Seventy years ago today, April 12, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt Died. Harry S Truman is shown here the same evening taking the oath of office as the 33rd President of the United States.
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We recently shared a 1940 picture of opera singer Lily Pons listening to her GE radio-phono combo. But it appears that Miss Pons had more than a passing interest in radio. Here, we see her in the April, 1938, issue of All Wave Radio magazine at the mike of amateur station W2JKQ. Shown in the picture are, from left to right, maestro Andre Kostelanetz, Miss Pons, and W2JKQ.
Miss Pons was probably first introduced to ham radio by her camera man, C. Roy Hunt, W6CNE. Mr. Hunt had allowed her to speak to her South American manager, who was at the mike of LU1DA in Buenos Aires. In this photo, she duplicated the contact from W2JKQ’s New York station. She also chatted with a fan in Greece, SV1KE.
Lily Pons in 1940.
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In 1967, the publishers of Electronics Illustrated and Mechanix Illustrated presented this little one-tube receiver in a publication entitled Practical Electronics.
The receiver tuned the AM broadcast band, amateur bands, or shortwave broadcast with the use of plug-in coils wound on the bases of old octal tubes. It used a dual-triode 12AT7 tube. One half served as the regenerative detector, with the other half serving as an audio amplifier. It used an isolation transformer, making the set relatively safe to use with 120 volts.
It was set up mostly as a low-cost starter receiver for the ham, as most of the coil data was for the ham bands. However, it would also make a good SWL receiver, and coil data was given for the 31 meter broadcast band.
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Film actress Hope Hampton starred in several silent movies. With the dawn of the sound era, she retired from the cinema and turned to opera, singing with the Philadelphia Opera. She returned to the screen in 1938, in The Road to Reno
And in the 1920’s, she had an interest in radio. In the top photo, she is shown using one of the piano wires as an antenna. And the lower photo shows her confidently handling a soldering iron as she solders the tuning coil of her set. The pictures above appeared in the July 15, 1922, issue of Radio Digest.
Here, she appears with Lon Chaney in The Light of Faith (1922):
Hope Hapmpton, undated photo. (Wikipedia)
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Armin Wegner. Wikipedia photo.
This month marks the hundredth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, in which over a million Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire and those working on its behalf. The killings were carried out in a variety of ways, and the net result was that the bulk of the Armenian Christian population was eliminated. Most of those who survived were forced from their homes and formed the Armenian Diaspora, with large populations in North America, the Soviet Union, Europe, South America, and Australia.
The “official” start date is generally considered to be April 24, 1915, when about 250 intellectuals and community leaders were rounded up in Constantinople for eventual execution.
One convenient method employed to execute women and children was to simply march them into the Syrian desert where they could die by dehydration and starvation.
Armin Theophil Wegner was born in Elberfeld, Rhineland, in Germany, in 1886. He was trained in law, but didn’t seem to have much direction professionally. At one time, he decided to work as a travel writer. Eventually, deciding to see the world, he joined the Army, and served as a medic. The outbreak of war saw him attached to the Ottoman army and stationed along the Baghdad railway in Syria and Mespopotamia.
He heard stories of the death marches going on around him, and when he got leave, he took a camera and decided to investigate the stories, despite orders to the contrary. He learned that the stories were true, and the photos he took served as one of the few pieces of documentary evidence of the atrocities.
He was ultimately found out, and sent back to Germany. Many of his photos were seized, but he managed to smuggle out many negatives inside his belt.
The experience was moving for Wegner. In 1933, he wrote an open letter to Hitler denouncing the treatment of the Jews. No newspaper would publish it, and he was arrested and tortured by the Gestapo. He was eventually able to flee to Italy, where he lived until his death in 1978.
In 1967, Wegner was recognized as one of the Righteous Among The Nations by Yad Vashem.
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Seventy-five years ago today, April 7, 1940, an annular eclipse occurred, the center line of which passed through Texas and the southeastern United States. Professor N. Wyman Storer of the University of Kansas took the opportunity to travel to Conroe, Texas, the closest point on the center line. There, he and assistants set up the University’s 6-inch refractor, shown here, on the tennis court of the Conroe High School, where he captured a number of good photographs of the eclipse. The telescope was acquired by the University for $1000 in 1885, and was still in use as late as 1968. The mount shown here was made of lumber, and cost $3. The photos taken during this expedition can be found in the August 1940 issue of Popular Astronomy.
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I’m occasionally asked where I find material for this site. Most of it is found at AmericanRadioHistory.com, which has an archive of millions of pages of old radio and electronics publications. Much also comes from Google Books.
For Amateur Radio, a treasure trove of information is the QST Archive, which includes every issue of QST back to 1915. The search engine is not the best, and some of the scans are of rather poor quality. But it’s a great source of information. (You must be an ARRL member and logged into your ARRL account to view articles.) All issues of 73 Magazine are also available for free download at Archive.org.
If you’re looking for a more user-friendly version of these two resources, they are available at a reasonable price from Amazon at the links below. The QST CD covers up through 1941, and the 73 CD covers all issues.
This little one-tube short wave receiver appeared in Popular Science 75 years ago this month, April 1940. It uses as 12B8GT tube, a combined triode-pentode. The pentode section is used as a regenerative detector, and the triode is pressed into service as a diode, serving as the rectifier. The set runs directly from 120 volts AC. A 360 ohm resistor in series with the filament drops the voltage to 12 volts, and a hefty choke and two capacitors filter the power supply. Even though it’s run directly from the AC mains, the schematic shows no connections directly to the chassis, so as AC-DC sets go, this one is relatively safe to operate.
According to the accompanying article, the set could pull in signals from South America and Europe most evenings.
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Was it a morning like this?
Under the headline, “Are You Ready For CONELRAD?”, the April 1955 issue of Radio News carried the plans for this small CONELRAD receiver which could be easily carried in a pocket or glove compartment. The circuit is very similar to the Conelrad receiver carried by Boys’ Life the following year. This receiver also consists of a crystal set followed by a one-transistor audio amplifier.
The article describes CONELRAD, and notes that “the responsibility of the individual citizen and particularly of the electronic technician and experimenter would be to provide themselves and their families well ahead of time with some means for receiving Conelrad broadcasts under any or all emergency conditions.” The article noted that receivers should be exactly calibrated, to avoid losing valuable seconds fumbling around trying to find 640 and 1240 on the dial. The article suggests using a signal generator to calibrate and mark the dial before an emergency.
It then offers the circuit shown here, since it would be “highly advisable to have available at all times a portable battery-operated radio. The average portable radio is fairly cumbersome to carry about over any appreciable distance and its power requirements are high enough to make it impossible to keep in operation continuously.
The author notes that his original plan was to have one transistor serve as the detector, but had some difficulty in designing the circuit, due to the low input impedance of most transistors. Therefore, like the author of the Boys’ Life design, he settled on a diode detector, with one stage of audio amplification.
Unlike the Boys’ Life model, which was mounted in a cigar box, this one is mounted snugly in a small plastic box. The author notes that “as most old crystal set men will recall, a fairly long antenna and a good ground are required for best results.” Therefore, he recommended taping 25-50 feet of fine wire to the case for use as an emergency antenna.
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