Eighty years ago this month, the June 1939 issue of Radio Retailing carried this ad reminding dealers that they should stock up on portables for campers, collegiate-ers, picnic-ers, and swingsters.
The set shown is the Model 590-1. The superheterodyne set featued a tube lineup of 1A7G, 1N5G, 1H5G, and 1A5G, with a 35Z5GT rectifier for use at home. The set switched automatically from household current to battery by removing the line cord.
Seventy-five years ago, wartime labor shortages meant that critical defense industries had to be creative when it came to staffing their plants. A logical source of labor came in the form of high school students, who eagerly took up the cause of defending the nation, and getting some spending money in the process. Today, there would probably be a great deal of hand wringing if kids were sent in to work with lead and acid, but these Milwaukee teens were eager to lend a hand.
Hundreds of students, both boys and girls, ages 16 and 17, were working for the Signal Battery Co. plant. Shown above cleaning batteries are Midge Wagner (left) of 2471 Fratney St. and Patsy Lee of 3219 N. Bartlett Ave. Both girls were students at Riverside High School. Also shown testing battery current is Mary Lou Burke of 2563 N. Farwell Ave., a student at Holy Angels Academy.
Northern Michigan University has on its website an interesting 1989 oral history interview with another teen worker at the battery plant, Evelyn Cieslick. She recounts:
I worked in a battery factory, in the summer when I was 16 years old, and we filled the acid that went into the batteries to make them work, and there weren’t enough boys around, so the girls took the summer jobs…. We worked in the factory and felt that we were doing our part in, for the war, along with everything else that was involved with giving up sacrifices for the war.
I had to take a bus to get there … in the mornings and, of course, work all day long, it was a summer job, and, like I said, all of us young people felt that we were doing our part by helping out. The name of the company was the Signal Battery Company. I’m sure they were for walkie talkies, and radios … for the war.
These photos appeared 75 years ago today in the June 19, 1944 issue of the Milwaukee Journal. These young women are about 91 years old today. We realize that people Google their own names, and we always enjoy hearing from people we have featured. Please leave a comment below or e-mail me at clem.law@usa.net. If you are one of the students shown here, thank you for your service to your country!
Sixty years ago this month, the cover story of the June 1959 issue of Popular Electronics was all about the small but growing number of amateur radio operators on television. The 70 cm band had been allocated for TV, and pockets of hams were putting it to use.
Cameras were very expensive, and required a lot of studio lighting. So some hams were content to get on the air with a flying spot projector and slides, similar to the test device we featured earlier. An existing TV receiver was used to illuminate the slide, with a photocell picking up the image as each line was illuminated.
In preparation for the total solar eclipse of 2 July 2019, which will be visible in Chile and Argentina, I have updated and translated into Spanish my “Take Your Kids To See The Eclipse” page. You can view the 2017 English version at this link.
En preparación para el eclipse solar total del 2 de julio de 2019, que será visible en Chile y Argentina, actualicé y traduje al español mi página “Lleve a sus niños a ver el eclipse”. Puedes ver la versión de 2017 en inglés en este enlace.
In drydock after salvage. Wikipedia photo.
This picture above appeared 80 years ago today in the June 16, 1939, issue of Radio Guide. Shown is a Washington, D.C., family gathered around the radio, obviously clinging to every word of the news announcer. They are the family of William Isaacs, who was aboard the Navy submarine U.S.S. Squalus when it sank off the coast of New Hampshire on May 23, 1939, killing 26 crew members. The remaining 33 aboard (32 crew and one civilian) were rescued. The ship was initially in contact with a companion ship by telephone line to a buoy, and the men were rescued from 243 feet of water thanks to the McCann Rescue Chamber.
The ship was eventually salvaged, and went on to serve in the Pacific during World War II as the USS Sailfish. The ship was scrapped after the War, but the conning tower, shown here, was preserved after the war as a memorial at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.
The family shown here eventually received good news, as Isaacs was one of the men successfully rescued from the sunken ship.
Roseville, MN, Target, 15 June 2019. OneTubeRadio.com photo.
My son and I happened to be at Target this afternoon, just in time for #TargetDown, also known as Targetgeddon. We weren’t actually buying anything–we were waiting outside the Minute Clinic for my son’s physical for summer camp. Suddenly, the lights in all of the checkout lanes started flashing in unison, and all of the cash registers went off line. The company suddenly ground to a halt. Customers, who were ready to give the store tens of thousands of dollars instead milled around the checkout lines. My son pointed out, maybe correctly, that it was a cyber attack.
No riots broke out, and everyone seemed to take the event in stride. But it was striking that even the smallest of transactions became impossible. There’s no provision in place to take money from customers without the computer functioning. According to news accounts, the outage was worldwide, meaning that the same scene was repeated in all other stores. Some stores apparently resorted to simply locking up and calling it a day on a busy Saturday.
It hasn’t always been this way. Back in an earlier lifetime, I managed a Radio Shack store. One day, as sometimes happens, the power went out. I knew that I had things in the store that people would want, so I took advantage of the situation. I put some flashlights in the window so that people could see some light emanating from the store. I moved other items, such as flashlights, batteries, and portable radios close to the counter. Within minutes, people started coming in with money to buy these things. I had record sales that evening.
