zotero/storage/SCRU5YBV/.zotero-ft-cache

The AWA Review
Volume 30 • 2017
Published by
THE ANTIQUE WIRELESS ASSOCIATION PO Box 421, Bloomfield, NY 14469-0421
http://www.antiquewireless.org


Devoted to research and documentation of the history of wireless communications.
THE ANTIQUE WIRELESS ASSOCIATION PO Box 421, Bloomfield, NY 14469-0421 http://www.antiquewireless.org
Founded 1952. Chartered as a non-profit corporation by the State of New York.
The AWA Review
EDITOR
Eric P. Wenaas, Ph.D.
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
William (Bill) V. Burns, B.Sc. Joe A. Knight
FORMER EDITORS
Robert M. Morris W2LV, (silent key) William B. Fizette, Ph.D., W2GDB Ludwell A. Sibley, KB2EVN Thomas B. Perera, Ph.D., W1TP
Brian C. Belanger, Ph.D. Robert P. Murray, Ph.D. Eric P. Wenaas, Ph.D. David P. Bart, BA, MBA, KB9YPD
OFFICERS OF THE ANTIQUE WIRELESS ASSOCIATION DIRECTOR: Tom Peterson, Jr. DEPUTY DIRECTOR: Robert Hobday, N2EVG SECRETARY: William Hopkins, Ph.D., AA2YV TREASURER: Stan Avery, WM3D AWA MUSEUM CURATOR: Bruce Roloson, W2BDR
©2017 by the Antique Wireless Association, ISBN 978-0-9890350-4-0
Cover Images: The cover page of Marconi’s Ocean Radio News distributed circa 1914 appears on the front cover of this issue (courtesy of Joe Knight), and the back page of an edition of the Wireless News distributed on the RMS Makura appears on the back cover of this issue. Both images are taken from “The Wireless News” by Bart Lee.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
Book design and layout by Fiona Raven, Vancouver, BC, Canada Printed in Canada by Friesens, Altona, MB


Contents
■ Volume 30, 2017
FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iv
PARADIGM LOST: NIKOLA TESLA’S TRUE WIRELESS
David Wunsch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
ZEH BOUCK, RADIO ADVENTURER PART 1: THE PILOT RADIO FLIGHT TO BERMUDA
Robert Rydzewski. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
A SOVIET ERA BROADCAST RECEIVER SYSTEM OF THE 1950s FOR REMOTE LOCATIONS
Robert Lozier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
WESTINGHOUSE RADIO AND TELEVISION PRODUCTION
Mike Molnar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
THE WIRELESS NEWS
Bart Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
HENRY K. HUPPERT AND HIS VACUUM TUBES
Eric Wenaas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
THE NAVAL RADIO SCHOOL AT HARVARD: A NEW ERA IN MILITARY TRAINING
David and Julia Bart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223
THE CRADLE OF COLLEGE RADIO: WJD AND THE PRESCIENT PROFESSORS
Mike Adams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295


iv The AWA Review
Foreword
This year we celebrate the 30th issue of the AWA Review marking thirty years of publishing the most respected journal chronicling the history of electronic communication with a focus on antique wireless. It should be noted that the thirty issues were not published in consecutive years because there were no issues published in the years 1994 and 1997. Robert M. Morris, W2LV, was the editor for the first issue published in 1986, and he was supported by managing editor William B. Fizette, K3ZJW. This issue contained eight articles in 123 pages, and the introductory article by Charles M. Brelsford, K2WW, covered the founding and development of the Antique Wireless Association and the development of the AWA Museum. This issue must have been very popular because it was reprinted in January 1991. From inception, there have been a total of eight editors and coeditors, all of whom are listed on the masthead of this issue. Robert Murray had the longest run as editor with ten issues (Vols. 19–28), while William Fizette was second with six issues as editor (Vols. 9–13) plus three issues as managing editor (Vols. 1–3). William Fizette’s most memorable issue is undoubtedly Vol. 12, published in 1999, with a single article entitled “The Atwater Kent Radios” written by Ralph O. Williams, NV3T. This issue is the only one that was devoted to a single feature article. The format of the AWA Review and the cover created for the first volume endured for the first sixteen issues. The first three issues had a photograph of antique wireless equipment on the front cover that had nothing do with the articles inside. When William Fizette became editor, he started the tradition of placing a photograph on the cover that was associated with one of the articles within. Brian Belanger gave the cover a new look when he became editor of Vol. 17 in 2004 by placing a table of contents on the cover, which was accompanied by a photograph from each of the five papers in the issue. He repeated this cover format on the 2005 issue. When Robert Murray became editor of Vol. 19 in 2006, he instituted many changes over his ten-year tenure that improved the articles and modernized the format. He is credited with expanding the range of content, requiring peer review of all articles, adding full color to selected papers and the cover, and engaging Fiona Raven Book Design to develop creative layouts and unique covers. Bob Murray’s wrap-around design on the cover of the 2012 issue depicting the Silent room of the Titanic on the front and the Marconi wireless room on the back will long be remembered. That issue, marking the centennial of the sinking of the Titanic, quickly sold out and was reprinted the next year. This year continues the traditions set by Bob Murray with eight high-quality, peer-reviewed articles and another creative cover layout using images appearing in Bart Lee’s article, “The Wireless News.” All but one of these articles were


Volume 30, 2017 v
written by returning authors that have published in the AWA Review before. We welcome our new author this year, and hope to have many more new authors in the future. A brief summary of each paper follows in the order they appear.
■ David Wunsch examines an article written by Nikola Tesla entitled “The True Wireless,” which appeared in the Electrical Experimenter magazine in May of 1919. He finds that Tesla was unable to assimilate a paradigm shift in the scientific discipline that explained the existence and generation of electromagnetic waves—the basis for wireless telegraphy and eventually radio. He quotes Tesla’s classic statement from the article: “The Hertz wave theory of wireless transmission may be kept up for a while, but I do not hesitate to say that in a short time it will be recognized as one of the most remarkable and inexplicable aberrations of the scientific mind which has ever been recorded in history.”
■ Robert Rydzewski writes about Zeh Bouck, born John W. Schmidt (1901–1946), who was an early radio pioneer, engineer, writer, and adventurer. He helped design the Pilot Super Wasp and flew it on the first ever flight to Bermuda, penned stories and radio plays, was an associate editor for Radio Broadcast and CQ, and was also an IRE Fellow and a member of the Radio Club of America. Despite an array of achievements worthy of a real-life Indiana Jones, today Zeh Bouck is an obscure footnote to radio history. Robert revives him and gives him new life with his article.
■ Robert Lozier continues his tradition of writing about interesting and unusual broadcast receivers manufactured outside the United States. Robert does not disappoint us this year with his description of a unique broadcasting system operated in the former USSR known variously as “radio-diffusion exchanges,” “cable radio,” or “wired radio.” They were centralized receivers with wire lines going to subscriber apartment buildings, factories, public halls, or schools and were operated much like telephone exchanges. Even more unusual were the thermoelectric generators that powered these radios, one of which is chronicled in the article.
■ Mike Molnar explores the history of consumer radio and television manufacturing at Westinghouse from the late 1910s to the end of the twentieth century. He raises many questions about Westinghouse sets and answers most of them. When was it made? Where was it made? Why are the ID tags on two radios so different? Surprisingly, the collector may have to ask, who really manufactured it? Read on and puzzle through some of these mysteries with the author.


vi The AWA Review
■ Bart Lee informs us that for well over a century, wireless radio provided ships at sea and their well-off passengers with current news of the world, market data, and sports. The wireless news has been indispensible to voyagers of many sorts, especially on transoceanic routes. We learn about the general content of wireless news publications, the companies who provided the wireless news, and how the news was received, printed and distributed to passengers on the ships. Bart also provides many examples of publications carrying wireless news—many in full color.
■ Eric Wenaas discovered the previously unknown papers of Henry K. Huppert, which he recently found in the possession of his granddaughter, Claudia M. Benish, who inherited them from her father, Ralph M. Huppert. These papers chronicled in his article contain technical notes, photographs, and other memorabilia of Henry Huppert, who designed the Solenoid tube, the Two-in-One tube, the Quadrotron tube, a unique thermionic X-ray tube with a control grid but with no trade name, and a diathermy machine with the trade name “American Radio-Thermy.”
■ David and Julia Bart tell us about the contributions of the U.S. Naval Radio School that was established at Harvard University in 1917 to train naval personnel to operate and repair radio equipment used in WWI. They explain how, in only eighteen months, the Navy came to train nine of every ten naval radio operators who served in the war. The article is filled with historic photographs taken at Harvard as well as photographs of associated memorabilia from the authors’ collection.
■ Mike Adams recently discovered the unchronicled story of early radio broadcasting at Denison University while researching at the Denison University Library. This library holds papers of Richard Howe, the prescient professor that instituted radio broadcasting at Denison in the early 1920s. The Denison story is so compelling because Howe kept detailed records and memorabilia of his radio broadcasting activities, which included correspondence with the Department of Commerce, early broadcast and experimental licenses, listener verification cards, photos of equipment, and much more.
We extend our sincere thanks to the authors for their excellent articles and to the reviewers for their able assistance in reviewing the articles and making suggestions that improved the manuscripts. I also thank the two associate editors, Bill Burns and Joe Knight, who assisted me this year. Their contributions were considerable. The AWA Review used the services of book designer Fiona Raven once again to prepare the AWA Review. Her help this year was invaluable,


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as it has been in the past. We thank Fiona again this year for her contributions and creative spirit. The word-searchable cumulative Table of Contents has been updated this year and is now current though Vol. 30. This index can be accessed on the AWA website at http://www.antiquewireless.org/awa-review.html. I have enjoyed serving as editor of the AWA Review this year and working closely with each and every author. I will continue to serve as editor of the AWA Review for at least one more year. I look forward to receiving manuscripts for your articles next year. Tips for authors who intend to submit articles follow.
Eric Wenaas, Ph.D. Editor San Diego, California
Tips for Authors
The AWA Review invites previously unpublished papers on electronic communication history and associated artifacts with a focus on antique wireless. Papers will be peer reviewed to verify factual content by reviewers whose identity will remain anonymous. This process gives the AWA Review credibility as a source of correct historical information. The papers will be edited to provide uniformity in style and layout among the articles. In general, shorter articles of six to eight pages (3,000 to 4,000 words) or less should be submitted to the AWA Journal, which is published quarterly. The AWA Review is intended for longer articles on the order of 6,000–8,000 words. Longer articles may be accepted with preapproval by the editor. The AWA Review will also publish Letters to the Editor as deemed appropriate. The letters should comment on articles published in the previous issue of the AWA Review or make brief comments on wireless history as it relates to one of the articles. Letters will not be peer reviewed, but they may be edited. Text is limited to 400 words and no more than 10 references. The editor reserves the right to publish responses to letters. It is strongly recommended that authors planning to prepare an article for the AWA Review send an abstract of approximately 200 words to the editor describing the subject and scope of the paper before writing the article, including an estimate of the number of words. It is never too early to submit an abstract. Space in the AWA Review is not unlimited, so it is important for both editors and authors alike to have an estimate of the expected number of articles and number of pages for each article as soon as possible. The deadline for submissions of manuscripts in 2018 is January 1. Papers will be accepted after January 1, but papers submitted


viii The AWA Review
and accepted for publication before January 1 will have priority in the event that there is not space for all papers submitted. Authors with an interesting story to tell should not be discouraged by a lack of writing experience or lack of knowledge about writing styles. The AWA Review will accept manuscripts in any clearly prepared writing style. Editors will help inexperienced authors with paper organization, writing style, reference citations and improving image quality. Edited manuscripts will be returned to the author along with comments from the editor and anonymous reviewers for the author’s review and comment. The manuscript will then be set in its final form and sent back for one final review by the author. Normally, only one review of the layout will be accommodated. To summarize, please submit completed manuscripts by January 1, 2018 (or earlier if possible) in three separate files:
1) A manuscript file without embedded figures or figure captions using Microsoft Word or other software that is compatible with Word. The manuscript should have a 200-word abstract, a main body with endnote citations and endnotes, acknowledgements, and several paragraphs summarizing the author’s background.
2) A figure file with numbered figures that match the figure call-outs that must appear in a sentence of the manuscript text.
3) A figure caption file with a short description of each figure and an attribution for each figure identifying its source.
You may use the articles in this issue as a template for the style and format of your paper. For more information, consult the AWA website at http://www .antiquewireless.org/awa-review-submissions.html. Please feel free to contact me for any questions:
Eric Wenaas, Ph.D. Editor eric@chezwenaas.com


Volume 30, 2017 1
Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
© 2017 A. David Wunsch
We examine an article written by Nikola Tesla entitled “The True Wireless,” which appeared in the Electrical Experimenter magazine in May of 1919. His essay is analyzed as an example of the inability of a scientist or inventor to assimilate a paradigm shift in his discipline, and we use the language and thought of Thomas Kuhn in this discussion. The paradigm shift in question was created by Maxwell and Hertz in the latter third of the 19th century, a shift that explained the existence and generation of electromagnetic waves—the basis for wireless telegraphy and eventually radio. We also focus on the magazine in which Tesla’s piece appeared and consider why the article might have been written and accepted for publication.
“The Hertz wave theory of wireless transmission may be kept up for a while, but I do not hesitate to say that in a short time it will be recognized as one of the most remarkable and inexplicable aberrations of the scientific mind which has ever been recorded in history.” —Nikola Tesla, “The True Wireless” 1919
“... the man who continues to resist after his whole profession has been converted has ipso facto ceased to be a scientist.” —Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 1962
The Paradigm
For historians of radio and the wireless telegraph, one of the strangest documents they are apt to encounter is an article entitled “The True Wireless” that was published in the May 1919 issue of the popular magazine, the Electrical Experimenter. The author was the renowned Serbian-born inventor, Nikola Tesla (1856–1943). Tesla spent most of his professional life in the United States, and by 1919 he was just past the peak of his fame—a man as nearly well known to the general public as Edison. He was a contributor to the
Sunday supplements of newspapers, where he described his latest proposed inventions such as a weapon that would make war obsolete by creating an enormous tidal wave.1 Although his reputation as an inventor may have faded, he persists today as a cult figure. A web search will lead to sites proclaiming that he invented radio, radar, x-rays, alternating current, the laser, the transistor, and limitless free energy. His name also endures as the brand of a pioneering high-priced electrical automobile.


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Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
There is some irony in this—the car is powered by batteries that supply direct current (DC), while Tesla’s great accomplishment resides in his contribution to the generation and distribution of polyphase alternating current (AC). He developed an ingenious device, the induction motor, that is ideally suited to polyphase AC because of the ease with which such current creates the rotating magnetic field required by many motors. Readers of this paper should have at their disposal a copy of “The True Wireless,” which can be found on the Internet.2 Note that the insert appearing in the article was written by the magazine’s editor, Hugo Gernsback, who asserted, “Dr. Tesla shows us that he is indeed the ‘Father of wireless.’” Tesla is referred to variously as an engineer, physicist, scientist, and inventor on many websites, including the Wikipedia, which contain his biography. Historically, this blurring of occupations has a distinguished lineage: Galileo, for example, invented telescopes and other instruments and was also an astronomer, and the transistor was invented by men trained as scientists, not engineers.
A Paradigm Missed
Had Tesla’s paper appeared fifteen years before—circa 1904—its content would be unremarkable. Coming as it does in 1919, just before the era of broadcast radio, it becomes useful as a notable example, in the field of science and technology, of an inventor’s failure to grasp what the distinguished historian
of science Thomas Kuhn has described as a “paradigm shift.” This term first appears in Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions published in 1962. The work is among the most cited scholarly books produced in the last half of the 20th century and has been in print in various editions for over 50 years. We refer here to the 3rd edition of 1996.3 The expression paradigm shift has entered everyday language, and its use has steadily increased since Kuhn coined the phrase. The concept will be employed here in the discussion of Tesla’s paper. What does Kuhn mean by this term? In the sciences, he asserts that a paradigm derives from “universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.” The word “model” is key here. The Greek-Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (100–170 AD) had a model of what we now call our solar system: his earth was at its center, and the sun revolved around the earth. The concept has a limited use—it does explain sunrise and sunset, but as mankind’s knowledge of the planets and stars increased, it became unworkable. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton killed the old model—their work, which began circa 1540 and occupied nearly two centuries, led to a classic paradigm shift. The shift describes the discarding of an old model whose use is unfruitful and untenable in favor of a new paradigm that more gracefully and convincingly describes recent experimental evidence.


