Automatic Testing in Telephone 

 Manufacture 



By D. T. ROBB 



(Manuscript received May 8, 1956) 



A general discussion is given on the philosophy behind the development of 

 automatic test facilities and the relationship of this activity to product design 

 and manufacturing engineering. A brief historical discussion of early auto- 

 matic test machines used by the Western Electric Company leads to a sum- 

 mary of design considerations. These considerations are then illustrated by 

 descriptions of the specific techniques used in three automatic facilities of 

 considerable diversity. 



INTRODUCTION 



Many of the parts used in the telephone plant are made in such num- 

 bers that automatic shop testing of them is desirable. The cost of manual 

 testing by suitable personnel is high, and its nature so repetitive and dull 

 that accuracy suffers. Fortunately, in many cases the complexity of the 

 test requirements has matched the state of the art and the business pic- 

 ture well enough to warrant the development of machine methods. It is 

 our purpose in these articles to review the art as it has evolved in the 

 Manufacturing Division of the Western Electric Company, and to de- 

 scribe some of the techniques. This is done with the hope that improve- 

 ments or extensions to other testing or manufacturing problems may be 

 suggested. 



It should be emphasized that the developments treated here and in 

 the other papers^ '^ have required cooperation among testing and manu- 

 facturing engineers in the Western and product design engineers in the 

 Bell Telephone Laboratories. Modifications of design for Western's con- 

 venience, changed methods for translating basic requirements into man- 

 ufacturing test requirements, informal Laboratories suggestions of ap- 

 proaches to manufacturing and testing problems, all are commonplace. 

 The boundaries of the specialists' domains are readily crossed. 



Testing is a process for proving something such as quality of a prod- 



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