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EARLY TRANSISTOR HISTORY AT MOTOROLA “DAVE ADLEY”S ELECTRIC RUNABOUT” by Ralph Greenburg |
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And so another project was started, this time with the blessing of management. The golf course manager agreed to the loan and said they kept very good records of how many times each cart went out before needing recharging so when they tested the converted cart vs. all the others an accurate comparison would be recorded. After installing the control our tests showed that the cart now would go about twice as far before needing recharging.
The cart was then delivered to Papago and the cart shop promised to put it in normal rotation with the other carts for one month. At the end of the month the Application team that had done the work went over to Papago with great expectations. Unfortunately our hopes were dashed when the manager told us there was no discernable improvement. We all went into shock and demanded to see the records and soon agreed there was no difference in the switch mode vs. the resistor control. This led to a great amount of technical hypotheses of how this was possible since our tests showed great improvement. Everyone had a theory, none of which made much sense.
After we ran out of ideas, the teen-age manager of the cart shop spoke up. He said, "I know why there is no difference". Since he looked like a high school drop out we all gave him an amused smirk, but let him explain. He said, "The carts are so under powered the golfers use only two positions on the speed control--full on or off". So it mattered little what kind of speed control was installed since it was virtually unused. Reluctantly we had to agree with him.
Fortunately the project was not totally worthless since we were able to use the same circuit ideas for other electric vehicles such as forklifts, and sold many semiconductors as a result. But first we made sure the end user really had a need for variable speeds and higher efficiency.
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A Transistor Museum™ History of Transistors Publication COPYRIGHT © 2008 by Jack Ward. All Rights Reserved. http://www.transistormuseum.com/ PAGE 3 |