Electric Taster

Westinghouse last week demonstrated in Manhattan an electric fruit taster. The inventor, Richard C. Hitchcock, Westinghouse electronic engineer, originally built the device to measure the minute" variations of currents which flow through radio, photoelectric and other vacuum tubes. It records the action of one-millionth of an ampere, a force about one-tenth the "wing power" of a house fly. The principle involved is the one Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) discovered 133 years ago when he placed two pieces of dissimilar metal in an acid solution: that an electric current circulates between the metals.

While Engineer Hitchcock was sitting at lunch in his laboratory recently, "it suddenly occurred to me that an ordinary apple contained a certain amount of electrical energy. Out of curiosity I inserted the two dissimilar pins of the recording meter into an apple that was lying on the table. I got the shock of my life when the meter began to register."

Tart fruits register higher microamper-age than sweet fruits on the device, which Westinghouse calls an electrynx. No. 1 pears show 14 microamperes, small pears 9, sweet pears 6. Other fruits: Delicious apple 10, Rome Beauty apple 8, big tart apple 10 1/2, large Sunkist orange 7, ordinary orange 5 1/2, California lemon 19, Italian lemon 15, Florida grapefruit 9, Porto Rico grapefruit 13. The device tastes tea. coffee and other materials with an acid content, provides samplers with a constant gauge of quality.

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