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For our present discussion, the important paradigm shift began with the Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879). Consider what Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman said about Maxwell’s work of the period 1860–1873: “From a long view of the history of mankind—seen from, say, ten thousand years from now—there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics.”4 Maxwell produced a paradigm, or a model, for light: it was an electromagnetic wave having transverse electric and magnetic fields. The theory described a wave moving at the speed of light that could be generated by electrical means, and it did not specify a wavelength—it could be, for example, 700 nanometers (like visible light, whose wavelengths were known in Maxwell’s era), or around 300 meters (like broadcast AM radio of our time). In the late 17th century, Newton had maintained that light consisted of streams of particles, which he named corpuscles; his prestige was such that his model still had some adherents as late as Maxwell’s era, although there was much evidence favoring a wave theory. To further complicate matters, others analyzed light as a ray that describes the path of the light energy.5 We now come to a narrative familiar to many readers. In the period 1886–1889, the German physicist Heinrich Hertz carried out a series of experiments in which he generated a wave that exhibited wavelengths on the
order of meters, possessed a measurable electromagnetic field, and to a fair approximation moved at the known speed of light.6 These waves could be reflected, polarized, and diffractedjust as visible light, whose properties had been studied for several centuries. Had the Nobel Prize been awarded in the lifetimes of Maxwell and Hertz, they would surely have been winners. Hertz’s work was published in the period 1887–1891 and served as a stimulus to such people as Guglielmo Marconi, Oliver Lodge, and Karl F. Braun, who sought to employ Hertz’s discovery in the field of wireless telegraphy. The story is well told in the book by Aitken.7 Tesla recounts a meeting with Hertz in the document we are studying: he traveled to Hertz’s laboratory in Bonn, Germany, in 1892 and describes in “The True Wireless” an unfruitful encounter where he informs Hertz that he had been unable to reproduce his results. If we believe Tesla, the two parted “sorrowfully” with our narrator subsequently regretting his trip.8 He also informs us that later, even having developed a “wireless transmitter which enabled me to obtain electromagnetic activities of many millions [sic] of horse-power,” he was unable to “prove that the disturbances emanating from the oscillator were ether vibrations akin to those of light...” Unable to generate what soon became known as Hertzian waves, and having read articles describing such waves over the eighteen-year period preceding this article, he remarks, “The Hertz-wave


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Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
theory, by its fascinating hold on the imagination, has stifled creative effort in the wireless art and retarded it for twenty-five years.” By the time Tesla wrote his article, wireless telegraphy had been a business for nearly 20 years—and had grown into a very big one at that. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the Marconi Wireless Telegraphy Company of America (American Marconi) had outfitted 582 wireless stations on ships and possessed 45 coastal stations for ship-to-shore and international communication.9 The Navy took these over at the beginning of the war. At the cessation of the war, British Marconi was eager to buy exclusive rights to the Alexanderson alternators from General Electric; these were powerful and efficient successors to the spark gap and arc transmitters used earlier in wireless telegraphy. Initially, they planned to spend over $3M on 24 alternators and employ them both in their own corporation and in American Marconi.10 If, as Tesla alleges, the big business of wireless telegraphy did not employ Hertzian waves, how did it operate? He specifically denies that the “disturbances” (a name he uses in lieu of Hertz’s waves) emanating from an oscillator “were ether vibrations akin to that of light.” It is interesting to examine the language of his paper. He speaks of “some kind of space waves” and “transversal vibrations in the ether,” and except to disparage them, he does not refer to Hertz’s (or Hertzian) waves. By 1919, his words and thinking were archaic.
The terminology in the discourse of radio and wireless telegraphy engineering had evolved since Hertz’s work and the growth of international wireless telegraphy. We now employ the Google Book’s Ngram Viewer, a piece of free Internet software that quantifies how frequently a word turns up in a large number of books during a specified time period. The output of this software is a graph showing the number of mentions in books versus time (in years) for a word or phrase supplied. The frequency of use of the term Hertzian waves over more than a century is shown in Fig. 1. We see the term gaining currency beginning with Hertz’s famous experiments and reaching a peak at about the time of Tesla’s paper. It is not hard to understand that it subsequently lost popularity. A search of the term electromagnetic waves, which ultimately replaced Hertzian waves, is shown in Fig. 2. As it became clear to the engineering community that the waves generated by Hertz were merely a part of the electromagnetic spectrum—one which was to become increasingly exploited by broadcast AM radio, television, and FM broadcasting—the locution Hertzian waves would have seemed anachronistic. It is evident that at the time of Tesla’s writing, the term “Hertzian waves” had already been eclipsed by “electromagnetic waves.” Incidentally, an Ngram of the term “radio waves” displays a curve much like that for electromagnetic waves. Both gained favor at the same time.


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Tesla “Disproves” Hertzian Theory
Electricity and Hydraulic Analogies
How did Tesla explain wireless communication without Hertzian waves or its synonyms? The answer is fascinating. He used a fishy version of alternating circuit theory. A close reading of “The True Wireless” reveals that he promoted a form of circuit theory employing but a single wire—in other words, there is no real circuit such as those who understood the subject are accustomed to. He also maintains that the earth itself can
function—must function—as this lone wire. He seeks to explain this with a labored hydraulic (fluid) analogy that is illustrated in Fig. 4 of his paper, which is reproduced here as Fig. 3. Of course, you can send a disturbance down a water filled pipe without employing a return circuit—just strike one end with a hammer. His analogy proves nothing, but its use is understandable. When Tesla was in college in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s, alternating current theory was a new and difficult subject.11 If he learned
Fig. 1. Frequency of use of the term “Hertzian waves.” (Google Ngram)
Fig. 2. Frequency of use of the term “electromagnetic waves.” (Google Ngram)


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Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
it there, or, as seems likely, on his own after college, he would have encountered textbooks that sought to treat this discipline using analogies drawn from hydraulics—a much older and better-understood subject.12 It was not uncommon then to use the word “pressure,” taken from fluid mechanics, where we now use “voltage” or “electrical potential.” Such analogies, which might employ water wheels to represent inductors and elastic diaphragms as proxies for capacitors, convey only an intuitive feeling for AC circuits and are of no use for communication systems employing electromagnetic waves.13 Thus, Tesla attempted to apply a dubious electric circuit approach where
it had no validity. In fact, one wonders why no one asked him if the return wire in the circuit could be eliminated, then why not also the wire that carries the current that is outgoing from the generator. Had he taken that radical step, he might have been on his way to understanding communication between two antennas in the absence of any earth.14 In criticizing Tesla for his wrongheaded model, are we in fact guilty of what has become known as Whig history? The term Whig history was introduced by the distinguished English historian Sir Herbert Butterfield in 1931. It can refer to an unfair judgment of historical figures and their actions that are based on our present
Fig. 3. Tesla’s fluid “circuit.” (True Wireless, Fig. 4)


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knowledge of what is humane and progressive and acceptable. For example, to condemn Thomas Jefferson for writing in the Declaration of Independence “All men are created equal” (where are the women?) would be to engage in Whig history. In the sciences, Whig history has a similar meaning: it would be to criticize a scientist or inventor of the past for failing to use concepts that we now take for granted.15 From our present perspective, Tesla’s not using a wave model to explain radio seems bizarre, but given what was known in 1919, are we being unfair and leaving ourselves open to the accusation of Whiggishness? An example of Whig history of science would be to condemn Ptolemy for his earth centered view of astronomy. Given the tools at his disposal, his mistake is understandable.
And to disparage Maxwell for his frequent use of the term ether—when we know that the concept is not validwould be Whig history. I will seek to explain in what follows that I have not fallen into the trap of Whig history in discussing Tesla.
Influence of Mountains or Obstacles
Tesla seeks to disprove Hertzian wave theory as a means of communication with several examples. Consider his Fig. 17, reproduced here as Fig. 4. Tesla claims that “unless the receiver is within the electrostatic influence of the mountain range”—in what we would now call “the near field of the antenna”—the signals at the receiver “are not appreciably weakened by the presence of the latter because the signal passes under it [italics added]
Fig. 4. Tesla analyzes the effect of an obstacle. (True Wireless, Fig. 17)


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Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
and excites the [receiving] circuit in the same way as if it is attached to an energized wire.” No radio propagation engineer would have accepted such an argument in 1919. Indeed, the receiver might well detect the transmitted signal, but not for the reasons stated by Tesla. No model of wave propagation asserts that the signal goes under the mountain.16 Following the work of Hertz, it was apparent that laws of optics could be applied to electrically generated waves. There would have been no problem in explaining the reception of waves by a detector lying on the shaded side of the mountain—it would be described as Fresnel diffraction, a theory put forth by the eponymous French physicist in the period 1815–1818.17 The theory asserts, in part, that the greater the wavelength used, the stronger the signal that makes its way into the optical “dark side,” provided the distance from the diffracting edge (here, the mountain top) is small measured in wavelengths.18 Given the long wavelengths employed by Tesla (10 kHz => 30 km. => 18 miles), a number taken from Fig. 1 in his article, there is no trouble in explaining wireless reception on the far side of the mountain. By the time Tesla published this piece, the subject of diffraction of electromagnetic waves had become sophisticated and had engaged the attention of a number of distinguished mathematicians. If the mountain is modeled as a hemispherical impediment to the wave, and if the earth is a good conductor, then the problem of scattering
by the mountain can be attacked using the method of images. The problem becomes that of a plane wave incident upon a sphere. This problem had been solved in the period 1908–9 by Debye and Mie and would also show a signal in the optical shadow cast by the hemispherical mountain.19 In the period beginning in 1889 and ending in the era of Tesla’s writing, the Scottish mathematician H. M. Macdonald had treated waves from a Hertzian dipole diffracted from the earth, which he modeled as a perfectly conducting sphere.20 His work was improved by the great French scientist and philosopher, Henri Poincaré, who in the period 1909–1912 converted Macdonald’s series of Bessel functions into a definite integral that could be better evaluated. The German mathematical physicist Arnold Sommerfeld, unlike his predecessors, treated the earth as an imperfectly conducting surface, although he simplified matters by making the earth flat. He placed a vertical, electrically short dipole above the earth and derived an expression for the resulting electric and magnetic fields. His results of 1909 were expressed in terms of an integral that he evaluated asymptotically for an observer far from the antenna. He found that a surface wave had been generated, and his theory nicely supported that of another German, Jonathan Zenneck, whose less rigorous work had led to what became known as the Zenneck wave, which existed on the ground at some distance from the antenna. The latter turned out to be the asymptotic solution


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of Sommerfeld’s theory. In 1919, the German mathematician Herman Weyl solved Sommerfeld’s configuration and ended up with a different approach that did not contain Zenneck’s wave. This result caused Sommerfeld to rework his solution, and his new findings did not agree with Zenneck. In short, the first two decades of the 20th century was a lively and sometimes contentious period in the theory of radio wave propagation, but there is no hint of this in Tesla’s paper. Nor is there any indication in anything he wrote that he had the sophisticated mathematical skills to comprehend what was being written by the people cited above. There were, of course, great inventors with minimal knowledge of higher mathematics (think of Edison, Morse, Bell) but these largely belonged to the 19th century, and one does see Tesla as part of that tradition. His clinging to a sketchy circuit theory explanation seems pathetic. Incidentally, as early as 1904, a textbook of Henri Poincaré had addressed the primacy given to currents flowing through the earth in Tesla’s model of wireless telegraphy. He points out that if a coherer is placed in a hole in the ground “it will operate [as a detector of wireless telegraphy] when uncovered; if the hole be filled with earth, the oscillations produce no effect. We must look for something more than earth currents to explain the phenomena.”21 Recall that the most common detector in use at that time was the Branly coherer. Putting aside theoretical considerations, Tesla’s paper is notable for the
omission of major empirical findings contained in the famous and practical Austin-Cohen formula, a concise expression that describes the strength of the electric field experienced by a receiving antenna when both receiver and transmitter are over the ocean. Louis Winslow Austin and Louis Cohen had worked for the U.S. Navy in the early 1910’s, making shipboard electrical measurements of the field radiated from various transmitters manufactured by Reginald Fessenden’s company, the National Electric Signaling Company, or NESCO. By 1911, the two men had devised a successful empirical formula that gives the received field.22
Ir = 4.25 Ish1h2 e-ad/√λ.
dλ
Here Ir is the current received by an antenna driving an impedance of 25 ohms, Is is the transmitting antenna’s current, h1 and h2 are the lengths of the two vertical antennas, l is the wavelength, d is the distance separating the antennas, and a = .0015. Lengths are in kilometers and currents in amperes. The formula was effective only during the day and was so useful that it became the basis for testing new theoretical predictions of received fields. The presence of the square root of the wavelength in the exponent was later derived theoretically by the English mathematician G. N. Watson and published in 1919, only a few months after Tesla’s paper.23 Interestingly, Tesla, speaking of the formula, states unequivocally “... the actions at a distance cannot be proportionate to the


10 The AWA Review
Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
height [length] of the antenna and the current in the same,” which is in direct contradiction to what the much-used equation asserts. Tesla’s statement “the current in the same” is especially puzzling, not only because it had been established experimentally but also because he has essentially been using alternating circuit theory, in a strange form, and the device he is employingan antenna, and a conducting earthare mathematically linear and should, according to linear circuit analysis, create a response in linear proportion to the current exciting the antenna. Strange to say, Tesla then uses Austin-Cohen to reject Hertzian waves, saying that, “...I cannot agree with him [Austin] on this subject. I do not think that if his receiver was affected by Hertz waves he could ever establish such relations as he has found.” So, on
the one hand, he rejects the famous formula but then embraces it as a means to argue against Hertzian wave theory. Let us now study Fig. 18, in Tesla’s paper, reproduced here in Fig. 5. He has now introduced a second mountain that is further from the transmitter than the one in the previous figure. He argues that if Hertzian wave theory were true, then the second mountain “could only strengthen the Hertz wave [at the receiver] by reflection, but as a matter of fact it detracts greatly from the received impulses because the electrical niveau between the mountains is raised...” [niveau is a French word for level surface]. What Tesla fails to understand here is that without knowing the wavelength of the radiation, the separation of the two mountains, and the position of the antenna between them, we can make
Fig. 5. Tesla considers the effect of two hills. (True Wireless, Fig. 18)


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no statement about the enhancement or reduction of the signal at the receiver caused by the presence of the second mountain. In fact, using elementary wave theory or a transmission line analog, we can argue that if the two mountains are separated by half a wavelength and if the receiver is midway between them, and if the soil is of reasonably high conductivity, then we have what is called a standing wave between the mountains. In this case, the effect of the more distant mountain is to enhance the signal at the receiver. There are waves moving from right to left and vice-versa between the mountains. Such an arrangement, when set up in a room, as Hertz did in his famous experiment published in 1888, is known as an interferometer.24
Kuhn tells us that if we want to see what constitutes “normal science” and the paradigms it embraces, we should look at the textbooks of that era.25 By 1904, we can say confidently that the paradigm shift created by Maxwell and Hertz had taken hold and was part of normal science. This was the date of publication of Poincaré’s book, whose chapters 7, 8 and 9 are devoted to the propagation of waves along wires, dielectrics, and air. It seems evident that Tesla was not reading the textbooks of his epoch.
Tesla and Antenna Theory
Another puzzling segment of Tesla’s anti-Hertz diatribe is his Fig. 16, shown below as Fig. 6. Tesla would have us believe that the antenna on the right
Fig. 6. Tesla considers a straight and bent antenna. (True Wireless, Fig. 16)


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Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
(which nowadays is called “an inverted L”) is just as effective as a receiver or transmitter as the straight antenna on the left. He claims that he has performed an experiment that supports this conclusion. He also asserts that the experiment proves that “currents propagated through the ground, and not ... space waves” is the reason for true wireless telegraphy. In 1919, an understanding of the theory of receiving antennas was still fairly primitive.26 And it was only in 1924, with the work on reciprocity of John R. Carson at Bell Labs, that the tools that had been developed to analyze transmitting antennas could be brought to bear on receiving antennas.27 So, we must not be harsh in condemning Tesla for his wrongful assertion. However, it was known as early as 1898 that if antennas are placed above a flat highly conducting earth, one can invoke the method of images for analyzing them.28 It was well known before 1919 that if the earth is a good conductor, the electric field of a propagating radio wave would be primarily perpendicular to the earth, and the field strength would be proportional to an integral of the current along the vertical portion of the antenna. It should have been apparent to Tesla that if a transmitting vertical wire antenna is small, measured in wavelengths, and has the shape of the antenna on the left of Fig. 6, and if it is now bent into the shape shown on the right, then the electric field normal to a flat highly conducting earth is reduced.29 However, the situation here
is potentially quite complicated. The difficulty occurs with an imperfectly conducting earth. Marconi, in 1906, described to the Royal Society an array he built consisting of inverted L antennas and observed that the array broadcasts most effectively in the direction of the arrow shown below, i.e., away from the horizontal element.30 Fig. 7 is taken from Principles of Wireless Telegraphy by G. W. Pierce, published in 1910.31 Jonathan Zenneck, in the same era as Pierce, describes the work of H. von Hoerschelmann, a student of Arnold Sommerfeld, who apparently was the first to explain the directive properties of Marconi’s antenna. His earth is assumed to be imperfectly conducting. He includes the vertical portions of the current induced in the earth directly under the horizontal wires of the array.32 The upshot is that whether one assumes a highly conducting earth or one of imperfect conductivity (as is required for Marconi’s antenna), Tesla’s assertion “that the antennas can be put out of parallelism without noticeable change in action on the receiver” is utterly wrong. Marconi’s inverted L was constructed in the year 1905, and the explanation by Hoerschelmann was
Fig. 7. Marconi’s directional inverted L antenna. (G. W. Pierce, Principles of Wireless Telegraphy, 1910, p. 298)


