Tour the Vintage Radio and Communications Museum (Video)

Video Tour the Vintage Radio and Communications Museum (Video) 19

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 09, 2014 @04:50PM from the oldies-but-goodies dept.

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"Welcome to the Vintage Radio and Communications Museum of Connecticut," is the headline on the museum's website. The site also says, "Our volunteers are happy to give personal tours," and that's what today's two videos (and two more we'll run tomorrow or later in the week) are: personal tours of the museum conducted by volunteer Bernie Michaels, known in ham radio circles as W2LFV. (Alternate Video Link 1) (Alternate Video Link 2)

NOTE: Transcript covers both videos

Bernie Michaels: My name is Bernie Michaels I am an amateur radio operator. My call sign is W2LFV Lima Foxtrot Victor in phonetics, and I have been a HAM since 1951. I actually got interested in radio in the late 1940s, and I if can tell a very brief story, I probably exist because of radio. My grandparents-to-be wanted to buy a radio in the 1920s but they knew nothing about it, and they discovered that a neighbor of theirs worked at a company that manufactured radios, the Stromberg Carlson company in Rochester, NY. They invited them over one evening to tell them about radio and he fell in love with their eldest daughter. So I was a product of that.

Timothy Lord: Great.

Bernie Michaels: In 2001, I was semi-retired and a friend of mine heard that on the radio, that the Vintage Radio & Communications Museum was looking for volunteers, and that sounded like a fun thing to do. So I applied and apparently because I made it to the museum from Massachusetts which is about a 20-mile drive they figured I was acceptable and I became a member.

Timothy Lord: You were curious enough.

Bernie Michaels: So I’ve been a volunteer ever since. I served briefly on the board of directors for a couple of years, my wife was treasurer, we published a newsletter, and quite honestly, it got to be a second job which I didn’t want, so I retired from it but I remain active. I am secretary of the amateur radio club here and we do have an amateur radio station on the premises which you will see briefly.

Timothy Lord: Great.

Bernie Michaels: On W1Victor Charlie Mike.

Timothy Lord: And do you exchange contact cards with other HAM radios.

Bernie Michaels: We do, yes, in fact you will be able to take a QSL card with you.

Timothy Lord: That would be great. Why don’t we take a tour?

Bernie Michaels: As I mentioned, Tim, we usually start off by taking a brief look at how our ancestors communicated, and we talk about the fact that people were limited pretty much by how far they could see or how far they could hear, and they used cannons, for example, a cannon would be fired at a boat Harbor when a ship came in, to let everybody around know that a boat had arrived. In France, they had fire towers from Marseille to Paris, every time a ship came in, and the night was clear, they would light a fire and they would be able to know that merchandise had come in. When Gutenberg invented the printing press with movable type, that expanded communications quite a bit, because in those days in the 1400s very few people knew how to read, but it was the beginning but slowly civilization adapts to new technologies. Animals, we used animals quite a bit, in fact, the Greeks during the first Olympics used carrier pigeons to convey the news of who won the Olympic events to Athens. The pony express in our country in the 1800s, another good example. All of that changed however in the mid-1800s when a portrait painter by the name of Samuel Morse, Samuel Morse and his associate Alfred Vail invented the telegraph, and it was the first practical means of communicating using electricity.

Now electricity was something rather new. That is your first name in Morse code. (– .. --) Electricity was fairly new; it captured the attention of people. What they designed was a mechanism that would respond to electrical impulses and Morse converted the alphabet into a series of long and short electrical pulses. What Vail did is design this mechanism that would bring a pen down on a strip of a long paper, and as these pulses were received the pen would mark the paper, and the telegrapher would then read the marks and go back to his chart and find out what letter that represented. Well, they discovered very quickly that the telegraphers began to recognize the sound the mechanism made and they abandoned the paper and the pen and they just did it by ear. And it has made the system very faster, much faster and much more reliable. The telegraph was so popular that was its demise because messages would pile up and even though it may take a week or so to get a message through which was a lot faster than a year to get a mail a letter from New York to California let’s say, by ship, it was still relatively slow, and people demanded something better. So there were a number of inventors who were trying to come up with a system where you could send more than one message on the wire at a time. And one of the inventors and experimenters was a man a speech pathologist in Boston by the name of Alexander Bell. He was trying to find a use of his knowledge of harmonics to allow more than one signal to go out on the wire. He and another inventor by the name of Elisha Gray came up with a way of converting the human voice into an electrical impulse and this gave birth to the telephone. The telephone was fantastic because you no longer needed an operator who was trained to read Morse code and interpret it. Anybody could pick up the receiver and talk into the mouthpiece and communicate with somebody else. So the telephone was a fantastic boon. It gave rise to new jobs, telephone operators, which were originally boys, because they didn’t think women couldn’t handle these complex electrical gadgets, but the boys proved less than desirable, so they hired women who had more of a sensitive nature and more patience with customers.

