As shown here in the January 1939 issue of Radio Retailing, it looks like a few boys 85 years ago got the memo that the place to meet girls (and learn a useful skill) was to take typing class.
And this school was doing it right. Above the blackboard, you can see a loudspeaker, which is playing an amplified recording. The magazine notes that this delivers a rhythm, which is desirable for the student typists to develop a uniform touch.
If you needed a desktop calculator 85 years ago, you couldn’t go wrong with the one described in the October 1938 issue of the British magazine Practical Mechanics.
It was a literal desktop calculator, since you affixed it to your desk. It consisted of three logarithmic scales, and could perform multiplication and division, and even square roots. To multiply, you placed your straightedge on the numbers on the outer scales. At the point where it crossed the middle scale, that was the product.
You could use any ruler, but the magazine recommended as the best option a strip of celluloid. You would carefully score a line down the middle, fill it with ink, and then polish away the excess ink.
With practice, the calculator was accurate out to three figures.
The New York city high school students shown above are presenting Macbeth over the airwaves of WNYC. They are featured in an article in the September 1938 issue of Radio Craft, which notes that a new “R” has found its way into education. In addition to Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic, the schools now included Radio.
The station presented two educational programs per day–one for elementary students, and one for the high schools. The fifth graders at P.S.92, Bronx, shown here are listening to one such program, which was picked up by an ordinary receiver in the room. Not all schools were yet equipped with radio, but the plan was for every classroom in the school system to have its very own radio in the near future.
The students appearing in the programs were selected by audition, and the magazine noted that there was no shortage of volunteers.
The same issue of the magazine also carried an editorial by Hugo Gernsback, who opined that schoolroom broadcasting would afford deserving young boys and girls and opportunity for self-expression never before available. He also reminded his readers that there was a very decent profit to be made by the enterprising radio man who goes after the business in education.
Distance learning is nothing new, as shown by these New York high school students 100 years ago, pictured in the July 1923 issue of Popular Science. While the magazine identifies the school as “Haarken High School” in New York, this is almost certainly a typo, and it should read Haaren High School, as confirmed by this site and others reporting the same accomplishment.
This is the accountancy class at Haaren, and the students are listening to a series of accountancy problems broadcast by WJZ in Newark, NJ (now WABC New York). A receiver and loudspeaker had been installed, and the students are seated at their adding machines. Problems were read slowly and distinctly, and the correct answers were read a few minutes later. “The general correctness of the classroom work was testimony of the clearness with which radio waves carried.”
Witnessing the successful demonstration are officials of the city Board of Education, as well as more than 25 principals of city high schools.
I recall checking out the book shown here, UFOs and IFOs: A Factual Report on Flying Saucers, by Gardner Soule, from the library in my elementary school. Looking at the reviews on Amazon, it looks like this particular tome made its way into a lot of elementary school libraries. In any event, it was a scholarly look at the UFO phenomenon, and since it was presumably vetted by the school librarian, it must have been real science.
The author was a fairly prolific writer about topics that we might today call the paranormal. He specialized in cryptozoology, and according to Wikipedia, his most famous work was Maybe Monsters. (But in my opinion, UFOs and IFOs was the most popular.) He specialized in books for young readers, and his works appeared in Boys’ Life and Popular Science.
I forget whether I took to carrying a compass with me, but I never did figure out how to get my hands on a diffraction grating for my everyday carry. Thankfully, kids (and adults) today have Amazon, and you can get everything at Amazon, including diffraction gratings.
If you see a UFO, and don’t have a diffraction grating in your pocket, you’re going to feel embarrassed, especially since we gave you this reminder. The scientists won’t be happy. Therefore, we recommend that you order one immediately:
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The March 1973 issue of Popular Science reported that in the past year, a million Americans had become owners of electronic calculators, and the prices had fallen below a hundred dollars for the basic models. In 2023 dollars, that hundred dollars would be the same as $673, so it still wasn’t a trivial proposition. But they were quickly becoming an item that people could consider owning.
