Eugène Aisberg, 1946.

After a wartime absence, the January 1946 issue of Radio Craft carried an article by writer Eugène Aisberg.  While that name might not be familiar to American readers, Aisberg was a prolific author in the early days of radio, and wrote some of the best treatises on radio for the popular audience.  He was fluent in French, Esperanto, German, Russian, and English.

Aisberg was born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1905, and lived most of his life in France. He was the director of the French magazine Toute la Radio and a prolific author of a number of books. His most popular book, which is still in print, is La Radio? Mais c’est très simple (Radio? But It’s So Simple!)  The book, currently in its 29th edition, an extremely solid background covering all aspects of electronics, and is written in a popular, easy-to-read style. While the book was ultimately translated into several languages, it was apparently never published in English.

The book consists mostly of a dialog between Ignotus and his uncle Curiosus, along with explanations by Professor Radiol, in which the characters explain in an interesting fashion all aspects of electronic theory.

Aisberg’s first radio book was actually published in Esperanto. Jen… mi komprenas la radion (“Now I understand the radio”).

1942 edition of Amélioration et modernisation des recepteurs.

During the war, under the noses of the occupying Germans, Aisberg published a book explaining how to pull in Radio London and other foreign stations. The technical title of the book, Amélioration et modernisation des recepteurs (“Improvement and Modernization of Radio Receivers”) was undoubtedly helpful in getting the book past the German censors.

While his most famous book was never translated into English, his later TV – It’s a Cinch was published in English in 1957. While analog TV is now an obsolete technology, the book is still an extremely interesting read, and the reader walks away knowing how the technology works.

The 1946 article, which marked his return to an American audience after the war, described a radio with automatic selectivity control.  The article also contains the following sidebar, which is a fascinating reminder of conditions prevailing in France immediately after the war:

Because of the conditions prevailing in Paris, instead of a check, Aisberg preferred payment for the article to be in the form of “chocolate, cocoa, toilet soap, shaving cream, corned pork, coffee, needles and thread, canned ham, and high-speed razor blades.”

Aisberg died in Paris in 1980.

See also:  Fall of Paris, 1940

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One hundred years ago this month, the January 1916 issue of Popular Mechanics showed the portable radio transmitter-receiver shown here.

The set was designed to be strapped to the waist, and was believed by the designer, Dr. H. Barringer Cox of Bedford Hills, New York, to be particularly suited for military use. While the full details had not been made public, the magazine revealed that the transmitter was powered by five dry cells going to a vibrator and transformer. The antenna and ground consisted of a wire of about four or five feet in length running to a “canelike metal rod.” For military use, the wire could run down a trouser leg to metal spurs in a soldier’s boots.

The receiver consisted of a drum encircled by a wire coil, with the detector on top. During testing, the set had a range of approximately 18 miles, although the normal expected operating radius was stated as being about 2-3 miles.

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It’s unclear exactly when and where these grainy old photographs were taken, but they depict something rather remarkable.  The top photograph is a radio receiver used by Allied prisoners of war from 1940 until the end of the war in 1945.

This set belonged to the crew of a Canadian merchant ship which was captured early in 1940. They managed to conceal the set in their belongings and smuggle it in to the POW camp near Bremen. The set’s hiding place is the hollowed out butcher’s block shown in the bottom photo.

The photos appear on page 14 of the January, 1946, issue of Manitoba Calling, the monthly magazine and program guide put out by CKY in Winnipeg. The article contains other tales of Allied POW’s managing to listen to the radio during their confinement. The article contains other such stories of how prisoners managed to keep clandestine radio receivers concealed.

In one case, prisoners at a camp in occupied Poland managed to steal a transmitter from a German armored car. When the camp was threatened with an exhaustive search for the stolen set, it was returned, since the men didn’t want to risk losing the twenty clandestine receivers in their possession.

Unfortunately, the article is lacking details on the receivers in use, their power supplies, and other details. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting read, and confirms that Allied prisoners were often able to keep in touch with news from home.

The author of the article was Calvin Peppler, who was employed by CKY before and after the war. During the war, he was a Spitfire pilot in various squadrons for several years. In the last few months of the war, he was shot down and served for several months as a prisoner of war himself, attempting several unsuccessful escapes. Peppler died in Toronto in 2015 at the age of 96.

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