Grebe Synchrophase 1926

Two pictures from an advertising booklet for one of the stranger user interfaces of the early radio sets. All totally functional, of course.

Click to see larger versions. Item recently listed for sale by

Sears, Roebuck's 1922 Catalog of Electrical Goods and Radio Apparatus

As some of you know, I run a small e-publishing company (first book, 1999, so we were pioneers). Steve Davis sent me some scans from his copy of this 64-page catalog from Sears, published just at the moment radio was changing from a hobby for experimenters to a mass medium of entertainment for the entire culture. Here's the cover (click for full-size version):

The first sixteen pages of the catalog are devoted to electrical appliances, and are lots of fun to look at. It's surprising how many home housekeeping functions were covered by things you could buy in 1922; and some of them had been available in one form or another for two or three decades by then. The radio interest begins on page seventeen, and continues until the end. Most of the entries are components, but there are modular chunks for assembling a complete receiving set, and even a couple of fully assembled modular packages. Here's a typical page (click for full-size version):

This was so cool that I talked Steve into scanning the entire thing, so that I could publish it as an e-book. It took me two months to clean up all the background trash on the pages (they're printed on cheap paper and the catalog is ninety years old), figure out how to format it so that it would fit in an e-book package, and get it uploaded.

It's now on sale in ePub format (for any ebook reading device) and in Kindle format (for Amazon's hardware). You can buy it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, and at the Apple iBooks store (search terms: Sears 1922 radio catalog). It's beautiful, if I say so myself, and it's $2.99.

Yes, it's cheaper than a latte.

There is no DRM (!). You can print pages out. You can lend it. You can even sell it, if you should be so internally damaged as to want to.

Obviously, we're not doing this to get rich. It just looked like something I wanted to own a copy of, and this was my rather involved of doing so ... with the result that you can own a copy, too.

One extra neat thing: if you are reading the book on an iPad, or on a software reading app on your computer, and even on certain hardware devices, you can double-tap the page or stretch the window to make the image very, very large. You can make it large enough that you can read all the little tiny type on all of the pages.

Getting this feature to work was one of the things that made formatting it a challenge. Although ebook reading devices nominally have small page sizes, the underlying image can be larger in number of pixels, as long as you don't go over a file-size limit. This book pushes all those boundaries. All the work I did in Photoshop to clean up the pages, to make the edges clear, and to minimize graphic artifacts collided with the file-size limits, and by sneaking around these limits we've made every page readable in complete detail. (Though you do have to read it on the right kind of device; on your iPhone it may be just a little bit too small no matter what.)

Buy a copy. Tell your friends. Did I mention that the two images in this blog post (large versions) are the images we used for those pages in the book? Click to make them big (limited by the size of your display, of course), and see what you think.

Radio Lifestyle Magazine from 1923

By mid-1923 there was already a rotogravured lifestyle magazine showing how rich people decorated their homes with elaborate radio sets. The radio set is here the centerpiece of the room, and serves as the main focus.

Copies of this magazine are not common! I photographed this from the copyright set at the Library of Congress. The magazine lasted for at least a couple of year, but by early 1924 had become just another radio technofan magazine. In the course of time I'll put all of the covers I have on the magazineart.org site in the Radio or Science/Technology categories. Don't miss the sections of advertisements for radio sets, phonographs, and records!

Click to enlarge photo.

Electro Importing Company Catalog 20 for 1918

Hugo Gernsback's Electro Importing Company provided thousands of experimenters with their introduction to wireless/radio. Here are some pages from their Catalog 20, published in 1918, courtesy of eBay seller retroetcetera who offered it for sale in 2007.

As always, click on an image to view a larger version of it.

Voices in the Air

Here's an early public commentary on radio, complete with photo of an early radio fan. Originally published in the April 22, 1922 issue of THE INDEPENDENT. Click the small pictures to see the kid and his set, and/or to read the article.

Here's the article in which it appeared:

Wonder who the kid is. He could still be alive today! What was it we were saying about rapid technological change?

Experimental Wireless Stations

Philip E. Edelman's book Experimental Wireless Stations includes some interesting photographs. Here's a one kilowatt amateur station from the 1920 edition:



Edelman's book was first published in 1912, and there was at least one other edition, in 1922. In recent times, the book has been reprinted by a number of companies that specialize in public domain works, and these can be found at Amazon by clicking on the book's title in the first paragraph. The BiblioBazaar edition listing on Amazon lets you look inside and see a few typical pages from one of the editions (probably 1920 or 1922). Thanks to Steve Davis for the scan!

Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony 1922

Here's the 1922 edition of A. P. Morgan's book; earlier editions were published in 1912 and 1915. Just for fun we see a couple of pictures of field radio equipment; unfortunately, the pictures themselves aren't dated. From Steve Davis.


Telefunken wireless cart, transmitter side:


And the receiver side (you couldn't exactly call this a transceiver):


As always, click on the images to bring forth magically the larger versions.