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Encyclopedia Of Collectibles Railroadiana, Radios, Redware Science Fiction S
The Encyclopedia Of Collectibles Railroadiana, Radios, Redware, Science Fiction, signs more. Hard Cover 1980 Time Life Books 160 pages (railroad 15 pages) RADIOS TO SIGNS
Radios captured my imagination early. Like many boys of the time, I built a set of my own in 1927, when I was eight years old. Since then 1 have put together at least 1,000. Nevertheless, I knew little about radio history when I set out to become a collector. I simply started driving around to neighboring towns and knocking on the doors of older homes. I found some early radios at good prices in just this way-and I stumbled onto a real bonanza just about two months after I started collecting.
A man offered me a bushel basket full of old parts for $50; I was bargaining with him on his front lawn when rain began to fall. Afraid that the rain would ruin the parts, 1 quickly raised my offer and closed the deal. After I got the parts home I discovered that they were the components of an Atwater Kent model 5-an AK5 to a collector-one of the most desired of antique radios. Not many were made-the AK5 did not work very well-and only 13 are known to survive.
The AK5 appeared in 1923. when radio had yet to become an intimate part of daily life, although communication by wireless had been established for several decades. Inventor Guglielmo Marconi had demonstrated its practicability in the 1890s. In 1901 the American Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company began handling messages transmitted in dot-dash telegraph code, and the armed forces of most countries soon bought similar equipment for their signal services. Examples of the wireless apparatus used in the early 1900s are very desirable to collectors; they are difficult to find and many are hard to identify because they resemble the telegraph equipment of the time.
The radios most collectors find are not commercial or military communications devices but the home sets built after the development of the vacuum tube, which made possible transmission of voices and music. At first most sets were home-built and in many cases home-designed. Some amateurs built transmitters and receivers so that they could communicate with one another. Many more people built receivers so that they could eavesdrop on the airwave chatter. Such sets, made before 1920, are very rare and desirable.
The majority of collectible radios date from the beginning of commercial broadcasting, on November 2, 1920, when station KDKA went on the air in Pittsburgh with news of President Warren Harding's election. The radio receiver became a home appliance you could buy-although many were homemade-and collectors seek the landmark models that are significant for appearance, popularity or technical innovation. Three main types are recognized: the early sets that could be listened to only with earphones; the battery-powered loudspeaker models that were popular until 1927; and the succeeding loudspeaker models that operated from regular house current. Radios from the 1920s and early 1930s are the most desirable, although there also is interest in models of the later 1930s. The cutoff date for collecting is generally the invention of the transistor -1947- which changed radios into the form they have today.
Radio broadcasting had to overcome a great deal of skepticism-"I don't hold with furniture that talks." grumped one comedian. Public acceptance was hampered by primitive receiving equipment. To listen to early broadcasts, people had to don headphones and fiddle with the cats whisker of a crystal set (page 8). The whisker was a movable wire of copper, brass or silver with which the would-be listener poked at a piece of lead sulfide to tune in a signal picked up by a long antenna strung outside the house. At best, such a set could bring in one or two nearby stations, scratchy with static, and then only after considerable probing with the cat's whisker to find the "sensitive" spot on the crystal. Old crystal sets are hard to find now and correspondingly valuable, although in the early .1920s they were cheap and plentiful. many of them made at home from inexpensive kits.
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