Business: Automatic Factory

In a compact little factory on the outskirts of Washington, executives and technicians from 200 companies in the electronics industry last week inspected a secret project of the Navy. After three years, and $4,700,000 spent in experiments on “Project Tinkertoy,” the Navy and the National Bureau of Standards had developed an almost automatic assembly line for many electronic parts.

Since the end of World War II, the Navy has been worried about bottlenecks in the electronics industry which might slow up war production in a national emergency. While electronic equipment is used in almost every modern weapon, as well as a wide variety of peacetime products, the industry relies largely on handwork (i.e., soldering and wiring) to put together complicated assemblies. Any major expansion of the industry, the Navy realized, would be slow and costly, and would call for big additions of skilled manpower that would not be available.

When the Navy learned that the Bureau of Standards was working on the same problem, the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics decided to underwrite the experiments. To get mass production, NBS simplified electronic products and designed a standard unit. Its basic element is a thin ceramic wafer, ⅞-in. square. Various electrical devices (conducting paints, tape resistors, paper-thin capacitors, etc.) are affixed to the wafer surfaces. Next, four to six such wafers, spaced less than ¼-in. apart, are connected by a gridwork of twelve wires. The end product can be used as a building block for any kind of electronic circuit. Six of them, for example, contain all the circuits needed for a six-tube radio. Other uses: in guided missiles, submarine detection devices, proximity fuses, electronic fire control, etc.

On its 21 automatic machines, Project Tinkertoy now turns out 200 to 300 finished units an hour. Production goal: 1,000 an hour. Cost per unit: 50¢, about half as much as the conventional unit. The Government holds all patents, will let anyone use them. Said one Navyman: “The field is wide open . . . We hope that private industry will pick up the ball and run with it.”