"whit3rd" wrote in message
...
On Wednesday, July 6, 2011 6:27:00 PM UTC-7, Arfa Daily wrote:

However, just because a design is 50 years old, and was 'elegant' in its
concept, that does not make it necessarily 'good', and by today's
standards,
a design that purports to be an extremely accurate timepiece, but which
runs
at an incorrect speed when the batteries are replaced, probably
legitimately
counts as being 'crap'.

Not really. The Accutron power supply was specifically a stable Hg cell,
and it isn't 'replace' that makes it run awry, it's 'substitute
nonstandard
supplies' that causes the issue. There's only so much compensation you
can do with a total semiconductor complement of one transistor.

Your correction is not correct. The mercury cells did start out at slightly
higher voltage. It a period of operation (several days I believe) until the
voltage fail to its stable point.