A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1954: Project Tinkertoy

 

Scraped from an ad: https://snapklik.com/en-ca/product/tinkertoy-30-model-200-piece-super-building-set-preschool-learning-educational-toy-
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I've been assiduously avoiding talking about "Project Tinkertoy" since the Bureau of Standards/Industrial Planning Division, USN/Kaiser Electronics Division, Wilys Motor Company pilot factory in Arlington, Virginia, hit the news, well before September of 1953, where Blogspot search turns up my earliest reference to it.  The thing is that Project Tinkertoy's press people are most impressed by the ceramic wafers that the Project Tinkertoy modular components are mounted on, and that is the part of the technology that most obviously has no future. Integrated circuits most definitely do, but that's a story that doesn't really get going until 1957, and apparently we're still one cycle of abortive precursors away from that, with the Army's 1957 Micromodule programme. On the other hand, the actual technology of the integrated circuit has a prehistory which is not well integrated into that of the various abortive precursors. So I'm going to take a rainy laundry day Saturday to look at that!

I'm not the first blogger to take an interest in Project Tinkertoy. Seven years ago, Steve Leibson, posting at LinkedIn (having not been there in years, I see I missed a chance to study for an online Australian MBA. Oops!), of all platforms, took his own look at Tinkertoy. He's a smart computer-y kind of guy,  and he sees a path to the "later IC production equipment." However he also talks about the "first application of printed circuitry," which it  most definitely is not. (Printed circuits and potted tubes made the proximity fuze practical.) Leibson misses a chance to link to John Sargrove's automatic radio factory, which was also not the first to use printed circuits, but which definitely predates Tinkertoy, going briefly into production in 1947.

That font's even older than mine!

I know people like to rag on Youtube commenters, but the factory guys pointing out the high wastage and maintenance issues with the Sargrove machinery are very interesting, and the same applies to the Tinkertoy Mechanised Production of Electronics method; I'd say that the emphasis on automatic quality control implies a high rejection rate, too. Both schemes are justified by appeals to mass production, so a high rejection rate is not good news. Tinkertoy also  makes a great deal of production automation. The circuit elements are designed by engineers on punch cards, which then control the etching and spraying in a weird recursion of computerised, numerically controlled machining. While this sounds futuristic, at least by 1954 standards), it is a far cry from producing standardised modules, which seems like the more obvious direction to take this technology.

Here we have, in general, the problem of the printed circuit, from its first inception to its far-future incarnation as Jack Kirby's "Mother Box." It is obvious what it is, but we're a bit clueless as to what it does.

(Leaving the atrocious mishandling of the concept in the Justice League movie aside. I don't want to be the comic guy ragging on
an artistic collaboration, but, darnit, Mother Box's inherent benevolence is important to me!) 

So let's do the easy thing and look at the Wikipedia history of the integrated (not printed) circuit for a bit of inspiration. As always, the crucial thing is to prepare for future intellectual property lawsuits, so we focus on the patent holders: Loewe-Audion GmbH's multifunction 3NF tube, arguably an integrated circuit in a can; Werner Jacobi's 1949 patent for an "integrated circuit-like semiconductor amplifying device," yet another reminder that there were transistors well before they were invented at Bell Labs, and above all, Geoffrey Dummer's 1952 proposal at the Symposium on Quality Electronics Components in Washington, DC. (Also, to fill out the paragraph, Sidney Darlington and Yasuo Tarui.)

It turns out that Drummer stands out in the literature because he stands out in the industry. A TRE mandarin with early connections to Mullard and Cossar,  Dummar made his name building and installing synthetic radar trainers and leading Dummer to seek more reliable components, a preoccupation that coalesced around the idea of a wireless circuit cut out of blocks. One thing that Tinkertoy is definitely not short of is wire connections, with cut blocks having up to twelve to connect with the next "block." 

Rather, the appeal, as put in the Popular Mechanics article in the June 1954 issue, was that Tinkertoy devices were just better:

. . . which strikes me as unlikely even if the project didn't insist on making its own capacitors. It is also a change on the original concept of a factory producing electronic components for consumer use, able to be rapidly transformed into a munitions plant in wartime. This was probably the reason for involving the Kaiser group (patronage apart), anf, with the launch of the first transistor radio, it was obvious that Tinkertoy had the wrong end of the stick.  A solution in search of a problem, then, and a demonstration of the broad base of convergence upon the consumer electronics revolution of the Seventies.