Electrified Condoms
» Marketing
Prophylactic testing must be mighty boring to perform but sounds like it would be fun to watch for few minutes.
The sheathed shafts rotate into an electronic tester that zaps them with 1,800 volts of electricity. If there’s a defect through which a single volt can pass, the machine blinks red, and the condom falls into a reject box. The good ones - more than 97% - are rolled, inserted into wrappers, squirted with lubricant, then sealed and tested again to make sure the packet is secure.
Making condoms is such a sensitive operation that a single speck of dust can cause an imperfection. So workers in separate testing rooms also sample each batch for consistency and strength, inflating the condoms until they explode with party-like pops and stretching them until they snap.
How rubber-growing Thailand became the No. 1 exporter of prophylactic devices in the world.
