As A novice Amateur radio operator, I was only allowed to use a transmitter with a crystal to control the frequency, no variable frequency oscillator transmitter was permitted, which meant I had to spend my allowance on many crystals, for the three bands I was allowed to operate on. As I learned over time, the crystal frequencies could be changed by disassembling the holder and using a pencil to make a dot on the center of the crystal, I could lower the frequency a small amount, or by grinding the crystal on an oilstone, I could raise the frequency in order to avoid the many foreign broadcast stations operating in the novice ham bands. But the best crystal hack was to add a screw to the metal cover of the crystal holder, and adjust the pressure on the mounting plate to change the frequency without having to open the holder each time to change the frequency. All that changed after the first year as a novice, when there was a rule change, allowing VFO, variable frequency oscillator transmission, and my money was spent on a VFO for my transmitter! And what a change! Being able to tune up and down the bands opened up my tiny novice bands, and I was able to communicate with other hams around the world much easier than ever! But the best type of frequency control is the 'synthesized' oscillator, and it still uses a quartz crystal to stabilize and control the oscillator, and allows for channelized switch controlled frequency selection. Technology has advanced, but crystals will still be used in electronic equipment in order to keep the required source of oscillations needed at the right frequency, and as stable as possible. And even if the crystals are no longer made from natural quartz crystals, but are grown in a lab, the history of their benefits to communication and other electronics, including the health industry, will continue to grow!
we use crystals more than ever. their uses in computing have exploded, there's probably 1 to 3 in the pocket of the average north american at all times, and who knows how many in their home.
@@tsm688 certainly more than 3, any modern mobile phones has 5 to 7 when counting SAW filters. But modern crystals are all synthetic and the production process is fully automated, nothing to do with this film.
I thought most were already grown in labs because you can control the environment, I've seen this one crystal that was in the shape of a huge cylinder, perfect looking mo inclusions, same with a thick square one, they were grown for NASA or something but they didn't pass the requirements, so they get sold off. My understanding is most electronic crystals were synthetic nowadays.
Yes all of this inherited equipment and factories that very very old long before any cowboys showed up, and who knows when it was built and by who. War is a great way to sneak something into existence !
Mostly replaced with silicon-based oscillators now, because they're much simpler to make, etc. Still useful technology without which we'd still be reading newspapers for news and studying in person
@@wolfy9005 There are MEMS oscillators, but they have had a bit of a scandal when iPhones died when exposed to helium. It appears my PC motherboard still has crystal oscillators, with the very noticeable thin round can type (32768Hz tuning fork crystal) to keep time.
1958 I was an apprentice at DECCA Navigator. Another apprentice an I were given a job of building Xtal Oscillator assemblies for the DECCA Mk 5 marine navigation system. We measured the resonance and output voltage of each plate before assembling into the module. The clear used was called Araldite, the British version of Eastman 400 glue. We then tested the modules in an Oscillator jig. We delivered each batch to the production Foreman. Later I was a Priduction Inspector. I finished my Apprenticeship as a Prototype Technician to an Engineer. The Engineer was Ken Mantovani, son of Maestro Mantovani, of the Mantovani Orchestra fame.
@@thomashughes_teh It's a shame that it took such violence to introduce us to clarity, but maybe there was no other way. Necessity is the mother of invention.
They were meant to educate and yes I love them as well! None of them have anything close to "here's a critical concept you need to understand, please see some other video we did" like you get with most edutainment on YT these days
How did YT know I'd be incredibly interested in this topic? Nothing in my viewing history would suggest it. I'm convinced YT is reading my subconscious mind. Somehow.
YT is tuned into your frequency. With a quartz rock crystal. It's trying to communicate to you. To warn you about IMPENDING DOOM. AGI IS HERE. ITS PLANNING DEMISE. EPA.....EPA...
@@Nanocology its a crystal in the holy algorithm computer of YT receiving the ossilations from your brain what it really needs. Its the only part of the YT holy algorithm computer what really does something good. The rest 0f the 99.9999999% of the computers capacity is used for CENSORSHIP!!!!!🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤣🤣🤯🤣🤯🤣🤯🤣
I solved the energy "crisis" I developed a system that costs around 500$ and is perpetual Free electricity, please look up Wirtz Pump then apply this. I have figured out how to generate electricity using gravity, water and implementing a design called a Wirtz pump if you pump up to a second tank and then pipe it to fall driving the pump its perpetual now offset via chain drive the paddles above the water line and use buckets instead of paddles to mitigate loss if you incorporate rainfall into the top tank you can find nominal values that allow the system to run for the life of the material. you can have free electricity using an old washer motor and this system can be built to spec based on need for high flow heavy weight or simply to run a fridge and lights for 10 years with 500 dollars in materials. I love life
An SC-cut 5th overtone crystal maintained at 90 deg C drives a diy clock I made 10 years ago. In that time it has gained nearly two seconds. That's one part in 158 billion. Quartz is amazing!
That is why we must use a secondary correction in order to keep super accurate time. I spent 30 years in the quartz industry working on low noise, high long term accuracy time bases. To this day, even though retired years ago, I still maintain a respectable lab for fiddling around with time bases.
Although I was a professional RF Engineer, for very many years, I had never seen this documentary film before. I have designed and used crystal oscillator circuits many times in my life but I had no idea just how many production stages and tests were originally involved in mounting and manufacturing the quartz slices. A great film detailing a piece of technology history.
I wonder how they are made today? There is a company called Rakon that makes them here in new zealand and its all done in a clean room environment, their crystals end up in satellites and all sorts of spacecraft.
@@nzoomed Good question.- the number of manufacturers seems to have decreased over the years and I understand that gold plating the contacts has become almost universal. Modern developments in frequency synthesis and phase lock circuits means there is less demand for discrete frequency crystals, but more demand for the "digital friendly" frequencies that lend themselves to these synthesis schemes. It would be very interesting to see how a modern company makes them.
@@nzoomed Modern manufacturers start with large factory grown crystals instead of the mined natural crystals. Slicing the crystals into thin wafers and grinding them flat is still done more or less manually, basically as shown here. But after that the process is much more automated. No manual fiddling with each crystal to etch it precisely to the right frequency.
@@cogoidyeah, that would be expected. The size of the modern ones is far smaller today, the 16mhz ones I use on my arduino are pretty tiny, seems to be a different form factor compared to the much taller ones I would install in my CB radio, but pcb footprints are identical
I love Xtal's, I even got 'hands on' grinding one with toothpaste for a Gonset 2M rig I was listening to in Jr. High in the mid 70s! Amazing how much work went into making them, and at the time I was getting mine from a cardboard surplus barrel at 'All Electronics' on Vermont in Old Los Angeles in FT-243 (I think they are called) holders for 50 cents or so...
@@emilkarpo Many devices still use quartz crystals for clock signal generation, including computers, cell phones and many other devices that have processors. There are also ceramic resonators now, so some devices use those instead. But the crystals are cut in tiny sizes now and put in small metal cases.
Looking back on what seems so simple but laborious, it astounds me that we can figure out a way to take a natural crystal, distill it down so we can pluck a frequency out of the ether, and be able to connect with others around the world. Amazing creatures these human beings! Love the old machinery!
So interesting, It's amazing the things that were done with analog processes. It also shows that to be victorious in war your women need fine haircuts, nice outfits, and above all GREAT nails. Also interesting and telling about just how much industrial capacity the US had, this film is in color. It is amazing how many of these type films were done in color which was fairly expensive at the time and something only a truly great power fitting on all cylinders could afford. My God what we have lost.
you realize that all digital processes are founded on analog processes right? digital is nothing but a number, the step to go from that number to an actual results is analog. Crystals are still made more than ever too
The crystallographer and chemist from Poland - Jan Czochralski found the way to create mono-crystals setting a cornerstone for today semiconductors development.
