Monthly Archives: April 2022

1962 One Tube/One Transistor Broadcast Set

1962AprPE1Sixty years ago this month, the April 1962 issue of Popular Electronics carried the plans for this hybrid one-tube/one-transistor receiver for the broadcast band. According to the magazine, the set would provide room-level volume on local broadcast stations, and while not hi-fi, was more listenable than one would expect from such a simple circuit.

The detector used a 12AE6-A tube as grid-leak detector. Since the tube was intended for hybrid car radios, it could run on a very low B+ voltage. In this case, that was 12 volts supplied by a filament transformer. The audio amplification was handled by a 2N231 germanium PNP transistor. The final semiconductor component was a 1N34 diode serving as rectifier.

The tuning coil was wound honeycomb style on a cardboard form. The set was said to pull in the local stations with an 8 foot antenna tucked behind a bookcase.

1962AprPE2



1950 Census

Census data about individuals is private for 72 years. I assume that the thinking is that after 72 years, nobody really cares how much money you made or other details of your personal life.  So after 72 years has elapsed, the information becomes public data.

Since census day was April 1, 1950, this means that the data for the 1950 census was made available on April 1, 2022. The census data for 1940 has been available online for ten years, and you can easily search it by many criteria, including name, at this link at Ancestry.com.  (In fact, if you just Google the person’s name and “1940 census,” you’ll probably find the data that way. All of the original images of these records are available at the U.S. Archives website, but they cannot be searched by name on that site.

The images of the original 1950 records are now available at the U.S. Archives, which promises that the records can be searched by name. However, since most of the records are in cursive writing, the OCR process is not yet quite up to the task. However, it promises that the Artificial Intelligence is going to engage in machine learning. In particular, users are requested to transcribe entries, and I believe the thinking is that the AI is going to use these examples to learn the handwriting of individual enumerators, the people who went door to door writing down the data about the people at each house.

If you do try to search by name now, you’ll need to use a little creativity.  In many cases, the last name is transcribed wrong, in which case you probably won’t find it.  But if you search for just the first names in such a case, you might find the household, especially if you can narrow down the location well enough.  But as the 1940 data proves, the searchability of the 1950 data is bound to get much better.

It took some searching, but I found my parents and grandparents. It was necessary, however, to know their address in 1950, at least approximately. Once you know where someone lives, you can find their “Enumeration District” with the interactive map at Ancestry.com.

Armed with this information, you can enter the Enumeration District, County, and State at the Archives.gov website.

You will then find a listing of all of the households in that neighborhood. Most of those listings seem to be about 25 pages long, and they are organized in the order in which the enumerator walked through the neighborhood knocking on doors. After you see which end they started on, it’s usually fairly easy to guess about which page the person of interest is on, and scroll through the pages to find them.

The example above is for then-Congressman Gerald R. Ford at his home in Washington, D.C. Since he was a member of Congress, the information for his household is struck out, with a notation that it will be transferred to his home district in Michigan.

The census contains the basic biographical data for everyone in the country. For about one person out of five, the enumerator was instructed to ask a few additional questions. My mother was one of those five people, and from her entry, I learned that in 1949, she earned a salary of $1600 per year working 41 weeks as a stenographer.



Prismatone Organ: 1947

1947AprRadioCraftThis musician is playing the Prismatone electronic organ, what the April 1947 issue of Radio Craft asserted “promises to be by far the most attractive of all the lower-priced electronic music instruments.” The musician here was highly skilled, as the magazine noted that the instrument required a skilled operator.

The instrument consisted of a projector sending a beam of light through a translucent disc, which projected a rapidly altering pattern. The colors are solely for the benefit of the operator, as the instrument instead depended on the frequency of the pulsating light beam caused by the disc. The two wands contain photocells, and their output is the same frequency as the portion of the light at which they are aimed. Volume can be changed by altering the angle at which each wand was held. The outputs were fed into a high-fidelity audio amplifier.

The magazine noted that for an even more spectacular effect, the musician can wear finger rings with small selenium photocells in lieu of the wands.

The instrument was created by one Mr. Leslie Gould, a “well known Connecticut inventor of many electronic devices,” including “the Sonicator, a radar-like instrument for small boats.” One of Gould’s earlier inventions, part of a tuning mechanism, was at issue in Levy v. Gould, 87 F.2d 524 (C.C.P.A. 1937).



April 1957 Multiband Antenna

1957AprQSTQST often contains cutting-edge technical articles, and the magazine’s April issue often contains the finest. It was no exception 65 years ago, and the April 1957 issue contained an article by prolific contributor Larson E. Rapp, WIOU, regarding the antenna shown above. Rapp noted that ferrite “loopstick” antennas worked well for AM radios, and surmised that they would make excellent multi-band transmitting antennas. He hoisted the model shown here atop his flagpole, and found that it performed exceptionally well.

But Rapp, being the technical genius that he was, carried the idea a step further. He noted that many antenna books depicted an antenna, along with its “image” directly underneath, below the ground. He surmised that if he buried the antenna, then the image would appear above the ground, without the need for any unsightly visible structure. He was able to get down to 35 feet, where he hit bedrock, and he buried the antenna there. He then hoisted a field strength meter up the flagpole, and sure enough, the maximum signal strength was achieved at 35 feet.