Chair wear simulator

In one of my many jobs over the years, I worked at the Food Physics lab in the General Foods Research Center in Tarrytown NY. One of our lab's missions was to develop quantitative measurements of 'mouthfeel' which is pretty much what it sounds like...how if feels to eat something. One of the tools that was built was a mechanism to determine 'crunchiness' of various cereal formulations. It was a pair of dentures with a linkage that attached to our Instron strain test machine. Literally a fake mouth. (it did not work as we hoped, in the end it was simpler to just use a cylindrical test probe moving into a cup of flakes and milk.)

That was a really fun and challenging job; unfortunately all the research we were doing was being farmed out to the various subsidiary companies after American Tobacco bought GF and I ended up laid off.

Jello Pops were invented in the lab next door, and I was a participant in a company-wide search for just the right strain of rice to make Minute Rice. Every Friday I got a big 2l beaker full of freshly cooked rice that I had to do three different tests on. Sadly ,just as I left we got the task of testing a bunch of entemanns coffee cake formulations...each test only used a couple of inches, so the rest of it was part of lunch :-)

Can't complain though, I ended up (on the basis the I'd taken some fortran courses in College) writing the user front end to digitizing our Instron test bed, which had previously been analog-only. One of the things that got me to my eventual career in IT...

Chair wear simulator - photo