With Canada’s men off to war, it was up to the women to work in war industries, as shown by this ad from the Toronto Daily Star 75 years ago today, February 7, 1945.
The ad doesn’t identify the company, but it’s a well-established organization that manufactures radio tubes. Women were needed full time to work as assemblers, and the work promised to continue after victory.
Application was to be made at an agency located at 832 Bay Street, Toronto.
The woman shown above is fixing her doorbell, courtesy of instructions 75 years ago in the wartime February 1945 issue of Popular Science. The magazine explained the exasperation that would result from a non-functional or intermittent doorbell, but pointed out that even a novice, with almost no equipment, could tackle the job of getting the dead doorbell back on its feet. The troubleshooting process was broken down into four categories: testing the source of current, testing the button, testing the bell, and testing the wiring for shorts.
It then laid out the procedures for each of these, for different styles of bells and buzzers. In some cases, the power supply was a transformer, and the article explained ways to see if it was putting out juice. If the current source was a dry cell, it could be tested with a flashlight bulb or simply shorting it and watching for a spark. But as any kid who has ever had a 9 volt battery knows, the sure way to test a battery is with the tongue. A good battery was described as giving a “strong sour taste.”
The button was tested by shorting it out with a wire, and the magazine gave various tips for checking the wiring without many instruments. Various bells, buzzers, and chimes were described. The woman shown at the top of the page is cleaning out a sticky solenoid on a chime. That type of sounder has no spark and is very reliable. A solenoid pulls a striker into a chime. Even though the unit is sealed, kitchen grease might get inside, and this woman is cleaning the solenoid with some cleaning fluid.
Seventy-five years ago this month, the January 1945 issue of Popular Science showed this simple tester for troubleshooting radio circuits if problems “can’t be located by guesswork”. The top portion was an audio or radio-frequency circuit tracer. You worked backwards from the speaker to locate the source of the trouble. The bottom section was a continuity tester. If you heard a click in the headphones, then you knew there was continuity. To test a capacitor, you would connect it and hear a click. If you waited a few seconds and repeated the process, a weaker click would tell you that the capacitor was holding its charge.
As you can see, there were still a few tweaks to be made, such as the elimination of TV channel 1, and the exact limits of the FM broadcast band. But by January 1945, the postwar allocations for the VHF and UHF spectrum were pretty much in place. This chart appeared in the January 1945 issue of Radio Service Dealer.
During World War II, one recurring theme in radio and handyman magazines was bringing the radio from the car inside the house. There were two practical reasons for doing this: First, no new radios were being manufactured, so if you needed another one in the house, you had to use some ingenuity. Second, the radio wasn’t doing much good in the car, anyway, due to gas and rubber rationing.
The January 1945 issue of Popular Science contains some pointers for doing the job. The radio probably used 6 volts for the tube filaments, and a higher voltage for the B+. The high voltage came from a vibrator power supply. The mechanical vibrator changed the car’s 6 volts from DC to AC, which was fed into a transformer to increase the voltage. The radio had a rectifier tube to change it back to the DC required by the circuit. To do the conversion, you needed a transformer that changed the 120 volt household current into 6 volts, with another winding of about 120 volts. This replaced the radio’s vibrator and transformer, and the set’s existing rectifier was used. The wiring for two common circuits is shown below.
For an antenna, the article pointed out that about 20 inches of wire would do a good job, since this is about the length of antenna the set was designed for.
This photo from the collection of the Imperial War Museum was taken 75 years ago today, Christmas 1944, and bears the following description:
In the living room of their home at 28 Marsworth Avenue, Pinner, Mrs Devereux and her daughter Jean enjoy a Christmas tea party, with four of Jean’s friends. The table is laden with sandwiches and mince pies. In the background, the Christmas tree which is a gift from her father, serving in Italy, can be seen. The tree was purchased through the ‘Gifts to Home League’ of the YMCA. A portrait of Trooper Devereux is just visible decorating one of the branches, near to the top of the tree.
In the photo below, twelve-year-old Jean cuts the cake.
Merry Christmas from OneTubeRadio.com!This photo establishes conclusively that Santa Claus has been placing radios under the tree for a full century, since the photo was taken on Christmas, 1919.
Shown is the family of U.S. Secretary of War Newton Baker. From left to right are his daughter Betty (Elizabeth Baker McGean), son Jack (Newton D. Baker, III), daughter Peggy (Mrs. Fulton Wright), and wife Elizabeth. The younger children were obviously extra good that year, since Peggy is shown playing her Schroeder-style toy piano, and was probably also the recipient of the doll bed shown in the background.
But young Master Jack had obviously been very deserving, since Santa brought him a radio! Not only was he probably the first on his block (child or adult) to have a radio, it was probably one of the first ever received as a Christmas present. The wartime ban on private radio receivers (presumably ordered by his father) had only ended on April 15 of that year. (The transmitting ban ended on October 1.)
The site from which this picture is taken, Shorpy.com (see more information below) has a high-resolution copy,which allows more detail of the radio to be seen. Unfortunately, there’s not enough to be able to positively identify the set, but it does appear to be a fairly high-end crystal 
set, not unlike the A.C. Gilbert model 4007 shown at the right (from the January, 1920, issue of Electrical Experimenter). According to another ad for that set, the list price was $25, and it was said to have a range of 200 miles. The one in the picture looks comparable. Since Master Jack lived right in Washington, he certainly would have been able to pull in the strong signals of station NAA in Arlington. Of course, any voice modulation was extremely rare at that time, so he would need to sit down and teach himself the code. And he wouldn’t hear anything with the set under the tree, since it doesn’t appear to be hooked up to antenna and ground. But since he was right in Washington, only a modest antenna would have been required to pull in the powerful government station. So I suspect he was hearing sounds out of the headphones Christmas night.
The image above is courtesy of Shorpy, an amazing archive of thousands of historical American photographs from the 1850s to the 1950s. The Washington Post describes the site as one which offers a chance to time travel. We hope the same can be said about OneTubeRadio.com. As you celebrate Christmas today, enjoy this opportunity to visit a young radio listener a century ago. If you gaze closely enough at the photo, perhaps you’ll be able to hear the buzz of NAA’s arc coming through those headphones.
Eighty years ago tonight, Christmas Eve 1939, these French soldiers attended midnight mass on the Maginot Line.
On this Christmas Eve, remember the American soldiers and Belgian sailors lost in the sinking of the SS Léopoldville, a Belgian ship chartered by the British Admiralty to transport American soldiers to fight in the Battle of the Bulge. The ship sailed from Southampton across the English Channel to Cherbourg. About five miles from its destination, the ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat. About a hundred men were killed instantly.
The captain and crew spoke no English, and the American soldiers didn’t understand the abandon ship instructions given in Flemish. Some soldiers boarded lifeboats, but many did not realize that the ship was sinking. Various errors prevented other vessels from being notified, and many went down with the ship or succumbed to hypothermia in the icy waters of the Channel. Approximately 763 American soldiers, as well as 56 members of the crew, died.
The military kept the details of the incident a secret, and discharged soldiers were even told that they couldn’t speak of the incident lest they lose their GI benefits. Documents regarding the incident remained classified until 1996.
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