Solderless Wrapped Connections - Introduction

Copyright, 1961, American Telephone and Telegraph Company Solderless Wrapped Connections Introduction By J. W. McRAE (Manuscript received February 9, 1953) In the telephone plant during the course of a single year, the operation of connecting a wire to a metal terminal is carried out approximately one billion times. Many of these connections are made in the factory. Others are made during the installation of equipment and a substantial number are made in the course of normal operation of the telephone plant. Successful functioning of the plant depends on trouble-free performance of each of these connections, most of which are now soldered in accordance with long-standing practice. Recently, a new technique for joining wires to terminals has been developed which will have important technical and economic advantages in the Bell System and which should have similar advantages in other fields. The immediate need for a new connection arose with the development of the new wire spring general purpose relay.* In this relay the terminals appear in the form of closely spaced wires and the standard methods of applying connections were not satisfactory. Since the production schedule for these new relays required something like fifty million connections a year on relay terminals alone, an intensive effort was made to devise a satisfactory method for wiring. The first result was the development of a tool which could wrap a few turns of wire around the terminals of the relay, and do this efficiently on the closely* Keller, A.