Timothy Lord: Bernie, how old is this telephone you are standing next to?

Bernie Michaels: This telephone is probably from the late 1890s, 1895, 1896, it had a magneto and you have to crank to generate voltage to ring the other phone, and then you had to pick this up and hold it to your ear, and you had to talk out of this, and if you were talking long distance, you really had to shout, because the signal was very very weak.

Timothy Lord: Is there a carbon microphone in there?

Bernie Michaels: It was a carbon microphone yeah. Interesting that the dial telephone was invented by a funeral director.

Timothy Lord: For a special reason?

Bernie Michaels: Yeah. Well, he had a funeral parlor in Kansas City, Kansas and the wife of his rival funeral director in town was a phone operator, and he suspected she was diverting calls and turned it from his parlor to her husband. So he and his son came about to develop the Strowger switch. Almon Strowger was his name. The switch by the way, variations of its basic design are still being used today like certain mechanical electromechanical switching devices. Again the telephone really sparked communication, now people can talk to other people locally in towns and this aided business and let people move away from their families and yet stay in communication. I am going to jump over to the phonograph which actually was developed between the time of the telegraph and the telephone were made. Thomas Edison and his people found a way to record sound and play it back by using a cylinder which was coated with a wax material and put in a machine like this and rotated, and as it rotated this horn which was connected to a diaphragm and a needle was brought up against the cylinder and as you talked into the horn, the vibrations of the air would cause the needle to scratch a groove in the cylinder. And that would capture the sound actually. When you played it back, the needle will ride in the groove and wriggle and cause the diaphragm to vibrate which caused the air to move and it would recreate the sound. So that was the first startup of recorded sound. What Edison envisioned for his invention was not so much recording music and entertainment but as a business tool, he was trying to find a way of making business operations less expensive. And in those days, executives would dictate letters to their secretaries who would write down the words in shorthand and that would have to be transcribed on a typewriter. What Edison thought if you could record it, you could give it a lesser paid person who ran the typewriter rather than a highly trained stenographer and this would lower the cost of doing business. So he invented the Edison recorder. And there was a company in Connecticut that picked up the rights to it, and called their invention the Dictaphone and as a result the name Dictaphone became the generic name for this type of device. And the Edison recorder was lost, long forgotten. Actually in reality, the Dictaphone was a better product. You want me to play these, one of these for a second?

Timothy Lord: If you can, that would be wonderful.

Bernie Michaels: I don’t know which one of these is working, but is amazing how much sound can come out of one of these things. Alright. Maybe this one is better. Let me try this one. This is all mechanical, there is nothing electronic, the motor is run by a spring, one motor. And the only way to adjust the volume is to close the doors.

Timothy Lord: How many of these do you think are still operational around the world?

Bernie Michaels: A surprising number. Every day we discover new ones, people want to donate or sell to us, it is amazing how many there are.

Timothy Lord: I have seen a few around the country and it always surprises me too.

Bernie Michaels: Yeah, me too, especially where they are located. I was going to make another comment but I forgot what it was. Oh, the term, have you ever heard the term ‘put a sock in it’?

Timothy Lord: Sure.

Bernie Michaels: What it meant was even with the doors closed sometimes it was too loud, so people would bunch up a sock and put it in the mouth of the horn. Because all of these basically used the same type of playback mechanisms.

Timothy Lord: Different sizes.

Bernie Michaels: Different sizes. They put a sock in there and that would tone it down even more.

Timothy Lord: By the way, is this also a, this is a Sonora and this is a Victrola, and this is an Edison.

