The first transistor radio I can remember having was a really odd one shaped like a little rocket ship. It had a wire coming out of the top that ended in an alligator clip that you had to attach to something metal. The other end had a ring attached to a thin "pole" that you slid in and out of the radio to find stations. It didn't work very well. It would only work with an ear bud......no speaker. I cannot find a picture of one. I'd lie in bed at night listening to....gasp…..dat debbil music.
Until signals were protected by carrier waves those huge AM roller coasters picked up any traveller that chose to attach and detach, without your American megawatt transmitters we had a hissing bad time in Britain.
@Mary Robi That was a crystal set! I had one of those also and finally sold it to a collector about 10 years ago.
I had one of those little rocket radios, too. I think that they were very popular for a while, easy to carry around, and didn’t cost much. Our parents probably liked that we could only hear through the little earbud, so they didn’t have to listen like they did when we packed around a transistor portable radio. They truly didn’t have much reception, and I lived in a small town with one radio station, so that was all I could ever pick up with the little rocket. It seemed to work better at night, and I could listen to it in bed, as long as I had something to clip it onto so it would work. Our local radio station shut off each night at 10pm, so unless I was able to catch one of the larger stations from Spokane or even Calgary, I was out of luck for music after 10. The portable transistor radio that I had was a lot better for reception, and the handle that I used to carry it around was also the antenna, so I could sometimes pick up the Spokane stations, usually at night. When everything was right, sometimes I would get some huge station out of Chicago, late at night. How it reached all the way out to north Idaho is beyond me, unless it works kind of like “skip” on a CB or shortwave radio. My dad was a power lineman, and he had a 2-way radio in his line truck, so the REA power station could reach him when he was out somewhere on a trouble call, or he could call them if he needed something that he didn’t have on the truck. He said one day, he got a call asking him to go somewhere and do something, and he had no idea where they were trying to send him, so he asked for better directions. It turned out that he was picking up some power company back in Ohio (or someplace a long ways away), and he said they came in as clear as his regular radio channel came through, at least for a little while, while the skip was working. One of my most favorite movies is Frequency, and it is about a shortwave radio, but the skip is from a time warp and not a distance warp. As many times as I have watched that move, I still enjoy watching it.
One of the most exciting things I ever got was a transistor radio. I was pretty young so it would have been sometime in the mid to late 1950s. It was just a small transistor radio with a tuner dial and a volume dial on the side, and it came with a case and earplugs. It looked something like this, I think. I loved that radio. I didn't listen to it much during the day, after the first week or so, but I had it under the blankets with me every night after bedtime. It was easier than a book and a flashlight after lights-out. I didn't listen to music much, but they were still playing the serial radio shows and I'd listen to them back-to-back. I would often fall asleep with it on, and mom would turn it off and take the plugs out of my ears sometime later.
AM radio. As a kid I listened to Big John and Sparky on Saturday mornings. Evenings some days was The Shadow, Edgar Burgan and Charlie McCarthy and Jack Benny among others. As a teen we had the Mighty 590 popular music station of the '50s. I have been listening to '50s music on CD with my hi-fi and the fidelity is so good that it's hard to believe it's what I listened to back then.When FM came out I bought a FM converter to tune FM in and it put out an AM signal so the car radio could play it.
Here is my first portable transistor I got as a present about 1958. I was so excited because I could carry it around. My first radio was a Knight Kit one transistor with a crystal diode detector. It required an antenna like a crystal set and also a 1.5 volt battery to power the transistor that was an audio amplifier so I could get some real power to my magnetic headphones. My daddy guided me as I assembled and soldered it. I was 6 then and so proud of what I had built. The next year my dad gave me a box of new parts with a schematic and basic layout instructions and I built a two tube AM broadcast and shortwave receiver. It had feedback regeneration for listening to Morse code. It also required headphones, but was more selective with an RF stage and I could pickup signals worldwide. I was hooked on radio and later became a First Class Broadcast Engineer. As a young teen I had about 100 transistors I collected. Most given to me because they quit working. I learned to repair them and always had one in my purse. I still have the one in the photo I took this morning and it still works. It was made about 1956 I think and one of the earliest transistors and MADE IN THE USA. Japan got in on the craze and USA made transistors were history. I once had over a thousand radios all made before 1970. I sold them all off, including ones I designed and built. During my high school years I was called the Transistor Sister. I earned that name because I was caught with an earphone in my ear and a wire leading down to this very radio in the photo, hidden in my purse, during study hall. The kid behind me reached in my purse carefully and pulled the earphone plug from my transistor and the class and teacher heard Freddy Cannon singing Transistor Sister loud and clear. I didn't get in any trouble, but was asked not to do it again. The teacher was a Freddy Cannon fan and in her 20's and was also a history teacher and I suspect she thought of herself as Abigail Beecher.
(Read my post above first) The boys on the ranch nearest us were as close to brothers as I had since I was an only child. After being busted in the 9th grade for illegal listening during study hall and known as the "Transistor Sister," these neighbor boys would sing Transistor Sister every time they saw me. They were really good singers! They even did a skit for the yearly HS talent show 1965 singing Transistor Sister while I sashayed across the stage with my transistor. Let's hear a blast from the past. Freddie describes me perfectly in those days, well except for the part about being irresistable. ha ha!