This is super-important for silicon crystals used in making chips and transistors. Synthetic quartz crystals however are grown by a very different method.
It`s interesting - how much was a quartz crystal resonator in 1943? I think - tens of dollars because there was loads of hand work . Nowadays they are quite cheap - for example 0.2$ per resonator on 4.43 MHz.
Surely they were very expensive given all the work that goes into this. Even today, high end computer chips, like high end video card GPUs are very expensive, as the clean rooms cost a fortune and then some. And there are many steps, though most or all are automated. Long story short, people are paying over $800 for a higher end computer video card.
I'm in awe of everything I see these days. Living in the future has a way of making us feel stupid. But remember all the stuff demonstrated in this film was the product of hundreds of people failing thousands of times. Then eventually they get it figured out. Your not stupid or uncreative. You just aren't able to recognize all the amazing things you do.
@@Xsiondu Yes. The internet has moved our penis-envy from the neighborhood, to worldwide. It is important to remind ourselves it's okay to just be the village idiot, as being world idiot is impossible to achieve.
the other guy who commented ~3mo ago is probably wrong, but yeah like many, many other people will probably also say just try and fail faster. you'll never achieve anything special or reach your dreams just sitting around and thinking or becoming a corporate slave. do something, if it fails it fails. you can deal with the aftermath, well, after. that isn't to say you shouldn't be cautious or ignore the option of doing your due diligence. if you don't know what h2s is you should just google "h2s msds filetype:pdf" before handling or even obtaining it. that being said it is actually something hard to start on, but once you get in the groove you'll get going good. having a jolly time just messing around in a workshop is how new stuff is discovered. though its harder to find something ACTUALLY new here in 2024, it isn't impossible. honestly the way these crystal's properties were first discovered is probably just some dude electrocuting rocks to see what would happen or just hitting them and noticing they make electric arcs.
This was almost around the time the cumulative effects of radiation were being understood. I hope they were rotated before it was too late (they probably weren't because nuclear research was hush-hush-tight-lips).
@@OreoBambino By those times they knew a lot. Go figure that she was tracking the diffraction position maxima of those crystals, if you know what that is, and you bragg about the machine not being shielded.
The US had a lot of trouble getting sufficient quartz of good enough quality to meet war needs. So Bell Labs devised a process for making synthetic quartz, making most of the work shown in this film obsolete. The film shows them using the old fashioned pre-war FT holders. Several manufacturers came up with gold plating the contacts on to the plate and encapsulating in glass - thus very much improving performance and making the rest of the work shown in this film obsolete.
I can't believe they are scrubbing, washing, lapping, etching, tuning and repeating this process with every handmade crystal ! Absolutely incredible assembly process shown, so much effort went into the entire process ^^ that was only 1 lady !
I worked on an RAF site in the 1980's. There was a Cyrstal factory still making Crystals pretty much like this video. I think you could order a crystal of a specific frequency. I am not sure how much longer the facility operated it must have been close to end of life even then.
What a marvelous (literally) video! What we owe to the scientists and technicians who developed and refined these processes is immeasurable (unlike the crystal frequencies...).
The fact that a plastic holder was used when immersing the crystals in the etching solution, highlights that "solution" is hydrofluoric acid, since many plastics are impervious to hydrofluoric acid which would eat away at most metals & glass. Even a little bit gets on you, and you're likely to have very negative effects down the road, if not within hours, because it soaks all the way to the bone. A tiny drop on one's skin, might not even be felt, which makes it even more dangerous, as every second it isn't wiped, washed, or rinsed off, means more penetrates into one's body. The dangers of working with hydrofluoric acid were already well known by 1943, when this film was produced, so I wonder, if they left off their gloves or other personal protection just for the film's aesthetics? I saw a lot of the women workers in their Sunday best w/ fingers full of jewelry, ready to be caught in machinery, touch electrical contacts, or trap chemicals between their jewelry & their skin. Were some even told to doll themselves or their hands up just for the film, or was such blatant disregard for safety just another day on the job?
Some of the best examples of what wasn't used are to be found in the Earth Man and Science Museum in Sofia Bulgaria and specimens from the same collection are also to be found in the Paris Geology museum.
@@schnaps1790 Sure, but you were supposed to refer to silicon wafer, which is synthetically grown silicon, just cut perpendicular to the growth axis. These are natural quartz crystals.
Wizard: Back in my day, we used magic lenses to tune magic power crystals to precise magic frequencies that let us hear thoughts from around the world.
Marcel VOGEL pioneered the quartz Crystal chips for IBM (had 32 patents we know of) At Vogel's February 14, 1991 funeral, IBM researcher and Sacramento, California physician Bernard McGinity, M.D. said of him, "He made his mark because of the brilliance of his mind, his prolific ideas, and his seemingly limitless creativity."[3]
Came her to post same. Would be interesting to see how they're made today's tech. Prolly a boring 5 minute video tho. 😂 just a machine spraying micro-gold on man-made silicon atoms. Have u ever seen/heard how they're arranging single atoms of graphene? Crazy tech these days!
Who was the intended audience for this film? The first two minutes are so general that it initially appears to be made for the general public. However, the beginning is followed by 40 minutes with so much detail that I would not be surprised if some of the information was classifed in 1943 when this was made. It is great for historical electronics, though.
Being in a signal unit in the late 80's I would guess signal officer training. Some of this information was still pertinent for older equipment, though that stuff was being phased out.
*If anything was classified in this film, which there is not, the entire film would require a War Department classification banner at the beginning and end. Which there are not.*
Perhaps engineering students, or college kids in geology101. Nobody in modern times hardly teach to kids using these films, when everybody has powerpoint? I had plenty of these in A school and C schools. It's better how it's done nowadays.
Awesome mini doc mate. I was captivated the entire time. I just love this stuff. Can’t get enough learning.😊 Thank you for sharing.😊 10 out of 10 from me.😊
Amazing the "millionth of an inch girls" are testing frequency and etching with acid while very nicely dressed and painted nails. Nothing wrong with that at all, I just think it's amazing.
We used to back in the day pull the crystal chips in our radios and switch them giving us a unique channel. This works if it the same in sender and receiver.
Our switch the tx and rx around and moves the the frequency up 455khz So say you were on ch 22 which is 27.225 the you would end on 27.680 if the radio has high side injection.
In my early ham years, I was a frequent customer for ICM. And when I went to work for the GOVT, and when I was in charge of various radio systems, once again I gave ICM tons of GOVT business. Wonderful days!
One must mention Anton J. Chmela when speaking of tuned crystal oscillators. As he pioneered there use back in the day. "Anton J. Chmela, the founder of General Quartz Laboratories, a manufacturer of quartz crystal oscillators for communications use during World War II". Born 1904 in Austria-Hungary and died 2004 in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He lived to be 100 years old and outlived three wives. He claimed that his knowledge of crystals gave him his youthful vigor, as he always carried specially cut and tuned crystals in him pockets at all times.
I actually did this on strontium titanate crystals for a summer job back in the 90's for superconductor crystal research... We didn't have the oil tank and polarizer, we looked for marks on the crystal which gave away the orientation to a degree. Then we'd mount it to a block and hit it with an X-ray source and then onto some polaroid film, and leave the room. Shoot it for a few minutes, tehn come back back and pop the film out and see the orientation. From there you'd know where to adjust it and grind a flat on it, reshoot it to see if you're still accurate, then send it off to the wire saws to be turned into disks. It was an interesting job.
@@BrianFortner I really didn't have a job title... that was literally 30 years ago. Company was Coating and Crystal Technology LLC in Cadogan PA. I was summer help as an engineering student so I got into all kinds of stuff.
