Sixty years ago this month, the September 1959 issue of Popular Electronics carried the plans for this three-transistor pocket transistor receiver with built-in antenna and speaker. It also pointed out the Holy Grail for the experimenter, and there’s more than a little bit of truth:

It is every hobbyist’s ambition one day to achieve loudspeaker operation using a single transistor and no external antenna.

The article noted that such a day was not here yet, but this three-transistor model was getting close. The internal loopstick antenna went to one stage of regenerative RF amplification, a diode served as detector, and two transistors provided loudspeaker volume.