The 1936 radio serviceman shown here is netting an extra five dollars is netting an extra five dollars for the service call, simply because he uttered the words, “any other electrical appliances in your home need repairing?”

The accompanying article, in the October 1936 issue of Radio News points out that no serviceman would sneer at an extra $5, but these words often reminded customers of other repair needs that had slipped their mind.

One serviceman noted that during a recent call, he was delivering a midget radio decorated with Mother Goose characters for the customer’s nursery. After installing the set, he replaced a belt on a vacuum cleaner, repaired a few frayed electrical cords and damaged outlets, and replaced an old iron with a new automatic model. “Most people prefer to have radiomen repair their vacuum cleaners and other appliances since dealers too often send out high-pressur salesmen to attempt to sell new apparatus when only the simplest repair is required.”

You can probably barely see it, but this gentleman is listening to an ultra-compact radio, as described 80 years ago in the October 1936 issue of Popular Science.

This “wrist-watch” radio is crammed into a chassis measuring two and a half inches square.  It’s a two-tube circuit, but uses a dual 6A8 tube, with one half serving as regenerative detector and the other half as audio amplifier to drive the headphones.  The set is powered by batteries around the gentleman’s waist.  If you look very carefully at the photo, you might see them.

The set called for a fifteen foot antenna, which he is presumably dragging along.

So even in 1936, if you wanted an ultra-discrete method to listen to the radio, you could put together one of these, and nobody would even notice that you had a radio with you.

I don’t have any information about this set, other than that it appears to be a well-made crystal set from 1917.

These photos were sent to me by Donald O. Caselli, the President of the Tuckerton Historical Society.  The set was donated many years ago to the Tuckerton Historical Society Giffordtown Museum in Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey, where it is currently housed.

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank  Donald O. Caselli, President of the Tuckerton Historical Society, for sharing these images.

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A few weeks ago, I featured the photo shown here of the zone and interzone console of the Illinois State Patrol radio in 1941, from the July-August 1941 issue of National Radio News.  Once again, I heard from reader Bob Ballantine, W8SU, who has a special interest in the history of police radio, being retired from the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

He pointed out that one of the officers shown in this picture (unfortunately, the issue of National Radio News from which it is taken doesn’t identify which is which) is famous in his own right.

Officer Charles “Ten Four” Hopper, born in 1906, is credited as the creator of the iconic “ten code” signal system used by decades by police officers.  During a time when radio time was limited, he recognized the need to abbreviate long transmissions, and came up with the number codes for common phrases.  The “ten” prefix was apparently designed to ensure that the message went through when the officer keyed up the mike, since the radio’s dynamotor power supply needed to come up to speed, and the first bit of a transmission might be lost.

The codes were originally proposed in 1935, and adopted in 1937 by the Association of Police Communications Officers (APCO).

Hopper was apparently licensed as a ham. There’s a listing for a Charles L. Hopper as W9THK in Springfield, Illinois, in the 1937 call book.

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Despite appearances to the contrary, Junior is not trying to do anything untoward, and it’s clear from the picture that the father’s fingers are safely on the low-voltage connections. What this wartime father and son are doing is getting their battery portable back in commission, despite the unavailability of B batteries due to the war.

They are working on an emergency power supply, following the plans contained in the August 1943 issue of Popular Mechanics.

Even though B batteries were unavailable due to the war, the perfectly good radio could be put back into operation thanks to this power supply, which could be assembled from noncritical materials found in the radio enthusiast’s junk box.

Two different diagrams were provided, adapted to the needs of the particular set. Rectification was accomplished by using one or more radio tubes. If triodes were used, the grid and plate were tied together. The filament voltage for those tubes was obtained by wiring them in series with one or more 60 watt light bulbs. For a filter choke, the secondary winding of an old audio transformer could be used. Two or three electrolytic capacitors were required for filtering. In addition, a couple of 1 watt resistors were used as a voltage divider for supplying the various voltages required by the radio.

The 1.4 volts for the filaments of the radio could be supplied by a flashlight battery, or two wired in parallel.

As shown below, despite wartime parts shortages, this ingenious device successfully brought an otherwise useless portable receiver back to life.

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