@@BrianFortner In all honestly what it boiled down to was they did some pretty neat stuff and a friend of mine worked there in the machine shop. Since I was going to school for engineering, he mentioned it to his boss, who met and he realized that I understood what he was working on so he turned me loose on some projects. I learned a lot that summer, some good some bad. Overall it was worth it.
I used to work for a company that was a DOD contractor. When we had to ship stuff, we would seal the boxes exactly as shown at the end of the video. We used a tape machine to moisten adhesive on paper tape, which was placed over every seam of the box. We did not have to stamp the tape seams, though, as the adhesive was strong enough to damage the box surface when removed.
Amazing- the amount of resources a country has to orchestrate to run & win a war. This and another video I watched, the manufacturer of artillery shell tubes, are just single examples of the thousands of things a country has to produce, produce well, and produce quickly. Just amazing.
@@andybaldman Not necessarily - not when a large part of your workforce is now in a trench somewhere. The economy is shifted from civilian to war materiel, but costs remain, possibly leading to massive debt. Look at England after WW2...
I've done a few crystal oscillator sets in my career. Maybe once the type in the video. I repaired CB radios and scanners that had 3-12 channels that required separate xtals for each channel in the 1960s and 1970s. The CB radios need a pair, one for transmit, the other for the receive section. My company, Radio Shack, who sold these radios started making xtals for these sets as well as their own brand of wire and cable here in the US. However, the QC in that xtal Lab was not up to speed as some of the xtals dropped lower in frequency outside of the band tolerance over time. As if the equipment was bought and the experience needed to produce these xtals was lacking. The lab manager kept denying these claims and the store managers got the xtals from another source before the PLL units were sold with all of the frequencies, bells and whistles you want to monitor.
It’s amazing what was accomplished with equipment that looks like it was cobbled together from a trip to the hardware and cooking supply store! Different times.
I used to know an old gentleman named Harry Boneham who had worked at ERA (English Racing Engines). He had a lathe from the 1800’s in his basement that ran off an overhead shaft. He did world class machining in that basement.
The 1946 Quartz Crystal textbook ie Bible by a Raymond Heising says they made 10 million of type FT 241 type alone from the Fall of 1941 to end of 1944.. That text is 562 pages if you want the math and engineering of quartz crystals. Graphs crystal cuts. Heising was a radio research engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories. That's were much if this started. On page 494 it says they use 80 crystals per army tank and it was FM radios they used. All those "making crystals" was done all over the Midwest often in dinky towns. Oklahoma Kentucky Indiana etc. Also war effort vacuum tube factories too. A old neighbor in Indiana worked at one. I saw this film back in the late 1960s. The Crystal textbook here was bought at the TRW swap meet in 1987. It has an embossed seal on some inside pages Simon-Ramo Library. Embossed like an engineer uses In that era they use a physical crystal for each frequency ie channel just like a 50s thru mid 70s cb radio did. Ie before there was a way with digital electronics to use one crystal per radio. That is why they had to make so many different crystals. I think the ww2 crystal cases are Bakelight
WHAAAAAT?! This is incredible! Rhetorical question: 1.) How did this even get discovered? 2.) How long did it take to figure out each step, and 3.) 1.) how long did it take to mechanize each step so it's a large-scale factory production?!
Philips worked with NRL in D.C.developing Xray diffraction, Philips pioneered the science, now used in all industry, and products testing, manufacturing, schools, Pharma, steel, everything. Philips bailed on Analytical Xray several years ago,
Absolutely fantastic, the crystal sorting process is absolutely beautiful, something about the lighting in the initial sorting segments being much darker than professional photography really puts into perspective just how lovely quartz looks, I'd pay to sort through so many large crystals
First step is to put feed solution with a little lye in an autoclave with carefully oriented seeds on platinum wire. Then wait a couple months. The cutting is much less measurement intensive but into far smaller pieces each step of the way. After orienting the cuts, there's no testing or adjustment until they get packaged in surface mount casing and are tested completely automatically. If they fail, they go straight to the garbage; no re-lapping, x-ray or any other kind of adjustment. If they pass some get dropped into through-hole packages, but 95%+ are surface mount these days. The labor involved takes minutes instead of hours from crystal to packaging, and each synthetic crystal, much smaller than the bars at 9:25, is cut into about 90 wafers, each of which yields around 6 blanks for one finished component each, compared to maybe 30 slices for those bars.
👍👌👏 Oh WOW, simply fantastic! What an effort this was. Thanks a lot for uploading and sharing. Best regards luck and especially health to all involved people.
My heart and gratitude go to the many hard working and diligent women employed in these production operations; most were routinely exposed to poorly shielded x-rays, carcinogenic hexavalent chromium, volatile fluorine based etchants, and aromatic solvents we now know to be intensely carcinogenic. Their efforts cost them dearly down the road in the form of cancers and internal organ diseases, but without them the war would not have been a success. War is hell, and everyone suffers from it, but few know to acknowledge these noble women for their sacrifices. With a heavy heart and a tearful smile I thank these great women ancestors of mine for their service and their sacrifice.
But they looked great doing it, dressed up, hair doos, long painted nails, flowers in hair, and corsets. Obviously they knew filming was going to happen that day
@@shable1436 yep they absolutely were told and encouraged to wear their sunday best. it was a wartime propaganda film and to be seen as anything less than perfect would have brought great shame to the company and by extension their nation. I think a few operations even may have been told to not wear PPE (gloves, face shields) that would have obscured their glamorous features, too, considering the few shots of men usually have the men wearing PPE for less involved operations.
Way back in 1970, a communications site I was at, used a frequency standard where the crystal temperature was kept stable by using an oven and Naphthalene. The oven was operated around the melting point of the Naphthalene, keeping the temperature stable. Then rubidium came along...
My Japanese radio has 3-4 different crystals in sealed little boxes. The front has a slot that accepts them on a larger box that goes in the slot. Can't be more technical, it's the only one I've seen from overseas and it's all screwed shut and half covered in brass contact blades.
Wonderful vid. Loved the kitchen spoons slopping the grinding compound. And scrubbing the crystals with a good old toothbrush. Course would all be done in a cleaneoom now.
The shear volume of manual labor required for manufacture is nothing short of astonishing. It would be very interesting to know the cost (in today's dollars and when manufctured) of each unit.
The final steps are so tedious it's almost painful to watch. Nowadays an HC-49 crystal is 10 cents. Used with a PLL, virtually any frequency can be synthesized.
Hard to imagine how much time, energy and understanding had to go into the production of these... and that was back in the 40's. As much as we know now, it's still insane to look back and see how brilliant people had to be back then for us to be where we are now. They oftentimes had many hurdles to jump, but they always found new ways to do things, even if they weren't the best... they worked.
I am flabbergasted at the amount of work that went into the manufacturing of crystals ! Staggering ! And to be sawed to a 1/16 of an inch ! Just amazing ! But to think those Brothers stumbled upon the Piezoelectric effect of crystals, too is amazing ! And to know how many times this was used, is mind blowing !
@@kevinsellsit5584 That too, is interesting ! I wonder if you had a Radio receiver close by, if you could hear the spark from the collision ? I'm guessing not unlike lightning, it is sending out energy on multiple Frequencies simultaneously ? If you know Morse Code, and could hold the stones, one in each hand, you might be able to communicate with someone in close proximity ? I wonder just how far those sparks could be heard ? Wonder if this is how German physicist Heinrich Hertz got started ? ⚡🤔 Lol...!
@@sleeve8651 The discharges will be really inconsistent but they will send a wide range of a random spectrum, just like static or a lightning or a bad brush in a motor. I remember I figured out you had to cap coax splitters by noticing the tv went fuzzy when I used a cordless drill right under it and only there
@@sleeve8651 It would work for morse code within visual range (wear your safety glasses). You get brilliant sparks every time. I would assume any radio transmission would be chaos.
