Tablet hardness testing is a laboratory technique used by the pharmaceutical industry to determine the breaking point and structural integrity of a tablet and find out how it changes "under conditions of storage, transportation, packaging and handling before usage"[1] The breaking point of a tablet is based on its shape.
The tablet breaking force was based on arbitrary units referred to as Strong-Cobbs.
They often include mechanisms like motor drives, and the ability to send measurements to a computer or printer.
The first machines continually applied force with a spring and screw thread until the tablet started to break.
[3] When the tablet fractured, the hardness was read with a sliding scale.