Color cover collection from Radio and TV News 1940s - 50s

slackercrurster · Nov 26, 2018

Interesting photos from early radio and TV era.

https://airwavesephemera.wordpress.com/2018/08/04/radio-television-news-cover-collection/

Who knew they had projection TV back then.

AgX · Nov 26, 2018

We did not even have real public TV at all in the 40s... But projection TV had been invented as early as 1939. In Switzerland.

ic-racer · Nov 26, 2018

I liked the one showing the current limiting incandescent lamps on the vacuum tube aging device, but where is the rest of the magazine?

Theo Sulphate · Nov 27, 2018

I want that bus! Those covers portray life and an era that I can only imagine - yet there's something fascinating about seeing devices which are at an infancy stage in their technological development.

Helios 1984 · Nov 27, 2018

Made in USA electronics.

slackercrurster · Nov 27, 2018

ic-racer said:
I liked the one showing the current limiting incandescent lamps on the vacuum tube aging device, but where is the rest of the magazine?

Sadly they were all water damaged and moldy. I cut off the covers and scanned them. After scanning I washed off my scanner.

I have a few of the mags left and will hopefully go through them to scan anything of interest and dispose of. Black mold to an archive is bad business. Although my archive is not some pristine, mold free archive anyway. If I find the article on the aging device I will scan it for you before trashing the mag.

slackercrurster · Nov 27, 2018

Helios 1984 said:
Made in USA electronics.

I found some sweat clothes from the early 80's in storage. They were made in the USA. I don't think we could do very well without China, et al. A guy at Walmart told me everything I had on from top to shoes was from China. And he was right.

Walmart had some frozen salmon. It said 'Harvested in the USA / Processed in China.' I guess it is cheaper to send salmon to China to be cleaned, frozen and shipped back than to do it in the US.

slackercrurster · Nov 27, 2018

Theo Sulphate said:
I want that bus! Those covers portray life and an era that I can only imagine - yet there's something fascinating about seeing devices which are at an infancy stage in their technological development.

Yes, amazing stuff.

slackercrurster · Nov 27, 2018

AgX said:
We did not even have real public TV at all in the 40s... But projection TV had been invented as early as 1939. In Switzerland.

I wonder what the picture looked like in the projection TV. I had never seen anything like that. All the old TV's I've seen are the round, small tube models.

ic-racer · Nov 27, 2018

slackercrurster said:
Sadly they were all water damaged and moldy. I cut off the covers and scanned them. After scanning I washed off my scanner.

I have a few of the mags left and will hopefully go through them to scan anything of interest and dispose of. Black mold to an archive is bad business. Although my archive is not some pristine, mold free archive anyway. If I find the article on the aging device I will scan it for you before trashing the mag.

You scanned them! Good work. Seems like most of the links to interesting items I see on this forum are never created by the original poster.

dmr · Nov 27, 2018

Wow! A stereo cart right in the middle of the kitchen floor! LOL!

slackercrurster · Nov 27, 2018

ic-racer said:
You scanned them! Good work. Seems like most of the links to interesting items I see on this forum are never created by the original poster.

Since March 2018 I have scanned 27,000+ images. I'm scanning a nice collection of color page proofs from 1960's Japan right now.

Scanners are going all the time, I have a number of them. The only thing I hate scanning is negs and chromes. They takes some time. I prefer bulk scanning. Sheet fed scanner can scan front and back in one pass. Can scan hundreds in a day. Only problem is sheet fed are lower IQ than flat bed and they need constant cleaning. And if you scan comic books or matte black ink, it transfers to and ruins the rollers. Then the rollers transfer the matte black into to other originals run though the scanner. I've had many heartaches with scanners.

Flat bed scanners are not an issue with dirt so much. A speck of dirt on a sheet fed scanner draws a white or black line down the entire image. A speck on a flat bed is a speck.

If any of you have some oversize items up to 11 x 17 I'd be glad to scan for free...up to 600dpi. Provided they are interesting to me and I will put in my Archive as well as on the Internet Archive. I'd like a 20 x 24 inch scanner, but can get by 95% of the time with the 11 x 17 inch. If I knew how to stitch it would not matter I guess. But halftones may not stitch perfect and get a moire pattern, don't know.

Here is a 24 inch sheet fed scanner, but poor reviews.

https://www.amazon.com/Colortrac-SmartLF-Scan-Format-Scanner/dp/B016P989OI#customerReviews

Here is another large format scanner. But the price is crazy and you have to buy $$ software.

https://www.scantastik.com/hardware/contex-scanners/large-format-scanner-IQ-FLEX.html

...well, if I hit the lotto I will try one.

slackercrurster · Nov 27, 2018

dmr said:
Wow! A stereo cart right in the middle of the kitchen floor! LOL!

