Eighty years ago this month, the June 1939 issue of Radio Retailing carried this ad reminding dealers that they should stock up on portables for campers, collegiate-ers, picnic-ers, and swingsters.
The set shown is the Model 590-1. The superheterodyne set featued a tube lineup of 1A7G, 1N5G, 1H5G, and 1A5G, with a 35Z5GT rectifier for use at home. The set switched automatically from household current to battery by removing the line cord.
Sixty years ago this month, the cover story of the June 1959 issue of Popular Electronics was all about the small but growing number of amateur radio operators on television. The 70 cm band had been allocated for TV, and pockets of hams were putting it to use.
Cameras were very expensive, and required a lot of studio lighting. So some hams were content to get on the air with a flying spot projector and slides, similar to the test device we featured earlier. An existing TV receiver was used to illuminate the slide, with a photocell picking up the image as each line was illuminated.
In drydock after salvage. Wikipedia photo.
This picture above appeared 80 years ago today in the June 16, 1939, issue of Radio Guide. Shown is a Washington, D.C., family gathered around the radio, obviously clinging to every word of the news announcer. They are the family of William Isaacs, who was aboard the Navy submarine U.S.S. Squalus when it sank off the coast of New Hampshire on May 23, 1939, killing 26 crew members. The remaining 33 aboard (32 crew and one civilian) were rescued. The ship was initially in contact with a companion ship by telephone line to a buoy, and the men were rescued from 243 feet of water thanks to the McCann Rescue Chamber.
The ship was eventually salvaged, and went on to serve in the Pacific during World War II as the USS Sailfish. The ship was scrapped after the War, but the conning tower, shown here, was preserved after the war as a memorial at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.
The family shown here eventually received good news, as Isaacs was one of the men successfully rescued from the sunken ship.
Sixty years ago this month, the June 1959 issue of Popular Science explained how the ubiquitous clock radio worked, using a General Electric model as the example. This model included a sleep feature which let the radio play when going to bed. In the morning, the radio would first come on, followed by a buzzer ten minutes later. It also included an outlet at the back for a small appliance.
According to the magazine, the clock radio first came out in 1947, and in the previous year, 2.3 million of the sets were sold by 25 different manufacturers.
The scouts shown above are taking a break from their campout to pull in some local broadcast stations on the two-tube superheterodyne receiver they constructing from the plans in the June 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics. The set used a 1R5 and a 1U5 tube and a 15 foot antenna to get good volume on the local stations. According to the magazine, the set rivaled any regenerative receiver, without the possibility of an annoying squeal.
According to the magazine, the rugged little set was ideal for camping or other knockabut use. It could be transported in a small cardboard container, or, if the builder preferred, in a cabinet.
The filaments ran off two flashlight batteries in parallel, with a 67.5 volt B battery. For strong stations, a 45 volt battery could be substituted.
The article shown above appeared in the June 1939 issue of Rural Radio magazine, detailing an award to Wilson E. Burgess, W1BDS, for his work during the 1938 New England Hurricane. The storm was one of the deadliest to ever hit New England and Long Island, with an estimated 682 killed. It’s the strongest hurricane to hit New England in modern times, possibly eclipsed by the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635.
While this article is short on details, more can be learned from Clinton DeSoto‘s 1941 book Calling CQ.
Rhode Island hurricane damage. Wikipedia image.
The storm was poorly forecast, and hit Burgess’s hometown of Westerly, R.I., with little warning the afternoon of September 21, 1938. Burgess was working as the manager of the appliance department at Montgomery Ward when the storm blew out the windows of the store. Panicked people were running up and down the aisles of the store. It soon became apparent that a hurricane was in progress.
He quickly collected a quantity of batteries and started for home on foot. He struggled up the street as trees fell around him. At the police station, he met up with another amateur, George Marshall, W1KRQ. Together, the set off toward Burgess’s home with the batteries. Eventually, they were able to hitch a ride on a county truck, but it was soon blocked by trees and they again had to continue on foot.
They eventually made it, but he found that the edge of his garage that had supported his antenna had been swept away. He went out in the 65 MPH winds to put it back up, and eventually had to settle for wrapping the wire around his house.
W1KRF, W1BDS, W1KRQ at the makeshift station. QST, Nov. 1938, p. 12.