Bernie Michaels: Yeah, this is an Edison. Now the recorded music actually didn’t take off until about ten years after Edison came out with his cylinders, that Emile Berliner invented the flat disc. And two advantages of a flat disc is that you could record on both sides, and you could mass produce these on a press rather than to having to record each one individually. So they were a lot less expensive. And they also contain more music. A cylinder would run maybe 3 minutes maximum. The discs, the smaller discs, would run about 4 or 5 minutes, the larger discs about 8 or 10 minutes.

Timothy Lord: Was that a 78 rpm?

Bernie Michaels: At 78 rpm, yeah. People ask me why did they come up with 78 rpm, I have not found a good answer for that, I think it was more or less arbitrary. But from there on, they have established the benchmark, and half the speed of 33 1/3 was the next recording and then the RCA in the 50s came out with their 45 rpm. So we had three different speeds to contend with. Edison and his people were very busy, besides inventing the electric light and coming up with sound recording, he got involved in motion pictures, now by the late 1800s photography was pretty well established. People were taking pictures all over the place, and the Kodak company in Rochester, NY had come out with a flexible photographic material. Before that pictures had to be taken on glass plates, that had photographic emulsion coated on them.

Timothy Lord: And you can’t run that through a mechanism very well.

Bernie Michaels: Very difficult. Very difficult. And Kodak’s first cameras had sheets of this stuff, and then they went to roll film for roll film cameras. Well the Lumiere brothers in France stuck with flexible material asked Kodak to cut it into narrow strips 35 mm wide punch a series of holes in the outer edge and they designed a machine that would actually run this so when you take a series of pictures, because obviously everybody I think knows these days that moving pictures don’t move. They are a series of still pictures.

Timothy Lord: That myth has been dispelled, right.

Bernie Michaels: Right, and our brain thanks to the phenomenon called persistence of vision blends these images because there is a momentary retention of the image that you just saw and it blends in with the new image coming in. So Lumiere and Kodak, I am sorry Thomas Edison and his engineers took this concept that the Lumiere brothers came up with and improved upon it. We don’t have a camera here but we do have a number of projectors, this is a still projector from about 1910, 1912, it is made by the Pope Company. It used a material based on nitrate, plastic on nitrates, if you are chemist, break down over a short period of time into an explosive material. Nitroglycerin it actually develops into. And they were very flammable. So projectors had to be designed with fireproof enclosures.

Timothy Lord: It is a safety consideration that we don’t have to deal with right now very much.

Bernie Michaels: Correct. Correct. So when safety film came along in the 20s, that solved their problem. The film would be fed through this projection mechanism and this particular model was with auto motor, the projection has had a standard 16 frames at 16 revolutions a minute and rotate the film by hand as it went through the machine and it got picked up and take up reel. Down there, there is no place. The arms are gone. But what is interesting is that this particular projector had an electric light source, they used carbon arc. This will be connected to electricity, these two bars will come together and then this will be pulled apart and there will be a very intense white light generated here, by electric current, and that light would be projected through the plastic material which got the name film because it had a film of emulsion on it, and it was projected on the screen. Silent systems.

Timothy Lord: Bernie, without an electric light source what would be the light source if they weren’t electric?

Bernie Michaels: They would use a flame acetylene or gas acetylene and helium, not helium hydrogen rather or oxygen

Timothy Lord: Like a miner’s lamp.

Bernie Michaels: Like a miner’s lamp yeah exactly. Speaking of light, you have heard the term ‘in the limelight’?

Timothy Lord: Sure.

Bernie Michaels: Well, before they had electric lights in the theaters the stage would be lit up by a series of these devices that were clamped to the edge of the stage that held a piece of calcium limestone and fed by oxygen and hydrogen gas and lit and the chalk would glow a very bright intense light, and there would be a reflector behind it, that would shine the light up on to the stage. And because of these they use these limestone pieces, the light is known as limelight, and that is how the term ‘in the limelight’ came about. The particular kit was owned by a traveling tour group that did theaters in the Mid-West. Might have even visited Austin, Texas at one time, who knows? Motion pictures developed in the late 1920s, sound was introduced up until that point, as I said, they were silent, although quite honestly, movies were never silent, there was always somebody playing a piano.

Timothy Lord: Now was that also an Edison invention?

