Monthly Archives: January 2017

USS Arizona, 1917

1917janpmShown here in Popular Mechanics, January 1917, is the recently launched USS Arizona passing down the East River from the New York Navy Yard on her first voyage into the Atlantic. The ship had been launched in June 1915 and christened with a bottle of water taken from the first to flow through the spillway of the Roosevelt Dam.

The 608 foot long ship remained stateside during the First World War. She was sent to Turkey in 1919 at the beginning of the Greco-Turkish war, and transferred to the Pacific Fleet for the rest of her career.

It was regularly used for training between the wars, and after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, the ship’s crew provided aid to the survivors. In April 1940, she was transferred to Pearl Harbor with the rest of the Pacific Fleet.

Arizona sunk and burning, December 7, 1941. Wikipedia photo.

During the attack of December 7, 1941, a bomb detonated in a powder magazine, causing the ship to explode violently and sink, with the loss of 1177 lives.

The ship remains a permanent memorial to “be maintained in honor and commemoration of the members of the Armed Forces of the United States who gave their lives to their country during the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.”



Alien Surrender of Shortwave Radios, Cameras, Guns, 1942

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Shown here, in the January 1942 issue of Radio Retailing magazine, are resident aliens in Los Angeles lining up at a police station to turn in their cameras, guns, and radios capable of receiving short wave.

The magazine noted that Attorney General Francis Biddle had issued an order that enemy aliens, that is, citizens of Japan, Germany, and Italy, turn these items in to the nearest police station.  An alternative would be to have receiver rendered incapable of receiving signals other than those in the standard broadcast band.  Therefore, the order “seems to open the way for radio servicemen to render a useful service of eliminating shortwave reception from aliens’ sets–and get paid for it.  In this way, the alien may keep his set for regular broadcast listening to U.S. stations, while the police authorities are spared the storage of hundereds of radio sets which they are poorly equipped to handle.  And the radio man collects $1 to $2 per radio set altered.

Typically, the modification consisted of removing the shortwave coils, and providing the set’s owner with an affidavit documenting the modification.

75 years ago today, the Chicago Tribune, January 6, 1942, carried an article regarding the status of the order.  It reported that local officials found the response so far to be unsatisfactory, since fewer than 2550 cameras, guns, and radios had been surrendered as of the previous night, despite an alien enemy population of more than 50,000 (28,000 Germans, 21,000 Italians, and 250 Japanese).

The Chicago police reported that the items surrendered included several antiques, including an 1878 breach loader. One man was reported to have “embarrassedly handing over a sawed off shotgun, possession of which had been taboo in Chicago ever since the prohibition gang war era. He said that he inherited the weapon from his father.”

One man, not bothering to wait for a receipt, simply drove up to the police station, hurried a radio from his car, and drove away. Another motorist tossed a $100 radio from his car and drove off.

The paper also reported a supplemental order from the Attorney General listing the following prohibited items:

Weapons or implements of war or component parts thereof; ammunition of all kinds; bombs; explosives or material used in the manufacture of explosives; signal devices; codes or ciphers: papers, documents, or books In which there may be invisible writing; photographs, sketches, pictures, drawings, maps, or graphical representation of any military or naval installations or equipment of any army, ammunitions, implements of. device or thing used or intended to be used in the combat equipment of the land or naval forces of the United States or of any military or naval post, camp, or station.

 



Maybelle Carstens, KWSC, Pullman, Wash., 1927

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Shown here on the cover of the January 1927 issue of Radio Digest is Maybelle Carstens of KWSC, the radio station of Washington State College in Pullman, Washington.  According to the magazine, this “demure maiden” was a favorite of a large circle of admirers who listened to the station.  She was described as a reader and regular member of the staff.

The station originally came on the air in 1922 as KFAE, changing its call to KWSC in 1925. When the college became Washington State University, call letters changed to KWSU in the 1960’s.  It remains the flaship station of Northwest Public Radio.

About the same time that Miss Carstens was on the air, another student by the name of Edward R. Murrow had enrolled in the college in 1926 and got his start in radio at the station.



1941 Popular Science “Summer-Winter” Radio

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1941JanPS2In January 1941, Popular Science carried the plans for this “summer-winter” receiver. During the summer months, it went in a cabinet “finished in striped airplane-luggage canvas” and was powered by batteries. But in the summer month, the chasis could be slipped into a smaller walnut cabinet powered by household current.

The superhet employed four tubes, two 1A5GT’s, 1H5GT, and 1N5GT. For use in the “winter” mode, it also included a 117Z6GT rectifier. When run on AC power, the filaments were in series with a 2500 ohm, 10 watt, resistor as well as a pilot light. In addition to dropping some of the voltage, the pilot light served as a fuse to protect the filaments.

The article’s author was long time Popular Science radio writer Arthur C. Miller.

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1957 TV Network

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This map in the January 1957 issue of Radio Electronics, shows the status of the TV networks sixty years ago (in black), ans shows the explosive growth from the network as it had existed just six years earlier in 1950 (in red). By 1956, most American and Canadian cities were on the network, and were capable of receiving live network programming by this network of coaxial cable and microwave links. By 1957, a certain amount of redundancy was developing. For example, in 1950, Minneapolis-St. Paul got its first link, via coaxial cable to Des Moines, which was in turn linked to the nationwide network via microwave relay from Chicago. By 1957, there is a second link shown from Chicago through Wisconsin.

The diagram also shows at least two interconnections between the U.S. and Canadian networks. The U.S. Network was operated by AT&T, which had coast-to-coast service in place by 1951.

1957janradioelec2The issue also carried a listing of all stations then on the air.  The Minnesota listing here reveals that in the Twin Cities, channels 4, 5, 9, and 11 were at their familiar spots on the dial.  In Duluth, channels 3 and 6 were on the air, and Austin and Rochester each had one station.



Happy New Year!

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Happy New Year from OneTubeRadio.com!

As we enter 2017, we look back 75 years to January 1, 1942, the first New Year’s Day of the War. The nation’s industry was already largely on a wartime footing, as shown by these night shift workers at the Northern Pump Company in Minneapolis. They took a half hour break to don paper caps and give 1942 a short defiant cheer. Then, they went back to work making anti-aircraft guns for the Navy.

The company was founded in 1929 by the merger of Northern Fire Apparatus Company and the Pagel Pipe Company. It moved to the Fridley plant shown here in January 1941. In 1942, it created subsidiary Northern Ordinance Incorporated. Northern Ordinance continued naval production until 1964 when it was purchased by Food Machinery Corporation (FMC), which operated the site until 1994. BAE Systems currently owns and operates the Fridley site.

Northern Pump currently operates in Grantsburg, Wisconsin.

This photo appeared in the January 12, 1942, issue of Life Magazine.