From now on, everything was controlled by electronic switches and relays. She didn’t need much skill, only quick hands. An operator sat at one end of each ECME line, feeding in die plates. At the end of the war, Sargrove built an automatic production line, which he called ECME (electronic circuit-making equipment), in a small factory in Effingham, Surrey.Ĭ. This was something that could be made by machines, and he designed those too. His solution was to dispense with most of the fiddly bits by inventing a primitive chip-a slab of Bakelite with all the receiver’s electrical components and connections embedded in it. In 1944, Sargrove came up with the answer. Making radios required highly skilled labour-and lots of it.ī. At every stage, things had to be tested and inspected. Even a simple receiver might have 30 separate components and 80 hand-soldered connections. But radios didn’t lend themselves to such methods: there were too many parts to fit together and too many wires to solder. Automating the manufacturing process would help. For more than a decade, Sargrove had been trying to figure out how to make cheaper radios.
John Sargrove, the visionary engineer who developed the technology, was way ahead of his time. Yet hidden away in the English countryside was a highly automated production line called ECME, which could turn out 1500 radio receivers a day with almost no help from human hands.Ī.
There were no computers to speak of and electronics was primitive. In the mid-1940s, the workerless factory was still the stuff of science fiction. There’s no chatter of assembly workers, just the whirr and click of machines. Production lines controlled by computers and operated by robots.
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