Shown here 70 years ago this month on the cover of Radio-Electronics, November 1949, is Rose Ann “Tex” Barbarite (nee Longnecker), described by the magazine as a “lady television engineer.” The magazine contains a brief autobiography of her as a pioneer in engineering.

She writes that radio had been her hobby since her youngest days, when she built crystal sets with her brothers. When those were outgrown, they moved to vacuum tube circuits.

When she started a private girls school, however, she found herself unhappy, since the school viewed science and math as unnecessary for a girl. Undaunted, however, after graduation, she started at the Texas College of Mines in El Paso majoring in math. She was offered an electrical engineering scholarship at Purdue, where she found that the engineering profession was opening up to women, due to wartime labor shortages.

At the time of the magazine article, she was employed by RCA at its Exhibition Hall in New York. She had also taught basic radio theory and code to Civil Air Patrol cadets.

Ms. Barbarite eventually stopped working to raise four children. However, from 1985 to 1987, she was a member of the Peace Corps and taught at a high school in Belize. She died in 1998 at the age of 73 in Columbia, Maryland.

She was licensed as a ham in 1957 as W3FUS.

Seventy years ago this month, the October 1949 issue of Radio & Television Retailing carried this ad for a top of the line Admiral console, the model 30F15.  The ad noted that Admiral had a 50% market share when it came to television combinations.  This one combined an AM-FM receiver, record player, and 12-1/2 inch TV.

You can see a specimen of the set at this link, although at some point someone decided that it needed a coat of blue paint.

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.

American television didn’t really get off the ground until after the war, but by 1939, there were a handful of stations, mostly in New York City, using standards compatible with postwar standards. For example, we’ve previously written about W2XBS, which later became WNBT, and is currently WNBC, which came on the air 80 years ago today, April 30, 1939. That station has been in continuous operation, meaning that modern television in the U.S. is 80 years old. The receivers numbered in the hundreds, and the majority of them were in public places such as taverns. The April 1939 issue of Radio Retailing shows the offerings available from a number of different manufacturers.

The viewer shown here is enjoying a program on her set manufactured by the American Television Corporation.

Shown here are members of the radio club of William Henry Harrison High School, Evansville, Indiana. The picture appeared in the March 1969 issue of Popular Electronics, which noted that the school claimed to have the only high-school amateur TV station. The club members built the station from modified military and commercial equipment and transmitted with 100 watts on 445 MHz from an 80 foot tower.

The magazine noted that 26 members had general class licenses.