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published in Zenneck’s book, which came out in German in 1912, both well before Tesla’s paper.33
Skin Effect
Tesla repeatedly speaks of his system of wireless telegraphy implemented by sending messages through the earth. Here he displays his ignorance of what is now referred to as “skin effect”: that alternating currents have a marked tendency to cling to the outside (skin) of conductors. Knowledge of this goes back to the work of the Englishman, Sir Horace Lamb, in 1883 and was advanced further by his countryman, Oliver Heaviside, in 1885.34 The results showed that the higher the frequency in use, the greater the tendency for the current to adhere to the outside of the conductor. It is especially puzzling that Tesla does not mention this phenomenon as he took advantage of it in arranging for photographs of himself enveloped by sparks.35 The frequency of the generator he was using was such that the energy would not penetrate deeply into his body, which meant that although he might have been burnt, he would not have been electrocuted. In an 1893 lecture before the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, he sought to explain his not being shocked with a confused discussion.36 By 1919, skin effect and the concept of skin depth (the depth of penetration of the current) would have been in the better electrical engineering textbooks.37 We can calculate how far a wave might penetrate into a mountain
in the United States where typical soil conductivity, s = .005 mhos/meter and the relative permittivity, er = 10.38 We will assume a frequency f = 100 kHz. Using the standard formula for skin depth that applies when conduction current greatly exceeds displacement current,39 we have
δ=√ 1
π f μσ
Here d is the skin depth and m is the permeability of the soil, assumed here to be nonmagnetic. The skin depth for the numbers chosen here is about 22 meters. It is virtually impossible for the signal that Tesla imagines to penetrate a mountain having these typical parameters.
Dismissal of Gliding Waves
Let us now focus on Tesla’s Fig. 13 (shown here as Fig. 8) and his accompanying discussion. At the very top of his figure Tesla has the caption, “Hertz’s waves passing off into space through the earth’s atmosphere.” To someone acquainted with even elementary antenna theory, the picture is a puzzle. It depicts what appears to be a vertical antenna fed by a generator connected between the base of the antenna and the earth. In 1919, such an antenna would likely be of small height when measured in the wavelengths in use. Using the method of images and antenna analysis dating from the turn of that century, it should have been apparent that no radiation propagates along the axis of the antenna; instead, the radiation


14 The AWA Review
Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
tends to be focused along the ground. In fact, if the current in amperes along the antenna is I0, then elementary antenna theory establishes that the strength of the electric field is at a distance r from the antenna, above the earth, is given by
Eθ = I0120πh sinθ for 0 ≤ θ ≤ π / 2 ,
λr
where h is the length of the antenna, l is the wavelength in use and r is the distance of the observer from the antenna.40 All the distances are in meters. The meanings θ and Eθ should be evident from Fig. 9. Observe that directly above the antenna corresponds to q =0, so that sinq = 0, which indicates there is no radiation normal to the earth, while along the earth q = 90 degrees, and the radiation is maximum, which might
suggest a wave gliding along the surface of the earth, provided we are close enough to the antenna to neglect the earth’s curvature. This result would have certainly been known well before 1919. The book Robison’s Manual of Radio Telegraphy and Telephony for
Fig. 8. Tesla condemns the “Gliding Wave.” (True Wireless, Fig. 13)
Fig. 9. Electric field and spherical coordinates.


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the use of Naval Electricians, published in 1918, contains the following diagram showing the direction of electric lines (see Fig. 10).41 It illustrates that a monopole antenna radiating above a flat perfectly conducting ground tends to radiate in a direction parallel to the ground and not in a direction along the axis of the antenna. This is not a polar plot of the field strength vs. angle but a picture showing the direction of the electric field at various locations. Incidentally, one can argue that there is no radiation along the axis of the antenna even if the ground has imperfect conductivity.42 Tesla specifically condemns any theory that claims “[space waves] pass along the earth’s surface and thus affect the receivers. I can’t think of anything more improbable than this ‘gliding wave’ theory which... [is] contrary to all laws of action and reaction.” Of course, this gliding wave concept that we would now call a “surface wave” did describe daytime radio propagation and was central to the work of such theorists as Sommerfeld, Zenneck, and Watson.43
Tesla Debunks the Ionosphere
Warming to the task of diminishing other theorists, Tesla then damns what was then only a conjecture: the belief in what was then known as the KennellyHeaviside layer. We now call this the ionosphere—a set of layers of three or more ionized gases in the earth’s upper atmosphere. It was first postulated, as a single layer, in 1902 by Arthur Kennelly and Oliver Heaviside, working independently, as a way of explaining how radio waves propagate beyond the horizon.44 Although its existence and height were not verified experimentally until 1924 by the Englishman Edward Appleton, for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize, its presence was generally accepted in 1919, especially as a means to explain the long distances that radio waves would propagate at night.45 Tesla tells us, “I have noted conclusively that there is no Heaviside layer, or if it exists it is of no effect.” One wonders if he recanted this statement after Appleton’s experiment.
Communication with Airplanes
Among the more perplexing aspects of Tesla’s article is his discussion tied to his Fig. 15. He is showing here in Fig. 11 a “Hertz oscillator” suspended in the air, and uses this arrangement to explicate something that became well known during World War I: an airplane could communicate with a wireless receiver on the ground. Also known, but not discussed by Tesla, was that two airplanes in the air might experience radio contact with each other.
Fig. 10. Electric field lines of a short monopole antenna. (Manual for U.S. Navy Electricians, 1918)


16 The AWA Review
Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
What Tesla must explain is how his transmitter in the air might communicate with the receiver on the ground in spite of its not having a direct connection to the earth that would be capable of effectively launching his crucial earth currents. His explanation is that “we are merely working through a condenser.” Stating incorrectly there is a capacity that “is a function of a logarithmic ratio between the length of the conductor and the distance from the ground,” he says the receiver is affected in the same manner as with an ordinary transmitter. Evidently, we are to believe that the capacitance between earth and ground makes possible the earth currents crucial to his argument. The formula for the capacity of a wire that he is most likely referring to would have been well known by the 1910s when it already had appeared in textbooks and handbooks:46
C = 1.111 L picofarads.
2h
2 ln ( r )
This expression is the capacity of a wire of length L above, and parallel to, the earth’s surface, which is assumed to be highly conducting. An airplane in flight dragging a wire antenna behind itself would create this situation. The wire is at height h above the earth, and its radius is r. All dimensions are in centimeters, and the logarithm is base e. Note that the capacity is proportional to the wire length L, not to the logarithm of L as Tesla asserted.47 Using the well-known formula for capacitive reactance X = 1/(2p f C), where f is the operating frequency, we could in principle obtain the impedance between the wire and earth. Dividing the voltage of the antenna, with respect to the earth,
Fig. 11. Tesla denies there is “Space Wave” transmission in wireless telegraphy. (True Wireless, Fig. 15)


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by this impedance, we might think we have obtained the current on the earth. But what voltage are we to use? Because the antenna illuminates the earth with an electromagnetic wave, the concept of voltage difference or potential difference cannot be applied. It was known in the late 19th century that electric potential difference between two points is calculated by the line integral of the electric field along a path between those points. When there is a time varying electromagnetic field between these points the result will depend on the path taken and so the concept of voltage difference ceases to be of use.48 Note that Tesla skirts entirely the phenomenon of airplane-to-airplane wireless communication, which had been observed during the war.49 Such communication could not possibly involve earth currents if the transmission took place over a desert or dry sandy soil.
The Hertzian Wave Discourse
The publication of Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873, which described his work of the previous decade, together with Hertz’s experiments of 1886–9, created the paradigm shift which Tesla was unable to accept. We might be a little indulgent here—the new paradigm was slow to be accepted—consider Marconi for example. By the late 19th century Marconi was being lionized in the British press because of his demonstrations of wireless telegraphy, but an interview in McClure’s magazine from 1899 has him
declining to say what sort of waves he was using: “What kind of waves they were Marconi did not pretend to say; it was enough for him that they did their business well.”50 When asked about the difference between his waves and those used by Hertz he replied “I don’t know. I am not a scientist, but I doubt if any scientist can tell you...”51 What seemed to impede the connection of Marconi’s waves to those of Hertz’s was that it was known by 1897 that the former’s radiation could pass through the walls of a building while Hertz’s, which was based on a model of radiation as visible light, would apparently not perform such a feat.52 Marconi’s first British patent, number 12039, which was filed in 1896, speaks of an arrangement that he calls “a Hertz radiator” producing effects “which propagate through space [as] Hertzian rays.” But he also talks of electrical actions or manifestations “...transmitted through the air, earth, or water by means of electrical oscillations of high frequency.” For a while, Marconi’s manifestations in the ether were known in some circles as Marconi waves, but the term soon died. Some further indication of the confusion, circa 1900, is a question raised by the historian of early wireless, J. J. Fahie, in his publication of 1901, “... is the Marconi effect under all circumstances truly Hertzian...?”53 After 1899, we find that Marconi began to refer more frequently in his work to “Hertzian waves.” In a speech given before the Institution of Electrical Engineers (now the IET) in


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Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
England on March 2, 1899, he says, “I think it desirable to bring before you some observations and results I have obtained with a system of Hertzian wave telegraphy, which was the first with which I worked....”54 His U.S. patent 676,332 of 1901 refers to “a transmitter producing Hertz oscillations.” And, following Kuhn, we can say that Hertzian waves entered the discourse of “normal science” because we find extensive references to them in a textbook, e.g., Poincaré, cited above. In fact, studying the index of Poincaré, we find that he uses Hertzian waves and electromagnetic waves as synonyms. John Ambrose Fleming, who was the first Professor of Electrical Engineering at University College, London, and who did major work for Marconi beginning in 1899, published a textbook titled Hertzian Wave Wireless Telegraphy in 1903, in which there is not the slightest doubt that wireless telegraphy relies on the waves of the title. Interestingly, Tesla, in certain of his turn-of-the-century U.S. wireless patents, refers to Hertzian waves, or “radiations,” being “brought into prominence” by Heinrich Hertz.55 In all of these instances, such waves are disparaged as being of an outmoded or less desirable way of transmitting signals, or energy, which should be discarded in favor of one that either uses extremely strong electric fields and high antennas to ionize a layer of the earth’s atmosphere which is to then act as a conductor of a transmission system (which includes the earth’s crust)—or of another that uses
wavelengths so long as to make the earth into a conducting sphere that has been brought to a resonant condition. In the later case, he recommends using frequencies lower than 20,000 cycles per second (cps) and asserts one might go as low as 6 cps (patent 787,412, lines 260–270).
Maxwell and Einstein: Difficulties for Tesla
When Tesla wrote his True Wireless paper he was not a young man—he was 63. Male life expectancy in the United States was then 54. His formal education in science and engineering had taken place many years before. He had studied for somewhat less than three years at the Austrian Polytech in Graz Austria in the late 1870’s. In 1880 he audited courses at Charles Ferdinand University in Prague but was not enrolled. His course work should have given him a solid grounding in electric circuit theory, and it was in school that he developed a great interest in alternating currents, especially for motors.56 It is highly unlikely that Tesla would have studied Maxwell’s theory while at school. As first presented in 1873, it was so difficult that few could understand it; nowhere will you find in Maxwell’s treatise the four succinct equations studied today by all electrical engineering and physics students. His analysis is based entirely on potentials, not the electric and magnetic fields used now. He used 20 equations and 20 variables, and it was only through the efforts of such people as Hertz, Heaviside, and Willard Gibbs


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in the late nineteenth century that the equations were to assume the form we find them in today.57 Even with their simplifications, we know that Maxwell’s theory was not systematically taught at Cambridge University until after around 1900.58 Because Hertz’s famous experiment was inspired by Maxwell’s work, which Tesla most likely did not understand, it seems plausible that Tesla might cling to an electric circuit theory paradigm in explaining what was called wireless communication. Note however, this was not canonical circuit theory—Tesla had added some bizarre features of his own to force it to explain wireless telegraphy. Maxwell’s theory and its experimental verification by Hertz is not the only paradigm shift in Tesla’s era that he was unwilling to accept and understand. Throughout his life, he spoke often of particles that moved faster than light—a direct contradiction of Einstein’s theory of relativity.59 In an interview with Time magazine on the occasion of his 75th birthday in 1931, he claimed to have “split atoms” with no release of energy—again a contradiction of relativity. He also asserted that he had, using “pure mathematics,” come up with a theory that “tend[s] to disprove the Einstein theory.” There is no indication that Tesla ever had the knowledge to derive a competing theory. Circa 1930, Tesla wrote a poem for his friend George Sylvester Viereck in which he muses about science.60 One stanza addresses Newton and contains these lines:
“Too bad, Sir Isaac, they dimmed your renown And turned your great science upside down. Now a long haired crank, Einstein by name, Puts on your high teaching all the blame. Says: matter and force are transmutable And wrong the laws you thought immutable.”
Note the “long haired crank”—Tesla’s name for the man who overthrew the Newtonian paradigm of mechanics. Much has been written about opposition to Einstein’s theory of relativity; this hostility reached its peak in the two decades following the confirmation of the general theory of relativity via the measurement of the bending of starlight by the sun’s gravitational field in 1919.61 Some of this opposition was rooted in anti-Semitism, as the preceding reference shows, and we do know that Tesla had anti-Jewish tendencies.62 In addition, Hertz, whom he diminishes, was, like Einstein, of Jewish origin,—only partly in Hertz’s case—but it seems more likely that the statement to Time magazine derives more from an almost pathological narcissism that compelled him to be in the public eye. Tesla has been called a scientist, engineer, and inventor. While the confusion and angst that can befall a scientific community having difficulty in adapting to a paradigm shift has been much written about, especially after Kuhn’s seminal publication, the effect of a scientific paradigm shift on


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Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
inventors, as opposed to scientists, has been less explored.63 When we study the lives of individual inventors or engineers we can find failure to adapt to a paradigm change.
Shifting Paradigms in Invention
Besides Tesla, whose inability to absorb a new paradigm should be evident, we have the example of yet another great inventor, Thomas A. Edison. Edison had little formal teaching in schools and was largely educated by his mother and by his own readings. His first important work experiences and inventions were in the field of the [wired] telegraph, which operates using direct currents, and it is clear that he obtained a strong intuitive grasp of DC theory. It is understandable that his subsequent system of generating and distributing electric power was all based on DC. Paul Israel, the esteemed biographer of Edison and editor of the Thomas Edison papers, remarks, “While experimenting with generators, Edison again relied on his experience with telegraph technology to provide a useful analogy that guided laboratory research.” Israel points out how Edison and his workers sometimes envisioned direct current generators as “carbon battery elements.”64 Historians have written about Edison’s unwillingness to adapt to the newly introduced system of AC electric power, which posed a direct economic threat to his own DC system.65 We will probably never know for sure if his objection to AC was truly based on his concern that it was more lethal
than DC, or whether he was acting out of pride, inertia, economic self-interest, or an inability to grasp a phenomenon requiring some mathematical sophistication that eluded him. His statement in 1891 to Henry Villard, President of Edison GE, “The use of alternating current instead of direct current is unworthy of practical men,” has proved to be as fatuous as Tesla’s notion that Hertzian wave theory is “an aberration of the scientific mind.”66
Age and Vanity
We are left to wonder why Tesla wrote this long paper displaying a wealth of ignorance. One clue might come from an article about him that appeared in the New York Times of January 9, 1943, a few days after the inventor’s death. The generally admiring piece observes, “His practical achievements were limited to the short period that began in 1886 and ended in 1903. And what achievements they were.” By 1919, Tesla’s last important work had taken place more than half a generation before. Studying a list of Tesla’s patents, we find that about 90% of them were filed on or before 1903, and all of his important ones were granted before this date.67
Resurrecting Tesla’s Reputation
His Electrical Experimenter piece can be read as a rather sad effort to resurrect his reputation. Moreover, his denigration of Hertzian waves and promotion of the primacy of earth currents may be seen as an attempt to preserve respect for his construction of a 187-foot tower (capped with a sphere) in 1901–1903 on


