re: #76 The Very Reverend Battleaxe of Knowledge

The old black-and-white ones you could just reach in with a pair of needlenose and break the little glass teat in the middle of the pins that they originally drew the vacuum through. You’d hear the air whistle in but it was perfectly safe.

The three-gun color tubes had a much wider neck and a plastic cover over the whole end, so it made it more difficult. The later one-gun inline tubes I don’t know about.

This was back in the ’60s, and the tube I am pretty sure was a three-gun color CRT.

CRTs are going the way of the buggy whip, so that particular danger of implosion and shattered glass everywhere will fade into history. The newer flat screens (LED, LCD, etc) have a different environmental hazard. I might have read somewhere that at least one company has proposed reclaiming the rare earth metals from them for reuse, but the cost of reclamation now is far above the market price of indium and the other metals. Most of those metals right now come from China.

Speaking of which, on Monday our class trip visited a manganese processing plant near here. There were sacks of manganese “briquettes” everywhere. The plant takes manganese extracted in a neighboring county, grinds it into a powder, and compresses the powder into briquette-sized pieces for transport.

The place smelled strongly of powdered metal. The workers did not wear masks, and the paper masks we were given were ineffective. Fortunately, we didn’t stay in that part of the plant very long.