Category Archives: World War 2

1961 Speed Mail

Sixty years ago, the U.S. Post Office tried something that Popular Electronics, in its April 1961 issue, called “Electronic Speed Mail.” The official name for the service was just “Speed Mail,” but it was an early hybrid of electronic mail (or more accurately, facsimile) and snail mail.

The Post Office Department envisioned having centers in 71 cities strategically located across the country. To write a letter that would be delivered the same day, a sender would write the letter on a special form provided by the post office, taking care to write only within the lines. The form was likened to the special “V-Mail” form of World War II, with which letters were microfilmed stateside and delivered to Army Post Offices where they were printed and delivered, or vice versa. In this case, the message form was sealed and deposited into the mails. At the local post office, it was fed in, still sealed, to a facsimile machine. The machine opened the mail, scanned it, and placed it into a sealed container. After the operator was sure that the message had been properly sent, the batch of message forms was destroyed.

The scanned message was then sent via the Echo 1 satellite to the closest post office to the recipient. There, the message was printed and sealed into a window envelope with only the recipient’s address and return address showing. Again, the entire process took place without human eyes seeing the message.

An example of the message blank is shown below. This one bears a message sent from Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield to Vice President Nixon, late in 1960. (Even though the message was sent crosstown in Washington, it was relayed via Chicago to demonstrate the service’s capabilities.)

When the Kennedy Administration took office, newly appointed Postmaster General J. Edward Day (best known for the creation of the ZIP code) was less enamored with the system, and no further efforts were made to promote it. The Western Union Mailgram service (“the impact of a telegram at a fraction of the cost”) was introduced nine years later in 1970, and allowed rapid mail service. Messages were sent by Western Union to the nearest post office, where they were printed and delivered the same day received.

National Postal Museum image.

1941 Grocery Prices

Here’s a snapshot of the cost of groceries just before World War II, from the Pittsburgh Press, March 28, 1941.

These prices look low, but there’s been a lot of inflation in the last 80 years. According to this inflation calculator, one dollar in 1941 was the equivalent of $17.89 in 2021 dollars. When you multiply all of these prices by 17.89, most of them stop looking like bargains.

1941 Young Soviet Radio Hobbyists

When this photo was taken for the March 1941 issue of Радиофронт magazine (Radio Front), the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 was still in effect, and it wasn’t until June 1941 that Hitler decided to invade the Soviet Union.

But if you look carefully at these young comrades, you can see that they know something is wrong. They handed the headphones to their most skilled operator, the young woman at the left, and she is probably pulling in a faint message indicating that the Germans are up to something. Chances are, she tried to warn Stalin, who wouldn’t listen to her. But these comrades knew that they would soon be called upon to defend Mother Russia from the invading horde.

And unfortunately, it’s unlikely that all of these young people lived to see the end of 1945.

Quonset Huts for Postwar Housing

One of the hallmarks of the early postwar years was the lack of housing. There had been a depression followed by a war, which meant that there hadn’t been much new housing construction for a long time. And suddenly, millions of servicemen were returning home from winning a war, getting married, having children, and needing a place to live.

As this March 1946 issue of Popular Science points out, for many, “home” meant a bedroom in someone else’s house. In fact, the number of families doubling up exceeded the entire populations of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia combined. Some kind of stopgap housing had to be built, and decommissioned military structures were put into service. The federal government made Quonset huts available to cities, universities, and non-profit agencies for use as housing. Those entities were responsible for providing the real estate and building streets and other infrastructure. The also agreed to rent the units on a non-profit basis and dismantle them when the crisis was over.

Photos and stories about one such neighborhood near where I grew up in Minneapolis can be found at this site and this site.

1921 Creed Automatic Radiotelegraphy System

No. 7W/3 Reperforator, manufactured by Creed and Company Limited, Croydon, London, England, 1925

Creed No. 7W/3 Reperforator (1925). Image courtesy of Science Museum Group Collection, © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum, U.K. released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

No. I.T. Morse Tape Printer (1925). Image courtesy of Science Museum Group Collection, © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum, U.K., released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

The two devices shown above represent a hundred year old method of automatically decoding International Morse Code. They, along with the sending device, are described in the March 1921 issue of Radio News.

At the sending end, the message is typed on a typewriter-like keyboard and punched onto a paper tape. An example of the tape is shown below. It’s not immediately obvious that the tape contains Morse code, but upon closer observation, it is. A “dot” is indicated by one hole directly above another hole. A “dash” is indicated by two holes that are slanted. Once you see this, the Morse code is obvious. The first word shown here is “the.” The first two holes are slanted. This is a single dash for the letter T. This is followed by four sets of holes, one directly above the other–four dots, for the letter H. Next, there is a single set of vertical holes, another dot for the letter E.