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Shoreham, Long Island, whose purpose was to produce a “World Wireless System” that would radiate “several thousands of horsepower” and permit the connectedness of all the telephone and telegraph exchanges in the world by wireless means. The system was to use currents in the earth but was never demonstrated.68 Consider his allusion in “The True Wireless” to a speech he gave in 1893 at the Franklin Institute where there is a portion entitled “Electrical Resonance.” He remarks in 1919, “This little salvage from the wreck has earned me the title of ‘Father of Wireless’ from many well-disposed workers ...” Perusing the speech, we wonder who these well-disposed workers are. In his Institute lecture he asserted, “I do firmly believe that it is practicable to disturb by means of powerful machines the electrostatic condition of the earth and thus transmit intelligible signals and perhaps power... We know now that electrical vibration may be transmitted through a single conductor. Why then not try to avail ourselves of the earth for this purpose [italics added]?”69 Notice the use of the word electrostatic. His proposal is not based on any use or understanding of electromagnetic waves. As further proof of this, he goes on to wonder what the electrical capacitance of the earth might be and “the quantity of electricity the earth contains.” None of this thinking proved germane to communication by wireless telegraphy nor is his obsession in the article with determining the period of oscillation
of currents that might be induced in a resonant earth.
Strengthening Tesla’s Claims
In a further attempt to strengthen his claims to invention in wireless, Tesla lays claim to discovering the forerunner of the Audion in the caption to his Fig. 9 (reproduced here as Fig. 12). The captions reads, “The Forerunner of the Audion—the Most Sensitive Wireless Detector Known, as described by Tesla in His Lectures Before the Institution of Electrical Engineers, London, February, 1892.” It is instructive to read the text of the talk where he discusses his “forerunner.”70 He begins by paying homage to Professor Crookes and his invention, the Crookes tube. Like Crookes, Tesla is not using thermionic emission. He employs a cold evacuated glass bulb, like a lamp bulb, but with no filament. The bulb, which has a “high vacuum,” contains some conducting powder, which in turn is connected by a wire to one terminal of a high frequency, high voltage induction coil. The bulb has a sheet of metal foil on its surface that is also connected to the coil for some experiments, but not others. The
Fig. 12. Tesla’s “Forerunner of the Audion.” (True Wireless, Fig. 9)


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Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
straight lines that you see in the figure he calls a “brush”; it gives off a glow that he calls luminosity—whose shape and form he reports is very sensitive to the presence of objects or nearby electric or magnetic fields. However fascinating his demonstration, Tesla still has not produced the forerunner of the Audion. The latter, we recall, was invented by Lee de Forest, and was the first working three-element vacuum tube. His patent application is dated January 29, 1907, and it issued on February 18, 1908. Despite de Forest’s confused understanding of his invention, within the next half dozen years it was proving its worth as both an amplifier and an oscillator. If we want to see the forerunner of the Audion we must look to the work of Fleming and Edison, whose devices, like de Forest’s, relied on thermionic emission. The distinguished historian of the vacuum tube, Gerald Tyne, makes no mention of Tesla in his well-regarded opus.71 This is not surprising—Tesla’s bulbs responded by glowing only in the presence of strong, quasi-electrostatic fields produced by his machines. It is regrettable that Tesla’s narcissism caused him to write this paper—it can only provide difficulty for his acolytes and apologists. The ignorance he displays of classical electromagnetic theory, which by 1919 was a mature subject, can only diminish his reputation.
Gernsback and His Magazine
If Tesla’s True Wireless is so utterly wrong, and if it conflicts with the paradigms used by engineers and scientists
of 1919, how did he get his article published? To answer this, we must focus on the magazine where it appeared and its editor/publisher Hugo Gernsback (1884–1967).72 Almost a generation younger than Tesla, Gernsback had certain things in common with him: they were both inventors with substantial lists of patents—Gernsback had 22, Tesla 112; both came from groups that placed them in small minorities in the United States (Gernsback was a Jew from Luxemburg); both studied science and engineering on the European continent; and both occupied a kind of nether world bridging science and fantasy.73 They apparently had a lasting friendship that would tend to counter suspicions that Tesla was an anti-Semite. Gernsback pressured the Westinghouse Company, which had benefited greatly from Tesla’s work in three phase power and induction motors, to give the near destitute inventor a pension in 1934.74
Gernsback’s Electrical Experimenter
The Electrical Experimenter, started by Gernsback in 1913, is where we find Tesla’s article six years later.75 Although the term “science fiction” did not exist until coined by Gernsback in 1929, his magazine Modern Electrics carried a serialized story of that genre in 1911–12, written by Gernsback—something to keep in mind when we look at the Electrical Experimenter, where Tesla was to publish abundantly in the 7-year life of that magazine.76 What sort of magazine was the Electrical Experimenter? It was dense


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with ads for radio hardware, e.g., Murdock headphones and audio interstage transformers as well as Grebe and De Forest radios. Mainly, it carried stories of new inventions, especially those with an electrical basis, such as a new radio compass, a method of abolishing smoke electrically, new electric stoves, and quack medicine—anesthesia via electricity and an electrical cure for tuberculosis using the Tesla coil.77 Much of the magazine was given over to what we would now call “techno-euphoria”—a belief that technology would bring us wonderful things in the not-too-distant future. One example was the Thought Recorder, shown in Fig. 13. The author of the article is none other than Gernsback himself. He imagines a man in an office who is connected to a halo on his forehead. The halo is supporting an Audion amplifier tube that detects and amplifies the
man’s thoughts. They are then sent to an instrument on his desk that converts his thoughts to an inscription on a moving tape. The latter is supplied to the man’s secretary who is capable of reading the information on the tape and who can now write letters or memos based on what the boss has been thinking. The article appears in the same issue as Tesla’s, and Tesla, in an introduction, gives some measured support to the idea. Interestingly, Greenleaf Whittier Pickard, a distinguished electrical engineer who helped develop what we would now call the crystal radio, circa 1904, also comments and employs the term “Hertzian waves,” illustrating how commonly the phrase was used.
The Electrical Experimenter does seek to explain legitimate recent advances in the sciences. For example, Einstein’s special and general theory of relativity and the general theory’s
Fig. 13. The “Thought Recorder.” (Electrical Experimenter, May 1919)


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Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
confirmation by the observed bending of light are carefully described in the January 1920 issue by an unusual person for the era: a female astronomer, Isabel M. Lewis, M.A, who was a regular contributor and the first woman astronomer to be hired at the U.S. Naval Observatory.78 The magazine also published pure science fiction stories, such as “At War with the Invisible” appearing in the March and April 1918 issues, which described a war between the planets Mars and Earth in the 21st century.79
Science Fiction, Nostalgia for the Future Unfortunately, a magazine mixing techno-euphoria, future studies, science fiction and real science is playing dangerous games: the boundaries became diffuse. The March 1918 Electrical Experimenter has an article by Gernsback starting on page 743 entitled “Can Electricity Destroy Gravitation?” The author asserts it can, and describes the work of a Prof. Francis E. Nipher of the Saint Louis Academy of Science. The professor’s experiment is described thusly: He suspends a small lead ball from a string. It is placed in proximity to a very heavy lead ball that rests on a bench. The small ball and string are seen to be deflected toward the heavy ball because of the force of gravitational attraction—a straightforward replication of the famed Cavendish experiment of 1797–8.80 The professor then passes a direct current through the large ball. Nothing has changed. But then he applies an AC current, et voilà, the small ball moves away from the
large one, thereby proving that gravity has been weakened by electricity. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge of electromagnetic theory would see what was happening here. The AC creates a time varying magnetic field that induces eddy currents in the small ball. These currents interact with the magnetic field to push the small ball away from the large one. The clue that Faraday’s law of induction and the induced current serve as the explanation should have been the failure of the experiment to work with a direct current. The gravitational field, like DC and its resulting fields, is static. A direct current cannot induce a voltage or current in a neighboring circuit, while alternating currents have that ability. Eddy currents were well understood by 1919. One wonders how much real science Gernsback knew; it is no surprise that he permitted another paper based on dubious physics to be published the next year: Tesla’s “The True Wireless.” The Electrical Experimenter morphed into another Gernsback magazine: Science and Invention, in 1920.81 This publication, although it did in some ways live up to its title, increasingly carried science fiction and proved so successful that Gernsback was able to introduce more magazines (e.g., Amazing Stories, Wonder Stories) that were wholly devoted to the science fiction genre, and he is best known as a publisher of science fiction. At least one historian has suggested that many of the ideas in Gernsback’s science-fiction stories promoted Tesla’s “still unrealized ideas” for inventions.82


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Endnotes
1. Nicholson Baker and Margaret Brentano, “The World on Sunday: Graphic Art and Joseph Pulitzer’s Newspaper (1898–1911),” (Bullfinch Press, Boston, 2005) pp. 102–103. 2. Nikola Tesla, “The True Wireless,” Electrical Experimenter, vol. 7, no. 3, May 1919, pp.22–23, 61–63, 87. The following website has images of the original pages: http://w w w.free-energ y-nfo.com/Tesla TrueWireless.pdf. Other sources of the paper can be found by Googling the search term “Tesla True Wireless.” Vendors of CD’s having a complete run of the issues of the Electrical Experimenter can be found on eBay.
3. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed., (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996). 4. R.P. Feynman, R. B. Leighton, and M. Sands, “The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. 2,” (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1964) pp. 1–6. 5. Jed Buchwald, The Rise of the Wave Theory of Light, (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989); With the birth of quantum theory circa 1900–26, a particle theory of light based on photons was to reemerge, but it did not undermine Maxwell’s work thanks to the concept of the wave-particle duality. See for example Ian Walmsley, Light: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015).
6. Hugh Aitken, Syntony and Spark: The Origins of Radio, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1985), Chapter 3.
7. Hugh Aitken, Syntony and Spark.
8. Interestingly, we have only Tesla’s word that this meeting took place. There is no supporting entry in Heinrich Hertz: Memoirs, Letters, Diaries by Mathilde Hertz and Charles Süsskind, 2nd edition (San Francisco Press, San Francisco, 1977). As Tesla was a famous inventor by the time of the meeting, it is puzzling that he was not mentioned by Hertz. Also, no meeting is described by Bernard W. Carlson in his definitive biography of Tesla: Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2013).
9. Tom Lewis, Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, (Harper-Collins, New York, 1991), p 136.
10. Paul Schubert, The Electric Word: The Rise of Radio, (Macmillan, London, 1928) pp. 166–168.
11. It was not until 1893, well after Tesla had completed his education, that the great simplification in AC circuit analysis made possible by the use of complex quantities began to be adopted, thanks to the work of C. P. Steinmetz. See, for example, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, “Complex Quantities and their Use in Electrical Engineering,” AIEE Proceedings of International Electrical Congress, July 1893, pp. 33–74. 12. Alfred Hay, The Principles of Alternate Current Working, (Biggs and Co, Boston, 1897) pp. 137–148. Available at Google Books; for other 19th century engineers who used fluid analogies—or rejected them—see Paul J. Nahin. Oliver Heaviside: Sage in Solitude, (IEEE Press, Hoboken, NJ) 1988, p. 59 (note his footnote 3 and the derisive comment “drainpipe theory”). 13. There is a stern critique of using mechanical explanations for explaining electrical phenomena in Henri Poincaré, Maxwell’s Theory and Electrical Oscillations, (McGraw-Hill, NY, 1904) Chapter 1, pp. 1–2. This book is available at Google Books. Tesla was so committed to hydraulic analogies that he supplied one for his high voltage, high frequency invention, the Tesla coil. See N. Tesla, My Inventions. This series of articles originally appeared in the Electrical Experimenter in 1919. They have been republished in his book My Inventions (Barnes and Noble, NY, 1995). See especially pp. 76–77. The analogy is so complicated that one is better served by studying the original electrical device and applying the laws of AC circuit theory and resonance. 14. Interestingly, in U.S. patent 645,576, Tesla has not yet discarded the return wire in a communication/power distribution system he is proposing. Part of his circuit consists of a path through an atmospheric layer that his powerful transmitter will, he asserts, succeed in ionizing. The earth is also employed in the circuit. The patent was granted in 1900, but by 1919 he has dispensed with the return part of the circuit. 15. For an explanation of the concept of Whig history, as it applies to the history of science, see Steven Weinberg, “Eye on the Present, The Whig History of Science,” New York Review of Books, vol. 62, no. 20, Dec. 17, 2015. 16. J. Zenneck and A. E. Seelig (translation), Wireless Telegraphy, (McGraw-Hill, NY 1915)


26 The AWA Review
Paradigm Lost: Nikola Tesla’s True Wireless
pp. 258–259. This book provides an idea of how textbooks, circa 1910–1920, explained waves received on the far side of the mountain. 17. See the article on diffraction in the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia-Britannica, vol. 8, 1911. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop %C3%A6dia_Britannica/Diffraction_of_Light /11. Also, for a modern treatment see Y. T. Lo, Y. T and S. W. Lee, Antenna Handbook, (Van Nostrand-Reinhold, NY, 1988) sec. 29. 18. R. W. P King and S. Prasad, Fundamental Electromagnetic Theory and Applications, (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 1986) chapter 7.
19. Jules Stratton, Electromagnetic Theory, (McGraw-Hill, New York. 1941), secs. 9.22–9.24.
20. Chen-Pang Yeang, Probing the Sky with Radio Waves (University of Chicago Press, Chicago. 2013). I am greatly indebted to this source. 21. Henri Poincaré and F. King Vreeland (translation), Maxwell’s Theory and Wireless Telegraphy, (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1904) p. 161. Tesla might have countered by asserting that the Branly coherer responds to the electric field—not the magnetic field—and the earth weakens the former. 22. L. W. Austin, “Some Quantitative Experiments in Long Distance Radio Telegraph,” Reprint No. 159, Bulletin of Bureau of Standards, vol. 7, no. 3, Feb. 1, 1911; see also Robison, 1918, p. 228. 23. Watson, G. N. “The Transmission of Electric Waves Around the Earth,” Proc Royal Society (London) Series A, vol. 95, July 15, 1919, pp. 546–553. 24. Heinrich Hertz, Electric Waves, (Dover Books, Mineola NY, reprint of Macmillan book 1893) chapter 8 (dating from 1888, especially Fig. 26). 25. Kuhn, page 43.
26. Samuel Robison, Robison’s Manual of Radio Telegraphy and Telephony for Naval Electricians (U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, MD, 1918) p.131. He asserts that the directivity behavior of the “flat top antenna” attributed to Marconi, which involves a long piece of wire or wires parallel to the ground, is still not understood. 27. L. J. Chu, “Growth of the Antennas and Propagation Field Between World War 1 and World War 2. Part 1, Antennas,” Proceedings of the IRE, vol. 50, no. 5, May 1962, pp. 685–7.
28. Charles Burrows, “The History of Radio Propagation up to the End of World War I,” Proceedings of the IRE, vol. 50, no. 5, May 1962, pp. 682–684. 29. Note that Marconi had described arrays formed from inverted L antennas as early as 1906, as noted in G. W. Pierce below. The horizontal elements were much longer than the vertical ones, a configuration not suggested in Tesla’s Fig. 16. G. W. Pierce, Principles of Wireless Telegraphy, (McGraw-Hill, New York, 1910) Chapter 25. See also Practical Wireless Telegraphy, Elmer Bucher, Wireless Press, 1917, sec. 233. Here, the horizontal portion of the antenna is nearly a mile long. 30. See G. Marconi, “On Methods Whereby the Radiation of Electric Waves May Be Mainly Confined to Certain Directions, and Whereby the Receptivity of a Receiver May Be Restricted to Electric Waves Emanating from Certain Directions,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character 77.518 (1906): 413–21; Electrician, vol. 60, 1908, p. 883. 31. Pierce, p. 298. 32. Zenneck and Seelig, Sec. 202–204. The book contains the reference to Von Hoerschelmann, which was published in German as a dissertation in 1911. 33. Aitken, p. 267. 34. Nahin, pp. 142–143.
35. Bernard Carlson, Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age, (Princeton U. Press, Princeton NJ, 2013) p. 200–202; note that some images were the result of multiple exposures where Tesla was not present when the sparks were being generated, see pp. 297–299.
36. T. C. Martin, editor, The Inventions, Researches and Writings of Nikola Tesla, 1893; republished by (Barnes and Noble, NY, 1992) Chapter 6. From the lecture: “The reason why no pain in the body is felt, and no injurious effect noted, is that everywhere, if a current be imagined to flow through the body, the direction of its flow would be at right angles to the surface; hence the body of the experimenter offers an enormous section to the current, and the density is very small, with the exception of the arm, perhaps, where the density may be considerable...The expression of these views, which are the result of long continued experiment and observation, both with steady and


