Raytheon Liquid Time Tubes???
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2024
- Did they exist? Did anyone use them? Who knows? I certainly have no idea. But it's a cool topic...
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Between this, mercury delay lines, water clocks, and god knows what other kinds of weird gadgets like this were developed in the first half of the twentieth century, there's a whole subgenre of "liquidpunk" retro computing. Now my head's swimming with project ideas!
Water clocks go back to at least the Middle Ages. But you’re probably thinking of a more modern kind of water clock?
Wee need Hydropunk to become a thing. Imagine entire cities with hydraulic lines running tom every home like we have electricity today to power all their devices
@@Laurabeck329 wouldn't this just be steampunk with high pressure steam lines running to homes?
I have seen these, and they were for warranty enforcement on industrial and military equipment. The tube had two platinum wires inside and the electricity would plate one side with copper. The tubes were mounted over a card that said depleted in faint blue ink that shows up when the tube is clear. You could adjust the rate of deposition by changing the current with a resistor, however the voltage must be kept reasonable or gas would build up inside and the tube would go pop.😮
Haven't seen one of those, but elapsed time indicators were a thing on professional/industrial gear. The most common was the Curtis "Indachron", which was a mercury-filled capillary tube, where a small bubble would move along a scale by electrolytic action over a period of time. They were used on broadcast VTR headwheel assemblies, projector arc lamps, and some transmitting tubes, where the warranty was tied to operating hours.
Mmm... that's an interesting application.
Pretty sure she showed one in an earlier video. Or maybe that was Dave.
Edit : it was Applied Science.
Ah, so it was attached to a consumable. That makes sense.
Yep, I have a JVC BR-7000 professional duplicator VCR, and it has one of those mercury tube thingies on the front panel. I think it is rated at 2000h. It has passed that a long-long time ago, but it still sports the original head drum, pinch roller and everything. According to the service manual, the head drum needs to be changed at 1000h, the pinch roller at 2000h. At 2000 hours, they recommended changing the upper drum (for the second time), pinch roller, take up reel motor, supply reel motor, and A/C head assembly. All that in once, in a few dozen or hundred VCRs per facility. So JVC was clearly underestimating the lifetime of their consumables, to milk more money from VHS duplicator facilities by forcing them to change perfectly fine components, which could have been used 2x...4x longer.
1000 hour for a head drum?! That means these VCRs officially needed a new head drum approx. every 2 months, or after 333 copies of a 3 hour long movie. I wonder how many facilities followed this recommendation. I would guess most of them followed it until the gear was under warranty, because that was probably necessary to keep the warranty valid. After warranty, they probably used everthing until it really needed replacement. If they were smart, they kept all the used head drums that were replaced under warranty, and used them a second time after the warranty expired.
Likewise, I still have a Panasonic edit suite with similar 1000 hour replace this, that, and the other component recommendations, though it had electronic metering. I did notice how the video and HiFi audio playback quality had suffered at the 1000 hour mark, and was really noticeable after the 2000 hour mark. But that was the only noticeable wear.
I don't think anybody followed those recommendations. At $1000 just to replace the upper video head drum (parts and labour), you wouldn't want to do that until you really had to. For some people, the equipment was quite obsolete by the time major refurbishment would have been required, but for others it's only a fraction of its expected lifespan. @@mrnmrn1
My father was a chemist and he encourage me to explore all kinds of chemistry experiments. One project we did was to build a 'clock' based on similar chemistry but we put different concentrations of the solution in 12 test tubes and one would change color roughly every hour.
I worked for Raytheon's Missile Systems Division as an engineer back in the 80s but have never heard of this product. I am going to hazard an educated guess though concerning it. A large part of Raytheon's work, historically, has to do with products for the military. I am guessing that this might have been developed as usage indicator that could be checked on a scheduled basis to determine when maintenance /replacement was needed for equipment that it monitored. Interesting find though... thanks.
Early VCR's had something like this. It mounted like a fuse and had markings on it indicating hours.
I second that. I distinctly remember long thin devices with markings indicating time what worked like that. Apparently in that form it's even reversible if you run the current in the other direction. Of course you can vary the rate of the process by varying the current.
Mercury elapsed time indicators that had a tiny gel gap that showed time. Time set by a series resistor that limited current to 1 or 2 microamps so it took time. The Raytheon device likely had 2 nickel wires and a copper sulphate solution so the copper blue was slowly changed to the slightly yellow tinge of nickel sulphate with time. Cam be unsoldered a d flipped around but will never be fully blue again.
