In other videos I showed you these interesting Belmont and Stantex pocket radios. Along the lines of those, but much more primitive--and quirky--is this Tinytone TT-1 Pocket Radio. It is a pre-transistor model from the early '50s. Like those other radios, there's no speaker inside of it. But UNlike those radios, you listen to this one through a rubber-like tube! So you're actually listening through a kind of stethoscope. The listening tube here is rather stiff from age as might be expected of something 70 years old.

"Listen While You Walk Down the Street!" Yes. Here's an original ad for this gizmo. It was made in Kearney ((CAR-KNEE)), Nebraska by an outfit known as Western Radio, also known as Western Manufacturing, and a lot of other names. I'll let you read for awhile.

Inside the radio is a patent notice which claims coverage for "combinations of tube and transistor circuitry," but there is no transistor, only a single tube and very li ttle else--just a tuning coil and slug, a transformer, a volume control, one resistor, and three capacitors. There's an ingenious string-driven tuning mechanism. And there's the earphone element there at the top, with the listening tube attached to it. Oh wait, it's not attached to it. Can you see that? I'll have to fix that. Here, I've reattached it. This radio uses a 30 volt battery and another, smaller battery to light the tube. The Western Radio folks gave us a lot of toy crystal radios too under the Tinytone name, as well as names like Pakette, Midget, Pee Wee, Ti-Nee, and Tinymite. Their crystal radios are smaller than this Tinytone TT-1, and appear in a range of attractive designs. If you know about crystal radios, you know that they require a long antenna and a ground and so aren't exactly mobile. The Western folks--and others--mislead the public for years about that fact, selling toy crystal radios as if they could be used anywhere on the go. But with this TT-1 model they had finally actually made such a radio. So now they were faced with the problem of overcoming the skepticism those previous ads had caused. And so they spelled it right out in their ad--with this radio you could actually, really, honestly listen while you walk down the street.

The Tinytone. One of the cheesy, cute, made in the USA radios from Western Manufacturing.

свернуть