Volume 30, 2017 27
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varying currents, is elicited by the interest which is at present taken in this subject, and by the manifestly erroneous ideas which are daily propounded in journals on this subject.” Tesla misses the essential point here—the very shallow depth of penetration of the energy. The arm plays no special role. Notice that he takes a swipe at other workers’ “erroneous ideas.” 37. Indeed, it was in Poincaré’s book of 1904 (see above). 38. E. C. Jordan and K. Balmain, Electromagnetic Waves and Radiating Systems, 2nd ed., (Prentice-Hall. NJ, 1968) p. 655. 39. Note that this is a simplification of a formula derived by Heaviside in 1888. See Nahin, who also gives the formula we are using here, p. 176 40. King and Prasad, section 5.9. The sinθ variation was derived by Hertz in the 19th century (see Hertz, Electric Waves, p. 143 above) and was popularized by Louis Cohen in a paper written for engineers in 1914. See his “Electromagnetic Radiation,” Journal of the Franklin Institute, April 1914, vol. 177, no. 4, pp. 409–418. 41. Robison, 1918, p. 62. Notice that the same picture appears in an even earlier edition of Robison, dating from 1911, on page 76. This book is available from Google Books. 42. R.W.P King, Theory of Linear Antennas, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1956) chapter 7. Note that this work is based in part on Sommerfeld’s work of 1909. 43. Burrows. 44. Ibid. 45. The ionosphere, although not called by that name, could be found in electrical engineering handbooks as early as 1915; see for example W. H. Eccles, Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony: A Handbook of Formulae, Data and Information. (Electrician, London, 1915), pp. 162–3. 46. Eccles, p. 120. 47. In the unlikely event that the wire hangs straight down from the aircraft, the preceding formula does not apply. However, it would still be incorrect to say that the capacitance varies with the logarithm of the length of wire. The required formula shows a more complicated behavior. See Eccles p. 120. 48. James Clerk Maxwell, A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, vol. 1.(Clarendon Press, Oxford 1891) p. 76. This has been reprinted by Dover Books, NY, 1954. For a modern treatment that emphasizes the limitations of the
concept of voltage difference see Edward.C. Jordan and Kenneth. Balmain, Electromagnetic Waves and Radiating Systems, second ed., (Prentice-Hall, New Jersey 1968) p. 36. 49. ht t p:// blogs.m hs.ox .ac.u k /i n novat i ng incombat/ See also R. W. Burns, Communications: An International History of the Formative Years, (IEE Press, UK, 2004) p. 407. 50. http://earlyradiohistory.us/1899marc.htm, McClure’s Magazine, (London), June 1899, pp. 99–112.
51. Sungook Hong, Wireless: From Marconi’s Black Box to the Audion, (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001) p. 205. See Aitken, his footnote 12 page 195. Note (same page) that even Fleming, Marconi’s well-regarded consulting engineer, was at first misled by the misuse of analogies drawn from the theory of light. 52. Aitken, pp. 285–286 and Hong p. 42, footnote 48.
53. J. J Fahie, A History of Wireless Telegraphy, (Blackwood, Edinburgh, 1901) p. 216. 54. Guglielmo Marconi, “Wireless Telegraphy,” Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, vol. 28, 1899, pp. 273–291. 55. U.S. Patent 685,955 of 1901, 685,954 of 1901, 685,956 of 1901, 787,412 of 1905. 56. Carlson, chapter 2. 57. Nahin, chapters 7 and 9. 58. Bruce Hunt, The Maxwellians, (Cornell U. Press, Ithaca, NY, 1991) p. 202.
59. Marc Seifer, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, (Citadel Press. New York, 1998) p. 423. 60. Margaret Cheney & Robert Uth, Tesla: Master of Lightning, (Barnes and Noble/Metro Books, NY, 2001) pp. 138–139.
61. Milena Wazeck , Einstein’s Opponents, The Public Controversy about the Theory of Relativity in the 1920’s. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2014). 62. Seifer, p. 212. 63. For an example of writing on the subject of paradigm shifts in physics after Kuhn, see Jaume Navarro, “Electron Diffraction Chez Thomson: Early Responses to Quantum Physics in Britain.” The British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 43, 2010, pp. 245–275. 64. Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention, (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1998) p. 176. 65. Thomas Parke Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1983).


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66. Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography, (Wiley, New York, 1992) p. 359. 67. The web site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ List_of_Nikola_Tesla_patents lists 111 or 112 U.S. Tesla patents (depending on how they are counted). 68. Nikola Tesla, “My Inventions,” Electrical Experimenter, 1919, see chapter 5, available on the Internet http://www.teslasautobiography .com/ See also Carlson, chapter 15. 69. T. C. Martin, pp. 346–7. In the late 19th century, Tesla spoke repeatedly of disturbing the electrostatic condition of the earth as a means of sending intelligence. See also Martin p. 292 for an example used in a speech before the British IEE in 1892. 70. This tube appears in a speech he gave in 1892 to the Institution of Electrical Engineers (London). See T. C. Martin ed. pp. 225–229.
71. Gerald Tyne, Saga of the Vacuum Tube, (Antique Electronic Supply, Tempe AZ. 1977). 72. Mike Adams, “Hugo Gernsback: Predicting Radio Broadcasting, 1919–1924,” Antique Wireless Association Review, vol. 27, August 2014, pp. 165–192. 73. For a listing of the Tesla U.S. patents see http:// web.mit.edu/most/Public/Tesla1/alpha_tesla. html. The number for Gernsback was obtained from a search of Google Patents using his name as the inventor. Footnote 64 above also gives a source of Tesla’s patents. 74. Carlson, p. 379. 75. K. Massie, and Stephen Perry, “Hugo Gernsback and Radio Magazines: An Influential Intersection in Broadcast History,” Journal of Radio Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 2002. Note that the magazine was originally titled The Electrical Experimenter. The title was shortened during 1917. 76. The term was apparently first used in Gernsback’s magazine Wonder Stories in the issue of June 1929; Gernsback had earlier coined the term “scientifiction.” See Leon Stover, Science Fiction from Wells to Heinlein, (McFarland Publishers, Jefferson, NC, 2002) p. 9. 77. Frederick Strong, “The Home Treatment of Tuberculosis by High Frequency Currents,” The Electrical Experimenter, vol. 5, no. 10, Feb. 1918. 78. http://maia.usno.navy.mil/women_history/ lewis.html. 79. M Ashley and R. Lowndes, The Gernsback
Days, (Wildside Press, Rockville, MD, 2004) p. 51–2. 80. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_ experiment. 81. Ashley, above, p. 53. 82. Stover, p. 175. In 1923 Gernsback produced a book, Radio for All, published by Lippincott. The work was designed to introduce people to what was still in many ways a hobby. Thus, there were instructions for building simple radios—crystal and one-or two-tube sets, as well as transmitters. It is puzzling that the book makes no mention of the work of Tesla, given his friendship with Gernsback, although there are numerous allusions to Marconi as well as single references to such inventors as Poulsen, Pickard, Fessenden, and Dunwoody.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Bruton of the University of Manchester, Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre, for reading this paper and offering useful advice. And I would also like to thank Prof. Karl Stephan of Texas State University, San Marcos, for giving me a valuable library of early textbooks on wireless telegraphy. I would like to thank Prof. Chen-Pang Yeang of the University of Toronto, a distinguished historian of early 20th-century wave propagation theory, for his comments. I am indebted to this journal’s editor Dr. Eric Wenaas for many useful suggestions that resulted in my paring down this paper and making it clearer.
About the Author
A. David Wunsch was born in Brooklyn, NY, on December 15, 1939. He grew up in the same Flatbush neighborhood of red diaper babies as Bernie Sanders. David studied electrical engineering at Cornell and later earned his Ph.D. at


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Harvard where he was a student in the Antenna Group directed by Professor R.W.P. King. David has spent most of his professional life at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell which is located in Lowell, Massachusetts. He is now Professor of Electrical Engineering Emeritus. In 1995 he started the course for liberal arts majors at Lowell, Principles and History of Radio. It is described in the article “Electrical engineering for the liberal arts: radio and its history,” IEEE Transactions on Education, vol.41, no.4, pp.320–324, Nov 1998. David is the book review editor of the IEEE Magazine Technology and Society. He is the author of two textbooks: Complex Variables with Applications (Pearson), currently in its third edition, and the recently published A MATLAB Companion to Complex Variables (Taylor and Francis).
David recently rebuilt the Heathkit oscilloscope that he constructed in 1957. He thought it would make him 17 again but his beard remains white.
David Wunsch




Volume 30, 2017 31
Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
Part 1: The Pilot Radio Flight to Bermuda
© 2017 Robert M. Rydzewski, KJ6SBR
Zeh Bouck (2PI, W4FCP, W8QMR), born John W. Schmidt (1901–1946), was an early radio pioneer, engineer, writer, and adventurer who represented amateurs in Washington, D.C. and met with President Hoover. He helped design the Pilot Super Wasp, was one of the first newspaper radio columnists, penned stories and radio plays, and was an associate editor for journals such as Radio Broadcast and CQ: The Radio Amateur’s Journal. An IRE Fellow and member of the Radio Club of America, he was most famous in his day for his role aboard the airplane Pilot Radio, a “flying laboratory.” In 1930 the plane made two historic journeys: the first flight from the United States to Bermuda and the first flight of any land plane around the South American continent. This article provides a brief biography of Bouck to 1930 and summarizes the history of the Pilot Radio Company of Brooklyn and its interest in aircraft radio. Along the way, other figures such as Reginald Fessenden, Hugo Gernsback, and Milton Sleeper are encountered. A detailed account of Bouck’s famous and hazardous Bermuda flight with pilot William Alexander and navigator Lewis Yancey follows, focusing on the role of radio communications. Remarkably, Bouck, who remains largely forgotten today, accomplished all this in spite of a serious disability caused by childhood polio.
Zeh Bouck
Accomplishments
Zeh Bouck visited the White House in 1930 and met with President Hoover, and at one point he represented the Hoover administration, acting as an unofficial U.S. ambassador to foreign nations.1 Alongside Hiram Percy Maxim and Edwin Howard Armstrong, he advocated for radio amateurs at the Third National Radio Conference in Washington in 1924. He was one of the first radio columnists, writing for the New York Sun by 1922, and a
newsmaker himself. He wrote hundreds of articles for magazines ranging from Boys’ Life to Radio News to Cosmopolitan, plays for the radio, technical pamphlets, and books. Largely selfeducated in radio engineering from a childhood spent chasing DX (longdistance communication) in the days of spark, he became a Fellow of and served on committees for the Institute of Radio Engineers and was a Member of the Radio Club of America. He contributed to the design of the Pilot Super Wasp and early receivers made by the National Radio Company. He helped


32 The AWA Review
Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
edit several journals, including Radio Broadcast, Aero News & Mechanics, and the radio amateur’s journal CQ. He was an aircraft radio pioneer, spending more than a thousand hours in the air and many more in the lab trying to solve the many problems involved in aircraft communications. He served as radioman aboard the Pilot Radio, a “flying laboratory,” on the very first flight from the U.S. mainland to the speck in the ocean known as Bermuda. Soon after, he served on the first flight of any land plane around the South American continent, surviving a plethora of emergency landings, mishaps, and one hellacious crash landing that took the Pilot Radio to its watery grave.
Despite an array of achievements worthy of a real-life Indiana Jones, today Zeh Bouck is an obscure footnote to radio history. One might have read his fate in the tealeaves of his later years. He was no Horatio Alger; if anything he went from riches to rags—not uncommon in those years of the Great Depression. By World War Two, he had seen his fame and fortune rise and fall. Time would not allow him to reach those heights again. Most people who have seen a picture of Bouck have come across it in the pages of old Radio News accounts of his aeronautical adventures. There he is, standing next to that vintage Stinson airplane in some exotic locale, a short,
Fig. 1. From left to right: Emile Burgin, Zeh Bouck, and Lewis Yancey. Photo taken at Roosevelt Field, New York, May 14, 1930. (Author’s collection)


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pipe-smoking, broad-shouldered man with a boyish face, Harry Potter-like glasses, and upswept dark hair, looking a bit old-fashioned even then with his signature cravat, and perched conspicuously on a pair of crutches (see Fig. 1). Most readers probably assumed he had just been injured in his adventures. Not so. Like a more famous American of the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, day in and day out Zeh Bouck stared down a major disability that would have left most people satisfied to just be able to get around the house, much less the cockpit of a plane or the jungles of the Amazon. But Bouck was different. His was a spirit and determination that few possess. He didn’t try to conceal his handicap, nor did he curse the rotten card that fate had dealt him in the form of childhood polio. In what may have been his greatest achievement of all, he simply ignored it and did what he set out to do, struggling along step by step.
A Short Biography
The story of Zeh Bouck has many chapters, the aerial adventure recounted here being just one of them. He was born John W. Schmidt in New York in 1901, the son of John A. Schmidt, a German dry goods merchant, and Alice White, whose maternal grandparents had the Dutch surnames Zeh and Bouck.2 The Boucks had produced a governor of New York. His mother’s brother had changed his name from Charles White to Bouck White and was famous (or infamous) as a firebrand revolutionary and writer who was, at various times, jailed, tarred and feathered, and driven
out of town.3 The Zeh and Bouck clans hailed from rural Schoharie County in upstate New York, where Zeh Bouck would later live and where Zehs and Boucks still live to this day. By the mid1920s, his parents had divorced, and he lived with his mother in New York City. John “Jack” Schmidt wrote under the pen name Zeh Bouck and later legally changed his name to that as well. Possible reasons for the name change could include the anti-German sentiments prevailing in the years around World War One, a preference to be associated with his mother’s side of the family, or just the more distinctive sound of the name. Unfortunately, his reasoning on this is unknown. Despite the thousands of available documents by and about Zeh Bouck, many blank spots on the map of his life remain. Writing about himself in the third person, he said that he had “blossomed forth as an operator in the heyday of the E.I. Co. to the crackling tune of the one-inch spark coil and the rat-tattat of the decoherer. His first call was issued by Gernsback in his Wireless League of America, and his first code was Morse.”4 All of this was before he had reached the ripe old age of 11. He attended Townsend Harris High School in New York City and took classes at the City College of New York, although he never received a degree.5 In 1928 Zeh Bouck married Charlotte Bosse, with whom he would have a daughter who, sadly, lived for only a few weeks, and a son, Paul. A natural born writer as well as a superb radio operator and experimenter, his works began appearing in


34 The AWA Review
Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
newspapers and magazines shortly after World War One. His earliest known article is a short story he wrote around the time he graduated high school, which was called “A Ham on the Telephone.” This appeared under the pen name of “Tewpieye” (a play on his callsign, 2PI) in the August 1920 issue of QST.6 By early 1922, he was penning a regular radio feature for the Saturday New York Globe (which later was merged into the New York Sun), thereby becoming one of the world’s—not just the Globe’s—very first newspaper radio columnists. His column reflected radio enthusiast interests of the day, the earlier ones being more technical (like how to build your own resistance-coupled amplifier), while later ones in the 1930s included critiques of popular radio shows, guides to listening in on shortwave bands, and observations on European shortwave propaganda broadcasts.7 In all, Bouck probably wrote several thousand articles in his short life, many of which can still be found. He also worked in various capacities for a number of radio parts manufacturers at times including Daven, Amsco, Arcturus, and later, Pilot Radio & Tube Corporation of Brooklyn (see Fig. 2). Ever busier, he wrote some fiction for national magazines including Cosmopolitan and Argosy, a few radio plays, books (one of them with a chapter on how to write radio plays),8 and he was a contributor, editor, or associate editor for a number of magazines, including Radio News, All-Wave Radio, Boys’ Life (which had some remarkably technical
articles for youths), Radio Broadcast, and Aero News & Mechanics. At one point he even helped organize a radio department for an advertising agency.9 Looking at his circumstances in those decades, like many another, it is likely that his jobs in the 1920s represented burgeoning opportunities, while those in the 1930s had more to do with keeping the wolves at bay. Back in the early 1920s, when more radio receivers were “homebrewed” than commercially manufactured, more money could be made selling radio parts than factory-assembled sets. Close ties existed between parts manufacturers, their engineers, salesmen, copywriters, publicity agents (who might all be the same guy), and magazine and newspaper publishers. “Every Saturday, The New York Sun published a 32-page supplement on how to build various circuits. Everyone followed the writings of Stuart Blyden, the radio editor at The Sun,” explained Harry Kalker, an M.I.T. educated engineer. “I was a salesman for Amperite... If I wanted to live well the following week, I regularly called on Thursday to see if Blyden of The Sun and Casson of The Telegram had specified my Amperite parts by name in the ‘Circuit of the Week’ for that issue.”10 It wasn’t unusual, then, for Bouck to “kill two birds with one stone” and write articles on circuits featuring Daven or Amsco resistors or Arcturus tubes in those years. But from the time he joined Pilot Radio in 1928, his job was different—and considerably more interesting.