During the 1980s I worked at a recording studio where they had U-Matic 3/4 inch VCRs. Inside these VCRs were these PCB mounted elapsed time indicators - that appeared to be a mercury coulometer. These meters were soldered to the PCB and contained a skinny glass tube with mercury inside sitting next to graduated marks - similar to a thermometer, but micro-sized. A gap between the mercury columns formed the indicator (or pointer) used to read the number of hours the unit had been powered on.
Sounds exactly like what bobweiss8682 describes in his comment above.
Similar in concept to the died piece of cloth that Alexander the Great had his field commanders wear to synchronize their moments on the battlefield. Wetted in water and worn around the wrist, it would change color by the hour as it dried. Maybe you could do a video on “Alexander’s Rag Time-Band”. ;-)
I remember my high school chemistry teacher, Ken Satterley, telling this story. I was never sure if he had bee n pulling our legs.
The use time is set by what Fran said at 1:25 - "at the end of 20,000 uA hours," and the current range on the data sheet at 2:44 - 250 to 5000 hours. So for 5000 hours, you'd run 4uA through it, and for 250 hours, 80uA. If your current is in between those levels, an intermediate time would pass before end of life dictated by T = 20mAHr/i. It essentially integrated a small current over time. This might be useful in estimating battery life - you'd put this in parallel with a small sense resistor, and whenever current went through that, a proportional amount would go through this device as well.
I don't know much about the chemistry, but I wonder if you could apply a high enough reverse voltage to get the copper to go back into solution.
As an obvious product of the times, the device's size is shown as scaled to a cigarette.
... a healthy modern asbestos filter cigarette...
Nowadays, people put a dollar or a banana next to something to show scale. In the next generation, when all payments are electronic, and bananas have been wiped out by fungus blight (which is in progress now), young people will look at our pictures and say “What are those things?”
@@censusgaryCigarettes will probably still be around at that point, though. Lol
1958.... i can imagine the 1958 Edsil having such a tube as an oil life indicator, its an idea ahead of its time and somewhat impractical.
At my last job, some of the equipment had a weird hour meter that looked like a small thermometer. Zero to fifty thousand hours , a small silver tube like you would see in an old mercury thermometer. Used for warranty verification. An electrochemical hour meter of some sort. Ran on 24 volts DC.. The entire thing was maybe two inches long, a half inch wide, and a quarter inch thick.
This was in the early '90s. That's the only hour meter like that I have seen.
I remember seeing those silver hour meters in commercial Panasonic time-lapse vhs recorders, (top loader).
Sounds a lot like a mercury timer. They were the same size as a 1.25" glass fuse. They even fit in a standard fuse holder. The shell was made of plastic with 1,000 hour tick marks. There was a small ball of mercury in a glass vile inside. As the time went by the ball would shift along the device to indicate run time and when to service. Could be reversed too.
I have a couple of these fuse-like devices except mine have a thin column of mercury with a break in it with a tiny amount of brown electrolyte in the gap. That gap moves up the tube I assume with the mercury transferring from one column to the other. Takes 1000 hours to move from end to end, then flip it over and ready to use again. They came out of escalator control boards.
One crazy idea that really never went anywhere. I was around in the 50s & those type watches weren't. Like you said, a big idea that was shelved.
These one-time use time indicators are very useful in industry for life-limited items. There are plenty of items where sure, you can run them until they break, but you really don't want to - either the quality of the output gets too bad, or it can fail at an inopportune moment or it may be safety-critical so it's only guaranteed to work for a certain number of hours and should be replaced to ensure functionality if it's needed. And yes, those parts were replaced on schedule as required - because saving a few bucks wasn't worth the potential losses that might happen if it failed at the wrong time.
I've never seen that product other than in the old advertisement.
I have seen a similar one that's liquid mercury in a capillary tube.
Either seems likely to be irreversible and therefore would need to be replaced when reaching full scale. The likely uses would be in equipment that requires an overhaul after a certain number of hours and the replacement would be supplied as part an overhaul kit
I cannot download the catalog posted on a Russian site, but it appears Raytheon marketted this as two!, two!, two parts in one. It was a time-lapse indicator and electolytic diode. The use of electrolytic diodes pre-dates lead crystals and I vaguely recall their use as a microphone (a wire dipped into the solution was attached to a diaphram and the vibration created a change in signal).
