AWA Museum Tour with Bruce Kelley and Chuck Bliley Bonus Reel

Well, you really found a very rare item. Really, it's not an original, of course, but this is what one could call the first receiver. Believe it or not, this is known as a Hertz resonator, and this actually dates back to 1888. Maybe it's a replica, of course. And the way Hertz determined the fact there were radio waves was the fact that little sparks would jump across between those two balls, see. And this loop beat a resonance to a nearby spark transmitter, and they pick up the RF for the radial power and jump across there and indicate there was radio power. What do you think of that?

Oh, I'm sure it couldn't go over 30 or 40 feet at the most, that's with tremendous power.

Oh, indeed. And oh, wait a minute, we've got something a little more practical. Let's put that over there. Chuck, let me show you the first receiver that was used really for communication. The resonator really wasn't used at all. This is a Marconi coherer receiver, stated about 1904, 1905. And it uses a coherer, and the coherer is this little glass tube with metal filings. When the radio signal came in, the filings would cohere, lower the resistance in the circuit, and it would trip a relay which would trip the sounder up here, see. And of course you read the Morse code. It's a very crude thing, but that's all they had in 1901. Well, I would say they used this up until about 1906, 1907. By that time they had developed a little better receiver. And this is the one simplest of them all. This is known as a crystal set. You've heard of a crystal set?

The crystal set had what was known as a cat whisker. Cat whisker is nothing but a little fine piece of wire, and that wire would rest on a crystal, a piece of galena, and when it found just the right spot, it would rectify. Really, a crystal set, the cat whisker you see here is nothing but a diode. You could replace it with a modern diode today. This was the receiver detector, and to determine the wavelength or your frequency, you merely slide these back and forth. That would change the inductance or the number of turns, and you bring it to resonance of the station you're receiving. It worked, and with crystal sets believe it or not of this type, you could get all 40, 50 miles sometimes.

It sure is. Well, we have here, I would say, the ultimate in a crystal set. This was hardly the type you had in the house, the home, but it was a commercial set made by the Wireless Specialty Apparatus and used on board ships and shore stations about 1912, 1914. It's a beautiful set. One has a choice of three crystal detectors, and the tuning is quite complex for a set of this period. Just look at this arrangement here. Wow, cut a mechanical movement. Oh yes, yeah, yeah. Beautiful cabinetry, isn't it? Excellent. Now, I mentioned the crystal set that was, you might say, the very first of the broadcast receivers, very simple, very easy to operate. But by 1922, 1923, the average person would have a tube receiver. This is a one-tube set. It's a Crosley, in fact it's known as the Crosley Pup. And surprisingly, a little set like that with only one tube, and of course you use earphones, one could receive, oh, on a good clear wintry night maybe a thousand, two thousand miles. As I say, you had to put earphones on, and what a thrill, what an experience it was to receive say California from someone back here in the East. The more affluent people would have a receiver possibly such as this Federal receiver made in Buffalo, and this set is about 1923, 1924. Not all the dials really, it wasn't necessary to adjust those dials to tune on the station. As a matter of fact, these two dials right here are the only ones that were really necessary. This was a very, very popular set, but for only those who had money. Now for a set of this type, you could divorce yourself from the earphones, the headset, and use the speakers we see over there, and then of course several people could sit around the living room and listen to the early programs.

Well, it certainly looks like a piece of battleship. As a matter of fact, it is. It came off a battleship of the mid-1920s. I believe the data on here somewhere is 1925. It's a receiver, and you know, you speak of modern module units so to speak. I had one of these. Loosen this, it still comes out. Here we are, see. Now you can see what one of these looks like inside. There are different sections. Say, a tube receiver. I believe there are three tubes in this set, believe it or not. You can appreciate modern solid-state circuitry when you see something like this. On subject of military, I brought this out. What we're looking at, Chuck, is a World War One spark transmitter, airplane transmitter, and believe me, this is basic, very crude, very simple. You have a spark coil, spark gap, and just one inductance here to determine the wavelength. It was used on an airplane, and it's dated 1918. I might add that the operator of this piece of equipment on board the plane did not receive anything. Why? They just couldn't hear over the noise of the plane, between the roar of the engine and the ignition noise. So all he did was to fly over the enemy's lines, make observations, and transmit back to ground. He never received anything at all. And sort of a neat little set, isn't it?