ECKLEBURG
2004-07-14 - 6:10 p.m.
Eckleburg: Certified Radio-Trician!
So Grumblecake and I bought a super-awesome 1940 tri-band 8-tube Zenith model S-8-463 Console Radio. It is gigantic – Grumblecake could easily fit inside it -- and has absolutely no plastic parts anywhere – all wood, metal, and glass. It features authentic Art Deco styling, and you can not buy one at Wal-Mart or Target.
It also has all of its original insides, vacuum tubes, old cloth speaker, other parts I don’t know what they do. These parts only partially work. It will turn on, and make crackly noises, and the green “tuning eye” (which reminds me suspiciously of a green version of the eye of Sauron from Lord of the Rings) glows more and less as you spin the tuning knob. But no music ever comes out.
The previous owners, now deceased (we got it at an estate sale), put a modern radio in the back and wired it so that you can turn it on and off from the front, and so the sound comes out the old speaker. So we can listen to it, or at least the fake part of it.
My first impulse was to ignore the old guts and figure out some way to jam an MP3 player in it, or network into my home network to play my MP3s. But now I have become drawn in to the challenge of fixing the old radio. It just seems too awesome an opportunity to pass up, and will give me a good lesson in 1930’s technology and electricity in general.
Knowing virtually nothing about radios or vacuum tubes, I of course went online and found this super cool 1931 course on how to be a radio repair guy, aka a “Radio-Trician”
Not only is it educational, it is fascinating to glimpse the science of the time, and the antiquated cultural references from the 30’s. But more on that later, I must get back to my studies in Radio-Trician-ology!
