A hundred years ago today, the September 30, 1921, issue of The Brattleboro (Vermont) Daily Reformer carried this editorial. It was under the heading of Brattleboro High School News, and the Editor-In-Chief is identified as Lynn Thayer, a sixteen-year-old student at the school.

According to the 1920 call book, the club was already licensed under the call 1UT.

Radio Practice in the High School.

Radio, one of the newer branches of engineering, has developed with tremendous success in the past few years. Important inventions occur with such rapidity that it is impossible to write a comprehensive text on the subject. A new radio station is being built on Long Island which will send and receive simultaneously from five European countries. Telephone communications have been carried on over greater distances without wires than have been carried on with wires. And yet the science is still in its infancy. No one dares to predict its .status twenty years hence.

The high school radio club, in the small town, is usually the only means of creating local interest in this diverting subject. Two or three boys in the town usually have special aptitude for this subject, but they cannot interest many of the others. A radio club is the means of not only instructing but also interesting the majority. Code practice and instruction in the use of apparatus are more readily given to an assembly. Oretical [sic] principles may be explained by the science teacher or one of the older members. Articles of interest concerning the latest inventions can be discussed and all the social advantages of such a club can be enjoyed.

You ask: What are the benefits boys derive from radio? Here is the answer:
Radio tends to cultivate patience and ingeniousness and concentration. It interests the boy in clean, fascinating work which may lead to a good job later. Should he erect a set at home there would be no question of where he would spend his evenings. It is an indoor sport which will teach him to use his hands and head. At the same time it will interest the rest of the family and keep them posted on things in the scientific world.

Radio is without doubt a modern subject. It is a study of modern things. It is the keynote to more difficult sciences and interesting subjects than most people realize. Since to be modern is to be up in all the latest subjects of interest no one is modern who does not know something about it. Radio is distinctly one of the latest. It is only at the beginning of its career, which will astonish the world because of its magnitude.

Seventy-five years ago this month, the September 1946 issue of Radio Service Dealer
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Radio-Service-Dealer/40s/RSD-1946-09.pdf
addressed the issue of how to deal with intermittent problems in radios. The magazine called them time wasters, because there was really no way to service the set until the problem manifested itself. And Murphy’s law being what it is, that generally meant that the set would work just fine when the serviceman was ready to work on it.

One solution to the problem was the circuit shown here. The set would be put on the bench hooked to a signal generator. The leads to the set’s speaker would be disconnected and hooked to the input. By carefully adjusting the control in the circuit, and the set’s volume control, the set would play while the serviceman worked on other sets. But when the signal strength started to drop, the bell would sound, and attention could immediately turn to the problem set.

The magazine even suggested that this circuit could be used as a final check for all sets serviced in the shop, to make sure there was no hidden fault before the set was returned to its owner.

Sixty years ago this month, the September 1961 issue of Electronics World showed how to put together this simple handheld transceiver for 15 meters, dubbed the “Simple-Talkie.” The designer was none other than Hartland Smith, then W8VVD, currently W8QX, whom we’ve featured previously.

With a short piece of wire serving as antenna, the range was said to be about a hundred feet, or several hundred feet with a half-wave wire. The power input was a modest 10 mW. While the range is short, it was useful for various antenna projects around the shack. To communicate from the shack to the tower, the ham inside would use the main station, and the ham climbing the tower could communicate with the tiny rig.

The September 1951 issue of Radio-Electronics carried this image of a Radio Officer in the Merchant Marine, aboard the Esso Tanker Bermuda.  The magazine carried a good summary of the profession. At the time, Radio Officers were in demand, and for a young man seeking adventure, it was an ideal time to land such a job. Minimum pay was $300 a month, and it could be as high as $500. Work could be on a freighter or tanker, where the attitude was more casual, and there was little concern about whether the officers were shaven or well dressed. On passenger ships, things were more formal, but the pay generally was better. The magazine noted that officers in the merchant marine were exempt from the draft, but also that the service had more casualties than the armed forces in the previous war.

The radio officer usually had a lot of free time after his watch, and it was an ideal opportunity for him to take correspondence courses.

Most of the time, the work consisted of keeping watch on 500 kHz and also on HF. This was usually done by having two loudspeakers playing. The operator could tend to other affairs while keeping an ear open for his ship’s call sign should it come over the radio.

The article noted that most radio officers were members of a union, but with a shortage of qualified men, joining the union was easy. And job security was guaranteed by international treaties which required a radiotelegraph station and qualified operator. In addition to the FCC license, the radio officer was certified by the Coast Guard which required, among other things, that all officers be certified in first aid.

From the picture on Google Street View, it appears that the Herron Avenue Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a vacant building today. And a hundred years ago, the pulpit was apparently vacant.

Undaunted, the members figured out a way to fill the pulpit, in the form of the radio receiver shown here. In the absence of a regular pastor, the pulpit was fitted with a radio receiver, and the service was received by radio from the Calvary Episcopal Church some ten miles away. According to the account in the September 1921 issue of Wireless Age, the service was received with unmistakable distinctness. “Interest was so well sustained throughout the religious services, that the proverbial sleeping brother in the amen corner was conspicuously absent.”

Eighty years ago this month, the September 1941 issue of Service magazine carried this ad reminding dealers that the Radiola model 526 would sell itself. The set covered standard broadcast and shortwave, and was billed as having a “Station Spreader” dial on the 25 and 31 meter bands. This appears to mean that the tuning range was 9.5 to 12 MHz, meaning that those two bands would naturally take up most of the dial, resulting in easy tuning on those crowded bands.

The same set was available in a wooden cabinet as model 527.  It could also be purchased without shortwave, in plastic as model 516, or wood as model 517.

Sixty years ago this month, the September 1961 issue of the British magazine Radio Constructor carried the plans for this one-tube regenerative receiver covering 150 kHz through 28 MHz dubbed the “Finger-tip Five,” owing to the fact that it covered the range in five bands with five plug-in coils. While it did cover the longwave and mediumwave bands, it was especially designed for the shortwaves, “where much of interest is transmitted.”

The set used an ECF80 dual pentode-triode tube. The triode was used as the regenerative detector. The other half was used as an untuned RF amplifier, whose main purpose was to isolate the detector from the antenna, thus eliminating any dead spots caused by the antenna loading down the detector. On this side of the Pond, the equivalent tube would be a 6BL8 or 6LN8.

Seventy-five years ago, the new serviceman learning how to fix radios could very well have done so in a classroom with this demonstrator at the front of the room. From the 1946 catalog of Concord Radio Company showed this working “All American Five” radio, layed out for instructional purposes. The circuits were easily accessible from the rear, so faults could be demonstrated by shorting out critical parts. The trimmers were all accessible from the front, so that alignment could be demonstrated.

The Baby Boomer generation is generally defined as starting in 1946, so this young gentleman shown on the cover of the September 1946 issue of Radio Service Dealer is probably one of the first.

The magazine identifies the parents as orchestra leader Ray Herbeck, and wife Lorraine “Pokey” Benson, vocalist with the orchestra. The young Boomer is almost certainly Ray Herbeck, Jr., who went on to become a screenwriter and producer, with a specialty of historical re-enactment. He served as re-enactor coordinator in movies such as Back to the Future Part III and Rambo III, and the 1984-85 TV miniseries North and South.

He’s described on this site as “probably the only movie executive in Hollywood who knew anything about reenacting and living history.”

In the photo, the three are listening to Benson’s solo on the band’s rendition of Vitamin Pills. It’s being played back on this Zenith console, and the magazine points out that the set has a Cobra radionic tone arm. Here’s another recording of the song, although I bet it sounded even better on the Zenith:

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