[NJARC] The Sylvania Tube Crusher

[Al Klase]

Folks,

Apparently there was a major scandal involving counterfeit and recycled 
tubes in the 1950's.  You may have noticed that, if you try to wash a 
lot of the miniature tubes of that era, the factory markings come right 
off.  My understanding is that that was done on purpose to prevent 
resale of used tubes.

Al

Al Klase -- N3FRQ
Jersey City, NJ
http://www.skywaves.ar88.net/

On 1/20/2015 1:47 PM, Thomas Lee wrote:
>
>
> Thought this might be of interest to some.
>
>
>     The Sylvania Tube Crusher
>     <http://hackaday.com/2015/01/20/retrotechtacular-the-sylvania-tube-crusher/>
>
> by Kristina Panos <http://hackaday.com/author/cornbreadninja/>
>
> This week, we're switching off the 'Tube and taking a field trip to 
> Emporium, Pennsylvania, home of the Sylvania vacuum tube manufacturing 
> plant <http://vintagetubeservices.com/sylvania-factory-tour/>. 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.
>
> sylvania-tube-crusher-thumbFor 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 
> <http://www.rfcafe.com/references/popular-electronics/foil-tube-forgers-january-1957-popular-electronics.htm> 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 
> <http://hackaday.com/2014/08/05/retrotechtacular-we-heard-you-like-tubes-so-heres-a-film-about-tube-tubes-from-the-webtubes/>.
>
>
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/private/njarc/attachments/20150120/cbc40d36/attachment-0001.html>