| Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios | |
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Eric
Posts : 9738 Join date : 2012-07-30 Age : 73 Location : Pensacola
| Subject: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Wed Mar 26, 2014 7:01 pm | |
| Our friend Bob is a picker and specializes in collectible electronics. I salivate over his McIntosh tube amps, tube tuners, and tube preamps. Yes, I have seen his stuff, and it is extensive. For instance, he has a TV that has a screen that is half the size of my smart phone... but I digress. Before transistors, vacuum tubes were used in electronics. In 1940, sub-miniature tubes were invented. Some portable radios were made then, but it wasn't until after WWII that factories actually produced portable tube radios. A company named Belmont made a lot of radios, and radar for the military during the war and was bought by Raytheon at the end of the war. They produced a classy two-battery, 5-tube shirt pocket tube portable AM radio and made about 5,000 of them. One web site I reviewed on this radio said that they tracked sales of this radio, called the Belmont Boulevard, and said there was only one sale of this radio this century. Originally $65 in 1945 dollars, the last sale for one was for $1,600... in 2001. None have been publicly sold since then. Bob has had 5 or 6 of these and still has one. He loaned it to me to take a high-res picture. Here is a 1945 full-page ad that was in Life Magazine. It showed a pre-production prototype. In a 1996 newsletter called "Transistor Network", Bob wrote under a pseudonym: - Quote :
- Many TN readers have requested articles about the subminiature tube portables which were produced prior to the transistor sets. Probably on of the most interesting and historically significant radio receiving sets ever produced is the Belmont Boulevard. If you have never seen one of these, there is a good reason.
Reportedly, there were less than 5,000 of these, the world's first commercial shirt pocket radio, were built. Think how hard it is to find a Regency TR1, and remember that 100,000 TR1's were made in it's first year of manufacture. But with only 5,000 Belmont Boulevards produced, one may presume that very few remain in existence. Rarity alone would make the first true pocket radio an extremely desirable item, but it has a lot more going for it.
If you've ever wondered why the first transistor set was not produced by RCA, Emerson, Philco, or any of the other major radio manufacturers - the answer is two words: Belmont Boulevard. In their book Transistor Radios, David and Robert Lane report that "above all, because pocket portable sets like the Belmont Boulevard had proven to be a financial boondoggle, everyone in radio manufacturing circles were sure that pocket portables wouldn't sell. Because of this, the first transistor set was made by a small, little known firm in Indianapolis.
Raytheon announced the Belmont Boulevard in a full page color ad, in the December 1945 ad in Life Magazine. The version depicted in the ad (shown above) apparently was a preliminary design which was never produced. The production set has a slightly different case design and variations have been discovered.
Internally, the Belmont Boulevard is fascinating. It exemplifies the end of an era that, of course, being vacuum tube technology. Raytheon created the pencil-thin subminiature tubes used in the set.
The Belmont Boulevard is indeed a very significant precursor to our beloved pocket transistor sets. If you are fortunate enough to find one, it deserves a prime spot in your collection.
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BobW
Posts : 486 Join date : 2013-02-20 Age : 75
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Wed Mar 26, 2014 8:00 pm | |
| I bought five of them from one seller at an antique radio collector's meet in Little Rock about 20-25 years ago, Eric. All 5 were missing their aluminum battery covers. Then a couple years later I found a complete one at a radio meet in Elgin IL. After that I got to know someone locally who had an elaborate machine shop. The battery cover is a cast aluminum piece. He used the one battery cover I had on hand to machine battery covers for the others out of block aluminum. But the recreated battery covers need extensive hand finishing and painting to match the rest of the case. And they need to have handmade battery terminals installed in the covers. I did all that to one of them and sold it back then. That could be the one referred to which sold in 2001 because it would have been about that time. I still have the remaining ones on hand.