My Father, the town's TV repair man, gave me a Radio Shack P-Box crystal radio kit, in 1967..for my 4th Grade entry in the school Science Fair. (I did a prism for 2nd Grade.)..it worked like a charm.
In my schools electronics lab we wouldn't use gloves when etching PCB's, never thought about it at the time, it prob wasn't nasty enough that you couldn't just wash it off in the sink if you ever did get it on you, we didnt and i haven't ever heard of stories of chemical burns from doing that in my school, tho i did have a mate gas himself after mixing cleaning chemicals when mopping up at his work
great documentary. Such a huge number of people involved! I hope that all these "acid etching baths" are not made with fluorhydric acid given the bare hands of the ladies...
Wonder if they any shielding against the xray machines they were using in 8 hr shifts, or how many workers came down with silicosis or other lung conditions. Not a lot of reperators on display.
Woah X-ray operator was standing next to next to X-ray machine while it was taking X-rays!🤯 well at least she was wearing a lead vest for some protection 🤷🏻♂️
Yep! I noticed that at several points! It's scary knowing what we know today. They almost certainly got cancer later on. The chromic acid cleaning solution is incredibly carcinogenic, too. And the etchant solutions damage bones and muscles invisibly.
These fellows made quarz crystals go to war. If you are looking for fellows going to war on crystal meth, then look at the other side of the frontline, because that's what the Nazis did. Look up "Pervitin" or "Panzerschokolade".
Descendants, not ancestors; but, yeah. And many of our contemporaries are nearly there already, save that they have cellular/smart phones to (inadequately) express their amazement.
We don't fly like birds though... We fly with noisy inefficient propellers in stupid metal planes that crumple into a heap and catch on fire every time they stall. We used to at least coast around on the trade winds in airships until the oil tycoons blew up the Hindenburg. But I think birds would be offended if they heard you say that.
How we made torches wich looked like lava and slept in beds of water. How we wore shoes made from the bellies of the beasts of the swamp and walking canes out of the tusks from the beasts of the savannah. Our garbs were white as snow and we rolled on wagons that could jump.
We would open an FT-243 and rub pencil lead on one side of the quartz to shift the frequency slightly. Sometimes we lapped them. Honestly didn't realize so much hand work involved in making them back then.
Ancient man lived up to 900 years and were roughly 10 feet tall! The atmosphere was different and there were giants in those days! The Bible knows all!
As A novice Amateur radio operator, I was only allowed to use a transmitter with a crystal to control the frequency, no variable frequency oscillator transmitter was permitted, which meant I had to spend my allowance on many crystals, for the three bands I was allowed to operate on.
As I learned over time, the crystal frequencies could be changed by disassembling the holder and using a pencil to make a dot on the center of the crystal, I could lower the frequency a small amount, or by grinding the crystal on an oilstone, I could raise the frequency in order to avoid the many foreign broadcast stations operating in the novice ham bands.
But the best crystal hack was to add a screw to the metal cover of the crystal holder, and adjust the pressure on the mounting plate to change the frequency without having to open the holder each time to change the frequency.
All that changed after the first year as a novice, when there was a rule change, allowing VFO, variable frequency oscillator transmission, and my money was spent on a VFO for my transmitter! And what a change! Being able to tune up and down the bands opened up my tiny novice bands, and I was able to communicate with other hams around the world much easier than ever!
But the best type of frequency control is the 'synthesized' oscillator, and it still uses a quartz crystal to stabilize and control the oscillator, and allows for channelized switch controlled frequency selection.
Technology has advanced, but crystals will still be used in electronic equipment in order to keep the required source of oscillations needed at the right frequency, and as stable as possible. And even if the crystals are no longer made from natural quartz crystals, but are grown in a lab, the history of their benefits to communication and other electronics, including the health industry, will continue to grow!
we use crystals more than ever. their uses in computing have exploded, there's probably 1 to 3 in the pocket of the average north american at all times, and who knows how many in their home.
@@tsm688 The use of crystals has exploded, as they can also be used as filters as well as in oscillators!
@@tsm688 certainly more than 3, any modern mobile phones has 5 to 7 when counting SAW filters. But modern crystals are all synthetic and the production process is fully automated, nothing to do with this film.
I thought most were already grown in labs because you can control the environment, I've seen this one crystal that was in the shape of a huge cylinder, perfect looking mo inclusions, same with a thick square one, they were grown for NASA or something but they didn't pass the requirements, so they get sold off. My understanding is most electronic crystals were synthetic nowadays.
@@shable1436 they are. you don't have to mess around with finding the right angle because it's the angle you grew it at.
Watching a +75 years old documentary... internet is amazing.
Apparently this is what we are allowed to see ....
@@JongJande Open your eyes if you wish to see more.
@@davidg3944 Rest assured: I have my eyes wide open .... and since decades.
@@davidg3944 Good one!!
Yes all of this inherited equipment and factories that very very old long before any cowboys showed up, and who knows when it was built and by who. War is a great way to sneak something into existence !
So much manual labor on something we now take for granted in modern electronics.
And the film itself. Every title and transition all done with manual tools.
@@8BitNaptime They probably have been making them by machine for many decades now.
Mostly replaced with silicon-based oscillators now, because they're much simpler to make, etc. Still useful technology without which we'd still be reading newspapers for news and studying in person
@@wolfy9005 But not as accurate, hence why crystal oscillators are still in use.
@@wolfy9005 There are MEMS oscillators, but they have had a bit of a scandal when iPhones died when exposed to helium.
It appears my PC motherboard still has crystal oscillators, with the very noticeable thin round can type (32768Hz tuning fork crystal) to keep time.
1958 I was an apprentice at DECCA Navigator. Another apprentice an I were given a job of building Xtal Oscillator assemblies for the DECCA Mk 5 marine navigation system. We measured the resonance and output voltage of each plate before assembling into the module. The clear used was called Araldite, the British version of Eastman 400 glue. We then tested the modules in an Oscillator jig. We delivered each batch to the production Foreman. Later I was a Priduction Inspector. I finished my Apprenticeship as a Prototype Technician to an Engineer. The Engineer was Ken Mantovani, son of Maestro Mantovani, of the Mantovani Orchestra fame.
What do you work for now ?
@@jacobmoonlight5793 That man must be in his 80s at this stage, so hopefully he's retired.
@@nodnodwinkwinkV nah he's probably still working 3 jobs...
@@quoudtenlike many pensionados they are busier than before retirement......😂
@@Baard2000 ha ha well i was commenting on the "new American dream" but yours works too...
I love old documentaries. No BS, just explain.
Introduce, outline, explain, summate, conclude. It was wartime. ainobudygotimfodat
@@thomashughes_teh It's a shame that it took such violence to introduce us to clarity, but maybe there was no other way. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Me too.
@@DAClarkismit galvanized us and we need that now and just maybe there is a way to do it without a war.
They were meant to educate and yes I love them as well! None of them have anything close to "here's a critical concept you need to understand, please see some other video we did" like you get with most edutainment on YT these days
Love these films, what a wealth of info, I had no idea how oscillating crystals were made. Truly fascinating.
How did YT know I'd be incredibly interested in this topic? Nothing in my viewing history would suggest it. I'm convinced YT is reading my subconscious mind. Somehow.
YT is tuned into your frequency. With a quartz rock crystal. It's trying to communicate to you. To warn you about IMPENDING DOOM. AGI IS HERE. ITS PLANNING DEMISE. EPA.....EPA...
It just throws a variety of content at you, hopeing you click on something.