As I’ve recounted previously, a few months later, I recall uncharacteristic jealousy of the kid sitting in front of me in one of my classes whose parents coughed up $79 for his very own pocket calculator. It was just three years later when I was shocked to see the TI-30 scientific calculator in the store for only $29, and I quickly snatched it up, and it saw me through high school. By then, four function calculators were in the under-$10 category, and it was clear that they were around for the long haul. Teachers still said, “but you won’t always have a calculator with you,” but it was soon clear that even they were wrong.
The magazine included a buyer’s guide, and for the newbies, even showed the exact key strokes necessary to carry out everyday math such as balancing your checkbook (a largely forgotten art, it turns out).
Today, of course, the calculator is a practically free commodity item, as evidenced by some of the ones below, all available with free shipping:
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The students shown here are now almost 100 years old, but 85 years ago, they were learning about the atmosphere in science class. These students, Marian Oakley, Henry Kehrer, Hannah Esterman, and Bruce Kunkel, were receiving instruction in person from science specialist Harry A. Carpenter, but hundreds of other students were taking part in the same class by radio, on station WHAM.
For several years, the Rochester, NY, schools had been conducting this sort of distance learning via radio. Afternoons, radios would be switched on in classrooms both in and outside of Rochester, and students would get their lectures by radio. Lessons could include well known guest speakers, music programs featuring the Rochester Civic Orchestra, and programs on books presented by the Rochester Public Library. The photo shown here appeared in the February 1938 issue of Rural Radio, and the students shown here attended Frank Fowler Dow School No. 52.
They didn’t have Zoom classes 60 years ago, but when a polio outbreak struck Nunda, NY, in 1962, the high school tapped the ingenuity of local hams and CB’ers to come up with a method of distance learning.
Several students came down with the disease and were confined to their homes. Initially, they had to discontinue their studies, but the school bought a number of CB radios. Hy-Gain antennas were placed on the school roof, with coaxial cables running to classrooms. The school purchased Johnson transceivers, and volunteer students carried the radios from class to class and plugged the radio into the coax outlet in each room. The teacher was then able to transmit lectures to students at home.
Individual homes had smaller mobile-style whip antennas installed hooked up to transceivers there. When homebound students were called upon, it was a simple matter of pressing the push-to-talk button.
The pictures here appeared in the November 1962 issue of Electronics Illustrated, which pointed out that so far, seven students had received their schooling at home via CB. The teacher shown above was discussing the lesson with a student after class. The magazine confirmed that call letters were always given as required.
Seventy years ago this month, the January 1952 issue of Radio-Electronics showed “the boldest stroke in education by television ever made.” The 31-foot TV truck of the Army Signal Corps would be used to televise intricate military exercises and maneuvers, allowing them to be viewed back at base on television screens by much larger numbers than would otherwise be able to witness them. In fact, the camera would make visible all of the little things you wouldn’t see if you were there, making the experience superior to attending in person.
The signals were relayed back to base with a 7 GHz microwave link.
A hundred years ago this month, the cover of the December 1921 issue of Science and Invention magazine covered a topic that seemed reasonable to me as a youth. Rather than spend waking hours with the burdensome task of learning, it would be easier to just play the material while sleeping, and let the subconscious mind soak it in. This gentleman is doing exactly that, and the whole system is explained in an article by Hugo Gernsback, who also included the technology in his novel Ralph 123C 41+, first published in serial form in 1911.
It never worked for me as a kid, mostly because I never figured out how to keep something playing all night. The record player could keep playing the same record over and over, but I didn’t have any records containing material I needed to learn. I had a tape recorder, but I never figured out how to make an endless loop long enough to contain useful information. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the machine shown here available.
According to Wikipedia, it doesn’t work anyway. But if you want to give it a try, you can find the materials at Amazon.
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