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.
This listing of U.S. television stations appeared in the July 1949 issue of Radio Electronics. It showed all stations on the air as of May 20 of that year. Los Angeles now led the nation with the number of stations on the air with six: KFI-TV, KLAC-TV, KNBH, KTLA, KTSL, and KTTV. New York had five stations on the air. Chicago and Washington DC had four. Baltimore, Detroit, and Philadelphia had three.
In the Upper Midwest, WTMJ-TV was on the air in Milwaukee, and KSTP-TV was on the air in St. Paul.
Very little modification of the lamp was necessary. Each lamp had a separate cord running to the base, so it was an
Pole lamps of this type are still available at Amazon, so there’s no reason why you couldn’t duplicate this feat today. The instructions for the project appeared in the July 1959 issue of Popular Mechanics.
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.
Castro in Washington, 1959. Wikipedia photo.
Sixty years ago today, on April 15, 1959, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro began his eleven day tour of the United States. But as you can see from the page of that month’s Popular Electronics shown above, another familiar Cuban name was making his mark in the U.S.
The article is a one-page feature on TV DX’ing, and offers little detail. The image at the top is a screen shot of WPST-TV in Miami, captured in Havana, Cuba. And the author of the article is none other than Arnaldo “Arnie” Coro, Jr., CO2KK, one of the founders of Radio Havana Cuba, and a popular host of the station’s DX program.
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.
We have to admit that today’s vintage TV program isn’t quite as good as the one we shared yesterday, in which a shortwave receiver was built from scratch before live TV cameras. But radio parts were hard to find during the war, so WRGB in Schenectady, NY, had to work with what was available, and that was blood.
The February-March 1944 issue of National Radio News detailed another “first” in American television, namely the first broadcast of an actual blood donation. As part of a three-part broadcast showcasing the American Red Cross, the blood donation was done live on the air. Another part of the broadcast showed it being processed into plasma.
The program concluded with the scene shown above, the staging of a battlefield scene where the plasma was administered.
Seventy years ago was the Goolden Age of Television, as conclusively proven by this article in the March 1949 issue of Popular Science. It details a most interesting program, namely, a live play-by-play of the construction of a shortwave receiver.
Starting from scratch, sound man Rudy Winston (shown at left in the photo) got the set working in 19 minutes while the live cameras of WCBS-TV looked on. The program was 30 minutes, but Winston had only 25 minutes, since the script called for a demonstration. But he was pulling in overseas stations with six minutes to spare.
The feat took place on the station’s “United Nations’ Casebook” program. The purpose was to “dramatize one of the world’s greatest needs–inexpensive, sturdy shortwave receivers.”
Today, inexpensive sturdy shortwave receivers, such as the ones shown below, are readily available. The models shown here can operate from power sources including solar or hand crank, meaning that they can bring shortwave reception to any point on earth. What we need more of are television shows demonstrating how they can be put together.
And, of course, if you get booked to go on TV to build a shortwave receiver, one of these kits will probably allow you to complete it in the course of a half-hour program:
Seventy years ago this month, the March 1949 issue of Radio Electronics magazine carried this depiction of the state of television in the United States.
According to the magazine, in the previous year, TV was rampaging across the nation. While a year earlier it had been confined to a handful of cities, it now had a foothold nationwide. 46 million Americans were within range of a station, and the magazine predicted that an additional 25 million would have access before the year was over.
