Author Archives: clem.law@usa.net

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from OneTubeRadio.com!

We present a hundred year old silent film, the 1923 version of A Christmas Carol starring Russell Thorndike as Scrooge. It’s a short feature, so the story is quite condensed into less than a half hour. This rendition is accompanied by recordings from that era. Thorndike is best known as an author, and you can find his author page at Amazon.

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1943 Code Practice Oscillator

The December 1943 issue of Radio News carried the plans for this simple one-tube code oscillator. The 117N7 with a built-in rectifier meant that it could be done with a single tube.

The author of the article is one R.C. Zaun, an engineer with the Thorardson Electric Manufacturing Company. Not surprisingly, the most expensive part shown in the schematic is probably the audio output transformer, which just happens to have a Thorardson part number.

As shown here, the oscillator had a pitch of about 1600 Hz. This could be varied in one of two ways. First, R1 could be replaced with a variable resistor, although the article noted that this would also affect the volume. Another method would be to change the value of C4, switching in capacitors of different values to vary the pitch.

If wartime parts shortages meant that the 117N7 wasn’t available, it could be substituted with other versions of a different filament voltage. Of course, an appropriate dropping resistor would need to be used.

S.G. Brown Headphones

This ad appeared 75 years ago this month in the December 1948 issue of Practical Mechanics.

Your choice of headphones was important. For DX work, you needed good fidelity. But more importantly, you needed to uphold British prestige. And to do that, you needed the Type K headphone from S.G. Brown, Ltd.

Pyruma Putty Cement, 1943

Eighty years ago in the U.K., there was a war going on, which meant that many Christmas presents might have been unavailable. But Britons were known for keeping a stiff upper lip, and if there were no gifts in the shops, then they could make their own.

This ad for Pyruma putty cement appeared in the December 1943 issue of Practical Mechanics. After making the model, you baked it in the oven and it became stone hard. The compound was also used by the military in making models.

1963 Radio Kit

Sixty years ago, if you were in the market for a transistor radio, and you had a little bit of mechanical aptitude, you couldn’t really go wrong getting this kit from General Electric. It was a kit, but the hard work, namely the construction of the individual circuit boards, had already been done at the factory. You just had to snip a few wires, and do a little bit of soldering, assembling, and gluing. In less than an hour, you would have a good five-transistor radio.

The kit was available from electronics suppliers, and this ad appeared in the December 1963 issue of Popular Mechanics.

Learning Code By Sleep Learning, 1923

A hundred years ago, these naval aviators look like they’re sleeping on duty, but sleeping was their duty. They are busy learning Morse code, and the Navy discovered that they could do so by sleep learning. While they were asleep, messages were sent to them at increasingly higher speeds. It was found that when they woke up, they were able to copy that speed. In fact, some of the trainees were able to recite the messages that had been sent to them while they slumbered.

The photo appeared in the December, 1923, issue of Popular Mechanics.

1963 Clock Projects

If you needed a bedside clock 60 years ago, the December 1963 issue of Popular Mechanics had a couple of good ideas. The gentleman shown here appears to be suffering some sort of night terror, but at least he knows what time it is, since the time is projected onto the ceiling. The projector is simplicity itself, consisting of a metal candy box (or some other enclosure that’s shiny on the inside). A 15-watt bulb illuminates a wristwatch strategically placed, and the image is reflected by a small mirror mounted at a 45 degree angle. The single lens makes sure that the image is not reversed.

The other idea was a $2.98 clock radio, which isn’t very different from similar ideas we’ve seen before. If you already own a perfectly good radio, you can turn it into a clock radio simply by attaching a switch to a wind-up clock.

1948 RCA Radios

If you were browsing the pages of Life Magazine75 years ago today, December 13, 1948, and you didn’t have your Christmas presents picked out, you couldn’t go wrong with one of these RCA radios.

If you wanted the “luxury look” in an inexpensive set, then the Model 75X16 was just the thing. The model 8B43 portable was just 6-1/4 inches high and came on the instant you opened it, thanks to the miniature but sturdy tubes and long lasting RCA battery.

The model 8X521 tabletop set was only six inches tall, and the model 8BX6 Globetrotter was a portable that could run on either batteries or AC.

1937 Zenith 4-B-132 Farm Set

This young woman is now close to 90 years old, but she is shown here, according to the calendar on the wall, in September 1937, in her living room in a farm house near Northome, in Koochiching County in far northern Minnesota. The house looks humble, and I’m not sure exactly what’s going on there in the corner. They don’t have electricity, as evidence by the kerosene lamps, but they do have a radio, and it’s a rather impressive radio.

The radio is a Zenith model 4-B-132. You can see a beautifully preserved example at the Radio Attic Archives. (In fact, if you want to buy that radio, it’s for sale at the Radio Attic.) Most farm sets used two batteries–a low-voltage battery to run the filaments, and a B battery of something like 90 volts. But with this set, Zenith used a different tactic, which probably saved the owner a lot of money over the years. It used a single 6-volt battery, and, like a car radio, it included a vibrator power supply to generate the B+. When the battery got low, it could be recharged with the car or tractor.

Now that we know what the radio is, we want to know what they were listening to. And if we do a close-up of the dial, we can see that it’s tuned between 1400 and 1500 kHz. That makes it easy. The only logical suspect is KSTP, which was then (prior to the NARBA switch, when they moved to 1500) on 1460 kHz, with 25,000 watts day and 10,000 watts night. At 206 miles away, the station would come in loud and clear at night, and probably during most of the day as well. It was a good receiver, there was little in the way of electrical interference, and there were few other stations close to it on the dial. In fact, a 1937 promotional brochure from the station claims the county’s 2400 radio homes (out of a total of 3345 families) as being part of the station’s secondary service area, along with counties in Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Dakotas.

The photo was taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Russell Lee, and is available at the Library of Congress website. Another picture featuring the family and the radio can be found at this link.

Some people look at a picture like this one and feel sorry. There was a depression going on, and there’s a reason why there aren’t a lot of farms these days in Koochiching County. Life was undoubtedly tough. But despite their otherwise austere living conditions, they owned a $40 radio ($854 in 2023 dollars) which undoubtedly brought much pleasure during the long winter nights. And by zooming in on the left side of the picture, we see that this girl, along with her brother and sister, also owned this pinball machine. We suspect this girl had a happy childhood, and a happy life.

Unfortunately, while many of these old Farm Security Administration photos include a caption with the names of the people, this one does not. All we know is that this family lived on a farm near Northome, probably in the house shown below, which was the next negative on the roll.

It’s a longshot, but if you know the people in the picture, or you are a member of this family, we would love to hear from you at clem.law@usa.net.

1923 Giant Radio Truck

We’re not sure where the speaker is, but a hundred years ago, this radio truck was going to replace the marching band in parades. It appeared in the December 1923 issue of Popular Science.