Yes, and look how them gals dressed up to cook! I'm not much of a history buff for text. But when it comes to photos I'm crazy about history.

Helios 1984 · Nov 27, 2018

slackercrurster said:
I don't think we could do very well without China

I wonder about that. I'm sure there are things we could do here if some greedy industrials would accept to make less profit.

mike c · Nov 27, 2018

Steve McQueen in the movie" Sand Pebbles" , I think the story of the Pueblo Incident in China many years ago.

Helios 1984 · Nov 27, 2018

mike c said:
Steve McQueen in the movie" Sand Pebbles" , I think the story of the Pueblo Incident in China many years ago.

Occident has become one big San Pablo and can't manage without China...

AgX · Nov 27, 2018

slackercrurster said:
I wonder what the picture looked like in the projection TV. I had never seen anything like that. All the old TV's I've seen are the round, small tube models.

The image typically was peojected onto a large reflective screen. Basically one could project onto a small groundglass as backprection with the whole setup resembling a large tv set, but this likely was too much technical effort for a then rather small image. The system was called Eidophor.

Theo Sulphate · Nov 27, 2018

mike c said:
... I think the story of the Pueblo Incident in China many years ago.

North Korea. North Korea captured the Pueblo.

You young guys...

mike c · Nov 27, 2018

Theo Sulphate said:
North Korea. North Korea captured the Pueblo.

You young guys...

Ha,Ha, I guess pre Senor memory loss.

4season · Nov 27, 2018

That's a pretty stylish electronic parts store.

Part of me would get a kick out of buying brand-new Western Electric 300B vacuum tubes.

But in 1947, where would I have to go to find proper jazz records? Or something by Robert Johnson?

slackercrurster · Nov 28, 2018

4season said:
That's a pretty stylish electronic parts store.

Part of me would get a kick out of buying brand-new Western Electric 300B vacuum tubes.

But in 1947, where would I have to go to find proper jazz records? Or something by Robert Johnson?

Don't know about the jazz records, but they had em. Get some old copies of Downbeat. I have a bunch from the 40's that needs scanning, but don't know when I will get to em .

Here are some from the 1950's

https://jazzjointarchive.wordpress.com/

When I was a kid and we had TV trouble my mom would have me remove the tubes from the TV and she would drive me down to Thirfty's. They had a tube testing machine. You would stick the tube base into one of the dozens of sockets to test the tube. If you needed a tube you would pull one from the under the tester that had a door and storage for various tubes. For payment my mom would buy me an ice cream there. It was .05 cents a scoop / cylinder. (They had a cylinder type gun that would scoop out a cylinder of ice cream and push it out with the squeeze of the long trigger handle.) If the tubes didn't fix the TV, then we called the TV man. He had a big mirror in front of the TV that he would set up so he could look at the screen while fiddling with the TV. The TV's came in beautiful wood cabinets back then.

Over at the Audiokarma forums they have a thriving community in tube stereo. I wanted to get into tubes, but too $$ for me. All my $ for to photos.

AgX · Nov 28, 2018

slackercrurster said:
When I was a kid and we had TV trouble my mom would have me remove the tubes from the TV and she would drive me down to Thirfty's. They had a tube testing machine. You would stick the tube base into one of the dozens of sockets to test the tube. If you needed a tube you would pull one from the under the tester that had a door and storage for various tubes.

What a story, and what a service...
Over here we learned that it would be deadly to even undo the cover of a tv...
Which did not keep me as a boy from resoldering tube sockets that evolved broken solder contact to the printed board and later even to install additional IF-audio boards, with as only aid the original tv-circuit-layout. These were the days when a tv had a complete circuit layout stuck under its cover.

foc · Nov 28, 2018

My dad was a broadcast engineer with the Irish national tv station (RTE) and Ireland won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970 . So in 1971 the winner had to host the competition and this was RTE's first colour outside broadcast. One perk of his job was he got hold of a colour tv receiver and on the night of the Eurovision Song Contest from Dublin, we had the 19 inch colour screen sitting on the dining room table and my family and all our relations sat in the sitting room with the dividing double doors open 15 foot away. Remember none of us had ever seen colour television before. I can still remember the opening when (almost like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz) it changed from black and white to colour. It was just one of those moments.

As an aside, the BBC in the UK offered colour technical assistance but political powers that be would have none of it. They went for Bosh colour cameras from Germany and they also went with Agfa process 16mm developing for news (the BBC used Kodak Ektachrome) but had to add an Ektachrome line a few years later to speed up the news coverage of the troubles in Northern Ireland.

Color cover collection from Radio and TV News 1940s - 50s

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