Wikipedia image.

Today is the 20th birthday of Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He was born on February 29, 1940.

A hundred years ago this month, the February 1920 issue of Electrical Experimenter detailed this plan which surfaces from time to time: To get hydroelectric power by piping water from the Mediterranean Sea to the Dead Sea, which lies 1400 feet below sea level.

The necessary tunnel would be 37 miles long, and would pass about 2500 feet under Jerusalem. According to the magazine, the plan would bring electric lights and electric trolleys to the Holy Land.

More information about the various proposals for this project over the years can be found at Wikipedia.

For this Kentucky coal miner in 1946, the radio was his link to the outside world. The photo is from the Department of the Interior, Solid Fuels Administration for War, and is dated September 4, 1946. It has the following caption:

Charlie Lingar and his son listen to their battery radio. He has worked for the company for fourteen years but was injured in a mine explosion last December and hasn’t been able to work since then. His three room house for which he pays $6.75 monthly has no running water, no toilet, no electricity. Kentucky Straight Creek Coal Company, Belva Mine, abandoned after explosion [in] Dec. 1945, Four Mile, Bell County, Kentucky.

Lingar was more than injured in the explosion.  He was trapped underground for over fifty hours after the explosion.  He and eight other men barricaded themselves in, but left a note in the slate that they were there.  The oldest of the men died, but the other eight, including Lingar, survived.  According to some accounts, a mysterious lumberjack (or perhaps it was a telephone lineman) appeared out of a door leading to a well-lighted room and assured the men that they would be rescued.  The man then returned to the well lit room, and closed the door.

I’m not able to identify the radio, but maybe some reader can. It’s a battery set, also often called a “farm set.” It seems to have two bands. If that’s the case, then it probably pulled in shortwave signals in addition to the standard broadcast band.

The original photo is available at the National Archives, which has this description of the collection:

In 1946 the Department of Interior and the United Mine Workers agreed to a joint survey of medical, health and housing conditions in coal communities to be conducted by Navy personnel. Under the direction of Rear Admiral Joel T. Boone, survey teams went into mining areas to collect data and photographs on the conditions of these regions, later compiled into a published report. The bulk of the photographs were taken by Russell W. Lee, a professional photographer hired by the Department of Interior for this project; others were taken by the Navy. These photographs cover a complete range of activities in mining communities. They show the interior and exterior of both company-owned and priv dispensaries; miners at work performing various tasks; mining grounds, equipment and wash houses; women performing household functions; children at play; recreation facilities, churches, schools, clubs; scenes of mining townspeople in and around company stores and town streets; family portraits; members of the medical survey group inspecting grounds and speaking to mine company administrators, local mine operators and union officials.

If I didn’t know any better, I would say that these Soviet diagrams from 50 years ago were suggestions for burglar alarms. Of course, they didn’t have to worry about burglars in the workers’ paradise, so they must have been something else. If I were able to read the text in the February 1970 issue of Юный техник, I would be able to come up with a more accurate description. But I’m guessing they’re probably designed to catch capitalist imperialist running dogs.

In any event, the two-transistor circuit at the left appears to be a solid-state relay to drive a buzzer. The other diagrams are self-explanatory, such as how to make a switch from a clothespin.

Yalta conference. Wikipedia image.

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the conclusion of the Yalta Conference, 4-11 February 1945, at which Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin worked out postwar plans for carving up Europe.  Roosevelt would be dead two months later, with Harry Truman taking over at the Potsdam Conference that summer.

A century ago, these children didn’t have to worry about their friend going home and taking the ball. The ball was supplied to children by their San Francisco playground. The only rule was that children could take the ball as far as they liked.

The picture appeared a hundred years ago today in the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger, January 26, 1920.

This handsome device from 80 years ago wasn’t a clock radio. Instead, it was merely a radio clock, namely, a clock and a radio in the same enclosure, both of which operated independently. It is the Belmont Model BRC-571, also known as the Clockette, and it’s shown here in the January 1940 issue of Radio Today.

The set tuned 540-1720 kHz, meaning that it would pull in police calls in addition to standard broadcast stations. The clock was described as self-starting, and the radio was a standard 5-tube superhet, both of which were housed in a walnut cabinet.

You can see a nicely preserved example of the set at the Radio Attic Archives.

Shown here are the televisions that were available 70 years ago from the Belmont Radio Corporation, 5927 West Dickens Avenue, Chicago.

The ad featured two sets. “The Criterion”, a console set, had a list price of $349.95. “The Challenger”, a table set, sold for $299.95. Both were billed as having a 176 square inch picture. This was apparently before the days when TV manufacturers started measuring the picture diagonally. 176 square inches would be equivalent to about a 19 inch diagonal tube. Other sets in the Belmont line went as small as 74 square inches, or about 12 inches diagonally.

The ad appeared in the December 1949 issue of Radio Retailing.

Photo credit: East Side Neighborhood Services.

This evening, I took the kids to see the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train as it made a stop in Northeast Minneapolis, a neighborhood in which the railroad has a large footprint, in the 260-acre Shoreham Yard site just west of Central Avenue.  The stop was at Lions’ Park, a small triangle at 37th Avenue and Stinson Boulevard, near the confluence of Minneapolis, Columbia Heights, and St. Anthony Village.

The train is brightly decorated with lights, and after it pulls into the stop, a stage opens from the side of one of the cars for a 30 minute concert to a lively crowd braving the 5° F cold.

At this stop, the concert featured country singers Meghan Patrick and Kelly Prescott, and Canadian soul and R&B singer Tanika Charles.

The three were backed up by a versatile band that seemed to be at home with the different genres, and the three artists did a few numbers together. Prescott commented that she had seen the Holiday Train as a youth as it passed through her hometown, and that she had come full circle by being able to be on the boxcar stage herself.

Each stop is a benefit for a local food shelf, and at this stop, the railroad made a $15,000 donation to East Side Neighborhood Services, a social service charity rooted in my old neighborhood of Northeast Minneapolis, and serving clients there and elsewhere in Hennepin County. Donations from the event were earmarked to their food programs, which concentrate on helping senior citizens and residents of high rise low-income housing. Other stops of the CP Holiday Train benefit similar food banks in the cities the train visits in the U.S. and Canada.

Canadian Pacific actually has two holiday trains, with stops in Quebec, New York, Ontario, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. Even though the two trains are halfway through their trek across the continent, there are still stops coming up in Minnesota, North Dakota, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia.

If you live in one of the states or provinces where the Holiday Train is still coming, I encourage you to attend and support your local food shelf. We brought along the proverbial non-perishable food item to donate, but forgot it in the car. So when we got home, we went to the East Side Neighborhood Services website and made a monetary donation.  If you don’t know of a local food charity in your community for such a donation (or in addition to it), we encourage you to do the same.

Photo credit: Canadian Pacific.

Maybe it’s just me, but the girl looks like she has some kind of sinister plan in mind. Ostensibly, Santa just brought this RCA toy phonograph which, according to the caption, should have been on every parent’s list, since it sold for only $4.95. But if I were little brother, I would be careful.

The picture appeared 80 years ago this month in the November 1939 issue of Radio Today.