Automatic Testing in Telephone Manufacture

Many of the parts used in the telephone plant are made in such numbers that automatic shop testing of them is desirable. The cost of manual testing by suitable personnel is high, and its nature so repetitive and dull that accuracy suffers. Fortunately, in many cases the complexity of the test requirements has matched the state of the art and the business picture well enough to warrant the development of machine methods. It is our purpose in these articles to review the art as it has evolved in the Manufacturing Division of the Western Electric Company, and to describe some of the techniques. This is done with the hope that improvements or extensions to other testing or manufacturing problems may be suggested. It should be emphasized that the developments treated here and in the other papers 3 9 have required cooperation among testing and manufacturing engineers in the Western and product design engineers in the Bell Telephone Laboratories. Modifications of design for Western's convenience, changed methods for translating basic requirements into manufacturing test requirements, informal Laboratories suggestions of approaches to manufacturing and testing problems, all are commonplace. The boundaries of the specialists' domains are readily crossed. Testing is a process for proving something such as quality of a prod1129