Digital Tachometer: Hand-Held Contact Type That Holds Its Reading (Sugiyama, Shimpo, US 4,000,465, 1976)

A hand-held digital tachometer. You press the contact head on its shaft against the end of a turning shaft and push the thumb button; a slotted disk inside chops a light beam into pulses, and the pulses counted in a fixed time, set by a quartz clock, appear in the window as the speed. A latch holds the reading after you take the tachometer away, so you can read it even where you could not see the window while measuring. Result: a contact tachometer that shows revolutions per unit time and keeps the last reading. Source: Y. Sugiyama (Shimpo Kogyo), US 4,000,465 (1976). Unknown: the number of holes, the clock, the gate time and the circuit details. Picture: the patent drawing.