[NJARC] The Sylvania Tube Crusher

[Thomas Lee]

Thought this might be of interest to some.


 The Sylvania Tube Crusher
																				by Kristina Panos
																			
																		
																	
																
																
																																			This week, we're switching off the 'Tube and taking a field trip to Emporium, Pennsylvania, home of the Sylvania vacuum tube manufacturing plant.
 Now, a lot of companies will tell you that they test every single one 
of their products, ensuring that only the best product makes it into the
 hands of John Q. Public. We suspect that few of them actually do this, 
especially these days. After all, the more reliable the product, the 
longer it will be before they can sell you a new one.
For
 Sylvania, one of the largest tube manufacturers of the golden age, this
 meant producing a lot of duds. A mountain of them, in fact, as you can 
see in the picture above. This article from the January 1957 issue of Popular Electronics vilifies
 forgers who used all kinds of methods to obtain defective tubes. They 
would then re-brand them and pass them off as new, which was damaging 
to Sylvania's good name and reputation.
In
 addition to offering a reward for turning in known tube forgers, 
Sylvania did the most reasonable thing they could think of to quash 
the gray market, which was building a tube-crushing machine. Pulverizing
 the substandard tubes made sure that there were no "factory seconds" 
available to those fraudsters. After crushing shovelful after shovelful 
of tubes, the glass splinters were removed through a flotation 
separation process, and the heavy metals were recovered.
Did we get you all hot about tubes? Here's how Mullard made their EF80 model.
 		 	   		  
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