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Fig. 2. Advertisement for the Pilot Radio & Tube Corporation. (Radio Design, Vol. 2, No 4, Winter, 1929, inside back cover)


36 The AWA Review
Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
Pilot Radio of Brooklyn
Management
The Pilot Electric Manufacturing Company made and sold parts as well as complete kits, the latter being something like the Heathkits of their day, if not as easy to assemble. Pilot ran the full gamut of activities, including manufacturing primary parts, designing circuits, publishing schematics, advertising in their house organ, Radio Design, and selling by mail order through their distributor, “the fastest radio mail order service in the world,” Speed, Inc.11 “Pilot was one of the very few real fabricators of the radio industry,” wrote former Pilot employee Robert Hertzberg. “In a crowded factory in Brooklyn, NY, it made its own tools and dies and manufactured all the bits and pieces of its components and assemblies. It did all its own turning, stamping, winding, plating, forming, etc.”12 Pilot’s pilot, so to speak, was Isidor Goldberg, who was raised in an orphanage on New York’s Lower East Side. Goldberg had been exposed to the possibilities of wireless by the age of 16 when he worked at Hugo Gernsback’s Electro Importing Company (E.I. Co.) factory.13 Later, he managed to construct a radio parts empire out of nothing but hard work, savvy, and determination. Goldberg had big ideas and knew how to take chances. His company, Pilot Electric Manufacturing Company, morphed into the Pilot Radio and Television Corporation, and then the Pilot Radio and Tube Corporation
in 1929; all will be referred to as “Pilot Radio.” Pilot Radio didn’t confine itself to just manufacturing parts for homebrew or manufactured radios; the company also explored promising new areas like television and aeronautical radio communication. Much later, it would be a pioneer in the new “high fidelity” audio field.
Pilot Radio and Early TV
Pilot Radio’s foray into television, back in those spinning disk days, may have contributed to the forced bankruptcy of former boss Hugo Gernsback’s publishing empire early in 1929.14 The year before, in a U.S. first, Gernsback had collaborated with Pilot Radio and its brilliant young chief engineer, John Geloso, to broadcast televised images for five minutes at the top of each hour (after a much more ambitious schedule had been abandoned) over his New York City radio stations, WRNY (920 kHz) and W2XAL (9700 kHz). One could watch “faces of living people, the WRNY placard... a moving toy monkey, and a moving ‘roly poly man.’”15 The Pilot television receiver used in the first public demonstration of wireless television in the United States is shown in Fig. 3. What could one see on the television that Pilot developed? According to Bouck, “One gazed hopefully through the window in the upper center and saw all sorts of things with zig-zags of dull red light predominating... Occasionally an image could be seen—the fringy call letters of the broadcasting station, or an equally fringy head and shoulders.


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This would float with varying degrees of rapidity across the field of vision and disappear in parts or wholly like the Cheshire cat.” There was a control for synchronization, but “this was usually accomplished far more satisfactorily by the rule of thumb—i.e., by placing the thumb against the periphery of the scanning disk as a light brake. You could always tell a television engineer... by the callous on his right thumb.”16 The images, of course, were unaccompanied by sound, except for the drone of the motor. The equipment and broadcasting costs involved probably helped push Gernsback’s own empire into the red at the time. Gernsback wrote in his
autobiography, “Indeed, the experiment, the first of its kind, cost a small fortune, with no income whatsoever even contemplated.”17 But mere bankruptcy couldn’t keep the futuristic Gernsback down, and a new series of magazines like Radio-Craft quickly rose from the ashes to compete with his old ones like Radio News. But the television venture hadn’t done much good for Pilot either. “I betcha I must have paid to have the darn things [Pilot television sets] thrown away in ’29,” Goldberg said decades later. “If I’d kept up all those programs, I’d have gone broke.”18 Television back then was definitely not ready for prime time. “After a few rounds,” concluded Bouck a while
Fig. 3. Rear and front view of the Pilot television receiver used at New York University in the fall of 1928 in a successful demonstration of images broadcast from Hugo Gernsback’s radio station, WRNY. Note the motor and large disk. The screen measured 1.5 inches. (Radio Design, Vol. 4, No. 1, Fall, 1931, p. 23)


38 The AWA Review
Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
later, “television never even came out of the corner.”19 When it finally did, after decades had passed and cathode ray tubes had supplanted spinning disks, Pilot Radio would have better luck, if more competition.
Wasps and Super Wasps
In late 1920s, it was in a different arena that Pilot Radio proved to be a quite a contender—that of shortwave receivers. Its introduction of the 3-tube, regenerative Pilot Wasp shortwave receiver in 1928 tapped into the burgeoning shortwave and amateur long-distance reception (DX) markets in a big way. With a $21.75 price in kit form including plug-in coils (around $300 today!),
it represented a good balance of economy and performance, and it became a popular choice for young amateurs and DXers. According to QST, by 1930 more amateurs were using Pilots than any other receiver. Adding a fourth tube, a screen-grid 224, in a front-end-tuned RF section was expected to improve its performance considerably. To this end, Goldberg assembled an all-star team including Robert Hertzberg, chief engineer John Geloso, Alfred Ghirardi, Zeh Bouck, and Robert S. Kruse. According to Hertzberg, the circuit was designed largely by Kruse (see Fig. 4), and the packaging was done by Geloso, while he himself did the field testing and manual writing. The roles of the others are less
Fig. 4. Pilot Super Wasp original schematic hand drawn by Robert Hertzberg in 1929. (Courtesy of son Paul Hertzberg, K2DUX)


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clear, but Bouck is credited with having an input into the design of the final product, the Pilot Super Wasp (see Fig. 5), which, gratifyingly, ended up living up to everyone’s expectations. It was an instant success, which Hertzberg attributed to its bulletproof design, favorable sunspot conditions, and the growing popularity of programs from the BBC in Chelmsford and PCJ in Eindhoven, Holland, with its star Edward Startz. The set was popular both in America, where one could either order the kit from Pilot Radio or buy it at Kresge’s, and abroad, where Pilot did a surprisingly large amount
of its business. Hertzberg himself personally installed a set in New York for the King of Siam (and he was).20 The success of the Super Wasp ensured that the AC Super Wasp, Universal Super Wasp, and eventually a very strange superhet cathedral set called the Super Wasp Allwave would follow. As for Bouck, he had previously designed circuits published in Radio Broadcast, and later he would have a hand in the design of some National shortwave receivers, along with Robert Kruse (again) and David Grimes.21 Based on his own choice of receivers in later years, Bouck would remain partial
Fig. 5. Robert Hertzberg at the controls of the Pilot AC Super Wasp in 1929. (Courtesy of son Paul Hertzberg)


40 The AWA Review
Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
to National sets for life. But in 1928, it was Pilot Radio that offered young Zeh Bouck truly soaring career opportunities as it entered a field where “the sky’s the limit” and let its Super Wasp fly.
Aircraft Radio
Utility
There were many reasons for airplanes to carry radios. Air-to-ground communications could greatly increase aviation safety. Bad weather might be avoided, flights tracked, emergency messages sent, aerial navigation improved, lives saved. As runways became crowded, hop-offs and landings could be coordinated to avoid accidents. Flight safety was not then what it is now; accidents were appallingly common, especially among small planes with fearless (or clueless) pilots. Improving flight safety was mostly a concern of commercial airlines that conducted regular flights, such as Pan American Airways and United Airlines. They preferred to keep their expensive planes and pilots intact and had to convince potential passengers that buying an airline ticket was not a form of assisted suicide. Manufacturers of small planes were more laissez-faire about it, as they were essentially selling the thrill—not the safety—of flying: “A half hour in flight on a bright sunny day will dispel all those memories of the difficulties of flying in a storm or fog.”22 But only if you made it through the storm or fog. Improving aerial navigation was another important use of aircraft radio. Early flight navigation relied mostly on
visual landmarks. In some states, towns over a certain size (e.g., a population of 4,000 in Maryland) were required to paint their names prominently on a roof or large tank for the benefit of flyers. Amelia Earhart herself wrote, “An arrow pointing the direction to the nearest landing field is also desirable.”23 According to Bouck, “Piloting a plane across country... is a tiresome undertaking, requiring constant vigilance of the man at the controls. Winds move much more rapidly than sluggish ocean currents, and the plane travels so fast that it requires only small errors in compass or judgment to throw the flyer off his course.”24 Worst of all, visual landmarks could not help at night, with low clouds or fog, or at sea. Navigation by radio waves would have no such limits. A. K. Ross noted, “No longer will it be necessary for the long-distance flyer, crossing the trackless ocean or fog-hidden land, to be isolated from those on land and sea as effectively as though he were on a different planet.”25 Radio beacons would point the way—literally. Using a system developed by the National Bureau of Standards in the mid-to-late 1920s, a central radio tower would support the tops of two large, side-by-side triangular loops, each of which would broadcast an aero band signal (315–350 kHz). Both would use the same frequency, but one would be modulated with a 65-cycle tone and the other at 85 cycles. The setup would allow these signals to propagate in figure-eight patterns at right angles to each other. Using a goniometer (an “overgrown variometer”),


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the orientations of the two figure eights could be rotated to any desired compass bearing without physically moving the antenna. The 65-cycle and 85-cycle signals would be of equal strength only at the centerlines of the four areas of overlap (see Fig. 6). A plane using a nondirectional antenna (often a 5- or 10-foot vertical rod) would receive the signals, which would be amplified and detected; the signals would ultimately cause two mechanically resonant reeds (one resonating at 65 cycles, the other at 85 cycles) to vibrate up and down rapidly, tracing out apparent white lines side-by-side on a black background. The lines would be of equal length when the signals were of equal strength, indicating an approach (or departure—beacons could be used for both) along the desired course (see Fig. 7). A shorter line on one side meant that the plane
was off course in that direction and the pilot would turn in the direction of the longer line until the two were equal.26 This visual indication enjoyed some advantage over a competing system that had used audio signals sending letters in code (A and N—with the di dah and dah dit starting at the same time so that it came out as a long dah or T, along the centerline). The pilot or navigator would have a hard time hearing these above engine noise (which he would rather listen to for signs of malfunction) and interference, even with the best headphone-equipped helmet.27 All of which points out just a few of the many problems that needed to be overcome in developing aircraft radio systems.
Aircraft Radio Challenges
Bouck describes various problems that had to be addressed in the design of radios for aircraft in an article entitled “The Problems of Aircraft Radio”
Fig. 6. Field characteristics of radiating loop antenna system for radio beacon. The two signals are of equal strength only along the crosshatched area. (Radio Design, Vol. 1, No. 4, Fall 1931, p. 127)
Fig. 7. Radio beacon indicator for panel mounting in plane. The instrument was “about the size of a pack of cigarettes.” (Radio Design, Vol. 1, No. 4, Fall 1931, p. 125)


42 The AWA Review
Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
published in Radio News. He writes, “A plane is capable of lifting a certain gross weight.”28 After subtracting out the machine itself, pilot, fuel and oil, “what is left is payload, and comprises passengers and express or mail.” Every pound added in radio equipment, antenna, and radio operator, including the effective poundage added by wind resistance of externally placed radio accessories like a generator, was one pound less that the plane could carry for profit. Aerial radiotelephony (voice) had an advantage over telegraphy (code) in that the radio operator’s weight would be eliminated and the pilot didn’t need to transmit and receive code, which required the use of hand and brain. Most pilots were not proficient in code and didn’t want to deal with it.29 But even after adding in the weight of an operator, telegraphy was still more efficient than telephony. As Table 1 shows, after including the operator’s weight for telegraphy (assumed to be 150 pounds here), pound-for-pound a readable code signal would still reach further than voice. With either method,
making the apparatus as lightweight as possible helped maximize payload, and aircraft radio found extensive use for aluminum in place of iron and steel wherever possible. Perhaps the biggest problem to confront aircraft radio designers in those days was noise caused by the ignition system with its multitude of spark generators and the audible noise of the engines themselves. Both were much worse than for autos and far harder to deal with. The U.S. Navy as well as many radio companies had found that the entire ignition system including plugs, high-tension wires, magnetos, and even the magneto switches needed to be shielded. This was best done at the time the plane was built, but unfortunately aircraft manufacturers didn’t seem too concerned with this. The audio noise generated by aircraft engine was another problem, and vibration of the plane could wreak havoc on vacuum tubes and create loud microphonics. Shock mounting the sets to the rack with just the right degree of rigidity and the use of special tubes helped with the
Table 1. Airplane Radio Ranges at 300 kc. (Z. Bouck, Radio News, July 1929, p. 20)
Power (W) Telephone Telegraph
(Antenna) Weight
(lbs)
Distance (mi)
Weight* (lbs)
Distance (mi)
50 100 50 250 200
100 175 100 300 300
150 200 120 325 350
200 250 135 350 400
250 275 150 375 450
*Including 150 pound weight of operator


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latter. According to Bouck, who had worked for Arcturus, the heavy-cathode AC Arcturus tubes were the best. The vibrations also affected variable condenser plates, causing rapid fluctuations in capacitance and therefore wavelength. Larger or more numerous, thicker (0.0025 inch) plates with wider spacing were called for. For ground-based applications, raising the antenna up high enough is never easy, but getting a good ground usually is. Aloft, the problem is strangely reversed. The metal fuselage (or frame with canvas-covered planes such as the Pilot Radio) could be used as a counterpoise surrogate for ground, but that required special preparation. All metallic parts not rigidly fastened together had to be bonded into a single electrical structure to provide a good counterpoise and reduce noise caused by rubbing together and sparking at imperfect contacts.30 Again, this was something best done during aircraft manufacture, but that often didn’t happen. Bouck tells of his own experience where a radio serviceman bonding structural elements accidentally bonded a rudder cable to a flipper control tube putting both rudder and elevator out of commission, which resulted in a narrow escape from what could have been a fatal crash caused by a radio serviceman improperly installing the ignition shielding.31 For airborne antennas of the late 1920s, the trailing wire type then in use came with a host of problems. The advantages were that the length of antenna reeled out could be adjusted to resonate at the desired frequency,
aerodynamic drag was modest, space and weight allocations were small, and there was no drag when not in use. But there were many disadvantages aside from a flyer forgetting to reel them out (or reel them in before landing). The line was typically terminated with a one or two pound lead “fish” to keep it from flapping around and tearing itself to bits or wrapping itself around the wings. If it were let out too quickly, the wind could take it, causing the whole antenna to snap off. A drag mechanism similar to that used on a fishing reel was called for, and more sophisticated antennas came with a centrifugal clutch to keep the release rate even. Still, things went wrong—farmers complained that their houses or barns were “beaned” by lead weights falling from the sky. Trailing wire antennas weren’t much use for planes on the ground. Another problem was the directionality of a relatively long wire antenna. This made it unsuitable for use with directional beacons mentioned previously. Loop antennas could be used and could even provide radio direction finding (RDF) for transmitters like broadcast radio stations, but they had to be mounted externally (that drag factor again), were low gain, and couldn’t be used to transmit. Bouck noted that a loop used with a superheterodyne broadcast band receiver was much less perturbed by ignition noise than other arrangements. Various configurations of dipoles strung from wingtips, fuselage, and tail were sometimes used, but were too short to have much gain on a small plane, particularly at the long


