TRANSISTOR RADIOS 1950S PORTABLE
TRANSISTOR RADIOS 1950S SERIES

Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on the bus, and the nation gears up for Operation Alert-a drill where we pretend that sixty cities have been targeted for nuclear destruction. sends more than two-hundred-million dollars in aid to Vietnam. Maybelline is being untrue to Chuck Berry, and the Platters want Only You. But we still make our own transistor radios.īill Haley & the Comets are Rockin’ Around the Clock.

Illinois passes the first mandatory seatbelt law. Perhaps reacting to consumer magazine complaints that those new little transistor radios sound awful, and cost too much to run, manufactures begin to sell lunchbox-sized luggables with bigger speakers, bigger batteries, more transistors, and better reception. At age seven life is already getting interesting. One winter night, hidden under my bedcovers in Buffalo, I think I hear Chicago, hundreds of miles away on my Remco Crystal set. It’s on… Princess Summerfall Winterspring. Hey kids, what time is it? I have my first crush. Those of us who are lucky enough to have a television in the living room can watch Captain Kangaroo and Howdy Doody on Saturday mornings, but only if we clean our rooms first. One of their favorite colonies gets divided into North and South Vietnam. The French are having a little trouble in Southeast Asia. Nautilus, the world’s first nuclear submarine, is launched. Workers are said to have stood in front of active radar antennas, using the microwave energy to warm up their bodies, apparently unaware of the risks. NY Giants defeat Cleveland (4-0).Įlvis Presley records That’s Alright Mama, The Crew Cuts have a hit-“ Sh-Boom (Life Could Be a Dream),” Perry Como thinks Papa Loves Mombo, and disposable aluminum “TV dinner” packaging is invented.Īmerica and Canada begin work on the 3,000-mile long Distant Early Warning system, dubbed “the DEW” Line.

TRANSISTOR RADIOS 1950S SERIES

The World Series television broadcast is in color for the first time. The American Motors Company, (AMC) is founded.

Here’s a wonderful old Promo video from Regency: The average after-tax American household income is less than $1,700 per-year, $33.00 per-week. It’s the Regency TR-1 pocket radio, uses four transistors, and costs an astronomical $49.95, (that’s if dad can find one). The folks at Texas Instruments, with the help of Indianapolis, Indiana manufacturer I.D.E.A launch the world’s first commercial transistorized product in October 1954. It started him on a life of inventing many “firsts” over subsequent years. Learn more here at the DigiBarn Computer Museum. Chuck sold to his friends, family and paper-route customers and made enough money to convince him that electronics was his field of interest. Chuck was 12-years of age at the time, living in Torrance, California and he charged $ 12.99 for his two-transistor earphone radios. 1954Ĭhuck Colby claims he started producing the world’s first transistorized radios, the Colby TR-2 in early 1954. Learn more about the venerable CK-722 transistor at Jack Ward's wonderful CLASSIC GERMANIUM TRANSISTOR WEBSITE AND MUSEUM. There might be a hobby market, the firm reasons, so they scoop up the hearing aid rejects, encapsulate them in bigger outer shells, label them CK722 and pass some samples out to electronics magazine editors, engineers and experimenters. They are too noisy, or don’t amplify enough.

The vast majority of the transistors they manufacture work, but they are not good enough for hearing aids. Transistors have been used in hearing aids for a while now, and Raytheon, the principle maker of the little devices is having a devil of a time with quality control. Many of us are already building transistor radios in our basements or on kitchen tables by 1953.

TRANSISTOR RADIOS 1950S PORTABLE

In 1952 Western Electric engineers made a four-transistor wrist radio as a gift for Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould.Ī few more commercial portables surface in 1951, 1952 and 1953 but the real commercial evolution of portable sets won’t begin until 1954. Another in the kitchen, and the forth was the focal point of dad's workbench. Polarized plugs and wall outlets evolved to minimize this risk. If you plugged one of these in the wrong way and then touched its metal chassis and ground you became part of a potentially lethal circuit. A/C-powered five-tube superheterodyne radios were the most common household radios. Mostly mom and dad were buying plug-in clock radios and kitchen radios, and new cars with dashboard radios, all of them containing tubes. Most radios sold in 1950 were A/C powered tabletop sets, although there were exceptions like the lunchbox-size battery portables made by RCA, Emerson and others.

Transistor radios 1950s