Seventy-five years ago this month, this curious ad appeared in the April 1951 issue of Popular Science. It invites you to send $5 ($62.84 in 2026 dollars) to Scientific Products of Indianapolis (conveniently headquartered in a Post Office box), and they will send you copyrighted instructions showing you how to build this radio powered motor. You turn the motor until voices or music are heard from it, courtesy of the proverbial strong local station. At that point, you can listen to it like a radio, but it keeps spinning, thanks to the energy taken from that station.

The skeptic will note that this device doesn’t provide very much energy. It can keep feebly spinning, and you can probably listen to the broadcast at low volume indefinitely, assuming you’re close enough to the station. But they thought of that. They did the impossible by making the tiny prototype, and now it’s up to you to make it more practical. And you can earn “$10,000” if you can pull it off. They include a “royalty agreement,” meaning that if they can commercialize your idea, you will make money. And more importantly for them, they will make money from your hard work.

We’re sure that many of our readers have independently come up with the same idea–using power from a nearby radio station to power up a small device. But we also know that there’s a limit to it.  The only references to “Scientific Products of Indianapolis” were similar ads in other magazines during about the same time frame.  They must have had a bit of capital to run all of those ads.  Let’s hope that not too many suckers sent them $5.

Eighty years ago, this Indiana radio worker is “tropicalizing” radio equipment. The chassis has just had a lacquer applied, and it is now passing through an infrared drying oven. The photo was taken at the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corp. in Marion, Indiana, and appeared on the cover of Radio News, January 1946.

If you were listening to the radio 100 years ago tonight, October 30, 1925, in Indianapolis, you would be able to tune in to the Claypool Trio, composed of Alma Miller Lentz on the violin, Carolyn Turner at the piano, and Consuelo Couchman Rettig on cello. The program was heard on WFBM (now WNDE), and this photo appeared in the Indianapolis Times, October 29, 1925.

Shown above is the radio service shop of Charles Hurt of Elkhart, Indiana, in 1940, shown here in the August 1940 issue of Service magazine.  He had been in business for a number of years without really making a living, and realized that he had to make some changes. He figured out that to be profitable, he had to make a profit on every single transaction, and he established a bookkeeping system to make sure that happened.

He also realized that there was fierce competition in his area, any one of which were able to press their advantages and force him out of business. The answer was to expand his service area and do it efficiently. Therefore, he purchased the trailer shown here, made it his shop, and adopted the slogan “service at your door.”

Hurt is also shown in this illustration in the December 1940 issue of National Radio News, which notes that the arrangement was also advantageous to the customer, as they avoided charges for pickup and delivery. This item also reveals that for AC power, the trailer was equipped with a dynamotor and storage battery.

This Zenith ad ran a hundred years ago today in the October 26, 1922, issue of the Richmond (Ind.) Palladium and Sun-Telegram.  It asks the reader what they’re going to do that night, and speculates that they might play an uninteresting game of cards, sit in an uninteresting conversation, or spend the night in some time-killing chore or lukewarm hobby.

But real, diversified entertainment was at hand, in the form of radio! To find out more, all you had to do was call the Weisbrod’s music store, the town’s Zenith dealer, and set up an appointment to come into the store and see what their sets could pull in.

(Click on the ad to see a full size version.)

A hundred years ago, if you were a kid in South Bend, Indiana, and you wanted to get in on the excitement of radio, then this deal was for you.

All you had to do was sell twelve new subscriptions to the South Bend News-Times (just 20 cents a week for a minimum of 13 weeks), and you would earn yourself a radio receiving machine, absolutely free. This ad ran in the paper’s June 1, 1922, edition.

Pembroke Arcade. Image, historicindianapolis.com.

A hundred years ago today, the January 9, 1922, issue of the Indiana Daily Times carried this feature describing a radio store, Hoosier Radio Company of Indianapolis.
RADIO CREATES NOVEL BUSINESS
Wireless Telephone and Telegraph Open New Field.

Radio telegraphy, which a few years ago was regarded by the general public as only for real experts when operated on a big scale, for youngsters to amuse themselves with on a small scale, now has come to assume an important place in the life of the community, and the radio telephone Is In far more general use than the average person realizes.

This new science, developed along lines all its own, has resulted in the growth of an entirely new business, the supply business for radio equipment, according to L. H. Smith, president of the Hoosier Radio Company, 108 Pembroke Arcade.

“When radio work was Just becoming popular users of equipment found it difficult in the extreme to buy supplies. Supplies of this character were handled by only a few shops as a sideline, the clerks knew very little about them and the technical nature of the equipment made it almost impossible for anyone not enthusiastic about radio work to deal
intelligently with the trade,” Mr. Smith said.

“This led me to establish a store handling nothing but supplies for radio telephone and radio telegraph equipment. My patronage comes from about every part of Indianapolis and Includes persons of all ages from the enthusiastic school boy to the business man, who is interested in radio work. I believe that at present there are more than 1,000 persons actively interested in radio work in this city and the number is steadily Increasing.

“There has been a genera! misunderstanding In the public mind as to the expense of a radio plant. Contrary to the general belief it is not at all prohibitory. A receiving set with a range of 4OO to 500 miles under favorable conditions may be purchased for $15, and no great amount of study is necessary to use these machines.

“Radio telephony is growing more popular every day, a popularity that is increased by the concerts sent out nightly by the Commonwealth-Edison Company of Chicago. These concerts are given by the Chicago Grand Opera Company and are heard in this city and all over the country. Dally concerts are sent out by the Westinghouse Company at Pittsburgh at the same time, and by simply tuning the instrument the owner of a wireless telephone plant has his choice of the music to which he desires to listen.”

The building in which this shop was located, shown above, the Pembroke Arcade, was located in downtown Indianapolis and built in 1895. It was what we would call today a shopping mall–an enclosed building with a large number of stores inside. It was torn down in 1943.