Once this tape is produced, it is sent through another machine which keys the transmitter and sends the Morse signal over the air.

At the receiving station, the two machines shown above are used to receive and print the message. The reperforator (top) connects to the receiver and produces an exact duplicate of the paper tape. Then, the paper tape is fed into the Morse Tape Printer, which prints the message on a paper tape.

The process was known as the Creed Automatic System, named after inventor Frederick G. Creed, an important figure in the development of the teleprinter. At the beginning of the 20th Century, Creed was told my none less than Lord Kelvin that “there is no future in that idea.” Undaunted, he managed to sell twelve machines to the British post office in 1902. The 1921 machine described for use with wireless telegraphy appears to be a variation of that device.

By the late 1920s, the company was producing teleprinter equipment using a variant of the five-bit Baudot code. The company became part of IT&T, and Creed retired from the company in 1930. Among his later projects was the “Seadrome,” a floating airport which could be placed along international air routes. The project is described in a March 1939 article in the Glascow Herald, and was undoubtedly a casualty of both the War and increased aircraft range. The Seadrome is the subject of US Patent 2238974, applied for in February 1939 and granted in April 1941.

The images above are copyrighted and provided courtesy of the Science Museum Group, U.K., where they are on display, and released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

Radio Hams Practice for War: 1941

In 1941, the ham radio operator shown here was asked how long he would need to get his portable station into operation in the field. “Six minutes is the average time,” he replied. The officers asking the question were skeptical, but they watched as he opened his suitcase, hooked up a car battery, hammered in a ground stake and slung the antenna into a tree. He then tapped out a message to the control station fifteen miles away.

This was but one of the tales recounted eighty years ago this month, in the March 1941 issue of Popular Mechanics, in an article entitled “Radio Hams Practice for War.” It detailed the work of the 1800 member Army Amateur Radio System and pointed out that in time of war, thousands of trained hams would go into the military for active duty, and others would take on civilian duties such as listening for clandestine stations.

In another exercise, hams were asked, “your radio transmitter is completely smashed by a falling chimney. How long will it take to borrow an old broadcast receiver from a neighbor and build a new transmitter from its parts?” Another ham was ordered, “simulate destruction of your main transmitter. Rig up your emergency equipment and report back on the air as soon as you can.”

The article detailed a number of ways in which hams were “preparing themselves against a possible ‘M’ day.”

Postwar Radio Retailing: 1946

Shown here on the cover of Radio Retailing 75 years ago this month, February 1946, this couple are taking home their first postwar radio. New civilian radios were coming back on the market after a long absence, and there was probably still a shortage, as evidenced by the crowd clamoring behind them.

The magazine reminded dealers, however, that the time would soon come when customers would stop searching for radios. Instead, they would soon be going from store to store choosing. It warned against complacency. Even though it was currently no real task to sell anything, the dealer’s goal should be to make a customer of every shopper. In particular, customers would appreciate a little extra courtesy and consideration.

Selling a scarce item with the same degree of interest that would be called for in a competitive era would have the result of making friends and getting free advertising for his goodwill.

The day would soon come when the dealer would have to fight for every dollar, and attractive selling methods now would go a long way to bring in those dollars.

Taking Requests by Signal Lamp: 1946

WW2-era signal lamp. Wikipedia photo.

The taking of requests has been a long-standing tradition in the broadcasting industry. Most typically, the requests come in by phone, but other methods are possible, as shown in this item from Broadcasting magazine 75 years ago today, January 21, 1946.

WXLH, the Armed Forces Radio Service station in Okinawa, which had come on the air on May 17, 1945, carried a request program, originally slated to run 45 minutes six nights a week. The program was widely popular with servicemen, and requests poured in by telephone, teletype, mail, and in person.

Buckner Bay. Wikipedia image.

Left out, however, were the sailors on the hundred or more ships anchored in Buckner Bay. To accommodate them, on Christmas, some of the station’s engineers rigged up a 500 watt bulb on a stand and pointed it toward the bay. They blinked out a message that the station would be happy to take Navy requests as well.

The sky lit up within minutes with beams of light crisscrossing the horizon. AFRS and Signal Corps men dotted the hillsides and took down the requests.

Pearl Harbor

USS Shaw at Pearl Harbor. Defense Department Photo.

Today marks the 79th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Here are links to some of our earlier posts marking that event:

Marketing Personal Portables: 1940

Eighty 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.

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

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