“Pick and place” machine from the 1940’s ! Electronics automated production

Film from 1947 on interesting way-ahead-of-its-time ECME Electronic Circuit Making Equipment assembly line from 1947. Invented by John Sargrove in the 1930s – one wonders how electronics manufacturing might look like if this company hadn’t folded at the end of the 1940s


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3 Comments

  1. Well less pick & place and more like a different Printed Circuit, but Still cool! 🙂

  2. “Using light bulbs to adjust voltage” – Awesome.

    I did that sort of thing on a Ni-Cad battery charger I built in 1991. The bulbs adjusted the current though.. A tad bit ashamed of that, but a tad proud in the same breath. 🙂

  3. That was an amazing thing to watch. And I thought that the specialty PWB core materials I read about in the 90’s that allowed internal power and ground planes to capacitively couple enough to take the place of bypass caps at ICs was a new and novel concept. Little did I know that capacitors integrated into the board was at least 50 years old…

    Although, I think they should have changed the first name of the machine from “Electronic” to “Automated”. Then it would have been the A.C.M.E. machine. Wiley Coyote would have been proud. 😉

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