Eighty years ago today, the September 27, 1937, issue of Life magazine showed this woman freed, once and for all, form the tyranny of dial twisting, as her heroic man lets her know that from now on, all she need do is “press a button–that’s all.”

The GE ad explained that she could now enjoy the greatest radio luxury, namely Touch Tuning. A double row of buttons was plainly marked with the call letters of her favorite stations. All she had to do was push the correct button, and the program was there, “automatically, silently, tuned to hairline precision.” With this advancement, General Electric finally “ended the long quest of the radio industry for completely automatic tuning.”

A mere $10 down payment would see one of these sets in your living room. Eighteen models were available for 1938, raning from personal radios to armchair sets to beautiful new consoles.

Typically, these pushbutton sets had a separate L-C circuit tuned by the serviceman for the desired stations, and setting the buttons and marking them was taken care of when a new set was purchased.  For those who desired, dial twisting remained an option.  Typically, one button was marked “dial,” and allowed the big tuning dial to be set in the conventional manner.

Shown here from the September 25, 1937, issue of Radio Guide is an article written by radio pioneer and questionable physician Dr. John Brinkley.  Shown in the upper left is his radio station, XERA, Villa Acuna, Coahuila, Mexico.  At the upper right is a picture of his home in neighboring Del Rio, Texas.

The station was famous not only for promoting the doctor’s dubious cures, but also for causing interference with U.S. broadcast stations.  We previously wrote about how another of Dr. Brinkley’s stations, XEAW, Reynosa, interfered with WCFL, Chicago.

In an editorial published a few months earlier, the editors of Radio Guide opined that Brinkley’s Mexican stations operated “regardless of the codes which keep one nation from interfering with another,” and that “sooner or later, Mexican broadcasters will have to abide by American laws.”

The editors agreed to allow Brinkley to publish a response, and the result is shown here. Brinkley began by noting that he resented the editorial as an unwarranted attack upon his professional and personal character. He did acknowledge that the opportunity to offer a rebuttal showed that the editor “cannot be a wholly bad fellow.”

Brinkley spent most of his time championing the cause of broadcasters in the Mexican Republic, noting that of the 89 channels available on the broadcast dial, 83 had been “appropriated by the United States, and the remaining six by Canada, leaving none for Mexico.

In Brinkley’s mind, the good citizens of Mexico were entitled to radio stations. And those radio stations just happened to be his, broadcasting in English to audiences in the same country that had “appropriated” the rest of the dial.

Brinkley then concludes by testifying as to his own good character, noting that he was the son of a pioneer physician whose life was spent in unselfish, often uncompensated, ministry to the sick, in the rugged and sparsely settled Appalachian mountains. This inspired his “unusual research,” motivated by his “innate, inalienable, perhaps undue, ambition to serve his race.” This drove him to the air, in the service of more than 10,000 patients who found relief in his hospitals.

He concludes by noting that he had recently been elected as President of the Rotarians, and was on his way to Nice, France, to serve as their delegate.

The plans for this handsome little one-tube regenerative shortwave receiver appeared 80 years ago this month in the September, 1937 issue of Short Wave and Television magazine.

The simple circuit was designed for the beginner, and could be put together even by “the man without previous experience in set-building.”

It employed a type 30 tube, although many other triodes could be substituted. The filaments were powered with two 1.5 volt dry cells, and the B+ was supplied by a 22.5 volt battery, although up to 135 volts could be used for added volume.

Band switching was accomplished by a tapped coil, with the wire running to the appropriate tap running up through the angled front panel. From there, it could be connected to a Fahnestock clip for the appropriate tap. Tuning and regeneration controls were on the front panel, as well as a connection to rotate the tickler coil.

As is evident from both the schematic and pictorial diagrams shown here, the set was easy to contruct, and could easily be duplicated with modern parts.  Sources of many of the required parts can be found on my parts page.

The father-daughter team shown here are putting the finishing touches on the plug-in coils for the two-tube broadcast/shortwave receiver described in the September, 1942, issue of Popular Mechanics.  The set was designed to build upon a one-tube receiver described in the magazine’s July issue.

Most of the parts, as well as the chassis, of the earlier set were re-used to make the more complex receiver shown here. The 1Q5GT detector was re-used, and another 1Q5GT was used as audio amplifier. On strong local broadcast stations, the set would provide loudspeaker volume. For weak distant shortwave stations, the set would provide excellent headphone volume. The five homemade plug-in coils would provide the regenerative receiver with coverage from the broadcast band through 20 meters.

Three power supplies were required. A 1.5 volt dry cell was used for the filament voltage, and four flashlight batteries were used for the bias voltage. The B+ was supplied either by a 45 volt battery or a battery eliminator which was also shown.

The little circuit shown here appeared sixty years ago this month in the September 1957 issue of Radio Electronics magazine. Almost anyone who has experimented with electronics has probably tried a variation of this circuit. It’s simply a way to run a small electronic device from the “free” energy of a nearby broadcast station. The signal is picked up by the antenna, is rectified by a diode, and the resulting energy is used to provide power to a transistor audio amplifier.

The example shown here appears to use a single diode to both provide power to the transistor, and the signal. According to the magazine, the diagram comes from U.S. Patent 2777057, issued to one  Jacques J. Pankove, and assigned to RCA.  While the patent contains drawings for circuits that are slightly more complex, the diagram here does not appear in the patent itself.