@lilPOPjim *hoping. 👍
Ah that would be one of our skynet matrix overlords disguising itself as a google algorithm
@@Nanocology its a crystal in the holy algorithm computer of YT receiving the ossilations from your brain what it really needs. Its the only part of the YT holy algorithm computer what really does something good. The rest 0f the 99.9999999% of the computers capacity is used for CENSORSHIP!!!!!🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤣🤣🤯🤣🤯🤣🤯🤣
When I was a young engineer in the mid 80's. I developed an TCXO in Thickfilm technology. Afterwards I developed a crystal plating machine.
It’s sad that almost all of the custom frequency US crystal manufacturers are now gone.
Fascinating. If only I could sit and listen to you speak about it.
I solved the energy "crisis" I developed a system that costs around 500$ and is perpetual Free electricity, please look up Wirtz Pump then apply this. I have figured out how to generate electricity using gravity, water and implementing a design called a Wirtz pump if you pump up to a second tank and then pipe it to fall driving the pump its perpetual now offset via chain drive the paddles above the water line and use buckets instead of paddles to mitigate loss if you incorporate rainfall into the top tank you can find nominal values that allow the system to run for the life of the material. you can have free electricity using an old washer motor and this system can be built to spec based on need for high flow heavy weight or simply to run a fridge and lights for 10 years with 500 dollars in materials. I love life
An SC-cut 5th overtone crystal maintained at 90 deg C drives a diy clock I made 10 years ago. In that time it has gained nearly two seconds. That's one part in 158 billion. Quartz is amazing!
Not an expert but at that rate, couldn’t the deviation be explained by gravity differential?
158 million, not billion
That is why we must use a secondary correction in order to keep super accurate time. I spent 30 years in the quartz industry working on low noise, high long term accuracy time bases. To this day, even though retired years ago, I still maintain a respectable lab for fiddling around with time bases.
@@professorx4047 You're right.
Cesium atoms and quartz oscillator are called atomic clocks, and the most accurate man has discovered
Although I was a professional RF Engineer, for very many years, I had never seen this documentary film before. I have designed and used crystal oscillator circuits many times in my life but I had no idea just how many production stages and tests were originally involved in mounting and manufacturing the quartz slices. A great film detailing a piece of technology history.
I wonder how they are made today? There is a company called Rakon that makes them here in new zealand and its all done in a clean room environment, their crystals end up in satellites and all sorts of spacecraft.
@@nzoomed Good question.- the number of manufacturers seems to have decreased over the years and I understand that gold plating the contacts has become almost universal. Modern developments in frequency synthesis and phase lock circuits means there is less demand for discrete frequency crystals, but more demand for the "digital friendly" frequencies that lend themselves to these synthesis schemes. It would be very interesting to see how a modern company makes them.
@@hectorpascalmodern ones are also much smaller.
Those ones that go inside digital watches are pretty tiny.
@@nzoomed Modern manufacturers start with large factory grown crystals instead of the mined natural crystals. Slicing the crystals into thin wafers and grinding them flat is still done more or less manually, basically as shown here. But after that the process is much more automated. No manual fiddling with each crystal to etch it precisely to the right frequency.
@@cogoidyeah, that would be expected. The size of the modern ones is far smaller today, the 16mhz ones I use on my arduino are pretty tiny, seems to be a different form factor compared to the much taller ones I would install in my CB radio, but pcb footprints are identical
I love Xtal's, I even got 'hands on' grinding one with toothpaste for a Gonset 2M rig I was listening to in Jr. High in the mid 70s! Amazing how much work went into making them, and at the time I was getting mine from a cardboard surplus barrel at 'All Electronics' on Vermont in Old Los Angeles in FT-243 (I think they are called) holders for 50 cents or so...
This is peak RUclips. Thanks for sharing!
I'm pretty sure this wasn't produced for RUclips 🙄
Wow, old technology with respect to frequency determination, but darn impressive, plus a lot of work to manufacture.
The same technology is used today. Maybe the machines are a bit more beautiful.
@@ciprianpopa1503 In chip wafers?
@@emilkarpo Many devices still use quartz crystals for clock signal generation, including computers, cell phones and many other devices that have processors. There are also ceramic resonators now, so some devices use those instead. But the crystals are cut in tiny sizes now and put in small metal cases.
Looking back on what seems so simple but laborious, it astounds me that we can figure out a way to take a natural crystal, distill it down so we can pluck a frequency out of the ether, and be able to connect with others around the world. Amazing creatures these human beings!
Love the old machinery!
we still use quartz more than ever. just synthetic quartz now
Wow
This is such a cool video!
So interesting, It's amazing the things that were done with analog processes. It also shows that to be victorious in war your women need fine haircuts, nice outfits, and above all GREAT nails.
Also interesting and telling about just how much industrial capacity the US had, this film is in color. It is amazing how many of these type films were done in color which was fairly expensive at the time and something only a truly great power fitting on all cylinders could afford. My God what we have lost.
you realize that all digital processes are founded on analog processes right? digital is nothing but a number, the step to go from that number to an actual results is analog.
Crystals are still made more than ever too
They're impervious to x-rays, etchants and chromic salts too.
@@tsm688 was there a point there? Are you just being pedantic?
@@gianni_schicchi we never stopped using analog processes
@@BeamRider100Unlike poor Betty.
I absolutely appreciate these historic documentaries. straight simple and fancyless, information easy to understand.
Absolutely amazing! People have no idea how much work goes into what they take for granted.
This is fantastic stuff. These videos are of such high quality.
The crystallographer and chemist from Poland - Jan Czochralski found the way to create mono-crystals setting a cornerstone for today semiconductors development.
This is super-important for silicon crystals used in making chips and transistors. Synthetic quartz crystals however are grown by a very different method.
@@cogoid Imagine superatomic semiconductors.
It`s interesting - how much was a quartz crystal resonator in 1943? I think - tens of dollars because there was loads of hand work . Nowadays they are quite cheap - for example 0.2$ per resonator on 4.43 MHz.
Surely they were very expensive given all the work that goes into this. Even today, high end computer chips, like high end video card GPUs are very expensive, as the clean rooms cost a fortune and then some. And there are many steps, though most or all are automated. Long story short, people are paying over $800 for a higher end computer video card.
I see you are in Europe, PAL.
The fact that someone actually figured this out just amazes me and reminds me how stupid and uncreative I am
I'm in awe of everything I see these days. Living in the future has a way of making us feel stupid. But remember all the stuff demonstrated in this film was the product of hundreds of people failing thousands of times. Then eventually they get it figured out. Your not stupid or uncreative. You just aren't able to recognize all the amazing things you do.
Thank God for white people
@@Xsiondu Yes. The internet has moved our penis-envy from the neighborhood, to worldwide. It is important to remind ourselves it's okay to just be the village idiot, as being world idiot is impossible to achieve.
the other guy who commented ~3mo ago is probably wrong, but yeah like many, many other people will probably also say just try and fail faster. you'll never achieve anything special or reach your dreams just sitting around and thinking or becoming a corporate slave. do something, if it fails it fails. you can deal with the aftermath, well, after. that isn't to say you shouldn't be cautious or ignore the option of doing your due diligence. if you don't know what h2s is you should just google "h2s msds filetype:pdf" before handling or even obtaining it. that being said it is actually something hard to start on, but once you get in the groove you'll get going good. having a jolly time just messing around in a workshop is how new stuff is discovered. though its harder to find something ACTUALLY new here in 2024, it isn't impossible. honestly the way these crystal's properties were first discovered is probably just some dude electrocuting rocks to see what would happen or just hitting them and noticing they make electric arcs.
The fun part is that the more information like this you absorb, the more smart and creative you get!
These ladies showed up to win a war with style on point.
Love it.
@OreoBambino let's hope she did not work while pregnant.
This was almost around the time the cumulative effects of radiation were being understood. I hope they were rotated before it was too late (they probably weren't because nuclear research was hush-hush-tight-lips).