Bernie Michaels: The sound? No. There were a number of developers in sound Vitaphone was probably the most well-known, and what the Vitaphone system and this was called the transitional projector, it synchronized a recording, a disc recording with the film. And what you had

Timothy Lord: What’s the diameter of that? It is about 18”?

Bernie Michaels: Yeah, it is a transcription disc. The projectionist will put this on the turntable they can find the hole and there will be a mark on the record as to where the tone arm should be and they would put it inside, it would play from the inside out, and then he would put the film in the projector and he would set the number 2 in the gates, so that when you projected it the number 2 would appear on the screen. And at that point, and the record was run by the same motor so they were locked together mechanically. And then as the film ran, the record would play, and it would stay within a frame or two of synchronization which was pretty good. Better than my TV set at home. In 1929, the Western Electric engineers came up with a way of putting sound on films. I don’t know if you can see, if I hold this up to light, you might be able to see. There is a stripe here along the film, along the pictures that has a series of marks in it, and that’s always on the other side, that is the sound track, those little wriggly lines in the middle of that white stripe, are picked up variations in light are picked up by a photo cell in the projector and converted from the film amplification system to sound. And they were able to synchronize the sound and picture precisely and they didn’t have to worry about the records. There was a lot of engineering problems to overcome but I won’t go into that, because that is a lot of detail. 35 mm was the film width of choice for theatrical work. In the mid-20s the Kodak came up with 16 mm film which was designed for industrial use and schools, I don’t have any here. Because the quality of the film had improved vastly and they were able to get a reasonably good image on the next smaller piece of film. And that spurred sales and the quality of it was so good that the industries began using it for making documentaries and informational films and independent film makers began using it for documentaries and pornographic movies. Again, they spur interest and sales during the Depression, Kodak again came out with a new gauge called 8 mm for the amateur, and everybody was supposed to go out and buy a little movie camera. This is run by a spring motor and that would allow you to take pictures of baby’s first steps and Sarah leaving for her trip to Europe, and that good stuff.

Timothy Lord: No telephone calls on that yet though, you can’t take a telephone call on that?

Bernie Michaels: No, afraid not. Okay. Let’s go back to our quest for communicating over long distances. The telephone was great, but it still tied people to a little wire, and engineers and scientists were trying to find a way of communicating without using wires between the receiver and the sender. A number of experimenters were in the field, notably there were two that history remembers—Nikola Tesla was one, and in the late 1880s he applied for a patent for a system of communicating using spark transmission which was based on the work that Heinrich Hertz the German scientist had developed and everybody was wondering what to do with these Hertzian waves as these were called to honor him. The other gentleman was Guglielmo Marconi an Italian who had experimented with wireless communication. And Marconi on his deathbed admitted that he based his invention on Tesla’s patents, but Marconi was an inventor and a good engineer in his own right. He was also an excellent businessman, and he experimented with wireless and he was able to communicate from his family’s yacht to his shore over fairly reasonable distances. He couldn’t get the Italian government into backing his work, so he went to England where he had influential friends.

Timothy Lord: Was he transmitting Morse code at that point? What was he sending between his yacht and the shore?

Bernie Michaels: Oh, Morse code was the only way to go. The telephone killed the telegraph and of course Morse but the code lived on as a communications mode for radio for wireless. And Marconi, eventually went to England as I said, he convinced the British Government to put his equipment on their naval vessels which they did. But Marconi’s big quest was to communicate across the Atlantic Ocean. And he assembled a team of England’s best scientists and I think it was in 1896 sent a message from England, from Cornwall, England to Newfoundland in the North American continent the letter S dit dit dit -- dit dit dit. And it was proved that wireless communication was practical.

Timothy Lord: Did he select S just because it is an easy signal to hear and interpret?

Bernie Michaels: No. Originally they were going to have the letter R to send dit dah dit dit dah dit but the generator mechanism broke down so they converted it to plant the letter S. And there is a lot of controversy because of the time of the year that Marconi transmitted. Our technology today tells us that it would be virtually impossible for a signal to go that distance from England to North America.

Timothy Lord: Is it a controversy whether it was genuine, whether he might have faked it?

Bernie Michaels: Some people say he was the only person who heard it. His associate who claimed he heard it was coerced into saying that. Others say well it must have happened because more than one person heard it. Anyway, Marconi formed a company, and the Marconi company began manufacturing equipment and licensing the use of wireless.

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