Torture Test! (Jun, 1960)
Torture Test!
It’s murder! Sardonic schemes check consumer products to see if they can take rugged treatment.
Groaning printed circuit of Sylvania TV set, with tubes and components in place, is made to vibrate up to four inches out of position 22 times per sec.
At left, simulated rainstorm pounds down on boxes of electronic components. This environmental test center at Frankford Arsenal, Philadelphia, also can subject components to searing sunshine. At U.S. Testing Corp. labs, right, electric motors are placed in tank where they will be soaked with salt spray.Share mobile radio microphone suffers indignity of being dragged along concrete road behind speeding auto. It survived 35,000 separate impacts.
Above right, Underwriters’ Laboratory technician checks to be sure steel ball will hit center of TV set’s screen when ball is swung from high point.
Quality control engineer shovels wet snow over Electro-Voice’s “Musicaster” outdoor speaker to see if new silicone-treated cone can take it. The Buchanan, Michigan, snowfall rose over two feet.
Television torture test, eh? I thought that was watching Dancing with the Stars!
I laugh sardonically to the article writers choice of word “sardonic”.
Perhaps the QA engineers laugh sardonically as they think of fiendish tests to perform.
I bet the original headline said “sadistic”, but an editor changed it to the entirely inappropriate “sardonic”, on account of the original word being too kinky for Electronics Illustrated in 1960.
They should’ve tried the TV PC-board vibration test after a few hundred heat-up/cool-down cycles, as would have been experienced by the actual production model in a real-world environment.
And how long a microphone cord was needed in the average vehicle back in that day? Certainly not long enough to make it outside to be dragged.