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| Sunday, April 25, 2004 |
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The more things stay the same 
| |  My father, pictured to the left there, was born in 1908, and was a teenager when radio took off, much like the Net did in the late 1990s, complete with the speculative boom. I remember Pop telling me about listening with a crystal radio receiver, which involved a coil made by wrapping wire around a cylindrical quaker oats container. (Good Lord, there's an entire society dedicated to crystal set radios.) The antenna was a long wire that went out a window. You tuned the thing by moving a wire called a "cat's whisker." Everything involved — coil, crystal, antenna, oat box — cost almost nothing. The one thing that cost serious money was the headphones. That's what we have here: |
| | These are the headphones my father used. My father's younger sister, Grace Apgar, found these in her house recently and mailed them out to me. They're in remarkable shape, considering. I put together a gallery of photos of the things. Most of the following links point there. |
| | On the back of each headphone, in raised lettering, is the legend "NATHANIEL BALDWIN / SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH / PAT. MAY 10, 1910 / SEP. 14, 1915 / TYPE C". So I looked up Mr. Baldwin and his headphones, and found his was quite a story. A pioneer farmboy who went to BYU and Stanford before returning to Salt Lake City to a life of invention, entrepreneurship and polygamy. These headphones were his most successful invention, and his legacy. |
| | The phono plug, now covered with copper oxide, is a Stromberg-Carlson that served as an adapter for the Baldwin's two pins. It must be nearly as old. |
| | Anyway, much appreciation to Aunt Grace for sending me these. I think when I get back from Europe I'll make a crystal radio with the kid and see how well these things still work. Betcha they're fine. |
| | [Later...] Grace just added this by email: |
| | The radio had, on the lower left side, a little crystal.( in a round metal holder about a quarter of an inch wide) The crystal looked like a small-rough- textured piece of black coal. Attached at that point, there was a ( 4"or so) short piece of platinum wire that would be placed in various crevices in the crystal's surface - bringing in the different radio stations. I don't remember an antenna wire. |
| | This was in Fort Lee, New Jersey, which is right across the river from Manhattan. The signals would have been pretty good. Here's a list of stations from 1925. |
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