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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.
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!)
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:
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