A hundred years ago this month, this illustration appeared on the cover of the August 1923 issue of Radio News. Most radio listeners had graduated beyond the crystal set, but this gentleman purports to have a super crystal set that can not only pull in a station 2000 miles away, but provide loudspeaker volume.
His friend is apparently convinced, but he doesn’t see the man’s confederate under the table, actually pulling in the program with a modern vacuum tube set.
A hundred years ago, radio was rapidly becoming a national phenomenon, and if you didn’t already own a radio, you would have one soon. If you lived in Omaha, this ad from the Omaha Morning Bee, August 25, 1923, showed you that you could get everything you needed at the newly expanded radio department of the Brandeis Store.
The easiest way to get started on a budget would be the Little Gem crystal set. For only $10.45, you would get not only the radio, but also headphones and aerial wire.
The General Electric crystal set was $5.95, but by the time you bought headphones and antenna wire, the price was probably about the same.
If you were well heeled, you could get a complete three-tube Radiola, complete with batteries, tubes, antenna, and tubes, for $142.50.
If you need something to compare those prices to, this grocery ad appeared on the same page. A yard of spaghetti tubing would set you back a dime, but three packages of real macaroni would be a quarter.
Shown here, in the August 1963 issue of Radio-Electronics, is the path of a telephone call made from Washington to London, as part of that year’s Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association (AFCEA) convention. The call was carried by conventional telephone lines at the beginning and end, but between Goose Bay, Newfoundland, and Flyingdales, England, it was a series of 13 hops over Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and Britain, via tropospheric scatter.
While not identified in the article, the system appears to be the North Atlantic Radio System.
For a snapshot of grocery prices in 1949, this ad for A&P stores appeared in the August 12, 1949 edition of the Chapel Hill (NC) Weekly.
The basics of a good dinner could be put together for about $2.29. Two pounds of roast beef would be $1.30, which could be served with two pounds of green beans for a quarter. A loaf of bread would be 18 cents. A pound of grapes was 15 cents, and a pound of coffee was 41 cents.
That sounds like a bargain, but there’s been a lot of inflation since 1949. According to this inflation calculator, that $2.29 works out to $29.36 in 2023 dollars. Maybe we’ll put back that roast beef and instead get some fish for 33 cents a pound.
A hundred years ago this month, the August 1923 issue of Science and Invention included a number of pointers for making the most of vacation time radio. The magazine advised against just storing the radio away and waiting for your return.
For example, a self-contained set with a loop antenna was perfect for the job, as shown in figure 1. If you need an antenna, figure 2 showed one way of putting it up, using a kite. If you didn’t feel like flying a kite, you could possible use the body of your car as the antenna, with a stake driven into the earth to serve as ground, as shown in figure 3. If you’re lucky, there will be a fence, which you can use as in figure 4. The car battery can probably be used, as shown in figure 5.
We’ve talked previously about using trees as antennas, and this idea is shown in figure 6. Figure 7 shows how you can put a wire, insulated by a rubber tube, underwater. And finally, figure 8 shows an idea before its time, namely, the slinky antenna, not unlike the one we showed previously, but prior to the invention of the slinky.
Shown here on the cover of Life Magazine 80 years ago today, August 9, 1943, is steelworker Ann Zarik. She had been employed by the Carnegie-Illinois Steel Works at Gary, Indiana, for five months as a flame burner. Her job was to cut out pieces of armor plate for ballistics tests. Her father worked there as a millwright, and her sweetheart was in North Africa in the Air Corps.
Women had quickly filled the ranks of lighter industry. For example, in 1941, only 1% of the aviation workforce were women, but that had jumped to 65% by 1943. But the magazine noted that, unlike in Britain and the Soviet Union, women were slower to fill jobs in heavy industry.
The women were paid the same rate as men, the minimum being 78 cents per hour. With overtime resulting from a 48 hour work week, that worked out to $40.56 per week.
The magazine noted that “the women steel workers at Gary are not freaks or novelties. They have been accepted by management, by the union, by the rough, iron-muscled men they work with day after day. In time of peace they may return once more to home and family, but they have proved that in time of crisis no job is too tough for American women.”
Seventy-five years ago, this young man with large pockets was pulling in a program with this three-tube “pocket size” receiver. He built it according to plans in the August 1948 issue of Popular Mechanics, and the set was ideal for taking to a ball game or on hikes.
The regenerative set had a built-in loop antenna, and ran on a 45 volt B battery, with flashlight batteries in parallel to light the filaments.
A hundred years ago, this couple are relaxing by listening to a radio broadcast, after a day exploring the wilderness on their camping vacation. The plans for the set appeared in the August 1923 issue of Popular Mechanics, which described the set as the simplest to both build and operate.
The set was said to be good even under unfavorable conditions. It called for a relatively short antenna, no more than 50-70 feet. With a 45 foot antenna 30 feet high, the set pulled in from New York WDAP Chicago, WLW Cincinnati, and many others.
In the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. Government realized that it needed a way to directly reach the Cuban people with a message of democracy. That was the job of the Voice of America (VOA), but the broadcaster’s shortwave transmitters were ill suited to blanket coverage of the island only 90 miles away from the United States.
The standard AM band was the way to go, and the station shown here was hastily put together, and the facilities in these three trailers were used to relay the VOA Spanish program with a 50,000 watt signal on 1180 kHz, beamed south to blanket Cuba. The frequency was shared with WHAM in Rochester, NY, but because of the directional antenna, very little of the signal could be heard in North America.
The August 1963 issue of Popular Electronics carried an article by William I. Orr, who got a tour of the station and wrote a description.
The VOA had another transmitter in Florida covering Cuba, which broadcast on 1040 kHz, a frequency shared with WHO in Des Moines. That frequency is no longer in use, but the 1180 kHz frequency is still used. In 1983, Radio Marti was spun off, which content targeted specifically to Cuba. In 1990, a television signal was added, broadcasting from a tethered balloon dubbed “Fat Albert” by locals.
Shown here is “Doc” Burkhart of Hanceville, Alabama, in the August 1943 issue of Radio Retailing. Next to his workbench, you might see some packages that look out of place, because Doc is actually a pharmacist, the proprietor of Hanceville Drug Company. He had turned his hobby in radio into a business. The store had a radio sales department for some time, and he had become the town’s only radio repairman.
In this picture, he was converting battery sets. Since batteries were hard to come by during the war, this allowed them to go back into service, doing their part to keep the nation informed and entertained.