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Transcription Mystery Disc #177
This is another nearly destroyed disc I acquired in that lot of transcription losers. This one is a Recordisc and has an outer edge start and spins at 78rpm. Obviously it has a metal core. It is...
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Azon Bomb
The AZON bomb was perhaps the world's first smart bomb. AZON stood for Azimuth Only, which I'll explain. It was officially named the VB-1, the VB stood for Vertical Bomb. The whole idea of a smart...
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Big Bill Hill
True to form, Big Bill Hill was a big man, 250 lbs, and over 6 feet tall. He was born in England, Arkansas in 1914 and rolled into Chicago in 1932 looking for work. He found work at a steel mill but he...
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Sisters of the Skillet
On CBS Ed East and Ralph Dumke were called the Quality Twins. But that was only in 1937 and 1938. Before that they were players in the Charlie Davis Orchestra. But earlier they were also known as the...
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RADIO ARTIFACT: WRTI signs on
This is a copy of the October 3rd 1947 issue of the Temple University News. It announces the impending completion of their own AM carrier current radio station, WRTI. It was such a big story at the...
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Transcription Mystery Disc #178
What I know of the Milt Herth Trio you could fit on a matchbook cover. They were an obscure music trio, halt jazz, half novelty wholly strange. They were sometimes also billed as the Milt Hurth Trio,...
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GWEN Towers
Like HAARP, this is a somewhat dangerous subject, rife with kooks, cranks and wonks. But GWEN Towers are real, and worthy as a radio topic. The Ground Wave Emergency Network (GWEN) was a communications...
View ArticleEarthquake on the Radio
Because radio stations broadcast more or less continually natural disasters are often recorded on the air. On the news this morning I caught bit of footage of a quake shaking up the morning DJs on...
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Chess by Radio
For reasons unknown, playing chess over the radio was a dream of early radio men, and has become a tradition ever since. This probably has roots in the much older tradition of playing chess games by...
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Spider Burks
If Spider Burk wasn't the first black DJ in St. Louis, he was close. Some sources cite Wiley Price as the first in that metro. Jesse Dillon "Spider" Burks was a graduate of the Hampton Institute, now...
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Transcription Mystery Disc #179
This is a 12-Inch Presto metal core transcription disc. It has an outer edge start, not that any of the actual outermost edge still remains. It's in sorry shape, having lost all of one side and most of...
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Copycode
We have become accustomed to a digital age when all data is forever, and can produce an infinite number of identical copies without loss and without the need for physical media (except the hard...
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Before The Dry Cell
Early radio equipment was all battery-powered. There were a handful of devices that were powered by crank dynamos, but for all practical purposes by the time we were using the word "radio" instead of...
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Radio Navigation
In several previous posts about radio navigation I've mentioned beacons, and that airplanes use them as points of reference. In one detailed post about Amelia Earhart I even roughly described the...
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The Novelty Boys
Jimmie Pierson and Richard "Dick" Klasi were the Novelty Boys,leaders of a touring and yodeling old time country music troupe. I say troupe because their group grew to include a number of other members...
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Transcription Mystery Disc #180
This is a 10-inch metal-core Audiodisc with an outer edge start. It is labeled on one side in pen, and the other in pencil in different handwriting indicating the recordings did not take place at the...
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Bebop Hits The Radio
I like Jazz, but I have a particular soft spot for Bebop. As a genre, it was short-lived starting with Coleman Hawkins highlights in the early 1940s and petering out into novel but less atonal work by...
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1966 Pennsylvania Manual
I found another even earlier edition of the Pennsylvania Manual. This one is from 1966 and it also has a section dedicated to radio. This one is shorter but with reason. There were thousands fewer...
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Competing Telegraphs
It wasn't much after Samuel Morse invented the first electrical telegraph in 1837 that competing systems first began to appear. But the first recorded instance of the transmission of an electrical...
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Labor Day
Today is Labor day and in recognition of who really does the work around here, I am taking the day off. You can read more about the holiday here.
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