This month 75 years ago, the April 1942 issue of QST carried this “stray” item announcing the death of Andreas Bertnes, LA6R, an amateur radio operator from Sendefyord, Norway, who was executed by the Nazis.
Bertnes, a medical student, was a member of a resistance group known as the Ask-gruppen. The members were rounded up in March 1941. Three, Bertnes along with Øyvind Ask and Johan Midttun, were sentenced to death on November 22. They were executed by being shot on December 4 at Trandum.
Bertnes was one of four amateur radio operators executed during the war for their resistance activities.
Bernes was active on the air before the war. He was listed in the “calls heard” listings by an English SWL on 20 meters in November 1937 and and April 1938.
Eighty years ago today, Life Magazine, May 24, 1937, carried these images of two separate but “equal” rail cars in the southern United States. The car on the left was reserved for white passengers, with the one on the right for African Americans. The caption noted that the car for whites was spotlessly clean and air conditioned, with individual seats. For the same fare, black passengers travelled in a dirtier car without air conditioning with standard seats.
The magazine feature was prompted by a lawsuit by Rep. Arthur Mitlchel of Illinois, who was then the only black Member of Congress. In April, he had traveled by rail from Chicago to Hot Springs, Arkansas. He traveled in a Pullman car and first class coach until the train reached the Arkansas state line. At that time , as required by Arkansas law, the conductor asked him to move to the Jim Crow coach, which the Congressman called filthy.
He brought suit against the railroad, but made clear that he was not crusading for the end of Jim Crowism. Instead, he was seeking merely the “equal accommodations” promised by the law. He lost before the ICC and the District Court, but ultimately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The case, Mitchell v. United States, 313 U.S. 80 (1941) was decided in Mitchell’s favor on April 28, 1941. In 1896, the Court had ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), that “separate but equal” satisfied the Equal Protection clause. That case wasn’t overruled until 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). But in Mitchell, the Court held that equal does, indeed, mean equal.
The railroad and the ICC had argued that there was little demand for first class accommodations by African-American passengers. In fact, the evidence suggested that Mitchell was the first black person to request first class accommodations on the train. But the court held that this was irrelevant, since the ruling “made the constitutional right depend upon the number of persons who may be discriminated against, whereas the essence of that right is that it is a personal one.”
The practical difficulties were irrelevant, according to the court. It was enough that the discrimination had taken place.
Seventy-five years ago today, the May 24, 1942, issue of the Chicago Tribune carried this feature about the shortwave program Command Performance, U.S.A., which began each week with the words, “Command Performance, U.S.A. The greatest entertainment in America as requested by you the fighting forces of America throughout the world, this week and every week until it’s over, over there.”
The article noted that even though the program was intended for servicemen overseas, many Americans with shortwave receivers on the homefront had discovered it and were regularly tuning in.
The programs were transcribed in New York and Hollywood, and featured the biggest stars of the entertainment world offering their talents without charge. The article noted that “sometimes the language on these shows is just a little more robust than is passed by standard broadcasting stations. Jack Benny, as we recall, last Sunday night encouraged our fighting men to ‘give ’em hell.'”
The newspaper carried the schedule shown below of the stations covering the show, along with times and frequencies. It noted that some of the beams were not heard well in the Midwest, but pointed out that many were. For example, it noted that the 10:30 PM broadcast to Central and South America was being heard well in Chicago.
In addition to Command Performance, special news and sports programs were broadcast for the military, and some domestic programs were rebroadcast.
Maybe your MP3 player sounds a bit better than this gentleman’s hi-fi turntable from 60 years ago, but I bet you can’t build yours from scratch, like this guy did. This one, shown on the cover of the 1957 edition of Radio-TV Experimenter, is entirely homemade, and despite the homemade appearance, probably did sound as good or better than anything on the market at the time, and would probably have sounded good even by today’s standards.
It was actually a phono oscillator, and transmitted the signal through an FM transmitter. Since the audio quality of the FM signal was better than the recording technology of the day, the fidelity was limited only by the quality of the record.
Sound quality was paramount in every detail. As is plainly visible, the tone arm is indeed made out of wood. In particular, the wood is basswood, chosen because it had less mechanical resonance than other woods. Metal would have been inferior, because of the capacitive effect with the leads running through it.
The pickup was homemade, not as a cost-saving measure, but because the design shown here was superior to the ceramic cartridges then commercially available. It used a capacitive pickup. The only commercial component was the sapphire-tiped needle, which was pushed into a rubber plug. A copper plate was carefully positioned next to the needle to complete the capacitive pickup.
The tone arm was cut with a jigsaw, and the article contained precise instructions for balancing it.
The electronics, probably the easiest part to construct, consisted of a small FM transmitter employing a single 6C4 tube. The example shown here was to be used for 45 RPM records, but the article noted that by adjusting the size and using an appropriate needle, it could be built for 33 or 78 RPM records.
Seventy years ago this month, Olson Radio Warehouse had a promotional idea that would probably be regarded as somewhat on the politically incorrect side today. To encourage radio servicemen to order parts and supplies, they instituted the Gift of the Month Club. When the serviceman placed an order, Olson would toss in a free gift. And they kicked the program off by giving away free cigarettes! That’s right: When the serviceman ordered tubes or resistors, Olson would throw in a pack of Camels, Chesterfields, or Luckies!
This piece of trade news appeared in the May 1947 issue of Radio Service Dealer. It reveals that, as of press time, Olson had handed out a quarter million free smokes.
