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Telecommunications

Book: The History of Radio, in Pictures and Words

A coffee-table book from the American Museum of Radio and Electricity chronicles five centuries of progress

30 Oct 2009

RADIO DAYS: The American Museum of Radio and Electricity, located in Bellingham, Wash., contains a unique collection of interactive galleries and artifacts. Here, curator Jonathan Winter adjusts the high-frequency electrostatic display on a rare combination Oudin/Tesla coil. These photographs are from the museum’s new book: Where Discovery Sparks Imagination: A Pictorial History of Radio and Electricity.
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HEAD CASE: Today’s electromedical researchers are busy mapping the brain, but 19th-century electrical engineers were already on the case. This electrical phrenology apparatus consists of two parts, a headpiece and a wooden box containing a sledge induction coil and three batteries. The headpiece forms a crown 23 centimeters (9 inches) in diameter with 13 brass electrodes evenly spaced across it.
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EARLY LEDs? Similarly, these days LED manufacturers are still working on some of their colors, but early electrical engineers had it all figured out. This exceptionally rare multibulb Geissler tube (1890) contains four different fluorescent fluids.
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ELECTRIC CANNON: This spark eudiometer, circa 1787, is also called a Volta cannon for its inventor. Alessandro Volta (1745–1827) discovered he could fire a cannon that had been corked shut after being filled with methane or a hydrogen-oxygen mixture. A brass-tipped metal rod at the bottom served as a spark plug, which was then sparked from a Leyden jar. It could fire a lead ball 6 meters (20 feet).
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METER IN A JAR: Chemistry also formed the basis of Thomas A. Edison’s first electric meters. Ever since Michael Faraday, it was known that the transfer of metal from one plate to another in an electrolytic bath is proportional to the current. Edison’s meter held a jar with two copper plates, one of which was removed and weighed for customer billing. The method was neither convenient nor accurate and was soon discontinued.
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THE SHINING: As with the telephone and many other inventions, Edison was not the first to come up with electric light. In fact, electric arc lamps were already widely used in factories by 1879, when Edison announced his new “incandescent” lamp. Edison’s device used less power, and multiple lamps could operate along a single circuit. Natural gas stocks plummeted, while shares in the Edison Electric Light Co. soared.
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MORSE’S MAGNET: In the 1800s, electromagnetism became increasingly important, as in the telegraph, where closing and opening a circuit remotely activated an electromagnet. In this 1837 Samuel Morse demonstration telegraph, a “port-rule” transmitter [foreground] transmits the numbers 1 through 9 to the pen register receiver [rear]. A codebook translated numbers into messages. For example, “8732” might mean “reply requested.”
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PLAYER-PIANO TELEGRAPHY? Morse’s telegraph wasn’t the only game in town, nor even the most technologically impressive. The Hughes printing telegraph used a piano-style keyboard instead of codes. Morse won out in the marketplace, but Hughes’s ideas didn’t lose out entirely—a visit by Christopher Sholes to a Hughes telegraph office would eventually lead to Sholes’s 1868 invention of the typewriter.
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SPEED ON THE SHIP: “SOS SOS CQD CQD Titanic. We are sinking fast. Passengers are being put into boats. Titanic.” That message is credited with saving over 700 lives. Was there ever a more urgent use for a nascent technology? A rare Marconi wireless set like the one on the RMS Titanic is the centerpiece of this faithfully accurate reproduction of the doomed ship’s radio room, at the American Museum of Radio and Electricity.
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DAWN OF THE RADIO ERA: The museum’s collection of radio artifacts is thousands strong. The first radio designed for home entertainment was this Westinghouse RA tuner and DA detector/amplifier with a Type LV “Volarola” loudspeaker, introduced in 1920 to coincide with the launch of the world’s first commercial broadcast radio station, Pittsburgh’s KDKA.
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RADIO REPAIR: Where there are radios, there are radio tubes, and where there are tubes, there are devices for testing them. The Supreme 400B Radio Diagnometer, made by the Supreme Instruments Corp., of Greenwood, Miss., is a particularly fine example of the sort of radio analyzer used by early radio repairmen. It measured AC volts, DC volts, milliamps, and capacitance.
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WHAT’S THE FREQUENCY? Speaking of tubes, the translucent beauty of the ones in the Atwater Kent Number 4333 “Compact” Receiver is so great as to render its functionality almost superfluous—which is a good thing. Shortly after this device was introduced in September 1923, the range of U.S. broadcast frequencies was expanded, rendering it almost useless. Today the 4333 is highly prized by vintage radio collectors.
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ANOTHER “PIANO” RADIO: Another exceptionally beautiful, though not terribly compact, home radio setup is the French “Piano” 4–valve receiver, shown here with Grammont Radiofoto type 209 marine lamps and a “Le Parfait” loudspeaker, made in about 1925.
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LOOPY: Compactness is one thing, and true portability is another. For one thing, portability requires its own antenna; the earliest radios used cold water pipes, radiators, and even a bed’s metal box springs buried underground. By 1923, some radio sets featured what became known as a loop antenna, essentially a long antenna wire wound around a frame.
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NIGHT AT THE OPERA: Iron bedsprings could serve not only as the antenna but as the base for the detector in a crystal radio. In fact, crystal radios were so simple they could be dressed up in any number of ways, including a top hat and tails. In this Grafton China Works radio, made in Britain circa 1924, the coil winds around the hat and the crystal is a shirt stud.
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TOP TUBE: The age of radio seamlessly transitions into the electronics age. In 1926, Germany introduced a radio tax based on the number of tubes in the set. Electronics manufacturer Loewe, founded in 1923, responded with the OE 333 receiver, featuring one “tube” that contained three triodes, two capacitors, and four resistors, all in a single glass envelope—arguably the first integrated circuit.
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Link: Where Discovery Sparks Imagination: A Pictorial History of Radio and Electricity
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type:slideshow history innovation telegraph edison radio wireless

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