We believe the one pictured in the Life ad was maybe a prototype which was never produced because all the production models I found (both the five found in one place the the 6th in another) have a smooth case without the ribbed design and don't have the pocket clips. | |
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riceme
Posts : 3098 Join date : 2012-12-02 Age : 52 Location : Fox, Alaska
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Wed Mar 26, 2014 8:18 pm | |
| That is pretty neat... Thank you both for sharing this. Bob, I am pretty familiar with Elgin... the #1 wind turbine gearbox supplier in the world is in Elgin, so I did business there for many years. | |
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BobW
Posts : 486 Join date : 2013-02-20 Age : 75
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Wed Mar 26, 2014 9:22 pm | |
| - riceme wrote:
- That is pretty neat... Thank you both for sharing this. Bob, I am pretty familiar with Elgin... the #1 wind turbine gearbox supplier in the world is in Elgin, so I did business there for many years.
I love the far west suburbs of Chicago, riceme. For many years I traveled once a year to Elgin (which hosted a large antique radio meet) and twice a year down the road to St. Charles (which hosted a large antique jukebox show). | |
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BobW
Posts : 486 Join date : 2013-02-20 Age : 75
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Wed Mar 26, 2014 9:24 pm | |
| Some background. The tube driven Belmont Boulevard set predates the introduction of transistor pocket radios by almost ten years. The transistor had not yet been invented. The transistor was invented by Bell Labs in 1947. Texas Instruments began to produce transistors in the early 50's. But they could not convince any of the large radio manufacturers to make use of it. RCA, Sylvania, Emerson and Philco all turned them down. But in early 1954, a little firm in Indianapolis using the brand name Regency (which later became known for CB radios) agreed to use TI's transistor to produce a pocket radio. The Regency TR-1 was the first consumer product of any kind to incorporate transistors. They rushed it to completion for the 1954 Christmas selling season. The TR-1 was an instant hit and 140,000 of them were sold at $49.95 each (a lot of money in 1954). In 1947, a man named Masaru Ibuka co-founded a Japanese company named Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo which had eight employees and started out in a Tokyo department store building which had been bombed out in WW2. Ibuka learned of the American invention of the transistor and traveled to the U.S. in the early 50's to learn about it. He convinced Bell Labs to license the transistor to him. In 1957, Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo exported the first Japanese made consumer electronics product to the U.S. They called it the TR-63. Notice on the right lower front of the case the brand name they gave it... 100,000 of the TR-63 were exported to the U.S. And in 1958 Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo changed the name of their company to Sony. The rest is history. | |
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BobW
Posts : 486 Join date : 2013-02-20 Age : 75
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Wed Mar 26, 2014 10:23 pm | |
| At about the same time the first transistor radio was being produced, the first color television set went on the market. It was an Admiral with a 15" screen and sold in 1953 for $1175 (which I've been told is about $10,000 in today's money). The first color tv program broadcast coast to coast was the 1954 Tournament of Roses Parade. | |
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riceme
Posts : 3098 Join date : 2012-12-02 Age : 52 Location : Fox, Alaska
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Thu Mar 27, 2014 2:01 am | |
| Holy crap. I cannot fathom paying $10k for a tv. That is just pure insanity. Some folks got more money than good sense. | |
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BobW
Posts : 486 Join date : 2013-02-20 Age : 75
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:34 am | |
| - riceme wrote:
- Holy crap. I cannot fathom paying $10k for a tv. That is just pure insanity. Some folks got more money than good sense.
And that is especially so since there was very little color programming for the next ten years (the transition to color programming didn't really begin to happen until 1965). lol . | |
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mediawatcher
Posts : 3139 Join date : 2013-08-07
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Eric
Posts : 9738 Join date : 2012-07-30 Age : 73 Location : Pensacola
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Thu Mar 27, 2014 11:09 am | |
| I used to have a small shirt pocket transistor radio in the 1960's and it played through a small earpiece.
I remember listening to WBSR in a downtown clothing shop and the salesman offered his sympathy to my mom for me being a deaf child. (He thought it was a hearing aid.) | |
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riceme
Posts : 3098 Join date : 2012-12-02 Age : 52 Location : Fox, Alaska
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Thu Mar 27, 2014 11:43 am | |
| - BobW wrote:
- riceme wrote:
- Holy crap. I cannot fathom paying $10k for a tv. That is just pure insanity. Some folks got more money than good sense.