Cool! I love Raytheon products. Smells like... Victory! 🤣
Never heard of a CK1053 but here's my thoughts from reading the blurb you showed: 1) It's not a Time indicator tube, it's an *Operating Time* indicator tube. Many vehicles, engines, gearboxes, aircraft, etc are serviced based on their operating hours. My lawnmower has an operating time indicator - although it is an electro-mechanical gauge in the middle of the dash. 2) Raytheon said they could be set up to measure any interval between 0 to 250 up to 0 to 5000 hours, which fits well with machinery operating time. 3) Measurement of the elapsed operating time is done using a colourimiter. 4) You are most likely correct about the electroplating process and the fact that they would be single use items. (but after 5000 hours who cares?) 5) The oil bath potential for vibration protection seems to have military or aviation markets in mind. 6) Sounds pretty clever to me, the only drawback I see is having to use 'specialist' equipment to make a reading - that's not going to work with domestic lawnmowers.
I’m guessing the 20,000 ma hrs to turning clear is to show when a max running hours has been exhausted. And in a harsh environment it’d be fail safe.
With different power supply and circuitry couldn’t the hours to ‘clear’ be set? So for 500 hours you supply higher current?
Maybe used in any machine where safety mandates a machine to be taken offline and serviced. So visual inspection can’t be mistaken. Like maybe tall building elevators drives. Or big machine tools. A guaranteed accurate running time accumulator.
I’ve seen these in old 1” and larger open reel VTR’s as hours meters.
electrochemical hour meters weren't super uncommon, one that goes clear would be handy for an external indicator and not being reversible would be a bonus feature (mercury capillary meters can be ran backwards)
I miss getting profiled by the military-industrial complex on Twitter. Classic content like this makes me nostalgic.
I think this product is made for indicating how many hours a part has been used and is to be replaced when the tube has turned clear for security reasons in military applications.
Mercury Coulometer Elapsed time indicator. As used in some Tek kit.
I have seen them. The idea was to replace a synchronous motor based time counter with something much smaller. The purpose was to provide warranty or “service required” indicator. When serviced, the simple 2-pin ampule was simply replaced. It operated on DC (while the clockwork required AC - of known frequency). The calibration of course was simply adjusted with a series resistor. Coulomb’s law…
I had one! Not sure where it went (I may still have it). I bought it on canal street sometime in the 1960's. It was a tube in a piece of plastic with tic marks. It was intended to track service hours for a piece of equipment. Definitely worked by some kind of electroplating. If I remember right, it would take 1000 hours for it to reach full scale. I was told then that it was used on photo copiers. All this information came from one of the many characters in that neighborhood. Some of those guys went back to the early days of radio where the RF was modulated by Carbon microphones. So they had these weird looking lips from RF burns. I tried it out and it moved so slowly, adolescent me got bored waiting for something to evolve.
There are modern versions of this which act as 'run hours' indicator.
I've seen this in the back of some old test equipment and they looked like fuses.
Nice Tektronics you got there! I have a 515A. As my uncle once said Tektronics is what TI used to calibrate their oscilloscopes. And there's nothing better than the smell of tubes warming up in the morning!
Also, being Raytheon, they might have made that tube for some other application like bomb triggers or usage timers and then tried to implement it in "civilian" products after it was no longer needed elsewhere.
This tube is useful to determine components that expired their expected life or time to do maintenance. Old computers had a elapsed time counter to that, but was a clunky big mechanical huge thing. This one would be an easier one to indicate time to change tube before they get to ol (yes old computers like the Bendix had tubes). Imagine for instance a lead battery that lives through, lets say 200 charge cycles. You put two diodes and a shunt with this component in series with this component and calculate the current so this device goes transparent when the life of this component ends. Making the encapsulament of it in a way that is tamper evident you can't sell old or refurbished products as new ones. For critical components or single use components, like military and aviation ones this is useful as much as a car odometer that when violated a white light falls over it or like the accelerometer ampoules or stickers used in HDs to detect falls. I saw devices that chance color, but were nor like those they had wax that was melted and change the color of a dot to indicate a burnt fuse.
The only use for these type of devices are as an indicaror for hours of use, as said below there were
various ones fitted to expensive gear that required regular maintenance.
