work at the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Tennessee in the mid-sixties, some of the old timers were still referring to common compressed gases by their wartime code names. We still had a section in the plant called "Coded Chemicals."

...He would be played by William Bendix.

"Scary looking thingamabobs"? LOL! Now I've just got to know what they really are. Fuel cylinders perhaps?

[Aviation oxygen tanks. - Dave]