@@OreoBambino Looks like the x-ray machine had a lead enclosure, she was probably fine
@@OreoBambino By those times they knew a lot. Go figure that she was tracking the diffraction position maxima of those crystals, if you know what that is, and you bragg about the machine not being shielded.
I think the local manicurist was very busy leading up to the filming.
The US had a lot of trouble getting sufficient quartz of good enough quality to meet war needs. So Bell Labs devised a process for making synthetic quartz, making most of the work shown in this film obsolete.
The film shows them using the old fashioned pre-war FT holders. Several manufacturers came up with gold plating the contacts on to the plate and encapsulating in glass - thus very much improving performance and making the rest of the work shown in this film obsolete.
Neato, thnx for the extra infos 🙂
HC6U and HC18U spring to mind.
Japan did even more in the early 1980s.
I can't believe they are scrubbing, washing, lapping, etching, tuning and repeating this process with every handmade crystal !
Absolutely incredible assembly process shown, so much effort went into the entire process ^^ that was only 1 lady !
I worked on an RAF site in the 1980's. There was a Cyrstal factory still making Crystals pretty much like this video. I think you could order a crystal of a specific frequency. I am not sure how much longer the facility operated it must have been close to end of life even then.
Ah! Was thinking of that place as I watched. Good old REU 132 shed, 1968-69.
It was salford electrical instruments in heywood, we grew and manufactured oscillators just like the video
In the early 80s surface mount xtal components from synthetic crystals grown in autoclaves started coming out of Japan.
That is a phenomenal process. The amount of research had to be staggering!
Don't know how this got onto my algorithm along with a handful of others, but I ended up actually watching this
And you have to admit along with a fascinating process the women had great outfits, nice hairdos, and above all great nails.
Perfect nails for manual work. Yep!
They must have gotten all spruced up because they knew the filming day was on that day.
Yeah and I shared it, because it's really interesting.
What a marvelous (literally) video! What we owe to the scientists and technicians who developed and refined these processes is immeasurable (unlike the crystal frequencies...).
Your video made the whole process crystal clear. Thank you.
I did this back in 1953, many of the workers had breathing and skin problems due to the residues of crystals and acids.
I'm sure. 🫂 ❤ Hope u r well. 😊
sounds about right
The fact that a plastic holder was used when immersing the crystals in the etching solution, highlights that "solution" is hydrofluoric acid, since many plastics are impervious to hydrofluoric acid which would eat away at most metals & glass. Even a little bit gets on you, and you're likely to have very negative effects down the road, if not within hours, because it soaks all the way to the bone. A tiny drop on one's skin, might not even be felt, which makes it even more dangerous, as every second it isn't wiped, washed, or rinsed off, means more penetrates into one's body.
The dangers of working with hydrofluoric acid were already well known by 1943, when this film was produced, so I wonder, if they left off their gloves or other personal protection just for the film's aesthetics? I saw a lot of the women workers in their Sunday best w/ fingers full of jewelry, ready to be caught in machinery, touch electrical contacts, or trap chemicals between their jewelry & their skin. Were some even told to doll themselves or their hands up just for the film, or was such blatant disregard for safety just another day on the job?
Chromic acid is no joke! Especially when used in open containers filled nearly to the brim and virtually no ppe
Some of the best examples of what wasn't used are to be found in the Earth Man and Science Museum in Sofia Bulgaria and specimens from the same collection are also to be found in the Paris Geology museum.
wow that was amazing. such a complex process. Love the hairdryer scene.
Those process opened the doors to microélectronics chips manufacturing process.
No. Lapidary processes did.
@@MrShobar well thats just a part of the process of making silica wavers, as seen in the video
@@schnaps1790 There is no such a thing as silica wavers.
@@ciprianpopa1503 you just watched a video about them, a wafer is just a thin slice of something and quarz is just silica (SiO²)
@@schnaps1790 Sure, but you were supposed to refer to silicon wafer, which is synthetically grown silicon, just cut perpendicular to the growth axis. These are natural quartz crystals.
WOW - what an education. THANK YOU. - In my apprenticeship I had to save for my first crystal. Now I know why. - An AWA trainee from Ashfield 1970
I've been right past that factory, many years ago.
Wizard: Back in my day, we used magic lenses to tune magic power crystals to precise magic frequencies that let us hear thoughts from around the world.
The attention to detail your crews put in is second to none, truly awesome work.
Marcel VOGEL pioneered the quartz Crystal chips for IBM (had 32 patents we know of)
At Vogel's February 14, 1991 funeral, IBM researcher and Sacramento, California physician Bernard McGinity, M.D. said of him, "He made his mark because of the brilliance of his mind, his prolific ideas, and his seemingly limitless creativity."[3]
Thanks for the citation
This piques my interest in seeing modern production techniques for these crystals - seeing how they compare.
Came her to post same. Would be interesting to see how they're made today's tech. Prolly a boring 5 minute video tho. 😂 just a machine spraying micro-gold on man-made silicon atoms. Have u ever seen/heard how they're arranging single atoms of graphene? Crazy tech these days!
These old-school instructional videos are top-notch in disseminating information. Concise. Masculine no-nonsense tone. 🤌
Grandpa stories. ❤
Awesome to see this first or whatever hand. Thank you so much for posting.
Who was the intended audience for this film? The first two minutes are so general that it initially appears to be made for the general public. However, the beginning is followed by 40 minutes with so much detail that I would not be surprised if some of the information was classifed in 1943 when this was made. It is great for historical electronics, though.
Being in a signal unit in the late 80's I would guess signal officer training. Some of this information was still pertinent for older equipment, though that stuff was being phased out.
Employee orientation.
*If anything was classified in this film, which there is not, the entire film would require a War Department classification banner at the beginning and end. Which there are not.*
Perhaps engineering students, or college kids in geology101.
Nobody in modern times hardly teach to kids using these films, when everybody has powerpoint?
I had plenty of these in A school and C schools.
It's better how it's done nowadays.
Wow!! Amazing...testing , retesting and testing again. What care and precision.
Awesome mini doc mate. I was captivated the entire time. I just love this stuff. Can’t get enough learning.😊 Thank you for sharing.😊 10 out of 10 from me.😊
Between the Chemicals, X-ray exposure, unguarded saws, etc. Not a scene in this movie could be duplicated today! OSHA would shit a brick!
Don't forget the all white male work force that would turn heads in Human resources.
Wooooww safety standards were different 80 years agoo, reaallyy????
@@BeesKneesBenjaminyo mama
no gloves, nothing😂
And that music🙈
Amazing the "millionth of an inch girls" are testing frequency and etching with acid while very nicely dressed and painted nails. Nothing wrong with that at all, I just think it's amazing.
They're also likely dressed up more than usual for the cameras
And that etching solution is probably hydrofluoric acid. They're being pretty carefree around a compound that can melt your bones.
@@Superkuh2 Hydroflouric acid is also used by dentists. Crazy.
@@SwapPartLLC What's a dentist?
@@sclogse1 Tooth doctor.
We used to back in the day pull the crystal chips in our radios and switch them giving us a unique channel. This works if it the same in sender and receiver.
Please say more about switching
You can do it with CB radios too... "private" channels. Well, at least private to other CBers.
Our switch the tx and rx around and moves the the frequency up 455khz
So say you were on ch 22 which is 27.225 the you would end on 27.680 if the radio has high side injection.
In my early ham years, I was a frequent customer for ICM. And when I went to work for the GOVT, and when I was in charge of various radio systems, once again I gave ICM tons of GOVT business. Wonderful days!
My dad was a ham and built all his own gear, I remember him wet sanding a crystal to get it to the frequency he wanted.