Now all of this is done in software, but even that doesn't always work as intended.
Still an interesting era to look back on, i grew up with valves / tubes and can remember the first transistor
radio's full of Mullard AF series germanium transistors that often failed, some were faulty before fitting them!
That face of skilled, experienced electro engineer on the cover image says everything. 😆👍
Isn't Raytheon a Military Contractor? It probably was a one time use for bombs or something? Just a thought I could be totally wrong.
I don't know if it is the same thing but there are liquid thermometer-type hourmeters in old-school spotlight (Super Trouper IIRC) power supplies. I seem to recall that they looked like mercury but I could be wrong.
One advantage of soldering the indicator into a circuit might be to make it more tamper-evident in case the elapsed time is important. It makes me think of elapsed hour indicators on engines. Anyway, thank you for another fascinating video!
I've seen the mercury-tube ones on some now-forgotten piece of test equipment. Perhaps a Fluke 6071A signal generator? or an RK8E disk drive? Or more likely an ancient 3-CRT video projector. On those the CRT's were only good for like 1,000 hours and they could probably boost replacement tube sales by having a run-time indicator. The disk drive needed to have its air filter cartridge replaced every 1,000 hours. I vaguely recall the time meter went up to 10,000 hours.
add'l info CK1053
Electrolytic Diode
Elapsed Time Indicator Length 1.50"
Dia. = .400 Max indication μA-hrs. Operating current range 1-100 μA
The company I used to work for would love this product.
A repair and service profit center!
I have never seen a Raytheon device but I have seen devices produced by a company called Bisset and Berman. Their product was called a Coulometer. They were used as timers in fuse assemblies. Once the device armed, the coulometer could be used to change operating modes or, after a longer period of time, neutralize the device. Most probably by exploding it.
That reminds me of those very old-school electrolytic energy meters where you took the electrodes out and weighed them, and then calculated the energy consumption. I'm wondering about the exact reactions involved and the composition of the solution. That could be pretty much the reverse of PCB etching, copper(II) ions recombobulating with electrons and depositing metallic copper...
Yes! This used to be THE method for high accuracy laboratory measurements. It also is what led Franklin to guess wrong about the polarity of the charge carriers - the physical buildup of material he assumed to be flowing through the wires, not the solution, or something like that.
Fran, seeing the CK number on the Raytheon item reminds me of Raytheon’s CK-722, the first widely available PNP transistor from the 1950’s. I built some projects with them.
The general idea is a rather old concept - Edison invented an electricity consumption meter in 1881 but of course his DC distribution method was replaced by Westinghouse's AC approach. As I understand it, they would collect the copper strip and weigh it after each billing period - the loss of copper represented the amount of consumption.
Nikola Tesla had a patent for an electric current meter which worked by similar means; two parallel conductors in an electrolytic solution; over time, one would plate-over onto the other. By careful weighing of the elements after a preset amount of time, you could determine how many amp-hours had passed through it. Thanks for another interesting show! :-)
1:04 *There's a different type. A gap between an anode and a cathode that slowly moves against a graticule to indicate hundreds/thousands of hours in operation.*
*You're supposed to replace the whatever before it fails on its own.*
1:55 *A resistor or shunt to reduce the current to mili-microamps.*
I'm thinking that Raytheon being who they are might be interested in a very accurate single use timer.
...what could they POSSIBLY be making that would only be used once?
Military usage would be my obvious guess, as they have inherently have a lot of use for "one time use" devices on a "cost no object" basis.
i see it as a very inteligent service indicator.🤨
the technician replace the tube after inspecting the equipment, neat
Just an idea of what the engineers may have thought this could be used for… These could be used in missile/rocket systems to control timing of ignition, stage separation. Maybe an encapsulated light source/time tube/photo diode that triggered when the dye in the tube became transparent. It would optically isolate the pyro/pusher system from the timing and other electrical systems 🤷♂️
a 1080s take was in laser printer (HP LaserJet II) drum kits where the drum was on a moving belt, on the edge of the roll was a silver/gold floppy write protector tab (remember those?), the tab would rotate with the belt and probably rubbed against tomething until the tab wore out which prompted you to replace the drum/belt assembly.
Those in the know would just replace this tab and get more life out of the belt assembly, perhaps up to twice as long.
One time use electronic hour glass?
