The plans for this British crystal set appeared 90 years ago in the December 17, 1927 issue of Amateur Wireless.

The set was billed as an ideal Christmas gift for someone living close to a BBC station. “A receiver such as this is inexpensive to build and would make an admirable Christmas gift to someone who lives near a B.B.C. station and has facilities for the erection of a reasonably efficient aerial-earth system.”

According to the article, if the set was equipped with a good aerial and earth, it would work two pairs of headphones with good volume, at a range of up to 12 miles from a main BBC station, or about half that distance from a relay station. The set was simple to operate, since it used a “permanent” crystal detector.

The article used quotation marks, since apparently the detector (available from either R.I. and Varley, or the Jewel Pen Company) was capable of an initial adjustment. “When testing on actual reception, carefully adjust the crystal detector until loudest results are obtained, and then leave well alone, as far as the detector is concerned.”

Seventy years ago, Santa was getting ready to head down the chimney with some of these Philco radios and phonographs shown in this ad from the December 15, 1947, issue of Life magazine.

The featured console was the Philco 1270, with a list price of $359.70. It featured an FM tuner, and also promised to let you say goodbye to record noise, with the “Philco Electronic Scratch Eliminator, the device that separates noise from music for the first time in the history of record-playing.”

If you wanted to add some scratches to those records to test the capabilities, the ad also featured two phonographs that could probably do the trick, models 1200 and 1201. The record was inserted into a slot on the front, and the ad promised “no more fussing with lids, tone-arms, or controls.” Model 1200 was just a record player, while model 1201 also featured a radio. Both were portable and could be carried anywhere.

You can see the 1270 in action at the following video.  While not mentioned in the ad, you can see from the video that the set also tuned 6-15.5 MHz shortwave.

While this project from the November 1947 issue of Popular Science is ostensibly a Christmas present for Junior, the text of the construction article reveals that Mom and Dad might have an ulterior motive:  “Everyone in the family will enjoy this little two-tube headphone set.  Junior can listen to all the programs especially meant for him, and Pop and Mom will escape the nerve-shattering tommy guns and thundering herds.”

The set is a two-tube regenerative receiver for the broadcast band, using a 12J7GT detector with a 12J5GT serving as audio amplifier.

It’s an AC/DC set, meaning that Junior should probably make sure he doesn’t use it close to the water pipes. It appears to be electrically isolated from the chasis, and as long as capacitor C8 doesn’t short out, the headphones will be isolated from the AC line.

To tame the regenerative receiver, and keep Junior from becoming a squeal hound, the controls are preset, and tuning is accomplished with three or four trimmer capacitors set to local stations, and a switch is used to pick the station.

No external ground is used (probably to keep the AC-DC set from blowing a fuse or zapping Junior). The article notes that an outdoor antenna is desirable but not absolutely necessary.

I’m not sure how practical the idea was, either then or now, but the December 1926 issue of Radio News offers this suggestion to turn your Christmas tree into a Loudspeaking Christmas Tree.

According to the accompanying construction article, authored by none other than publisher Hugo Gernsback himself, “a Christmas tree and music are almost synonymous.” For some years, Gernsback had been wondering why the self-evident idea of combining the tree’s scent with a radio has not been more universal.

The idea shown here killed two birds with one stone, by providing not only a base for the tree, but also make the tree musical.

Ninety years ago, Christmas 1925 was a Radio Christmas for this family, shown on the cover of that month’s issue of Radio in the Home enjoying their new set.

Radio was coming of age, and it was no longer the sole province of home do-it-yourself tinkerers. The magazine asked the question: “Will our next radio set be home-made or factory-assembled?” While it didn’t provide a definitive answer, the handwriting was on the wall, and most homes with radio would be getting a factory built set. It noted though, that “some of us prefer a home-made set, just as we prefer mother’s home-made cake; whereas the rest of us are going to the store and buy the best set which our pocketbook can afford, just as the apartment dweller buys bakery goods because the kitchenette is too small to permit manufacture of a full-size cake.”

By 1925, almost three times as much money was spent on sets as was spent on parts, what the magazine. But back in 1922, ten times as much was spent on parts as compared with manufactured sets. So in just three years, there had been a radical shift toward the factory sets.

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