Probably would have worked for some of the minor smoke escapes. Unfortunately we on occasion had major smoke releases..
In the mid 1980's R&D released a new product and turned the sales department loose on the building market. The New York sales staff was particularly efficient and thus a major percentage of these units were sold and being installed in the New York Region in which the set-up and troubleshooting of the new stuff (as well as training of the field hourly personnel in doing the same), just happened to fall into the lap of the New York Regional Field Engineering Department and more specifically the New York Regional Field Engineer - the 'department' consisted of one person but the business card looked impressive. Keep in mind that the reason companies have Field Engineering Departments is because the other Engineering department wouldn't recognize their product if they sat on it (but it sure looked good on paper.)
What R&D had done was take a cpu control that they had been using in another field (specifically medical testing) and repurposed it to control vertical transportation equipment by redesigning the I/O section and writing new software (or re-writing without testing depending on whether you talked to the software guys in Hyvinkää or Louisville..)
Somewhere around 1987 or so purchasing got a real good deal on tantalum capacitors and because of the quantity of units and the number of I/O boards in each, they chose to use these in a the I-O boards as a cost-reduction measure (the CPU, power supply, and memory boards in the computer section were from a different vendor due to the mentioned reuse of the previously designed cpu section.)
I, er, I mean, the New York Regional Field Engineering Department had received a 'heads-up' from Corporate Engineering to take a quick look at the board racks of the new installs before we powered up the cpu and let them know what color the capacitors were on the I/O boards... Knowing that electrons don't give a farad about what color the outer dip on the capacitor is, I, speaking for the NYRFE Dept, asked the obvious question that any good technical person would when asked to check on a seemingly obscure item... "Why?" and received the answer "You'll see.." (Actually they were just a tad more helpful than that - it was strongly recommended that before I fired up any of those new units I needed to make sure that I had enough spare I/O boards to repopulate the rack.. That in itself was no problem since I was in a room with six of these panels full of spare parts, er, circuit boards.. And none of them were on-line - yet.)
So the day arrives when we are to try to breathe life into the first unit in this motor room. We unplug all the circuit boards, power things up, verify correct voltages, check all the field inputs for out-of-range voltages - all that preliminary stuff. We plug in the boards in the cpu section (leaving out the interface board between cpu and I/O section) and verify that the cpu runs, plug in interface and verify cpu sees it, (of course killing power between each step).
Then we plugged in the I/O boards.
And turned on the power.
And promptly entered a war zone.
Or a Fourth of July celebration.
Or Chicago after dark.
After being treated to a prolonged series of FlashPoppoppoppop - poppetypoppop. Poppop. PoppopPOP. Psssstpop. Flash. Smoke... POPPP.............PopSmoulder. (which continued long after we had killed the switch - an automatic function that occurred shortly after the first Flashpop..) And after the funky-but-not-as-funky-as-toasted-selenium smoke cleared, I pulled the I/O boards out of the rack noting that fully 90% - percentage was easy, it was 9 out of 10 ;-) contained green clad tantalum capacitors in various states of perforation which had indeed allowed the smoke to escape. I made a phone call to corporate engineering with the news the I had found out 'why' and asked the question 'what's the next step?'. They said (correctly) "I bet the one that didn't blow up had blue capacitors.." and instructed me to find, if I could, enough boards with blue caps to refill the rack, otherwise just keep plugging them in until I had enough that didn't spew smoke..
We had a lot of fun purging the system of those green capacitor populated I/O boards... ;-) Corporate USA wouldn't let me write CorporateFinland - Engineering to inquire as to the success of that 'cost reduction' (even though I had a direct line from my terminal in the NYRFE office...)
Now maybe when I sent those boards in for 'repair' they did refill the smoke, but if they did, they didn't re-coat the caps in green.
*sigh* I wish that story was unique...
Crisped selenium stack is an invigorating stench.
Tantalum capacitor dazzle flashes bother your eyes for several minutes afterwards.