The mercury versions of this that other commenters have mentioned, could be reversed once it got to the end. Kind of like an hourglass.
There was a product, I forget its name, that was something like this that was once used for a crude data logging purpose. For example, if you had some voltage produced by a flowmeter, this would act as a chemical totalizer. I forget how you read the data, but I vaguely recall you connected it to a device that "read" the data and also converted it back to its original chemical state to re-use. Very equivalent to storing a charge in a battery or capacitor, I suppose, except it "remembered" very well and did not have anything bleed off like could happen to a capacitor or battery.
This reminds me of a mercury hour counter Applied Science did a video about 9 years ago
"Read with a commercially available colorimiter"..... yeah, nah.
The mercury-capillary type indicators seem a much better solution to this problem, especially as mercury wasn't as unfashionable then as it is nowadays. . I wonder if this came before them, or were aiming to compete with them.
You know this was a part specifically created to be used in circuits in any kind of missile. Knowing that a missile circuit has been active for X minutes is probably a good piece of information.
I can see this Ratheon device being attached to a critical assembly. A worker could be tasked with inspecting the machine on a weekly basis. On his check list there is a check mark for, is the vile still blue? No, time in service for the part is done, time for maintenance.
As a youngster fascinated by electronics and taking old TVs apart, I always found glass delay lines fascinating.
I think a name for that sort of thing was "solion integrator"
I have seen a thing like it as an "engine hours" switch. It had 3 legs not 2. Two of the legs would become connected when the time was exhausted.
I've used copper sulfate crystals to dump down your drain to kill roots. No longer legal in a lot of states in the US. I believe its exothermic or endothermic depending on if you're making or dissolving them.
I could not find the TH-cam video that featured a teardown including a similar device, I thought it was on DiodeGoneWild or Msylvain59, but in any event, there was (or is) a soviet hour meter using a horizontal glass tube that was essentially a mercury thermometer with a mercury salt dissolved in water in it. As current flows through the tube, more and more liquid mercury would accumulate at one end resulting in a reading proportional to the Coulombs and reading out in hours. I did find an Ebay listing for the display in "New NOS RARE Soviet Time counter Electrochemical ЭСВ-2,5-12,6-1 / ESV-2,5-12,6-1" (It may have been you not really entirely certain)
Besides as some kind of run time indicator, it could have been used as a way to compensate for aging of other devices. Another might be as some kind of timing control for mode switching, or as a detonator timer?
Love the intro! ... (and the rest of the video) :)
Like many others I have seen the mercury filled thermometer style type running on constant current (high ohms resistor on +5V) to measure operating hours, probably for warranty issues. The last time I saw one was in an EMT 245 (or was it 251) reverb processor for audio studio purposes
It's possible that such a tube could have been used in combination with a color spectrum light detector to alert of the MTBF of a component or set of components before actual failure occurs. Meaning, you would install this tube along with a photo color spectrum detector that would shine a light through the liquid to detect its current color. Once the tube's color became mostly clear, that would indicate when a separate component needs to be changed.
It seems you might embed this tube along with the photo receptor assembly along side a removable component assembly which could be replaced at a specific intervals timed by the tube. The difficulty would have been how accurate the tube's timing might have been. If it color became clear too rapidly, the component might be replaced prematurely. If the color change was too slow, the component might reach failure before it turned clear. That seems like the most probable use case, but I can't think of any components used in the 50s that might fail regularly enough to warrant needing a tube timer system like this.
I ran across one once (I think in a TV, not sure) to force service at intervals. Didn't keep the Sams, left them in the sets.
The ad may be somewhat misleading, but if you read it carefully, the tube is not meant to tell time and it's not meant to be reset, it says clearly "operating-time indicator" i.e. it shows how many hours a certain machine has been in use. Lifetime indicator for a machine, similar to the odometer in a car. So, the process is not meant to be reversible. There are many applications for such a device.
One huge application of this kind of thing was to make cold war adversaries expend time, money, and effort trying to duplicate and find applications for it. Spinning them in circles was an effective way to keep them occupied in ineffective pursuits and I'm sure all sides did (and probably still do) it.
