As we noted last night, we’re trying to land a breaking story this morning that’s taking some time to confirm. In the meantime, we were fortunate that Carnegie Mellon University professor Dave Touretzky sent us this fun item.
It appears someone has scrapped a bunch of E-meters. How do we know? The meter movements are available for $5 each at All Electronics.
The item description says “125 DC Microampere = full-scale. High-quality 6″ wide DC panel meter. Solid plexiglass enclosure, 6″ wide x 4.25″ oval. Removed from equipment.”
The “Rise-Set-Fall-Test” markings are unique to Scientology’s E-meter. The markings aren’t the only unusual thing about this meter. As detailed on my “Secrets of the E-Meter” page, the meter uses an undamped “taut band” movement designed to produce a specified amount of bounciness, per Scientology’s specifications. Auditors are trained to interpret the needle movements, so you have to have some bounce in order to produce phenomena for the auditor to interpret. You can’t locate those sneaky BT’s with a bounceless meter.
After an informant bought one of these movements and let me know about the item, I contacted All Electronics to find out how many they still had in stock. They had 67. My informant, who wishes to remain anonymous, is fully aware of the significance of the meter, and is considering some ironic artistic uses for it, like the image above (reproduced with permission).
So where did this surplus come from? Did Scientology scrap a bunch of their old meters? Did they unload some parts inventory from the E-meter repair shop at Gold Base? Another possibility is that a vendor was getting rid of back stock, but such a specialty item would probably only be fabricated when an order came in, so there would not be dozens of extras collecting dust in some wog warehouse.
The Church of Scientology lost a PR battle when it could no longer block private E-meter sales on eBay. But having the face of their sacred lie detector show up in a junk electronics catalog is a new low for them — one more drop of humiliation in the flood that is eroding Scientology these days.
Thanks for that, Dave. And we think we might have an answer to your question. At the blog Possibly Helpful Advice, a document was posted recently suggesting that all Scientologists are under pressure to turn in their pre-GAT II meters, books, and course packs. Could it be that a few enterprising folks are trying to get a few bucks from their scrapped E-meters rather than turn them in to the org?
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Posted by Tony Ortega on March 20, 2014 at 10:00
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