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This new method of production can be equally well applied to television and other forms of electronic apparatus.į. ECME, he reported the following day, “produces almost without human labour, a complete radio receiving set. When Sargrove unveiled his invention at a meeting of the British Institution of Radio Engineers in February 1947, the assembled engineers were impressed. Its built-in components made it more like a modem chip.Į. It predated the more familiar printed circuit, with wiring printed on aboard, yet was more sophisticated. Sargrove’s circuit board was even more astonishing for the time. But Sargrove’s assembly line produced circuits so cheaply they just threw away the faulty ones. And if more than two plates in succession were duds, the machines were automatically adjusted-or if necessary halted In a conventional factory, I workers would test faulty circuits and repair them. The plates were automatically tested at each stage as they moved along the conveyor. Electronic eyes, photocells that generated a small current when a panel arrived, triggered each step in the operation, BO avoiding excessive wear and tear on the machinery. When ECME was working flat out the whole process took 20 seconds.ĭ. By the time it emerged from the end of the line, robot hands had fitted it with sockets to attach components such as valves and loudspeakers.
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It sped on to be lacquered and have its circuits tested.
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Now the plate was a composite of metal and plastic. The next stop was the milling machine, which ground away the surface layer of metal to leave the circuit and other components in the grooves and recesses. Again, the nozzles only began to spray when a plate was in place. There, eight nozzles rotated into position and sprayed molten zinc over both sides of the plate. First stop was the sandblaster, which roughened the surface of the plastic BO that molten metal would stick to it The plates were then cleaned to remove any traces of grit The machine automatically checked that the surface was rough enough before sending the plate to the spraying section. From now on, everything was controlled by electronic switches and relays. She didn’t need much skill, only quick hands. An operator sat at one end of each ECME line, feeding in die plates. At the end of the war, Sargrove built an automatic production line, which he called ECME (electronic circuit-making equipment), in a small factory in Effingham, Surrey.Ĭ. This was something that could be made by machines, and he designed those too. His solution was to dispense with most of the fiddly bits by inventing a primitive chip-a slab of Bakelite with all the receiver’s electrical components and connections embedded in it. In 1944, Sargrove came up with the answer. Making radios required highly skilled labour-and lots of it.ī. At every stage, things had to be tested and inspected. Even a simple receiver might have 30 separate components and 80 hand-soldered connections. But radios didn’t lend themselves to such methods: there were too many parts to fit together and too many wires to solder. Automating the manufacturing process would help.
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For more than a decade, Sargrove had been trying to figure out how to make cheaper radios. John Sargrove, the visionary engineer who developed the technology, was way ahead of his time. Radio Automation forerunner of the integrated circuitĪ. Yet hidden away in the English countryside was a highly automated production line called ECME, which could turn out 1500 radio receivers a day with almost no help from human hands. There were no computers to speak of and electronics was primitive.
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In the mid-1940s, the workerless factory was still the stuff of science fiction. There’s no chatter of assembly workers, just the whirr and click of machines. Production lines controlled by computers and operated by robots.