The World’s Most Punishing Test 📌
A famous dexterity test involves a bunch of metal rods, a bunch of tiny holes, and a pair of tweezers. It was invented by a General Electric employee and could determine whether surgery is for you.
Happy Monday! Here’s another edition of Lesser Tedium, the version of Tedium that doesn’t require fine motor skills. Want to try something more challenging? Subscribe over this way.
Writing is not a field where you need to have particularly strong dexterity—especially since we’re no longer doing this with pens. You put your fingers on the keyboard, remember where you want to press, and boom, you just put a letter into your internet machine.
Perfect, fine. But some fields actually do need fine handiwork, and there needs to be a way to measure for this.
Enter the O’Connor Tweezer Dexterity Test, a tool that people use to show that they can adeptly put small objects into specific places. You need to use a pair of tweezers to grab a number of small pins, which you then put into a small board. If your hands are shaking, or you end up panicking mid-tweeze, maybe you aren’t the best person to solder a motherboard or perform heart surgery.
The test looks somewhat like a cribbage board, except much finer. It was developed in the 1920s by Johnson O’Connor, a former General Electric employee who first gave skills tests to his GE co-workers, including the dexterity test, which was clearly the most popular. These tests, which later became the centerpiece of a research foundation that bears O’Connor’s name, became useful tools to understand a person’s aptitude, including strengths and limitations.
These tests, despite being essentially tweezers, metal rods, and a piece of plastic, sell on Amazon in a similar price range to a Nintendo Switch Lite, a device that is obviously significantly more fun, and also has plenty to teach you about dexterity. But certified tests are certified tests.
If we stand a chance against the robots, I guess we probably need to start passing this test with flying covers.
» Wanna learn more? Check out “A Plethora of Tweezers,” a piece from 2020 that did basically no traffic but was an amazing deep dive into the many ways tweezers get used. Deserves a second chance if you ask me.
More recent stuff by Ernie:
“News of the Monoculture,” an appreciation for MTV News and a discussion about why it was better than it had any right to be.
A piece for Motherboard about Apple bringing Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro to the iPad.
A piece for NEWART about sampling, copyright, and AI-generated music.