Wireless music for home entertainments

ENTERTAIN your friends with radio concerts, enjoy the fascination of radio as a hobby, make wireless a profitable part of your business, get news and market reports before they are published, take public speeches off the air. With a simple receiving set and a Radio MAGNAVOX you can do all this, and more, too, in your own home or office. The front cover of this magazine shows how easy it is, with a Radio MAGNAVOX.

Practically every variety of vocal and instrumental music from jazz to grand opera, news reports in plain English, and many other special features are radio broadcasted daily, free to anyone with the simple equipment to receive and reproduce them. Read the article in this issue.
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Mike and Speaker on Phone Make Talk More Convenient

THE latest gadget for attachment to your telephone is an amplifier and loudspeaker which permits you to speak and listen without holding the transmitter up to your face.

As shown in the photo at the left, the transmitter-receiver piece is hung on a special device which feeds into an amplifier that boosts both the incoming and out-coming voice. The former issues from a loudspeaker, while the latter is picked up by a super-sensitive microphone.

Dialing is accomplished in the usual manner. The device is the invention of Hans Schmidt, a Berlin Engineer, who labored for five years on the development of his creation.

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World’s Greatest Radio Listening Post

RADIO fans take pride in the number of stations they can “log” and verify, especially if these are at a great distance. Contests for the most successful listening are as popular, now that one may hear Australia or South America, as they were in the days when people sat up in the hope of hearing Pittsburgh or Schenectady. However, the prize for the world’s most systematic listening should go to Mdlle. Marianne (the personification of the French Republic, as Uncle Sam is that of the United States). She has erected the world’s most elaborate receiving station for the purpose of listening to and recording broadcasts, as illustrated here.
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RADIO IDEAS

TABLE-LAMP RADIO. Built Into the bakelite base of this attractive table lamp is a five-tube radio receiver with a dynamic speaker. A knob controls the on-off switch, and tuning is accomplished by turning the revolving dial in the base with the tips of the fingers.

CABINET TOUCH-UP KIT. Six different shades of high-grade lacquer are supplied in a handy kit for touching up plastic and colored cabinets. The colors are walnut, ivory, black, red, blue, and green. Bottles holding the enamel have plastic tops with attached brushes for applying it to cabinets.
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Radio Milks Cows, Runs Street Cars

THERE seems to be no end to the versatility of radio in these days of electrical and mechanical miracles—not even cows and street cars are immune to the influences of its radiations. As a curtain raiser at the annual radio show held recently in St. Louis, a street car was operated from a distance by a mere man with a radio transmitter in his hand, and a Holstein cow was made to dispense her milk by the medium of radio waves, whether she liked it or not.
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Heliograph Uses Sun to Flash Morse Code Messages

HELIOGRAPHING is an old method of signalling practiced by the army, forest rangers, boy scouts and other groups in the field, and it is recommended as an effective means of communicating at a distance. The apparatus, known as a heliograph, is a simple rig, as you will see by the plans for a home-made model. There are two parts to the apparatus. First, the sun reflector and sighting device, and, second, the transmitter. Each is mounted upon a tripod.
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The NATION Sits in on National Conventions

Politics becomes mechanically minded in 1936, and both Republicans and Democrats are providing the machinery which will permit the nation to listen in to the proceedings.

by BOB GORDON

THE political machinery for nominating the presidential candidates of the two major parties remains as old as the parties, but in June this year the entire nation will be given ringside seats at the National Conventions at Philadelphia and Cleveland, with both parties taking advantage of every latest scientific wrinkle to bring the conventions to your home or local movie.
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Radio Calls Movie Star to Work

HERBERT MUNDIN, movie star, recently had to work in four different pictures at the same time. Finding it rather difficult to keep track of his working day schedule, and to know just where he was wanted next, he had to use a portable radio set.

With radio communication the directors had but to step up to the microphone to call their “much-in-demand” actor.

The tiny radio set and batteries are supported by a slingstrap. Headphones are used for reception, with a tiny loop aerial attached to them. No ground wire is needed since transmitter is close.

Glass “PIPE” ferries 10,000 Conversations

Slim new vacuum tube is radio’s mightiest amplifier.

Nationwide networks of ultrahigh-frequency radio stations that will relay telegraph messages and long-distance telephone conversations, as well as television and radio programs, will be possible in the near future. A completely new type of amplifier tube, developed at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, can handle simultaneously 40 full-color television programs, or 10,000 telephone conversations, or 100,000,000 words a minute by telegraph. Read the rest of this entry »

If they had already perfected explosion-proof telephones in 1935, why can’t I use my cell phone at the gas station? Has this miraculous technology been lost?

SAFETY PHONE GUARDS AGAINST EXPLOSIONS
A new type of explosion-proof telephone, exhibited in Chicago, is a recent addition to the roster of curious safety appliances developed especially for use in industries where dust, gunpowder, or inflammable gases present the constant hazard of a blast. Not only does the construction of the instrument guard against the possibility of an electrical spark igniting any combustible material in the surrounding air, but even the mechanical working parts have been designed particularly with a view to reducing friction so that a spark cannot be produced.

Keeping Clocks RIGHT by Wire

NEW apparatus, of almost human intelligence, aids in transmitting the Western Union Telegraph Company’s time service to subscribers in all parts of the country. Improved synchronizing and testing machines have recently been installed in the telegraph company’s new building in New York City. Time reports go out electrically from the New York master clocks to other master clocks in all the larger cities. Thence they are distributed to subscribers by branch lines. In other parts of the New York building are electrical devices that automatically wind and set at regular intervals the 120.000 clocks of the system. Read the rest of this entry »

Sure, it’s a Compuserve style walled garden, but there was a pretty impressive amount of information available online in 1979.

Over-the-phone computer data bank

Telecomputing Corp. of America is now offering a computer information service called The Source. Actually a large computer located in Virginia that contains some 2000 programs, The Source includes a tie-in with the UPI and New York Times news and data banks. Type in your question and you get answers on everything from the latest news and stock-market reports to methods of conserving energy.
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