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4,000,000 Listen to Auto-Radios

The amazing fact and figure story of the radio in your automobile.

BACK in 1922, William Lear, a Quincy, Illinois, radio experimenter, hooked up sixty odd pounds of complicated electrical equipment and sold it to Dr. Edward Martin, of Kahoka, Missouri.

The doctor fitted it into the back of his car and drove off to California. But he didn’t have much fun, he was too busy trying to tune in something—anything! Not until he was home again did he think to reverse the power plug, whereupon the contraption worked perfectly.

That was the first auto-radio.

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New Refrigerator Has Built-in Radio Receiver

A REFRIGERATOR equipped with a built-in radio has been placed on the market. So popular was the first model that the manufacturer has made available a choice of several models in different sizes equipped with radio. This has been accomplished by having the radio mounted in the top of the refrigerator, and having the refrigerator constructed so that a top equipped with radio may be substituted for one without.

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TALKING DUMMIES ADVERTISE GOODS
Talking dummies, with human voices that draw a crowd’s attention, have been devised for advertising purposes by a Brooklyn, N. Y., technician. The voice is supplied by a loudspeaker, connected to a hidden microphone or a phonograph pick-up. Some of the dummies represent persons prominent in public and industrial life. Thus the phonograph voice of a well-known automobile manufacturer may talk of his car’s merits.

Planning high-speed business

An Advertisement of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company

More than 95% of the telephone calls from one town to another in the Bell System are now on a high-speed basis. This holds whether the call is from New Orleans to Boston or from New York to Oyster Bay.

Even if it is a long call, the operator in many cases now asks you to hold the telephone while the call is put through.

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Electronic newsboy

Is this how you’ll get your newspaper In the future? Maybe, says Toshiba, the Japanese electronics firm that developed this facsimile receiver. It prints both sides of a sheet simultaneously, in six minutes. If mass-produced, the device would sell for an estimated $300.

Radio and Electronics Today

A—Designed to send and receive radio messages in trucks, taxis, fire trucks, police cars and civil-defense passenger cars, this lightweight unit can be installed quickly by plugging it into a cigarette-lighter outlet to obtain the necessary six volts for operation. It is available in either a variable or fixed-frequency model and may be operated on various wavelengths. It has a power output of about four watts and -a range of approximately 20 miles. It also may be used on a standard 115-volt 60-cycle a.c. line

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Blind Spots in Radio Mystify Science

WHAT is the mysterious force that makes certain spots on the earth’s surface apparently impervious to radio messages? Although about fifty of these “dead” gaps have been charted in North America, and its coastwise waters, no one has found the cause for the “blind” pockets. One of the largest dead gaps is just south of Hudson bay in Canada; another is over the ocean off Atlantic City, while a third is supposed to be in the vicinity of Camden, N. J. Neither does Mexico offer an entirely uninterrupted path to the wireless waves, for somewhere south of that country’s capital a blind spot has been found in the air, and further north, on the border of Texas, there is a gap that defies passage of the wireless.

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Will Power Operates Gramaphone

YOU can take this story as seriously as you want to. It came to us as perfectly legitimate stuff and here it is:

Major Raymond Phillips, O.M.E., late member of the Inter-Allied Commission of Control, claims to have evolved apparatus which will cause a gramaphone or kettle to function entirely by will power.

Major Phillips explains that the human body acts as an earth and the constant capacity is maintained within three yards of the apparatus. A momentary pause in the flow to earth through the body—produced entirely by mind concentration—is followed by an upward surge of sufficient intensity to cause a series of relays to operate.
That’s the story. You can take it or leave it. We have a sneaking suspicion that somebody is being kidded.

WRIST RADIO

DICK TRACY, the famed comic-strip detective character created by cartoonist Chester Gould, has been using a wrist radio for years in his fight against crime. Now the wrist radio is becoming a reality and Sylvania Products, Inc., has proved it by developing the tiny transmitter shown here. But it can’t receive signals such as Mr. Tracy’s. A separate, larger unit is used. This little radio has been made possible by the transistor, a tiny crystal device, which promises to expand greatly the field of electronics by making possible the manufacture of tiny electronic sets.

The Radio War

Not with bombs, bullets or blood-shed is the present World War raging Instead the nations of the world are disseminating propaganda by radio

France, Italy, Germany, Japan, Russia, England and even the United States are intensifying their radio campaigns. Each nation objects to the direct verbal assaults issued against it by the other nations partaking in this feud. The newspaper clipping at the right is only one of hundreds found in the daily press.

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World’s Smallest Talking Machine

HERE is a portable talking machine that is thoroughly “portable.” Reputed to be the world’s smallest, the miniature, shown on the right, is constructed of steel and leather, and looks like a folding camera.

The horn is carried inside the machine and the same screw that is used for fixing the record to the plate is used in closing the apparatus. It weighs slightly over three pounds and tits in a coat pocket.

Pulley System Speeds Data
TO SPEED written messages and other data between buildings at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., Dr. Harry Rowe Mimno, assistant professor of physics, developed a mechanical carrier system operated by a motor driven rope-and-pulley.

Messages are placed in an aluminum cylinder and carried between buildings by the motivated rope-and-pulley system. Upon reaching its destination, the cylinder causes a red light to flash, informing office personnel that message is waiting.