Hi Fran. It’s possible the reaction was reversible by reversing the current, thus driving the copper back into solution. That Chemist (YT Channel), or NileRed (YT) will know more about that sort of thing, but it does seem feasible. Given the right selection of metals (or even graphite) for the electrodes, the reaction might even proceed in the reverse direction naturally, once the current is removed. I can see these being replaced after “used”, and the service technician just takes the used tubes back to the shop and plugs them into a constant-current (or constant-voltage, not sure) source wired up to a bank of 2-pin sockets. Once they’re blue again, they’re removed and ready to go back in service. This way, the shop only needs to buy a supply of tubes equal to the # of units they have a service contract with, plus a couple extras for “walk-ins”.
The reason the electrolytic mercury time meters are reversible is that their electrodes are liquid. If you try this with solid electrodes (as one company did), you discover after a while that the more times you reverse the current, the more it tends to grow dendrites rather than plating evenly across the whole electrode surface. I've seen a number of copper/copper sulfate time meters that had short-circuits formed by a fine hair of copper that had grown down the center.
I haven't seen these myself, but it sounds like they used a thin plating on the inside surface of the envelope, connected to the base by an insulated wire, with the other electrode being directly mounted in the base. As current flowed, it should de-plate the copper on the glass, starting near the base, with the copper disappearing over time.
They can be used in a new car, calibrated to the warranty expire date then everything breaks after that 😮
It is electrolysis, but just taking place very, very slowly. The electrolytic cell is fed a constant current from a DC supply with a suitable series resistor, the current being chosen such that after some number of hours, the solution has lost its colour altogether. It would be used in some expensive piece of machinery to show when maintenance was required; replacing it almost certainly would not be the most expensive part of the work.
A current of 1A flowing for one hour corresponds to a certain fixed number of electrons (= 0.0373113708 moles' worth). And one Cu++ ion takes two electrons from the negative electrode to plate out onto its surface as an atom of copper. So you just need to make sure there are the right number of Cu++ ions present to begin with. By the time they have all been discharged, the solution will be clear. Knowing how many grams of CuSO4 you started with in each litre of water, the molecular weight of the salt and the amount of solution in the tube, you can calculate how much charge will be required to discharge and plate out all the copper ions in the tube, thus leaving a clear solution.
The positive electrode must also be producing oxygen and twice as much sulphur trioxide, of course, as two SO4-- ions each donate two electrons to it, leaving O2 and 2SO3; but probably not enough to build up a dangerous pressure.
Yes yes yes took me a year to find you again thank god
i could see it being used as an expiration indicator
Would be useful for single use experiments or expendable devices. Or as an anti-tamper device for some electro device you want to tell if its been powered up or not.
Recently I got a ЭСВ-2,5-12,6-1 work time meter, it was used in some radio equipment, likely to know when tubes need to be replaced. It also uses electrolysis, but is easier to read: a tiny drop of electrolyte moves between two mercury electrodes, one being consumed and another being deposited. Effectively the gap in mercury moves. There is resistor to limit the current (didn't check, assumption, meter shows 102kΩ), you apply 12.6V and the gap moves slowly.
I bet those blue tubes need a resistor too. Guess they could have been made reversible, but not too many times, as many metals (including copper) form dendrites and it takes effort to make them deposit smoothly.
Unsurprisingly, it sounds like military application, wherein if the colorimeter turns to 5,000 hours, the piece of equipment is deemed beyond usefulness.
As an example of military process, heavy chains used to secure large equipment for transport have dates at which they are "taken out of service", regardless if they have ever been used. I actually have one, that was never used, had the original paint,.. but was taken off the shelf, due to age. Best chain ever, completely unaffordable to the average farmer. The glut of military style resupply procedures, is beyond what most people think. My guess, for this, simply due to the 5,000 hour max, was generators or similar equipment, where the idea is to remove from service when the percentage of possible failure reaches,...."lets replace it to be sure" supply chain insurance for factories. And they could sell colorimeters as well.... I'm also going to suggest, many viewed it as a scam, and the only buyer was military,... who actually do this type of thing regularly, as part of their process for keeping factories active, so the supply chains are healthy. or so goes the idea...
a timer for a missile or military component
i havent heard of those but seen mercury based 'hour meters' in the form of small tubular fuse packages ... dunno if still available......
This is kind of reminiscent of the battery life labels that some manufacturers (Duracell?) put on the side of their batteries. I think you have to press both ends of the label for a few seconds, and a line appears, indicating the approximate remaining battery life. I'm not sure how they work, but they look like some kind of LCD technology.
