Category Archives: World War 2

1941 Radiola Ad

Eighty years ago this month, the April 1941 issue of Radio Service Dealer carried this ad from RCA reminding servicemen that Radio radios could sell themselves. It suggested, for example, that when bringing a set into the shop, they could leave behind a model such as the Radiola 515, a six-tube set retailing for $24.95. While it was there, customers would discover the convenience of a second set that they could easily carry from room to room. And, of course, since the set pulled in the shortwaves, the customers would be able to listen to the latest war news direct from Europe.

Also shown was the Model 510 in striking molded plastic, and the model P-5 three-way portable. The multiband set is being shown off by Eugenia Lincoln “Jinx” Falkenburg, America’s number 1 model, who went on to have a radio show with her husband Tex, undoubtedly heard over many Radiolas, after the war.

The ad mentions that the serviceman might be in the customer’s home to set the pushbuttons on the radio. This is because on March 29, 1941, most North American radio stations changed frequency. Sets with pushbutton tuning would need the buttons reset to the new frequencies.

High School, 1946

Shown on the cover of Life Magazine 75 years ago today, April 22, 1946, is Marilyn Rights, a junior at Denver East High School, in her Latin class. She would have been in seventh grade for Pearl Harbor, and most of her high school career took place during the war. The magazine profiled the school, and also took a look at the tension between two competing points of view.

One view, championed by the National Education Association, called for more practical program for high school. Harvard University, on the other hand, called for more emphasis on cultural and academic subjects. The magazine’s focus was on how well the school was measuring up under the two competing plans. Harvard would be pleased to see Miss Rights’ studious attack of Latin, whereas the NEA would probably be pleased with the typing class shown here. The magazine noted that the class was one of the most popular at the school. While it was originally intended for “commercial students,” it was open to other students who learned typing in order to prepare neater homework.

At least one of the courses, practical chemistry, allowed students to learn about cosmetics by manufacturing their own cold cream, probably with a formula such as this one involving borax.

The psychology class appears to be much more interesting than the one I took in college. Here, we see the class on a field trip to see Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound, which deals with psychiatry. They discussed the film in class, and were critical of its superficial psychiatric approach. Those same students were also engrossed in the simple science experiment shown below, demonstrating how sound is transmitted to the ear. The spoon was tapped to the desk to make it vibrate, and the string held to the ear to demonstrate how the vibrations traveled through the string. In fact, elementary students looking for a simple experiment for the science fair can conduct this experiment, which you can see described at this site.

Another interesting activity in the psychology class is shown in the sociogram of the class below. Each student was asked to name their two best friends in the class, and these links were plotted on the chart. This revealed that the class consisted of four distinct “cliques,” which were largely independent. Girls 12 and 15 were revealed to be the most popular, with four students each identifying them as a friend. Interestingly, each was member of a separate clique. Girl 25 is identified as a “typical lonely student,” who chose students 4 and 11 as her best friends, but was herself chosen as best friend by no other student. Interestingly, though, she is the only student who links two cliques. One of her friends, 11, is a member of the clique at the left, and her other friend, 4, is a member of the lower clique.

1941 Prices: Western Auto

Here’s a snapshot of the cost of living from 80 years ago, on the eve of World War 2, from the April 16, 1941, issue of the Pittsburgh Press, courtesy of this ad for Western Auto Stores. (For a larger image, from most browsers, click twice on the image.)

According to this inflation calculator, one dollar in 1941 was the equivalent of $18.02 in 2021 dollars. Here are some representative prices, with the modern equivalent in parenthesis:

Western had its own brand of radios, Truetone. A portable, which could operate on battery or household current, sold for $14.45 ($260.39), not including the battery. A single-unit car radio, with pushbutton tuning, could be had for the same price. A three-piece unit sold for $27.95 ($503.66), which included installation. The six-tube set had a chassis that mounted out of the way, with separate control unit and speaker. Whichever car radio someone bought in 1941, there’s a good chance that they would be taking it inside to listen to when gas rationing meant the car spent most of its time in the garage.

Spark plugs would set you back a quarter ($4.50), but they were guaranteed for 10,000 miles. Fan belts started at 34 cents ($6.13). A new battery for the car would be $4.45 ($80.19) and was guaranteed for two years. A bicycle was $18.75 ($338), but if you needed just a tire, that was $1.62 ($29.20). Tires for the car started at $6.44 ($116.05), but they included a free tube. If you wanted to go fishing, a complete outfit could be had for just 98 cents ($17.66).

1941 CW Transmitter

Eighty years ago this month, the April 1941 issue of Popular Mechanics showed how to put together this simple CW transmitter designed to cover five bands (160, 80, 40, 20, and 10 meters, since 15 meters wasn’t a ham band until after the war). Crystals for the transmit frequency could be used, or the crystals for 160, 80, and 40 would double easily. Plug-in coils were used to switch bands (and presumably, a 15 meter coil could be wound after the war).

The 20-watt transmitter was billed as suitable for the beginner. If the receiver in the photo above looks familiar, it appeared in the magazine’s January issue, and we previously wrote about it. The transmitter, like the receiver, had a built-in AC power supply, this one using a type 80 rectifier. The transmitter itself used a 6L6-G tube. The parts for the set were said to be available in kit form from a number of suppliers, and would set the builder back about $13, plus tubes, coils, and crystals.

The new ham putting together these sets would be able to work only other U.S. stations, since there were already restrictions on working foreign stations. And 8 months later, they would be off the air after Pearl Harbor, although the receiver would continue to pull in war news.

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.”

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