An undergraduate laboratory experiment of 35 years ago whose time has yet to come

Summary form only given. An experiment on probability for undergraduate electrical engineering students was devised in 1958, and was met with wide acceptance at the time. It was later realized that the principle employed might find application in the area of precision AC-to-DC transfer instrumentation for the measurement of fluctuating voltage. Since precision transfer devices are still largely analog and because sample values are compared directly with DC levels, thermal transfer devices prove useful for laboratory experimentation