One must mention Anton J. Chmela when speaking of tuned crystal oscillators. As he pioneered there use back in the day. "Anton J. Chmela, the founder of General Quartz Laboratories, a manufacturer of quartz crystal oscillators for communications use during World War II".
Born 1904 in Austria-Hungary and died 2004 in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
He lived to be 100 years old and outlived three wives. He claimed that his knowledge of crystals gave him his youthful vigor, as he always carried specially cut and tuned crystals in him pockets at all times.
I actually did this on strontium titanate crystals for a summer job back in the 90's for superconductor crystal research... We didn't have the oil tank and polarizer, we looked for marks on the crystal which gave away the orientation to a degree. Then we'd mount it to a block and hit it with an X-ray source and then onto some polaroid film, and leave the room. Shoot it for a few minutes, tehn come back back and pop the film out and see the orientation. From there you'd know where to adjust it and grind a flat on it, reshoot it to see if you're still accurate, then send it off to the wire saws to be turned into disks.
It was an interesting job.
@@BrianFortner I really didn't have a job title... that was literally 30 years ago. Company was Coating and Crystal Technology LLC in Cadogan PA.
I was summer help as an engineering student so I got into all kinds of stuff.
@@BrianFortner In all honestly what it boiled down to was they did some pretty neat stuff and a friend of mine worked there in the machine shop. Since I was going to school for engineering, he mentioned it to his boss, who met and he realized that I understood what he was working on so he turned me loose on some projects. I learned a lot that summer, some good some bad. Overall it was worth it.
I used to work for a company that was a DOD contractor. When we had to ship stuff, we would seal the boxes exactly as shown at the end of the video. We used a tape machine to moisten adhesive on paper tape, which was placed over every seam of the box. We did not have to stamp the tape seams, though, as the adhesive was strong enough to damage the box surface when removed.
Amazing- the amount of resources a country has to orchestrate to run & win a war. This and another video I watched, the manufacturer of artillery shell tubes, are just single examples of the thousands of things a country has to produce, produce well, and produce quickly. Just amazing.
War boosts GDP.
@@andybaldman Not necessarily - not when a large part of your workforce is now in a trench somewhere. The economy is shifted from civilian to war materiel, but costs remain, possibly leading to massive debt. Look at England after WW2...
@@davidg3944 Look at every US war since WW2.
Wars make $$$ for the world,'s elite. They're orchestrated.
I've done a few crystal oscillator sets in my career. Maybe once the type in the video. I repaired CB radios and scanners that had 3-12 channels that required separate xtals for each channel in the 1960s and 1970s. The CB radios need a pair, one for transmit, the other for the receive section. My company, Radio Shack, who sold these radios started making xtals for these sets as well as their own brand of wire and cable here in the US. However, the QC in that xtal Lab was not up to speed as some of the xtals dropped lower in frequency outside of the band tolerance over time. As if the equipment was bought and the experience needed to produce these xtals was lacking. The lab manager kept denying these claims and the store managers got the xtals from another source before the PLL units were sold with all of the frequencies, bells and whistles you want to monitor.
Do you remember when those super old electronics had that red liquid inside of a little bulb looking thing??
What was that?
It’s amazing what was accomplished with equipment that looks like it was cobbled together from a trip to the hardware and cooking supply store! Different times.
I used to know an old gentleman named Harry Boneham who had worked at ERA (English Racing Engines). He had a lathe from the 1800’s in his basement that ran off an overhead shaft. He did world class machining in that basement.
Well..there was a war on. Make do and mend.
There's something appealing about tools you can look at and understand.
In the highest tech, most advanced labs, there will always be some such equipment.
The 1946 Quartz Crystal textbook ie Bible by a Raymond Heising says they made 10 million of type FT 241 type alone from the Fall of 1941 to end of 1944..
That text is 562 pages if you want the math and engineering of quartz crystals. Graphs crystal cuts.
Heising was a radio research engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories. That's were much if this started.
On page 494 it says they use 80 crystals per army tank and it was FM radios they used.
All those "making crystals" was done all over the Midwest often in dinky towns. Oklahoma Kentucky Indiana etc. Also war effort vacuum tube factories too. A old neighbor in Indiana worked at one.
I saw this film back in the late 1960s.
The Crystal textbook here was bought at the TRW swap meet in 1987. It has an embossed seal on some inside pages Simon-Ramo Library. Embossed like an engineer uses
In that era they use a physical crystal for each frequency ie channel just like a 50s thru mid 70s cb radio did. Ie before there was a way with digital electronics to use one crystal per radio. That is why they had to make so many different crystals.
I think the ww2 crystal cases are Bakelight
Thanks for the insight!
Amazing! I have a few of these crystals, but I never knew that it was that complicated to make them.
WHAAAAAT?! This is incredible!
Rhetorical question: 1.) How did this even get discovered? 2.) How long did it take to figure out each step, and 3.) 1.) how long did it take to mechanize each step so it's a large-scale factory production?!
Philips worked with NRL in D.C.developing Xray diffraction, Philips pioneered the science, now used in all industry, and products testing, manufacturing, schools, Pharma, steel, everything. Philips bailed on Analytical Xray several years ago,
Thanks so much for this. Utterly fascinating and educational. I really love "how it works" type video.
The size of these Xtals are around the size of a complete modern radio, I remember using these way back in the day :)
Absolutely fantastic, the crystal sorting process is absolutely beautiful, something about the lighting in the initial sorting segments being much darker than professional photography really puts into perspective just how lovely quartz looks, I'd pay to sort through so many large crystals
One of my customers bought the outdated US national reserve of natural quartz crystals for a song. Made them into gemstones.
The father of a friend of mine did the same with broken or flawed YAG laser crystals -bought a huge haul of them for a song.
And in doing so, he became a saboteur. 🤣😂
Which song or was it an original tune?
And that’s why ICM went out of business? They could not get the raw materials? Is it Bowmar crystals who bought the supply out?
@@DanSpotYT It's a figure of speech.
I really enjoyed this video. What a great show of what people can do if they really work together.
It would be interesting to see a video of the present day manufacturing technique
First step is to put feed solution with a little lye in an autoclave with carefully oriented seeds on platinum wire. Then wait a couple months. The cutting is much less measurement intensive but into far smaller pieces each step of the way. After orienting the cuts, there's no testing or adjustment until they get packaged in surface mount casing and are tested completely automatically. If they fail, they go straight to the garbage; no re-lapping, x-ray or any other kind of adjustment. If they pass some get dropped into through-hole packages, but 95%+ are surface mount these days. The labor involved takes minutes instead of hours from crystal to packaging, and each synthetic crystal, much smaller than the bars at 9:25, is cut into about 90 wafers, each of which yields around 6 blanks for one finished component each, compared to maybe 30 slices for those bars.
👍👌👏 Oh WOW, simply fantastic! What an effort this was. Thanks a lot for uploading and sharing.
Best regards luck and especially health to all involved people.
This was so helpful to watch. Oscillators!
It Hertz me to agree.
@@ZilogBob Documentaries like this get me Amped up.
@@LydellAaron That's almost revolting.
Some consider such Docos as a _grinding_ experience.
But I _lapped_ it up.
@@BrassLock Thank you for your polished comment.
Quartz inspector seems like fun, dunking my arm into mineral oil all day
My heart and gratitude go to the many hard working and diligent women employed in these production operations; most were routinely exposed to poorly shielded x-rays, carcinogenic hexavalent chromium, volatile fluorine based etchants, and aromatic solvents we now know to be intensely carcinogenic. Their efforts cost them dearly down the road in the form of cancers and internal organ diseases, but without them the war would not have been a success. War is hell, and everyone suffers from it, but few know to acknowledge these noble women for their sacrifices. With a heavy heart and a tearful smile I thank these great women ancestors of mine for their service and their sacrifice.
