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Fragile: Guided Missile Parts Inside!

What! Mil-spec Sylvania/Philips tubes labelled ‘FRAGILE‘? You cannot be serious! These tough little critters can withstand blistering temperatures of over 200°C, operate at 80,000 feet altitude (the edge of space), survive 500G impact acceleration (equivalent to the ‘Blackbird’ SR-71 spy plane hitting a mountain at Mach 3) and are immune to high doses of hard (neutron and gamma) radiation: just what exactly did Sylvania think the United States Postal Service were going to do to them!? Shoot them into the Sun? But joking aside, the fading print on this battered brown carton of one hundred vintage subminiature tubes tells a fascinating tale of where and when they were made and where they were destined to go…

To begin, printed in large black lettering on the top left hand corner of the box is the tube type (6112), date of manufacture (1/86) and batch number. Just below is what appears to be an address: EMPORIUM PA 15834. This is the address of the factory where the 6112 tubes were manufactured—the Sylvania’s Emporium plant in Pennsylvania. Below the larger text is stamped another address: 1025 Westminster Drive, Williamsport, PA 17701. This was the location of Sylvania’s advanced automated tube testing facility. Incidentally, many years later Hughes Aircraft Company, founded by the eccentric, billionaire, maverick aviator Howard Hughes, acquired ownership of the Williamsport premises.

After testing, the tubes were shipped out to their customer, the Defense Depot Ogden in Utah. This sprawling site served the United States Army, supplying food and provisions (including electronic components) for the WW2 effort, and later, the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. Within its vast warehouses there must have been many, many thousands of cartons, a staggering quantity of vacuum tubes, numbering in the millions. The cartons remained in storage until the mid 1990s when the depot closed and the tubes were auctioned or sold off as military surplus. The cartons soon found their way into the hands of various tube vendors and tube equipment manufacturers, such as Groove Tubes, Seymour Duncan and Effectrode—these tiny tubes are a vital component within our Fire Bottle booster and Mercury fuzz pedals.

And so their journey continues, possibly taking them to the beer-stained floor of a John Verity blues gig, David Gilmour’s Astoria recording studio, the 2,000 year old amphitheatre in Pompeii, or maybe onto that killer new pedalboard you’ve always dreamt of…

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2 COMMENTS

John C. December 18, 2014 at 02:35:45 Log in to Reply

As robust as the NOS JAN tubes are, I can recall seeing one roll off a shop bench and shatter when it struck the floor.Assuredly, it was traveling well below Mach-1 when it landed.Luckily, replacements were quite affordable in the early 80s.

Phil December 18, 2014 at 11:06:29 Log in to Reply

It happens. I suppose it depends how they fall...

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