Shown here in 1940 is the then mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia impressing former mayor Jimmy Walker (standing) with the radio built into his desk drawer.

The set was a gift from WOR radio, designed into the desk by the station’s chief engineer J.R. Poppele. There were a number of critical design constraints. The set had to blend in with the rest of the décor, and couldn’t clutter up the desktop. The mayor didn’t even have a telephone on the desktop, so there was certainly no room for a radio. The solution was to mount it in the drawer, with burglar-alarm-type switches mounted on the side to turn the set on whenever the drawer was opened. The set used direct-heater battery tubes, and would thus start to play as soon as the drawer was opened, without the normal warm-up period required by most tube sets.

The set was a Pilot T-71, a battery-electric portable. To make the drawer entirely self-contained, without the need for a power cord, it was set up to run on battery only. Multiple batteries were placed in parallel inside the drawer to ensure 500 hours of operating time before a battery change was needed. One potential problem, of course, of most broadcast sets is that the loop is directional. Normally, this doesn’t present a problem, since the set can be adjusted slightly. But since this was no longer an option, the loop antenna was mounted horizontally in the drawer to make it non-directional.

Also, the mounting necessitated having the panel lay horizontally. This was a potential problem, since the tubes ran the risk of shorting out internally if not vertical. This was solved by rotating the tube sockets so that they would be vertical.

The photo and description appeared in the October 1940 issue of Radio Craft, which noted that the idea presented the possibility of extra money for servicemen: “Here is an opportunity for aggressive radio Servicemen to drum up additional business. The order to install and service a built-in desk radio set frequently would result if Servicemen would only suggest to their customers the installation of a new or rebuilt radio set.”