Category Archives: World War 2

Marketing Personal Portables: 1940

1940DecRadioRetailingEighty years ago this month, according to the December 1940 issue of Radio Retailing, everybody, including Santa Claus, stopped, looked, and listened to the new personal portables that had been hitting the market. When America entered the war, sourcing the required batteries would become an iffy proposition, but in the meantime, the sets were popular.

It’s quite possible that Santa got the idea from having lunch in downtown Denver. According to the magazine, the radio buyer of the Denver Dry Goods Company harnessed the power of “women paid to gossip” to sell the sets. You could put one on layaway for a dollar down and a dollar a week. Then, to drum up excitement, “certain shopgirls were loaned instruments, subsidized to play and talk about them during lunch in the smartest restaurants in town.”

The young women shown below are on their lunch break from their duties at the store at one of the aforementioned smart restaurants. For each sale they referred, they earned a one dollar commission.

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According to the article, twenty radios were sold the first day, and “in this case, it paid to pay women to gossip.”



1945 One Tube Broadcast Set

1945NovRadioCraftSeventy-five years ago this month, the November 1945 issue of Radio Craft carried this circuit for a simple one-tube receiver for the broadcast band. The set used either a type 30 or 1G4 tube, with as little as 3 volts B+ on the plate. The circuit had been sent in to the magazine by Bill Buehrle, Jr., of Ferguson, MO, who reported that he was able to pull in a half dozen stations clearly from 25 miles away.

Even though the circuit was published after V-J Day, it’s likely that it was perfected while the War was still in progress with its attendant parts shortages. The author points out that parts weren’t critical. In addition to the tube and headphones, the circuit required only six manufactured parts, two resistors, two fixed capacitors, and two variable capacitors. The coils and the RF choke could be wound at home.

The circuit could be easily duplicated today. The tube is still readily available on eBay. The type 30 and the 1G4 are electrically identical, but my preference would by the 30, since its glass has the classic styling of the 1930’s era bottle, as opposed to the more “modern” octal style 1G4.   It’s such a simple set that it would form the basis for an excellent science fair project. And with only 3 volts involved, it would even be a safe project. The original article contains some suggestions on how the circuit could be modified, so comparing some of these modifications would make the project very worthwhile.  The young scientist needing to track down the parts will find some helpful leads on my crystal set parts page.



UN 75th Anniverssary

Photo, Minn. Historical Society, via Minn. Alumni Assn.

Photo, Minn. Historical Society, via Minn. Alumni Assn.

For better or worse, the United Nations came into existence on this day 75 years ago, October 24, 1945. The organization came about as the result of the conference in San Francisco that summer, while the war in the Pacific was still raging. Shown above is former Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen signing the charter as part of the U.S. delegation. At the time of his death in 2001, Stassen had been, for a number of years, the last living signatory of that document.



1940 RCA Ad

Life1940Oct21This ad showing RCA’s product lineup for 1941 appeared 80 years ago today, in the October 21, 1940, issue of Life magazine.

For those on a budget, the model 45X-1 for $9.95.  The ad bills that set as having one police band, but in reality, it covers the broadcast band but with a bit of extended coverage to pull in police calls in many areas.

The most expensive of the table radios shown is the 18T for $49.95.  That 8-tube set featured six pushbuttons and two shortwave bands for pulling in the war news from Europe.  At the top of the line of the tabletop radio-phonos was the V-102, a 7 tube set which appears to be broadcast only, for $59.95.

For a larger view of the ad, from most browsers, click twice on the image.



1940 British One Tube Shortwave Regen

1940OctPracWirelessThe plans for this simple one-tube wartime regenerative receiver appeared in the British Practical Wireless, October 1940. The author reports that nearly any triode can be used, and he suggests that if more than one is available, they should all be tried to find the best specimen.

The author reported that he was able to pull in many DX transmissions that evaded his friends. He attributed this not only to the sensitivity of the receiver, but also to his patience and possibly good location.

The author used an aluminum chassis, which he acknowledged might not be available. He noted that perforated zinc might be substituted, as long as good ground connections could be made.

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1945 Three Tube Regen

1945SepRadioNewsThis handsome 3-tube shortwave receiver was put together during the war by Harry D. Hooton, W8KPX, as reported in the September 1945 issue of Radio News.  He reported that at the outbreak of war, he sold his receiver and other equipment to the U.S. Army Signal Corps. But before long, he had the urge to build something, and this set was the result. He was able to find many of the parts in his own junk box, and acquired others by very carefully negotiated trades with other local hams.

The set covered 2-20 MHz with three plug-in coils. It used three tubes, plus one rectifier in the separate power supply. Hooton reported that he constructed the power supply separately to avoid hum in the high-gain audio stage, and also to make the set usable with batteries if desired at a later time.

The set used a 6SJ7 as RF amplifier, followed by a 6SN7, a dual tube used for regenerative detector and audio amplifier. This went to a 6C5, which was a second stage of audio amplification.

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The USPS Delivers!

MailTest1We take unwarranted criticism of the U.S. Postal Service very seriously around here. As we reported previously, the Post Office stood ready to serve the nation even after a nuclear war, and during COVID-19 the men and women of the USPS have acted heroically to ensure that the mail goes through. Even when rioters burnt down two post offices in Minneapolis, the Postal Service quickly regrouped to make sure that its customers would continue to receive mail with minimal interruption.