But they looked great doing it, dressed up, hair doos, long painted nails, flowers in hair, and corsets. Obviously they knew filming was going to happen that day
@@shable1436 yep they absolutely were told and encouraged to wear their sunday best. it was a wartime propaganda film and to be seen as anything less than perfect would have brought great shame to the company and by extension their nation. I think a few operations even may have been told to not wear PPE (gloves, face shields) that would have obscured their glamorous features, too, considering the few shots of men usually have the men wearing PPE for less involved operations.
so well said , many people depreciate the past efforts thta lead to our comfort.
1:10 Quarz has been used for more than decoration for a long time.
For example powdered quarz has been used as a flux in metallurgy for centuries.
Great Video
Blessings From Aberystwyth , Wales
Way back in 1970, a communications site I was at, used a frequency standard where the crystal temperature was kept stable by using an oven and Naphthalene. The oven was operated around the melting point of the Naphthalene, keeping the temperature stable. Then rubidium came along...
Now we just have GPS lol.
X-ray crystallography, I had know idea.....cheers.
Thank you for this, I was thinking the other day how much id like to see historical education. Instant Subscribe
My Japanese radio has 3-4 different crystals in sealed little boxes. The front has a slot that accepts them on a larger box that goes in the slot.
Can't be more technical, it's the only one I've seen from overseas and it's all screwed shut and half covered in brass contact blades.
Wonderful vid. Loved the kitchen spoons slopping the grinding compound. And scrubbing the crystals with a good old toothbrush. Course would all be done in a cleaneoom now.
The shear volume of manual labor required for manufacture is nothing short of astonishing. It would be very interesting to know the cost (in today's dollars and when manufctured) of each unit.
About $50 in 1945, a small fortune for a MIL-STD crystal.
Its absolutely amazing to see such quality control and pride in your work. These were the times when America was at its greatest
What a great video, no wonder crystals used to be expensive.
The final steps are so tedious it's almost painful to watch. Nowadays an HC-49 crystal is 10 cents. Used with a PLL, virtually any frequency can be synthesized.
@@d.jensen5153 The highest performance crystals are still expensive today. A simple 10 MHz oscillator from Wenzel costs a few hundred dollars.
Hard to imagine how much time, energy and understanding had to go into the production of these... and that was back in the 40's. As much as we know now, it's still insane to look back and see how brilliant people had to be back then for us to be where we are now. They oftentimes had many hurdles to jump, but they always found new ways to do things, even if they weren't the best... they worked.
Did you know that 4 quartz makes a gallon and ten gallon makes a hat.
A pint of clear water weighs a Pound and a Quarter. ..Imperial
Like collecting ivory in Alabama. Becasuse the Tusk'a'loosa
Badum tish!
A Ten Gallon Hat sure makes a cool Gunslinger.
lol Paul 😂
Truly fascinating. Unbelievable how much labor was applied.
I am flabbergasted at the amount of work that went into the manufacturing of crystals !
Staggering !
And to be sawed to a 1/16 of an inch !
Just amazing !
But to think those Brothers stumbled upon the Piezoelectric effect of crystals, too is amazing !
And to know how many times this was used, is mind blowing !
If you simply throw any white Quartz rock against another one in the dark, you will get a brilliant display of the electric potential in the rocks.
@@kevinsellsit5584
That too, is interesting !
I wonder if you had a Radio receiver close by, if you could hear the spark from the collision ?
I'm guessing not unlike lightning, it is sending out energy on multiple Frequencies simultaneously ?
If you know Morse Code, and could hold the stones, one in each hand, you might be able to communicate with someone in close proximity ?
I wonder just how far those sparks could be heard ?
Wonder if this is how German physicist Heinrich Hertz got started ? ⚡🤔
Lol...!
@@sleeve8651 The discharges will be really inconsistent but they will send a wide range of a random spectrum, just like static or a lightning or a bad brush in a motor. I remember I figured out you had to cap coax splitters by noticing the tv went fuzzy when I used a cordless drill right under it and only there
@@sleeve8651 It would work for morse code within visual range (wear your safety glasses). You get brilliant sparks every time. I would assume any radio transmission would be chaos.
Nice corn bread
My Father, the town's TV repair man, gave me a Radio Shack P-Box crystal radio kit, in 1967..for my 4th Grade entry in the school Science Fair. (I did a prism for 2nd Grade.)..it worked like a charm.
that is an entirely different form of crystal! :)
Oh! It is a very time-consuming technology. 73 ! Thanks for downloading this.
10-4
Gotta love that these people are lowering crystals into highly corrosive etchants, without gloves... yeek.
In my schools electronics lab we wouldn't use gloves when etching PCB's, never thought about it at the time, it prob wasn't nasty enough that you couldn't just wash it off in the sink if you ever did get it on you, we didnt and i haven't ever heard of stories of chemical burns from doing that in my school, tho i did have a mate gas himself after mixing cleaning chemicals when mopping up at his work
Pull up RUclips videos of factory workers in China; not much has changed.
Out of sight out of mind.
the level of detail, craft(wo)manship, and labor made me realize my work pales in comparison, but their work is an inspiration
great documentary. Such a huge number of people involved! I hope that all these "acid etching baths" are not made with fluorhydric acid given the bare hands of the ladies...
Of course it is and you gotta love the chromium bath also
its impressive to see where we come from.
Incredible manual labor of those incredible gals...
I watched the whole thing
Wonder if they any shielding against the xray machines they were using in 8 hr shifts, or how many workers came down with silicosis or other lung conditions. Not a lot of reperators on display.
also submerging up to your forearms in that mineral oil, hopefully it wasn't a carcinogenic oil like PCB oil.
Thank you, this was a great watch!
Woah X-ray operator was standing next to next to X-ray machine while it was taking X-rays!🤯 well at least she was wearing a lead vest for some protection 🤷🏻♂️
Better than being one of the Radium Girls at least, I hope.
Yep! I noticed that at several points! It's scary knowing what we know today. They almost certainly got cancer later on. The chromic acid cleaning solution is incredibly carcinogenic, too. And the etchant solutions damage bones and muscles invisibly.
Incredible. Thanks bunches for this informative video.
And this was just one tiny aspect of the war effort. 🤯
Narrator turning the pages on his sheet is hilarious
Yeah - why not just use an iPad?
It appears that this is the wrong crystal I was looking for, good day.
These fellows made quarz crystals go to war.
If you are looking for fellows going to war on crystal meth, then look at the other side of the frontline, because that's what the Nazis did.
Look up "Pervitin" or "Panzerschokolade".
Move along, move along...
Very informative, nice video from the good old days
Some day our ancestors will be telling stories of us in their caves. How we could fly like birds and make rocks talk to each other.
Descendants, not ancestors; but, yeah. And many of our contemporaries are nearly there already, save that they have cellular/smart phones to (inadequately) express their amazement.
@@herbertbates4655 sorry 😂
We don't fly like birds though... We fly with noisy inefficient propellers in stupid metal planes that crumple into a heap and catch on fire every time they stall. We used to at least coast around on the trade winds in airships until the oil tycoons blew up the Hindenburg. But I think birds would be offended if they heard you say that.
How we made torches wich looked like lava and slept in beds of water. How we wore shoes made from the bellies of the beasts of the swamp and walking canes out of the tusks from the beasts of the savannah. Our garbs were white as snow and we rolled on wagons that could jump.
At the rate we're going, that's lamentably ineed very likely.
We would open an FT-243 and rub pencil lead on one side of the quartz to shift the frequency slightly. Sometimes we lapped them. Honestly didn't realize so much hand work involved in making them back then.
We truly do stand on the backs of giants 😮
Ancient man lived up to 900 years and were roughly 10 feet tall! The atmosphere was different and there were giants in those days!
The Bible knows all!
Thank you. That was absorbing.