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Celebrating The 100th Birthday Of The First Consumer Radio Ever Made
Over the past year, we've been celebrating 100 years of broadcasting, with WWJ Detroit and KDKA Pittsburgh making the claim of being the first official radio station in existence. (Not to mention CFCF, which no longer exists, but was actually on air as XWA in Montreal a year earlier.)
And while there were tons of amateurs listening to signals on the airwaves through all sorts of experimental contraptions, what about the first real radio to be sold to consumers - one that came fully assembled that buyers didn't have to put together? It was apparently called the RA-DA, and it, too, turns 100 years old in 2020.
The only things missing are FM and HD! But I wonder what that knob labelled "The Tickler" did?
Happy 100th Birthday To The First Consumer Radio
- Lorne
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Re: Celebrating The 100th Birthday Of The First Consumer Radio Ever Made
RadioActive wrote:
But I wonder what that knob labelled "The Tickler" did?
That got me curious as well, so I did some searching and found this at : "It contains a variometer for tuning in the radio stations and the tickler for controlling the regenerative feedback." Since that didn't really mean anything to me, I did some more searching and found both terms discussed at . Although I still found the explanation there to be rather technical, hopefully it will make sense to at least some other people here.
- RadioActive
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Re: Celebrating The 100th Birthday Of The First Consumer Radio Ever Made
I always thought "The Tickler" should have been a Batman villain!
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Thread Starter- RadioActive
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Re: Celebrating The 100th Birthday Of The First Consumer Radio Ever Made
I know this is only of interest to a few here, but I learned something from part 2 of this series that I'd never heard before. Did you know that back in 1919, the American government was this close to putting the development of radio entirely in the hands of the U.S. Navy?
Imagine what that would have been like.
The playlists would have been extraordinary:
Anchors Aweigh - U.S. Marine Band
Navy Blue - Diane Renay
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey - Paul McCartney & Wings
Smoke On The Water - Deep Purple
Sloop John B - Beach Boys
Come Sail Away - Styx
And of course:
In The Navy - The Village People
Thank God that didn't happen!
The article also reveals how RCA was born because of fear over British Marconi taking over an industry that hadn't even started.
Technology at 100: How Radio Was Almost Given Over To The U.S. Navy
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