Recently, for political reasons, the USPS has come under intense criticism, the gist of which being that they can’t do anything right. They were allegedly in the process of ripping out all of their sorting machines, and even removing mailboxes. The particular conspiracy theory was that without these sorting machines, they would be unable to deliver millions of ballots. This didn’t make much sense to us, since most ballots in a given locality would all be addressed to the same city or county election office, and wouldn’t require much sorting, by machine or otherwise.

And allegedly, the removal of mailboxes was to prevent voters from sending their ballots. The theory was that a voter would go to a spot where there used to be a mailbox, would see that the mailbox was gone, and then give up in despair. For the theory to work, the voter would have to be too dumb to look for another mailbox, take it to the nearest post office (where they would find a mailbox in the parking lot), give it to their friendly letter carrier, or just take it to the election office themselves. In short, as conspiracy theories go, it wasn’t very plausible, but a lot of people seemed to subscribe to it.

So as an experiment, I decided to test the United States Postal Service. I asked for volunteers on Facebook and NextDoor. I had them send me their address, and I mailed them an honest-to-goodness piece of snail mail. I had ten volunteers, and I asked them to inform me when they received the letter. I mailed the letters from three different locations. Some I mailed from a blue mailbox in front of a local strip mall (one of the boxes that was allegedly being torn out). Some I mailed from the drive-up mailbox in front of my local post office. And some I placed in my own mailbox, and the friendly letter carrier picked them up with the mail.

A small sampling of my letters is shown above. All ten were delivered in a timely fashion. Most of the transit times included a Sunday, but I included it. All ten of the letters were delivered in four days or less. Crosstown letters were delivered in either one or two days (the two day period included a Sunday). I tracked the average speed of each letter (measured by road miles from the center of the two ZIP codes). The slowest traveled an average speed of 0.16 miles per hour (845 feet per hour). That sounds slow, but keep in mind that I dropped it in a box in the afternoon, and there’s no way it could have arrived any earlier than the next day.

The fastest letter got from Minnesota to Maine at an average speed of 19.6 miles per hour. Remember, this included a Sunday, when it presumably didn’t travel at all. It was undoubtedly in multiple trucks during its trip. In my humble opinion, travelling at that speed for a mere 55 cents is an amazing bargain. Letters to Texas and Washington got similar excellent service. The full results are shown in the table below.

All of my letters were addressed by hand, and as my elementary school teachers would attest, my penmanship isn’t the greatest.  But the post office managed to sort them.  And all of the letters I saw had bar codes printed on them.  These would have been printed on the envelopes by an automatic sorting machine, and they are designed to be read by other automatic sorting machines.  These, of course, are the automatic sorting machines that the USPS allegedly ripped out and put on the scrap heap.  But somehow, my letters all made it through one or more of these allegedly non-existent machines.

In short, the criticism of the USPS is unfounded. As they have done throughout the pandemic, as they have done despite civil unrest, they continue to serve their country proudly.

If you’re wondering about the design on some of the envelopes, I copied the design from a 1944 patriotic cover. (You can see that cover and read more about it at this link.)  Just like they do today, during the war, the Post Office Department made sure that they mail went through. I’m sure there were detractors back then, but someone decided to print up some special envelopes to thank their letter carrier for heroic service.

We ought to do the same today.  If you haven’t done so recently, thank your letter carrier for his or her hard work.  And for the workers behind the scenes, you can invest 55 cents and mail them a thank you card.  Just address it to “Postmaster” and your city, state, and ZIP code.  I’m sure it will get pinned up to the employee bulletin board.  They’ve worked hard to serve you, and they deserve your thanks.

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Postwar Radio Sales Begin

1945SepRadioRetailingSeventy-five years ago this month, the September 1945 issue of Radio Retailing was a thick one–175 pages. It was packed with ads from radio suppliers announcing that new radio would be rolling off the assembly lines for the first time in over three years. There was a pent up demand, and it was going to be a great time to be a radio dealer.

This editorial from that issue of the magazine tells all about the great day that was finally there. It was going to be a prosperous time, as Americans hit the showrooms for radios, appliances, and even television.

From most browsers, you can click on the image above to view it, and then click again for an enlarged version.



Laying Telephone Wire by Airplane

1945SepPMIt looks like Bell Labs was working on this idea toward the end of the war, and it probably wasn’t implemented, at least on a very large scale. But this ad from the September 1945 issue of Popular Mechanics sounds like a good idea for quickly laying lines for military field telephones. Instead of having men do the work on the ground, possibly through enemy territory, an airplane does the job, at a rate of 16 miles in 6 – 2/3 minutes. One end, with a weight and parachute, is dropped to the ground. Then, wire is spooled out continuously.



1940 Portable

1940AugPS3Europe may have been at war 80 years ago, but it was still peacetime in America, and this happy couple was enjoying a radio program while on the go, thanks to this new portable receiver, said to resemble a camera. The manufacturer is not named, but it’s shown in the August 1940 issue of Popular Science.

The set resembled a camera in its outward appearance, and was available with either a carrying strap or handle. It weighed in at 4.5 pounds, and measured 4 by 5 by 8 inches. It employed miniature tubes, and used normal flashlight batteries for the “A” battery. The superheterodyne receiver featured a built-in aerial and dynamic speaker. It also had a connection for headphones for private listening or pulling in distant stations.