By this time, of course, the power was out, and there was no way to power Burgess’s normal 600 watt transmitter. Working by kerosene lantern, the two men worked for two hours building a one-tube transmitter to use with the batteries carried from the store. DeSoto reports that the windows had been blown out by this time, and daughter Jane Gail Burgess, shown in the photo above, then three months old, was crying in terror.
Finally, they had the transmitter and a makeshift receiver ready, and Burgess started putting out a QRR–the then-distress call. Unfortunately, nobody really knew that an emergency was in progress, and their weak signal simply wasn’t heard over the interference of a normal busy ham band. They moved their CW signal up to the phone band, reasoning that the CW signal would stand out there. The trick worked, and soon W2CQD in New Jersey answered the call, with W1SZ in Connecticut (QST managing editor) later taking over. For the next five days, the Connecticut station maintained contact.
Neighbors eventually got word to the local Red Cross that radio contact had been made, and the house soon became a center for relief activity. The first official message was to Red Cross headquarters in Washington, but that message was not accepted, since it was signed merely “Westerly Red Cross.” Eventually, the name of the local chairman was added, and the message was accepted.
The gentleman shown here is obviously a mover and shaker, and he’s staying in touch thanks to a portable citizen’s band transceiver that he assembled himself from a semi-kit. The electronics came pre-wired, but he had to do the final assembly himself, a process that took about three hours.
The set, from a company called Springfield Enterprises, sold for $41.90, plus $5.73 for the battery. The set was reviewed in the June 1959 issue of Electronics Illustrated. The magazine had two of the units, and found the reliable range using the whip antennas to be about a quarter of a mile.
The top photo is taken at Times Square, as revealed by this photo.
The cover of National Radio News, the publication of the National Radio Institute home study school, for June-July 1944 shows the exterior of Meadwell’s Radio & Electirc, 110-3rd Ave. S., Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
Shown by the truck at the left are the owners, Mr. & Mrs. John D. Meadwell, both graduates of of NRI. They wrote to the magazine of their gratitude to the school for the training and cooperation received, and that they owed their success to NRI.
They reported that they had done wonderfully well and believed that they had the largest radio repair shop in Saskatoon.
The building in which the shop was located was known as the Dinkle Building, and was destroyed by fire in 1986. The three-story building had shops on the lower level, with the top two floors being residential. More pictures can be found at the Saskatoon Public Library website.
Shown here in the June 1939 issue of Radio Craft is sixteen-year-old Kathryn Hutchinson of the famous Flying Hutchinsons. According to the magazine, she was an amateur radio operator, although her call sign was not specified. She is shown here working on part of the Amateur Radio display of the 1939 World’s Fair, which was part of the Westinghouse exhibit in cooperation with the ARRL.
Flying Hutchinsons, circa 1932. Wikipedia image.
The Flying Hutchinsons had earned their fame in 1931, when Kathryn was about eight, when they visited the capitals of all 48 states by air. The next year, when Kathryn was nine, the family achieved further fame in an attempted around-the-world flight. The attempt ended off Greenland when the plane crash landed and the family was stranded for several days before being picked up by a fishing trawler and taken to the U.K. Kathryn’s parents, George and Blanche, wrote two books detailing their adventures, The Flying Family in Greenland (1935) and Flying the States (1937).
You can see Kathryn and the rest of her family in this 1932 newsreel in which her father defends the flight:
You can hear Kathryn and the rest of the family at this 1939 radio program. More information is available at this link. I believe the program is actually a dramatization of the completion of a flight that never took place. Begun in 1939, the Hutchinsons made it as far as Mexico before the war broke out, making impossible a visit to all nations on earth.
Kathryn Hutchinson James died in Florida in 2015 at the age of 92. At the time of her death, she was a registered Republican. Her mother, Blanche D. Hutchinson died in 1995.
Wartime parts shortages often meant that radio servicemen had to be creative, and that often meant tube substitution. If the replacement tube was not available, it was often possible to substitute one that was. The substitute often had similar or even identical electrical characteristics, but had a different size plug or pin configuration.
The June 1944 issue of Radio Craft, like many other radio magazines of the era, carried some pointers. The illustration shows common adapters. The base was made of a burnt out tube (perhaps the one being replaced), and the top was a new socket for the new tube. When tubes became available, the adapter could be removed and the original inserted in the socket.