44 The AWA Review
Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
aero band wavelengths then in use. The best antenna to use seemed to be “up in the air.”
The Flying Laboratory
At the time Pilot Radio entered the field, the idea of airborne radio was not new. As noted by Arthur Lynch, radio and aviation grew up at about the same time and even in the same neighborhood. He observed that Professor Fessenden “conducted much of his preliminary work on radio on Roanoke Island, just about three miles from where the Wright brothers were doing their first work with gliders at Kitty Hawk, at the same time.”32 Aircraft wireless telegraphy from the plane to ground by spark transmission predated World War One, primarily due to its “eye in the sky” military potential for aerial reconnaissance and artillery spotting.33 Airborne wireless equipment had played an important role in the first transatlantic crossing by the U.S. Navy flying boat NC-4 in 1919,34 and a lesser one in Admiral Richard Byrd’s 1926 flight to the North Pole.35 Although the market for aircraft radio among explorers would always be miniscule, the markets for military aviation, airmail and airfreight, and the expanding passenger air service were huge. The fact that radio in those days had been tied to exploration and adventure in the public’s mind offered a way of increasing sales of whatever the company happened to manufacture. After all, Eugene McDonald hadn’t outfitted the MacMillan expedition with his company’s equipment with the goal
of marketing it to the Inuit peoplesalthough if anyone could do that he could. Instead, he provided a way for ordinary Americans to make a vicarious connection to the thrill of Arctic exploration without risking frostbite or having to eat their dogs—simply by buying a radio marked “Zenith.”36 Others in the radio business had tapped into the romance and adventure of flying for promotional purposes as well, including Powel Crosley, who sometimes supplied his radios to selected dealers in well-publicized flights of his personal plane.37 His company even manufactured a plane for a while, the Crosley Moonbeam.38 In short, an association with airplanes or exploration could sell radios—or anything else. Whether Pilot Radio ever seriously aimed to build and sell receivers and transmitters for the small plane market (where most pilots didn’t want to be bothered with what they’d initially see as another complication), or the commercial flight or military aircraft markets (which corporate giants like RCA, GE, and Western Electric had already sunk their talons into) is debatable.39 More likely, the impetus behind Pilot Radio’s efforts had to do with Goldberg’s aerial enthusiasm. He had previously sold aeronautical parts and even model planes. In 1909 and 1910 he had worked with Glenn Curtiss at Curtiss Field. As Pilot’s president, Goldberg had a landing strip built near his home in Westchester County, and his use of the Pilot Radio for business travel no doubt allowed for tax advantages to help defray its expense.40


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A second and more practical reason for Pilot’s involvement in aero communications was to use Pilot Radio flights, which involved constant air-to-ground HF contact, to generate publicity and boost sales of their popular shortwave Super Wasp receivers, a Bouck-modified version of which their plane carried. Whatever the reasons, between 1928 and 1930 Pilot Radio acquired, maintained, equipped, and flew a “flying laboratory,” a Stinson Detroiter monoplane aptly christened the Pilot Radio. Other companies had their own flying laboratories as well, including RCA, which also used a Stinson Detroiter and flew it cross-country, awarding prizes to the amateurs who communicated with it at the greatest distances.41 Pilot Radio’s interest in airborne radio likely began in 1927, the year of the Lindbergh transatlantic flight. An article in the Brooklyn Standard Union on May 15 states that Milton B. Sleeper, a “well known radio engineer and originator of the transatlantic receiving tests in 1919,” had joined Pilot as Chief Research Director.42 Sleeper, who was four years older than Bouck, had also started out in amateur radio before World War One. Soon he was writing about the latest radio circuits and kit building for magazines such as Everyday Engineering. He later founded his own magazines, including Radio and Model Engineering, and, much later, High Fidelity. Like Bouck, he was a prolific writer and a colorful figure in radio history. Although Alan Douglas refers to him as “primarily a writer” in Radio Manufacturers of the 1920’s,43
Sleeper’s technical abilities must have been considerable as well since he not only had his own radio company in the early 1920s, but he also had been a radio engineer for Western Electric.44 He would later go on to serve as editor of the Proceedings of the Radio Club of America.45 His plunge into aviation may have begun with his decision to volunteer for the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) during World War One. He had ground training in Toronto and the fascinating accounts he published about it in Everyday Engineering may be the only known documentation of that process.46 Sleeper was discharged from the RFC, which had an overabundance of volunteers, after only five months, and he apparently never flew in combat.47 A Popular Aviation article in early 1929 identified Sleeper as overseeing the f lying laboratory.48 Curiously, although the Pilot Radio name and logo can be seen painted on the plane behind him in an accompanying photo, the article never once mentions Pilot Radio, which could not have pleased Goldberg. It would not be the last time Pilot’s pricey sponsorship would be unreported, its public relations and promotional value lost. How long Sleeper stayed at Pilot Radio is unclear; a month after that article appeared, his primary affiliation was with his own Sleeper Research Laboratories, from which he penned an article deriding the type of spinning disc television that Pilot had worked on.49 Although correct about the limits of that technology, it seems he chose to rub salt in Goldberg’s wound.


46 The AWA Review
Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
Bouck and Sleeper must have known each other, since both were early amateurs, engineers, writers, and members of New York’s Radio Club of America, and Bouck had taken over as editor of Radio Engineering magazine following Sleeper’s departure in 1927. Bouck began his affiliation with Pilot Radio the following year, overlapping with Sleeper for a time. Their hierarchical relationship at that point is not known. Aviation Week reported that both Bouck and Sleeper oversaw Pilot’s radio engineering.50 But then again, they also reported that they were working on aero television. After Sleeper’s departure from Pilot, however, there is no doubt that Bouck, with the title of Engineer in Charge of Aeronautics, led its aerial efforts.51
Aerial Feats
By 1930, many dazzling aerial feats had already been accomplished by deathdefying (if they were lucky), leatherhelmeted, flying idols—the rock stars of their day. Charles Lindbergh had successfully soloed the 3,500 miles across the Atlantic from New York to Paris three years earlier, becoming a national hero and the most famous man in America overnight. About three months later, pilot Roger Q. Williams and able navigator Lewis “Lon” Yancey attempted the 4,000+ mile transatlantic flight from Maine to Rome.52 Their first attempt ended in a plane wreck, but some people never learn. They set out again in the Bellanca monoplane The Pathfinder, and by flying blind part of the way, they were able to reach that
destination after an emergency landing in Spain. Arriving in Rome, they were greeted by Air Marshal Italo Balbo, cheered by admiring throngs, and decorated by Il Duce (Mussolini) himself.53 New York Times headlines and a parade down Broadway followed upon their return. Two weeks earlier, on the opposite side of the United States, two Army Air Corps flyers, Lieutenants Albert Hegenberger and Lester Maitland (in whose honor two streets near the Oakland, California, airport are still named), accomplished the first nonstop “hop” from the U.S. mainland across the Pacific to the Hawaiian Islands. Starting from Oakland, they set down their Fokker C-2 trimotor, Bird of Paradise, some 2,400 miles away at Wheeler Field on Oahu the next morning (see Fig. 8).54 Interestingly, although radio beacons had been installed at both fields, because of spotty reception and limited range at both ends,55 the oldfashioned, visible beacon of the Kilauea lighthouse proved more useful in guiding the flyers to their destination.56 By April of 1930, many of the biggest feats in long distance aviation had already been accomplished. But one peculiar challenge remained: no one had ever flown a plane from the U.S. mainland to the tiny islands of Bermuda, just over 700 miles away. Bermuda had neither runways nor radio beacons, and unlike the European continent (almost 4 million square miles) or the Hawaiian Island chain (4000 square miles), at 20.5 square miles it was truly “a dot in the ocean.” In those


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days before LORAN, GPS, or Google Maps, when aerial navigation (or “avigation” as it was sometimes called) was via compass, sextant, and other dated methods, a deviation of just a few degrees could mean never seeing land and being stranded at sea, far from help, or worse, as befell Amelia Earhart in the Pacific seven years later. So the challenge remained. Bermuda was a British dependency, and therefore not subject to U.S. Prohibition, making it a very popular destination for wealthy American tourists in those years. A two-day trip by steamer was the only way to get there. The island’s merchants, however, realized the economic opportunities that tourists arriving by air could present, and just getting a plane to reach the islands was the obvious first step.
Armstrong’s Seadromes
Interestingly, Armstrong had an idea that would convert that step into two
shorter ones—that is, Edward R. Armstrong, an engineer and former aviator. He proposed that a giant (1,100 foot long, 28,000 ton) floating mid-ocean platform be constructed about halfway between Bermuda and the United States.57 This would ride 80 feet above the surface, anchored to the sea floor with steel cables, and it would come complete with a landing strip, radio and visible light beacons, a weather station, service and refueling facilities, and a hotel equipped with a Prohibition-free bar for nervous passengers and thirsty aviators.58Armstrong had met with, and received encouragement from, Bermudian officials. The first seadrome, the Langley, was to be anchored 395 miles southeast of New York. Although a concept endorsed by many, including Igor Sikorsky,59 the Armstrong seadrome fell victim to the unpredictable (poor financial timing) as well as the totally predictable (planes with extended ranges). Armstrong attempted for years to revive
Fig. 8. Arrival of the Bird of Paradise, the first flight from the United States to Hawaii, at Wheeler Field, Oahu, June 29, 1927. (Photo on display at the Kilauea lighthouse in Hawaii, credited to U.S. Air Force Museum)


48 The AWA Review
Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
the seadrome idea in the interest of patriotism (boosting jobs during the Depression, bringing bits of America closer to Europe whether they wanted them there or not), or in a seedier form, as a tourist destination “beyond the reach of the 18th Amendment,”60 which would only have to be “free from practices that would shock the conscience of mankind.”61 But the Langley and its kin would be at sea only in the figurative sense. The technology Armstrong pioneered, though, would later enable the development of offshore oil rigs.
Bermuda Safety Prize
To encourage efforts to reach it by air, with or without seadromes, the Bermuda Trade Development Board had offered a prize of £2,000 (about $140,000 today) to be awarded to the first flyer to reach it from the United States.62 Although it was termed the Bermuda Safety Prize (see Fig. 9) and would supposedly be awarded based on the safety measures employed rather
than speed, doubts were raised that it might instead only serve to lure reckless flyers to their doom. Lost at sea or crash-and-burn would be bad for business, not to mention the airmen. At the behest of the Director of the National Aeronautical Society in the United States, the prize offer was withdrawn before anyone tried for it.63 But the lure of being the first remained. Prize or no prize, there was the glory that went along with the risk, and to many flyers that was enough. On October 28, 1928, the Ireland N-2B Neptune amphibian Flying Fish, with pilot W. N. “Bill” Lancaster, navigator Henry W. “Harry” Lyon, and passenger George Palmer Putnam, publisher and future husband of Amelia Earhart, attempted the nonstop flight from Long Island Sound, with Amelia herself waving goodbye from shore. Other than Putnam, this was an experienced crew. Lancaster was a pioneering aviator and Lyon a legendary character who had recently been the navigator on
Fig. 9. Bermuda Safety Prize announcement and map. (Aero Digest, September 1927, p. 276)


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the first flight from the United States (Oakland) to Australia (via Hawaii and Fiji).64 But great expectations couldn’t lift the ship. Placid waters made for too much surface tension, making it impossible for the heavily laden flying boat to take flight. The ship was later able to hop off from Hampton Roads, Virginia, but various problems including water in the gas were blamed for it ultimately setting down off Atlantic City, New Jersey, rather than Hamilton, Bermuda.65 The flight of the Flying Fish to Bermuda was postponed and later rescheduled, but it never took place.66 Among those who thought they could do better was Captain Lewis Yancey (see Fig. 10), the navigator on
the much-publicized Williams flight to Rome. A native Chicagoan, he had enlisted in the U.S. Navy at 16, had been a lieutenant in World War One, received master mariner certification in civilian life, then joined the U.S. Coast Guard, becoming interested in aviation and especially the application of the science of navigation to flying. A true navigator’s navigator, Yancey went on to write a book on aerial navigation.67 He found the challenge of locating that dot in the ocean irresistible, and publicly announced that given just 48 hours’ notice he could guide any good plane and pilot to Bermuda.68 William H. Alexander was one good pilot. A World War One flyer and flight instructor who had trained at the Wright brothers’ aviation school, he held the Fédération Aéronautique
Internationale, or FAI (an international organization based in Paris), flying license No. 1.69 But unlike Yancey, Alexander had recently experienced more ignominy than adulation. On Saturday, September 7th of the fateful year 1929, after dropping off six passengers from his Coastal Airways plane at North Beach he took off again but soon ran out of fuel. Taking his seaplane down off Coney Island in the fog, he landed among the shocked bathers at Seventh Street, killing two children and wounding ten other people. Alexander, “haggard and grief-stricken,” held that his water landing would have injured no one had not a wing accidentally struck a warning sign, deflecting the plane into the bathers. Nevertheless, his pilot’s license was revoked and he was charged
Fig. 10. Captain Lewis Alonzo “Lon” Yancey, navigator on the historic flight of the Pilot Radio to Bermuda. (Aero News and Mechanics, Vol. 2, No. 1, Feb. 1930, p. 9)


50 The AWA Review
Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
with homicide.70 In what now seems too far-fetched for even a Perry Mason courtroom drama, the judge agreed to fly with Alexander in a reenactment, after which he suggested further safety regulations for aviators and not only cleared him of all charges but noted that it was “a marvelous experience.”71 Alexander’s license was soon reinstated. How navigator Yancey, pilot Alexander, and radioman Bouck came together on the Pilot Radio for the historic first flight to Bermuda and exactly what their hierarchical relationship was are not exactly clear. Bouck was no stranger to Bermuda; he had already visited the islands ten times,72 including at least once with his wife Charlotte,73 and he had friends there. A document providing important clues to the origin of the Bermuda flight can be found in the Bermuda Archives.74 On January 9, 1930, Zeh Bouck wrote to J. P. Hand, the chairman of the Bermuda Trade Development Board, that a friend, Allan Thompson, suggested that he contact Hand about flying to Bermuda. Bouck said he was “seriously contemplating” flying to Bermuda from New York within the next month “if it is worth while.” “Can you,” he asked, “get the Board of Trade to put up a cash price [sic] for the first flight to the Islands?” He must have been aware of the previously withdrawn prize, and was hoping to get it reinstated. “I should like to know what the Board of Trade can offer me and my co-pilot for the first and necessarily historic flight to your beautiful islands.” This, and a later reference (“I am flying my ship to
Miami. . .”) would seem to indicate that Bouck, who needed crutches to walk due to what one newspaper account said was “infantile paralysis” (childhood polio),75 could still fly a plane. A number of other accounts over the years suggest this as well,76 and reports of Bouck driving a car can also be found. A recent search was not able to uncover a pilot’s license for Bouck, but these can be hard to find, and in those days some flyers (including Lewis Yancey) apparently considered them optional.77 So for now, this remains yet another unknown in the story of his life.78 Another surprising thing about Bouck’s letter is his affiliation. His letterhead was from Mackinnon Fly Publications, Inc., the publisher of Aero News & Mechanics, of which he was the Managing Editor. Neither his employer, the plane’s owner (Pilot Radio), nor radio in general is mentioned at all. In the letter, Bouck noted that his secondary purpose was to arrange for a series of annual air races to Bermuda, to be sponsored “more or less” by Aero News & Mechanics (see Fig. 11). Bouck mentioned that manufacturers (aircraft, instrument, or radio?) and pilots were enthusiastic about this, and informed Hand that he was tentatively scheduling the races for May! This letter and a few other available documents on Bouck’s private business dealings give the impression that, rather than being meek and mild as one might expect from his photos, Bouck’s was a hardnosed, “take-charge” personality that would put Alexander Haig to shame. Being crammed into a confined space


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Fig. 11. Cover of Aero News and Mechanics, Volume 2, Number 1, Feb. 1930. Zeh Bouck was Managing Editor for this magazine, published by Experimenter Publications, and originally envisioned it sponsoring a first flight to Bermuda followed by annual races to the island.