Seventy-five years ago this month, the May 1942 issue of Radio Craft featured on its cover this handheld radio telephone weighing only four pounds, which the magazine noted was not much larger than the handset of a “French” telephone. The set was the product of the Weltronic Corporation, which was the assignee of the patent, U.S. Patent 2276933, with a pre-Pearl Harbor application date of October 1, 1941, and an issue date of March 17, 1942.
The magazine noted that the set had a range of about a mile, and could operate on any frequency between 112-300 MHz. The diagram below reveals that the set appears to be one tube functioning as an oscillator and superregenerative detector, with the other tube serving as AF amplifier to drive the headphone on receiver, and as modulator on transmit.
Commercially available batteries were said to allow continuous operation for eight hours, or about a week to a month in normal service. The article noted that the set was being made available to governmental agencies.
The cover photo shows the unit in use by a guard around a defense plant.
The article puts quotation marks around the word “transceiver,” since such a combined unit would have been unfamiliar to many readers.
On this day one hundred years ago, May 18, 1917, Congress passed the Selective Service Act of 1917, authorizing the military draft, now that the nation was at war.
Unlike the draft for the Civil War, the act specifically prohibited the hiring of substitutes:
No person liable to military service shall hereafter be permitted or allowed to furnish a substitute for such service; nor shall any substitute be received, enlisted, or enrolled in the military service of the United States; and no such person shall be permitted to escape such service or to be discharged therefrom prior to the expiration of his term of service by the payment of money or any other valuable thing whatsoever as consideration his release from military service or liability there to.
The first registration under the act, for men age 21-31, was set for June 5, 1917. 18 year olds were set to be registered in 1918.
If Junior just remembered that the Science Fair project is due tomorrow, and he hasn’t even started, there’s no need to panic. The little project shown here can easily be whipped up in an evening, and the teacher will be none the wiser about your haste. He or she will assume that the little scientist has been working on it for weeks.
While Mom and Dad race to the dollar store before it closes to buy the poster board and markers, Junior can start building this instrument for measuring wind resistance for objects of various sizes. Unless someone sticks their fingers into the moving fan blades, this experiment should be completely safe. It appeared 80 years ago this month in the May 1937 issue of Popular Science.
Of course, the teacher expects the students to come up with things like a hypothesis, which should be pretty easy. All Junior needs to do is come up with a sentence such as “a ______ shaped object has more wind resistance than a ______ shaped object.” The blanks can be filled in with whatever objects are easier to construct, for example, a cube and a sphere.
The instrument shown here is pretty self-explanatory. The object being tested is mounted on top of a rigid wire, with a counterweight at the bottom. To make it look fancy, you can make the pointer and scale. Then, you balance the wire and blow a fan at it. The object that deflects the furthest has the greater wind resistance.
As can be seen here, the fan has an “egg box partition” in front of it to straighten out the air currents. Apparently, in 1937, most households had egg boxes lying around with cardboard partitions. A modern egg carton probably won’t work, but Junior can retrieve some cardboard from the recycling bin and simply make a grate consisting of square openings.
When you get home with the poster board, Junior can copy down some interesting facts from the Wikipedia article about drag, and the result will probably be a blue ribbon.
If you’re like me, you probably assumed that the hymn How Great Thou Art has always been a part of the American religious music scene. However, it is actually relatively new, being first popularized only sixty years ago, in 1957. It was performed for the first time by George Beverly Shea at Billy Graham‘s Madison Square Garden Crusade, which began on this night 60 years ago, May 15, 1957. The crusade lasted until September 1, and during its run, more than two million persons attended to hear Graham preach and Shea sing. Over 56,000 reportedly responded to the message by making a decision for Christ.
In the video below, Cliff Barrows describes it in his introduction as “a new hymn to American audiences.” The hymn was not exactly new when Shea brought it to American audiences. The tune was a traditional Swedish melody. The Swedish lyrics, “O Store Gud” were penned in 1885 by Carl Boberg, who was inspired while walking home from church listening to church bells. A sudden storm was followed by a similarly sudden calm. According to Boberg, the words were a paraphrase of Psalm 8:
Lord, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
in the heavens.
The first translation of the hymn was into Russian in 1912, “Velikiy Bog” (Великий Бог – Great God) by Ivan S. Prokhanov. It was published in a Russian Protestant hymnal in 1927.
The first English translation came in 1925 by E. Gustav Johnson, who made a literal translation of the Swedish lyrics published in the Covenant Hymnal as “O Mighty God.” Those words remained as late as the 1973 edition:
O mighty God, when I behold the wonder
Of nature’s beauty, wrought by words of thine,
And how thou leadest all from realms up yonder,
Sustaining earthly life with love benign,
With rapture filled, my soul thy name would laud,
O mighty God! O mighty God!
Credit for the now familiar English lyrics goes largely to British Methodist missionary Stuart Wesley Keene Hine, who heard the hymn sung in Ukraine in 1931. He did a paraphrase of the Russian translation, which includes most of the familiar lyrics, as well as the title, “How Great Thou Art.”
Hine finalized the lyrics in 1949, and he performed it for the first time at a convention in New York in 1951. It was first published in 1956, in the collection “Eastern Melodies & Hymns of Other Lands.”
The hymn soared in popularity after Shea’s 1957 performances at the Madison Square Garden Crusade. It’s unclear whether the hymn was performed on the first night of the crusade 60 years ago tonight, but it was performed at most of the services.