Credit card imprinter. Amazon photo.
In the event of an emergency, Target has a lot of things that people will need. In addition to flashlights and batteries, they also have food. But if the power is out or the computers are down, they have absolutely no method in place for selling it.
When I kept the store open despite the power being out, I really didn’t think much of it. I’ve always thought of things like electricity and computers as luxuries. But at some point, many people started to rely upon them as necessities. I first realized this when I heard many people assume that it was impossible to make coffee without electricity. (This is not true, as I’ve documented at my How to Make Coffee Without Electricity page.)
But it’s more troubling when people needlessly turn them into necessities. With just a bit of advanced planning, a retailer could continue, at the very least, to take cash for purchases. Waffle House, for example, is famous for remaining open in the wake of emergencies. In the process, they provide a vital service to the public, and also make a profit for themselves, a win-win situation, it seems to me. As I saw today, that attitude is all too rare today in American business.
Sixty years ago this month, the June 1959 issue of Popular Science explained how the ubiquitous clock radio worked, using a General Electric model as the example. This model included a sleep feature which let the radio play when going to bed. In the morning, the radio would first come on, followed by a buzzer ten minutes later. It also included an outlet at the back for a small appliance.
According to the magazine, the clock radio first came out in 1947, and in the previous year, 2.3 million of the sets were sold by 25 different manufacturers.
The scouts shown above are taking a break from their campout to pull in some local broadcast stations on the two-tube superheterodyne receiver they constructing from the plans in the June 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics. The set used a 1R5 and a 1U5 tube and a 15 foot antenna to get good volume on the local stations. According to the magazine, the set rivaled any regenerative receiver, without the possibility of an annoying squeal.
According to the magazine, the rugged little set was ideal for camping or other knockabut use. It could be transported in a small cardboard container, or, if the builder preferred, in a cabinet.
The filaments ran off two flashlight batteries in parallel, with a 67.5 volt B battery. For strong stations, a 45 volt battery could be substituted.
The article shown above appeared in the June 1939 issue of Rural Radio magazine, detailing an award to Wilson E. Burgess, W1BDS, for his work during the 1938 New England Hurricane. The storm was one of the deadliest to ever hit New England and Long Island, with an estimated 682 killed. It’s the strongest hurricane to hit New England in modern times, possibly eclipsed by the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635.
While this article is short on details, more can be learned from Clinton DeSoto‘s 1941 book Calling CQ.
Rhode Island hurricane damage. Wikipedia image.
The storm was poorly forecast, and hit Burgess’s hometown of Westerly, R.I., with little warning the afternoon of September 21, 1938. Burgess was working as the manager of the appliance department at Montgomery Ward when the storm blew out the windows of the store. Panicked people were running up and down the aisles of the store. It soon became apparent that a hurricane was in progress.
He quickly collected a quantity of batteries and started for home on foot. He struggled up the street as trees fell around him. At the police station, he met up with another amateur, George Marshall, W1KRQ. Together, the set off toward Burgess’s home with the batteries. Eventually, they were able to hitch a ride on a county truck, but it was soon blocked by trees and they again had to continue on foot.
They eventually made it, but he found that the edge of his garage that had supported his antenna had been swept away. He went out in the 65 MPH winds to put it back up, and eventually had to settle for wrapping the wire around his house.
W1KRF, W1BDS, W1KRQ at the makeshift station. QST, Nov. 1938, p. 12.
By this time, of course, the power was out, and there was no way to power Burgess’s normal 600 watt transmitter. Working by kerosene lantern, the two men worked for two hours building a one-tube transmitter to use with the batteries carried from the store. DeSoto reports that the windows had been blown out by this time, and daughter Jane Gail Burgess, shown in the photo above, then three months old, was crying in terror.
Finally, they had the transmitter and a makeshift receiver ready, and Burgess started putting out a QRR–the then-distress call. Unfortunately, nobody really knew that an emergency was in progress, and their weak signal simply wasn’t heard over the interference of a normal busy ham band. They moved their CW signal up to the phone band, reasoning that the CW signal would stand out there. The trick worked, and soon W2CQD in New Jersey answered the call, with W1SZ in Connecticut (QST managing editor) later taking over. For the next five days, the Connecticut station maintained contact.
Neighbors eventually got word to the local Red Cross that radio contact had been made, and the house soon became a center for relief activity. The first official message was to Red Cross headquarters in Washington, but that message was not accepted, since it was signed merely “Westerly Red Cross.” Eventually, the name of the local chairman was added, and the message was accepted.
The gentleman shown here is obviously a mover and shaker, and he’s staying in touch thanks to a portable citizen’s band transceiver that he assembled himself from a semi-kit. The electronics came pre-wired, but he had to do the final assembly himself, a process that took about three hours.
The set, from a company called Springfield Enterprises, sold for $41.90, plus $5.73 for the battery. The set was reviewed in the June 1959 issue of Electronics Illustrated. The magazine had two of the units, and found the reliable range using the whip antennas to be about a quarter of a mile.
The top photo is taken at Times Square, as revealed by this photo.
