Machine “Eats” Old Light Bulbs (Feb, 1930)

Machine “Eats” Old Light Bulbs

BURNED out electric lamps which have been thrown into ashcans as worthless are now considered so valuable for salvaging purposes that a new machine, called a rumbler, has been perfected to thresh the brass shells out of this former waste. A New York company collects 300,000 incandescent lamps annually and salvages the brass ends by means of the new machine shown below. The old method of collecting bulbs and cracking them up in churns took much more time, was less efficient, and the brass ends had to be sorted out by hand.