In message <[email protected]>, Bob Camp writes:
>Early in the WWII era, quartz blanks were not commonly etched after >begin ground / polished to frequency. This left debris on the surface >of the blank. The net result was that the resonators failed after >a period of time in the field, especially under damp conditions. >The problem got so bad that it actually threatened the ability to >communicate in 1942. A fairly high level team looked into the issue >and etching of blanks (and a few other mods) were made a mandatory >part of all crystals suppled to the government. The story is slightly more interesting than that: Blileys crystals were almost totally without these problems, but they wouldn't tell why that might be. In the end the government put a lot of pressure on Bliley to squeeze out the manufacturing secret. The secret was etching. To keep it secret, Bliley had called it something along the lines of "X-Grind" and not applied for a patent. The Government forced Bliley to share the etching secret without giving any compensation, and the Blileys were bitter about that for the rest of their lifes. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [email protected] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
