Monthly Archives: December 2020

Selling Recorders in 1940

1940DecRadioRetailing3Shown here transporting a set are Cleveland radio dealer Louis Schwab and Rev. W.P. Schmidt of the Parma Evangelical Lutheran Church, 2625 Oak Park Ave., in suburban Cleveland. The photo is from an article in the December 1940 issue of Radio Retailing, which details Schwab’s success with selling recording phonographs. The article noted that less than 5% of the phonographs sold included recording, but with salesmanship of the type employed by Schwab, this number could be increased. The magazine noted that once the set was sold, sales of blank records were almost sure to follow. One family with musically inclined offspring bought two packages of records a week. And another customer did “recording parties,” at which he would go through at least three dozen disks.

The sale depicted in the photograph resulted from the fact that the church organist was going to have a baby. Rather than pay a substitute during her maternity leave, the church sprang for the radio-recorder shown here. The organist pre-recorded the hymns to be played during her absence, and the machine took over the musician’s duties. The set was used at other church gatherings to listen to broadcasts and recorded music.

The church shown here appears to be the predecessor of Parma Lutheran Church, which is now located about a mile away from its 1940 location.



1920 French Crystal Set

1920DecRadioNewsA hundred years ago this month, the December 1920 issue of Radio News showed this French receiver designed for receiving time signals from the Eiffel Tower. If it looks familiar, it’s because we featured it before.  The same receiver appeared in Popular Mechanics in 1914, so it had been on the market for at least six years before showing up on the cover of Radio News, which gave more details of the set and of the time signals sent from the Eiffel Tower.

In the magazine, we learn that the receiver is known as the Ondaphone, and consists of a galena detector mounted on the back of the telephone receiver. One wire is connected to a convenient ground, such as a radiator, and the other wire is connected to an antenna. In the picture here, a light fixture is used for the antenna. In a rural area, the article suggests that even an umbrella might form a suitable antenna.

Despite any inductor, the set was said to work well throughout Paris, and even in outlying areas.



Marketing Personal Portables: 1940

1940DecRadioRetailingEighty years ago this month, according to the December 1940 issue of Radio Retailing, everybody, including Santa Claus, stopped, looked, and listened to the new personal portables that had been hitting the market. When America entered the war, sourcing the required batteries would become an iffy proposition, but in the meantime, the sets were popular.

It’s quite possible that Santa got the idea from having lunch in downtown Denver. According to the magazine, the radio buyer of the Denver Dry Goods Company harnessed the power of “women paid to gossip” to sell the sets. You could put one on layaway for a dollar down and a dollar a week. Then, to drum up excitement, “certain shopgirls were loaned instruments, subsidized to play and talk about them during lunch in the smartest restaurants in town.”

The young women shown below are on their lunch break from their duties at the store at one of the aforementioned smart restaurants. For each sale they referred, they earned a one dollar commission.

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According to the article, twenty radios were sold the first day, and “in this case, it paid to pay women to gossip.”



1940 Two Tube Radio-Phono

1940DecPM1Eighty years ago, Junior was hard at work putting together this inexpensive two-tube receiver, while Dad unobtrusively keeps an eye on the progress. He is holding the construction article (complete with his own picture) as it appeared in the December 1940 issue of Popular Mechanics.

When complete, the set would provide about a watt of loudspeaker volume and pull in the local stations. In addition, it had a phono input for connection to a record player, which could be had for about $6. To accomplish this easily, the set was equipped with two volume controls. When you wanted to listen to records, you simply turned down the radio and turned up the control hooked to the record player.

The tube lineup was 25B8GT serving as RF amplifier and detector, with a 70L7GT as rectifier and AF output. When working as a phonograph, the detector stage of the 25B8GT was pressed into service as an audio driver. The set was said to provide volume sufficient for the average room.

1940DecPMschematic



1970 Grocery Prices

1970Dec1PghPressHere’s a snapshot of what grocery prices looked like 50 years ago today, December 1, 1970, from that day’s issue of the Pittsburgh Press.  This store had just started a practice that is quite common today, namely, posting the unit price of items, rather than having to do the math in the store.

Flour was $1.77 for a 25 pound bag with coupon, or $2.18 without the coupon. Many canned goods, such as beets, green beans, kidney beans, and store brand soup, were 8 for a dollar. Margarine was 5 pounds for a dollar, and 3 pounds of peanut butter was 99 cents.

Saltines were 4 boxes for a dollar, a tuna was three cans for a dollar. Ground beef was 59 cents a pound, and bacon was either 59 cents or 79 cents a pound, depending on brand. You could also get one pound of bacon in a can for only 79 cents. One pound loaves of bread were a quarter.

In the produce aisle, bananas were 8 cents a pound, carrots were a dime a pound, and grapes were 29 cents per pound. A ten pound bag of potatoes would set you back 89 cents. Cans of store brand pop were a dime.

The federal minimum wage was $1.65 at the time, as opposed to the current $7.25 per hour, about 4 times higher. Postage had just gone up to 8 cents, compared to 55 cents today, almost 7 times higher. So depending on how you account for inflation, you would need to multiply these prices by a similar number.  A pound of hamburger cost 59 cents. If you use the cost of postage to track inflation, that works out to about $4 a pound.  Fifty years ago, you had to work just over 3 minutes at the minimum wage to buy an 8 cent banana.  Today, that same amount of work would earn you 40 cents.

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