On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 09:02:45 -0800, Jim Stewart
wrote:

Yesterday I was trying to recount a story I heard years
ago. It was something like... a US company makes an
incredibly small drill, drills a hole in something, sends
it to their Swiss/German counterparts to show it off,
Counterparts send the part back with the hole tapped and
a screw in it.

Does anyone know the story and is it true?

The version my father (instrumentation designer/builder
for Dow Chemical) told me (in the late '50s) was:

US company draws fine wire that they are very proud
of. The send it to a Swiss rival who send it back
with a hole drilled through. (I seem to remember my
dad saying lengthways, but when I asked him recently
he said that it was just crossways. This, for me, adds
some credibility to the story.)

His other fine wire story is more related to some
other threads seen here recently: A co-worker came
into the instrumentation lab and asked my dad for
a piece of the smallest wire he had. My dad reached
into his desk drawer, pulled out a corked test tube,
and handed it to him. The guy says, "There's nothing in
there." My dad takes him over to a dissection microscope
and shows that there is indeed a one inch piece of very
fine wire in there. Dad says, "Now, what do you want
to do with this wire?" "Oh, I need to clean out the nozzle
of this can of spray paint." My dad went to the boxes
of music wire on the shelf and selected one from the middle
of the range and snipped him off a piece. So, the lesson is:
specify by real requirements, not by asking for the limits
of possibility.


--
--Pete
"Peter W. Meek"
http://www.msen.com/~pwmeek/