SOURCE: NYTIMES
It Takes a Gadget to Test a Gadget
By SANDEEP JUNNARKAR
Published: October 7, 2004
AT the entrance to the library of the Consumers Union testing center here sits an apparatus that resembles the innards of a piano, but with an angled plank, some rotating levers and strange knobs protruding all around.
As it turns out, the device was built in the 1930's for purposes neither musical nor particularly technical. It tested the wear and tear on socks.
Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, has a museum of sorts filled with some of the unique contraptions it has built since its inception in 1936 - some of it "really, really bizarre stuff," said Evon Beckford, the organization's senior director of electronics.
The sock tester and the other pieces of vintage equipment are the predecessors of the peculiar gadgets Consumers Union still creates to evaluate manufacturers' claims about their products. The Yonkers campus holds 50...
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