And that is especially so since there was very little color programming for the next ten years (the transition to color programming didn't really begin to happen until 1965). lol
. I was thinking the same thing... what was there to watch?? When I was a kid we had about 2-1/2 channels of tv (dependent upon the weather), and the thing rarely got turned on. I guess it would be different if it was a novelty (particularly a novelty you paid ten thousand dollars for), but still, as you said... how much was even broadcast back then? | |
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BobW
Posts : 486 Join date : 2013-02-20 Age : 75
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:23 pm | |
| - Eric wrote:
- I used to have a small shirt pocket transistor radio in the 1960's and it played through a small earpiece.
I remember listening to WBSR in a downtown clothing shop and the salesman offered his sympathy to my mom for me being a deaf child. (He thought it was a hearing aid.) Your post got me to thinking about it and I'm not aware of anything which had those little ear canal earphones until that Belmont Boulevard. And it's just a sheer guess but I'm guessing that little earphone may have been developed for World War 2 communications. But of course it became a standard item included with most all pocket transistor radios. Not only the "2-transistor" sets which had no onboard loudspeaker. But also the ones that did have amplified sound and a louspeaker. | |
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BobW
Posts : 486 Join date : 2013-02-20 Age : 75
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:35 pm | |
| About 25 years ago, radio collectors started to discover how stylish and attractive the early transistor sets were. In the late 50's when the transistor radio craze took off, literally hundreds and hundreds of different examples were produced. To me the most desireable ones are the Japanese imports from the early 60's. Style and looks in consumer electronics didn't begin with Steve Jobs and Apple. Here's just one example to help me back that statement up... | |
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BobW
Posts : 486 Join date : 2013-02-20 Age : 75
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:46 pm | |
| But style didn't start with transistor sets either. The 1930's produced some of the most attractive industrial art we've ever had in the form of a type of table model radio. We now refer to them as the "catalin" radios. The name comes from the plastic material they were made of. Feast your eyes on these...
https://www.google.com/search?q=catalin+radios&client=firefox-a&hs=IFh&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=sMU0U5CAFLKvsAT84YDgBQ&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1440&bih=756 | |
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BobW
Posts : 486 Join date : 2013-02-20 Age : 75
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Thu Mar 27, 2014 7:48 pm | |
| My favorite of all was made by a company called FADA and they called this model The Bullet. | |
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Eric
Posts : 9738 Join date : 2012-07-30 Age : 73 Location : Pensacola
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Thu Mar 27, 2014 9:24 pm | |
| I had me an old AM radio that ran off 110 volt AC, and I ran antenna wire all the way around my back yard on top of a ten-foot fence. KAAY out of Little Rock, Arkansas came through as good as WBSR.
Yeah, I know KAAY was a high power station, but proximity should account for something. | |
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BobW
Posts : 486 Join date : 2013-02-20 Age : 75
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Fri Mar 28, 2014 6:02 am | |
| Eric,
KAAY was legendary in the 60's for it's radio show called Beaker Street with deejay Clyde Clifford.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_Street | |
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Eric
Posts : 9738 Join date : 2012-07-30 Age : 73 Location : Pensacola
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Fri Mar 28, 2014 10:35 am | |
| - BobW wrote:
- Eric,
KAAY was legendary in the 60's for it's radio show called Beaker Street with deejay Clyde Clifford.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_Street I remember that show. They had some great music on KAAY, too. | |
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BobW
Posts : 486 Join date : 2013-02-20 Age : 75
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Sat Apr 05, 2014 12:46 pm | |
| Here's a little electronics trivia I thought you might enjoy. It really hits home how far we've come. Most of those transistor radios had six transistors in them. I just bought a PC video card to get me an HDMI output. It's an outdated card released in 2008 and was only $25 on eBay. Even still, it has THIS MANY transistors onboard... | |
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PkrBum
Posts : 1017 Join date : 2013-02-14 Location : 45th Parallel
| Subject: Re: Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios Sat Apr 05, 2014 8:09 pm | |
| Cool thread... I enjoyed reading it. | |
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| Before there were portable transistor radios, there were portable tube radios | |
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