Sometimes inventions, even without finding a place in the world, push other inventors to improve themselves, or to come up with better technologies. Let's look back in 1936 and see how John Sargrove invented the first conveyor belt for making radios. It was called - ECME, which means: equipment for the production of electronic circuits.
While at British Tungsram Radio Works Ltd, John Sargrove experimented with the idea of making chains by spraying metal onto Bakelite. This process allowed John to create resistors, capacitors, and inductors, and the electrical connections between them, on a single bakelite blank.
A new factory outside London receives a new robotic machine that takes a piece of plastic from one end and prints out printed circuits from the other end at a rate of three pieces per minute. (Someone calculated and published the data in Mechanix Illustrated in 1948 - it would take about 2,000 workers to do the same job manually).
To obtain a finished receiver, it remained only to insert lamps and capacitors into the slots.
The 21 meter long conveyor consisted of a series of 20 individual machines, each with a different task. The progress of the operations could be observed through the windows. Special blocks of "memory" protect each process, stopping operations if one of the machines fails, and reporting the location of the breakdown.
But … technology has stepped forward, the Americans have learned to massively print circuit boards themselves. John Sargrove tried to enter the Indian market, but there, too, a large order for radio stations by the Indian government was canceled in 1947, which led to the closure of Sargrove Electronics Ltd.
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