It's a heater with a label on top with thermochromic pigment which changes color depending on the heat generated which is proportional to battery voltage.
Think "mood" ring or those stick on thermometers. They also sold some with it in the plastic package so you can check any brand battery of the same size. I like that they put a load on the cell
It's actually a thin wire heating element that causes the outer wrapping to change color.
Actually, those were a marketing ploy, meant to cause you to discharge the batteries before their time, since it took quite a bit of current for them to work.
Planned obsolescence! Perhaps used in some component that you had no choice but to purchase a replacement at EOL!
Technically, the term "planned obsolescence" was not meant to describe products that wore out quickly or were one time use. The term was coined by Industrial Designer Brokke Stevens at a conference to describe how a product can be redesigned, perhaps in appearance only, so that the consumer replaces his existing perfectly fine product with the "new" version. The "obsolescence" was due to the new desire placed in the mind of the consumer. Think of automobiles in the 1950's as a shining example of this taken to excess.
Well, there are such things as rechargeable batteries, so perhaps these tubes could go through multiple cycles. And it takes time to recharge or discharge a battery, that's not instantaneous.
I've seen "thousands of hour meters" in old studio vidicon cameras, the ones I've seen looked like a hybrid of a mercury thermometer and a 3AG fuse. I'm not certain why it was important to clock the cams, but I wonder if this was a predecessor?
@glasslinger might be able to make you one.
That's exactly what I was thinking. He may also know if it was used and what for.
Why no captions, not even the auto-generated option, at least at this moment? Doesn't seem like *any* of your videos have any captioning at all :/
An un-resettable warning indicator for forensic accountability?
so what is the tube for? is it the display?
Egg timer for the modern house wife? 😂
"It is a solution in search of a problem".
Well, it certainly is a solution.
I would like to see one of the chemistry channels on TH-cam that I watch make one of these. just to see how it works.
Having worked with copper sulfate in our high school chemistry class, I do wonder how they could control and standardize the rate of electrolysis.
The only practical use I can think of for something like this would be for a solid-state fuse for an explosive of some sort.
It does suggest a proprietary solution to be accurate....
If a known fixed amount of copper sulphate is in solution, we can calculate how many copper ions we have (remember, we express the amount in moles and use Avogadro's number to arrive at how many). Then, knowing the charge per ion, we know exactly how much charge (which we can express in coulombs or milliampere-hours or similar) is required to remove those ions from solution. Regarding copper sulphate in solution, the copper atoms have given up two electrons, so the charge is about 3.2 x 10^-19 coulombs per ion. By applying a known constant current to the tube, we can calculate the time required. As long as there is no significant contamination with other ions, we have a reliable timer. This principle is used in the plating industry to determine how long to electroplate an object to achieve a particular thickness given a particular current density to be used. 🙂
i would have thought thet it was intended as as service indicator, for milatry/industrial equipment.
I don't know how this is better than the rotating wheel type displays for machine usage hours, i suppose it's probably impossible to wind back or whatever, if It's on a machine where they want to bill you for hours of use, but how accurate is it? And it says you need a colorimeter to read it, don't know how portable or expensive they would have been in the 50s. Also some enterprising person could just bridge it out for free hours.
Mainly, it's a great deal smaller and cheaper than a mechanical counter and motor. The needed "colorimeter" would likely be a printed card with a number of color samples on it, so no great expense there, either.
I wonder if the idea was used in some chemical detector or something like that. Like a test timer. Just guessing.
Won't electroplating be undone if you run the current in the other direction? Am not a hardware girl, but I appreciate those who are.
The watch is used for time travel 🧭
Engineered obsolescence what every company loves light bulbs are made to burn out
Only slightly familiar w/ electroplating, wondering how the time duration of this might be affected by exposure to ionizing(nuclear) OR non ionizing(microwave) radiation??
Didn't two american scientists, Tony Newman and Doug Phillips, tumble helplessly along the infinate tunnels of time with the help of Liquid Time Tube ?
It’s just an indicator. It might have been conceptually inexpensive to produce compared to another type of tracking device Ike hour meters.
Remember those green dot lead acid batteries? It’s like that. Sorta. Not really.
Hey Fran
Whats with Raytheon's component # indexing system? Am I the only one(old enough) to notice the similarity of the CK1053 and their legendary CK722 Transistor??