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Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
(the Pilot Radio) on stressful missions with two other gentlemen similarly not lacking in ego or self-proclaimed authority surely had interesting consequences, but unfortunately little about this remains in the historical record. In writing to Hand, Bouck didn’t fail to note that “we all appreciate the publicity and trade that would accrue to Bermuda as a result of my primary flight and the subsequent annual races.” Bouck did receive a reply to his letter—a negative one. He was advised to “abandon any such idea until proper navigational and meteorological facilities exist.”79 Bermuda had already voted funds for the construction of a meteorological station and planned to eventually install a radio beacon, but the government was slow to act, which may, in fact, have prompted the flyers to hurry up and reach the islands while doing so was still a challenge. Replying to the Bermudian objections, the ever-resourceful Bouck wrote back, suggesting that Bermuda station BZB could be used as a navigational aid (RDF). Permission to land, required by international convention, was never granted,80 the prize was not reinstated, and the proposed races would never take place, but the proposed first flight to Bermuda did... “more or less.”
The Flight to Bermuda
Preparations
Financial support for the flight came from a variety of companies. Isidor Goldberg, provided the lion’s share by providing the Pilot Radio, the radio
equipment, and payments for the crew. Goldberg no doubt anticipated his company’s name being featured nationwide in news accounts of the flight. Richfield Oil provided the fuel and oil. The Pioneer Instrument Company was a sponsor. The Edo Corporation, named from the initials of founder Earl Dodd Osborn, fitted the “ship” with the pontoons that would allow for water takeoff and landing. This was carried out in secret lest someone else beat them to the punch. Aero News & Mechanics was apparently not involved,81 but other publications, notably the New York Times, were. In fact, Bouck would be pounding out exclusive in-flight dispatches to the Times radio station WHD on 43rd Street in Manhattan and its chief engineer and crack operator, R. J. Iverson, thus reducing to practice the idea of constant two-way air-toground HF communication. WHD already had an impressive record of DX communications with explorers and flyers (although not necessarily continuous contact) and would build on this in coming years.82 The Pilot Radio itself was a recently manufactured, modified 6-seat Stinson SM-1FS “Detroiter” high-wing monoplane (NR 487H) powered by a 9-cylinder, 300 horsepower Wright “Whirlwind” (J-6) engine, with brakes by Harley Davidson (see Fig. 12). The ship, acquired in mid-to-late 1929 to replace an earlier Pilot Radio flying lab (a Stinson SM-1B, NC 4876),83 was specially equipped with extra gas tanks in the wings, for a total fuel capacity of 200 gallons, enough to cruise at 100


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mph for 12 hours. Oil could be added from inside the plane. It had a maximum speed of 135 mph and a service ceiling of 17,000 feet.84 Its rated carrying capacity was 4,700 pounds, but the fully laden plane at takeoff would weigh 5,200 pounds.85 The plane would carry two transmitters, one longwave (600–1100 meters) for the old aero beacon/emergency band and the other a shortwave transmitter (35–50 meters) for anticipated in-flight communications. Both were housed in a single unit, and both employed a Hartley oscillator. Communications would be entirely radiotelegraph. All of the radio equipment had been built by Pilot Radio under Bouck’s direction. The receiver was a modified AC Super Wasp that used Arcturus AC tubes, which, with heavy cathodes, were less prone to microphonics than DC tubes. Special coils allowed it to be tuned between 14 and 1200 meters. Receiver and transmitters were combined in a single unit suspended from the top of the plane’s frame. An Exide “non-spillable,” 12-volt, lead-acid aircraft battery supplied filament voltage
to both receiver and transmitters and powered an Esco dynamotor that fed 1000 volts at 100 milliamps to the plate of the De Forest 510A transmitting tube. The Exide, in turn, was continuously charged (except when receiving) by a wind-driven generator mounted on the plane. Receiver B and C voltage was supplied by Eveready batteries. A trailing antenna of variable length was used. Communications would be carried out with the antenna spooled out to 90 feet to work the third harmonic on 41 meters. When not in the air, an emergency antenna could be strung up between the wingtips or flown via kite,
Fig. 12. The Pilot Radio, Pilot’s “flying laboratory,” a Stinson SM-1FS Detroiter that made the historic first trip from the U.S. mainland to Bermuda. (Aero News and Mechanics, Vol. 2, No. 1, Feb. 1930, p. 52)
Fig. 13. Zeh Bouck at his station aboard the Pilot Radio. (Radio News, July 1930, p. 12)


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Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
and Bouck estimated there would be enough power to communicate for ten hours without charging.86 The entire radio setup weighed 140 pounds, and the plane’s callsign was W2XBQ (see Fig. 13).
The Bermuda Short Hop
It was April Fool’s Day, 1930, but the mission that day was dead serious. The flyers were eager to hop off as soon as possible to forestall possible competition for the title of first to fly from the United States to Bermuda, but weather was a major factor. For advice on weather, they turned to Dr. James H. Kimball, chief meteorologist at the New York Weather Bureau, whom Bouck referred to as “that Palladium of oceanic flyers”87 (i.e., their protector). He had prognosticated weather conditions for Lindbergh for his famous transatlantic flight and for Byrd on his flight to the North Pole.88 At 11 p.m. on March 31, Kimball’s report had come in: calm weather was predicted the next
day for the entire area between New York and Bermuda. The hop was on (see Fig. 14). In the wee small hours of the morning at Bouck’s New York apartment “provisions had to be packed and other domestic arrangements completed, much to the annoyance of the folks living below. They rapped viciously and repeatedly on their ceiling with some variety of battering ram. After eighteen hours of a hard day’s work, this was an amusing interlude, and I responded, in my kindly way, by dropping encyclopedias on the floor at judicious intervals.”89 After just a couple of hours of sleep, Bouck went to pick up the battery that he had left at a battery station for charging after specifically warning the attendant not to top them off. Batteries meant for airplane use were constructed differently from car batteries to compensate for in-flight sloshing; the cells were not meant to be filled completely. Of course, after a
Fig. 14. The Pilot Radio being towed from its hangar into the water at College Point, Queens, the morning of April 1, 1930, for its historic first flight from the U.S. to Bermuda. (Author’s collection)


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shift change the new attendant took a look, saw the low level, and proceeded to top them off. “I discovered this at 6 a.m. with our takeoff scheduled for a half an hour later,” wrote Bouck. “There was only one thing to do: empty out most of the electrolyte and add sulfuric acid. Unfortunately, there was no sulfuric acid to be found. I tried frantically for a half hour to locate an open drug store without success.” He finally located some at 7:30, dumped the old electrolyte and filled each cell with 24 hydrometers full, one by one. “We blew through the gates at North Beach a quarter hour later, held up for a moment by an importunate member of the press who was clamoring for a story. We explained that we were somewhat busy at the moment, whereupon he sweetly expressed himself with the following sentiment: ‘I hope — — plane sinks!’ This didn’t bother me at the time, though I did recall this touching farewell that night.”90 Because of the battery, Bouck was nearly two hours late for the “hop off” and out of contact with Alexander, Yancey, and others who were probably searching for him the whole time. Usable daylight hours, important for this long flight, had burned away. The greeting he received from his fellow crewmembers can only be imagined; about it he wrote nothing. The plane was afloat on Long Island Sound at Clason Point where the takeoff was attempted. Inauspiciously, the takeoff failed four times in a row because the fair weather had left the waters too calm, which made for high surface
tension, which produced significant drag on the pontoons of the heavily laden plane. This was the same problem that had beset the earlier Bermuda attempt by Lancaster and Lyon. Even the big 300-horsepower Wright Whirlwind engine struggled with this. Takeoffs in choppy water were easier. To lighten the load, the weight needed to be reduced, and it wouldn’t be surprising if the idea of jettisoning Bouck and his batteries came up. Instead, a sea anchor, spare pontoon plates, and some extra fuel were discarded. The fifth attempt again failed, but the sixth was a charm. This time they took advantage of the wakes created by two ferryboats and some helpful waves created by an assisting Edo seaplane. “Bill Alexander gave her the gun,” chronicled Bouck. “In another second the Pilot Radio was on the step, the bumps becoming sharper and sharper as the air speed indicator rose from fifty to fifty-five, sixty, sixtyfive miles an hour. One more sharp rap on the pontoons and we were off. We gained altitude rapidly and cleared the bridges in good style.” Yancey remembered it differently. “I saw the Hells Gate Bridge straight ahead. I pointed it out to Bill. He nodded and said he saw it. Meanwhile, when destruction seemed certain and it appeared we were going to crash into it, Zeh Bouck, calmly oblivious, proceeded to reel out his fishing line antenna . . .”91 The oblivious Bouck then began his radiotelegraph dialog with the New York Times station WHD. “What provisions were they carrying?” asked the


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Times. “Rations on board consist of two broiled chickens, four boxes wholewheat crackers, five pounds of chocolate, twelve oranges, five gallons water, one quart Scotch,” he radioed back. In those Prohibition days, the last item seemed to create some excitement, but Bouck noted that it was for medicinal use only—later observing that they were probably the only ones ever bringing whiskey to Bermuda. Yancey took sightings by sextant after sliding back a plastic (pyralin) window at the top of the cabin, letting in 100 mph winds. Sightings taken through the pyralin would have been more comfortable, but they would have been in error because of its refraction.92 Yancey carried three Longines chronographs so that if one got out of whack the other two would give a consensus on which one was in error. The plane sped on its way at an altitude of 2,000 feet. Bouck communicated with WHD regularly the whole way, and the station relayed his messages.93 At 1:55 p.m. Bouck sent a message, “Greetings from mid-Atlantic to you, mother....JACK.” WHD was asked to relay hotel reservations to BZB in Bermuda. Yancey asked Bouck to tap out, “The sky is partly cloudy and we hope it will get no worse, as it might prove hard to find the islands.” At 5:20 p.m. the message from the Pilot Radio was, “If we don’t see the islands pretty soon, we will set her down for the night. If we have to set her down for the night, don’t let anyone worry about us. The sea is like a lake.” Fifteen minutes later the update was, “we may make it and
we may not.” It was getting dark and they had been fighting headwinds. The morning’s delay loomed larger and larger. Had Yancey really steered them on the correct course? At 5:50 PM a decision was reached: “Setting her down right now. Position sixty miles north of Bermuda. Tell everyone not to worry... Will continue to Bermuda in the morning.” GN (good night) followed. The New York Times would tell its readers the next morning: “TwoHour Delay in Taking Off Is Blamed for Failure to Reach Objective.” Bouck decided that after landing on the water, he would let his notorious batteries rest until morning rather than string up an emergency antenna and run them down overnight. Fully charged batteries would be most useful in case of problems taking off in the morning. While the Pilot Radio had been fitted out with pontoons for water takeoff and landing, actually being able to land on the open, rolling sea and then take off again the next morning after the engine had potentially been sprayed with brine all night was not assured. And with the sea anchor left behind, there was the possibility of drifting into a coral reef overnight that could sink the plane (after all, there was that reporter’s curse). In fact, to that date no plane forced down in the middle of the ocean had ever successfully taken off again. For one thing, as Bouck was to note, “water is a hard thing to hit at 60 miles per hour.” But Alexander, an experienced seaplane pilot, managed to set her down and the Edo pontoons held. Seen up close, the


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sea turned out to be rather unlike a lake. The sea anchor having been jettisoned, a couple of 10-quart pails were strung together to provide some stability, but these proved useless for much of the time. Afloat, the flyers endured swells and pitches. “‘Gentlemen, I’m going to be sick,’ Alexander said. And he was.” The plane was too far away from Bermuda for it to have been spotted, and the flyers rather conspicuously made no attempt to contact the Bermudian authorities, who had pointedly denied them permission to land there in the first place.94 Bermudians were therefore unaware of the plane’s presence off their shores until a cable from New York reached them after 8 p.m. The sound reasons behind denying landing permission then became apparent. With incomplete information from New York and nothing from the plane, Bermudian authorities had to assume that it was in distress and mobilize their resources for assistance. Much to their credit, this they did, fully and immediately. Bermudian authorities tried to communicate with W2XBQ (the Pilot Radio) at the 600 meter (500 kHz) international emergency frequency from their St. George’s wireless station, which was kept open all night, but received only silence in return. A little-publicized consequence of the Pilot Radio’s silence was that U.S. East Coast radio stations briefly shut down at about 5:52 p.m. Eastern time per protocol to “clear the airwaves” for a possible 500 kHz SOS transmission.95 Upon learning that the plane had been working 41 meters, the Bermu
dians attempted to reach the flyers on that band as well, but the De Forest 510A tube remained unlit, perhaps unlike the flyers with their bottle of Scotch. Searchlights were switched on. A lookout was kept at the Gibb’s Hill lighthouse. All ships anywhere in the vicinity were asked to be on the lookout. Arrangements (which included insurance issues and financial considerations) were made to have a steam tender, the Mid-Ocean, leave Hamilton at dawn to search for them.96 In short, the Bermudian authorities went to great lengths to aid the aviators perceived to be in distress, who had given them no notice, intentionally remained silent, had been warned not to attempt it, and were pointedly informed that no assistance would be offered if they did. Three times during the night the flyers spotted the lights of a ship in the distance. After considering the possibility that it might be out looking for them, at 3:15 a.m. they fired off the “Very pistol” (a flare gun). The ship, which turned out to be the Canadian steamer Lady Sommers, hove to and headed towards them. They could have communicated with her at some distance by code using a flashlight, but Yancey had lost the plane’s only flashlight while inspecting the pontoons. Fortunately, this was a problem that even the dullest of the Radio Boys—much less Zeh Bouck himself—could easily solve. Gathering together a spare bulb, a couple of wires, and an extra flashlight battery he tapped out Morse messages, touching wire to battery terminal. The Lady Sommers had in fact been sent out to


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look for them and offered to take them aboard. Its captain was surprised at the flyers’ reply; they did not wish to be rescued. They would weather the swells for the rest of the night and proceed to Hamilton in the morning, asking Captain Armit to kindly relay the message.
Land Ho!
At daybreak, around 5:40 a.m., despite the swells and seasickness, “Bill [pilot William Alexander] showed his mastery of a ticklish job, and for the first time in the history of flying, a plane forced down in the middle of the ocean took off again.” Five minutes later the antenna was out again, the 50-watt transmitter and modified Pilot Super Wasp receiver fired up, and there on 41 meters was the radio operator at WHD New York, “as loud and clear as when we were over the East River,” happy to find the adventurers alive and well and approaching Bermuda. He informed them that some
other New York papers had already written them off as dead, “which news amused the lads up forward [Alexander and Yancey].” A copy of the message they sent to Edo 10 minutes after taking off praising the quality of their pontoons is shown in Fig. 15. At 6:15 a.m., an island was spotted dead ahead—Yancey had made good on his boast, guiding them on a beeline to Bermuda. Bouck would go on to chronicle this flight in at least four publications: Radio News, Radio Design, The New York Sun, and Yachting.97 These accounts differ slightly in length and a few minor details, but for the most part are quite consistent, even using the same text—recycling copy having always been popular among writers. The first three of these, however, end with the sighting of Bermuda in the distance that April morning and Bouck calling Yancey “the finest aerial navigator in the world.” The reader is left
Fig. 15. Part of an advertisement for EDO pontoons. Note that the telegram’s letterhead refers to the South American Good Will flight, which would not take place until later, but had apparently been in preparation for some time. Also note that Bouck is listed as navigator and Yancey’s name is absent from the letterhead. (Aero Digest, June, 1930, p. 101)


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with the impression that from there it was just a matter of setting her down in Hamilton Harbor—presumably to loud huzzahs—to complete their historic flight. In fact, the end of the journey was quite a bit more complicated, as Bouck related only in his article in Yachting. Since then, many secondary accounts of the journey either contain differing accounts of this stage or leave it out entirely. But of all the reports at the time or since, Bouck’s eyewitness account most has the “ring of truth” to it and consequently is presented here. With the islands in sight, Bouck asked Alexander how much fuel was left. “About one hour,” he replied. But a few minutes later, “‘Putt . . . putt . . . putt,’ says the motor, and conked . . . Once having heard that sound, it is as easily forgotten as the shake of a rattlesnake’s tail. We were definitely out of gas.” An overly optimistic fuel gauge had deceived them. They had been spotted from shore by Commander Landman, the pilot warden, but they wouldn’t know this until later. Alexander again set Pilot Radio down at sea, this time in an emergency landing about five miles short of the islands “just inside of the reefs.” In fact, their improvised sea anchor actually caught on the rocks just a few feet below the pontoons, temporarily anchoring the plane in place. Bouck began stringing up an emergency antenna, but before they could call for help, the frayed anchor line snapped and the current caused the plane to drift west, “toward New York City,” as Bouck said, but by way of the pontoon-piercing reef.
The story continues at that point: “Bill’s genius rose to the situation. He figured that rocking around out there, as we had been doing for the past half hour, we might have sloshed a quart of gasoline down into the equalization tank. Lon [navigator Lewis Yancey] cranked the engine. She took instantly and Bill gave her the gun with Lon climbing through the door, and ten fathoms of rope and radio antenna streaming out behind. We had two minutes of gas—enough to set down definitely in the steamer channel just off Shelley’s Bay.” Here they were met by Messrs. Tucker and Meyer in a speedboat, the first two from Bermuda to contact the new arrivals. Informed of their dry tanks, they soon went back to get the flyers some gas. In the meantime, along came a more official delegation from Bermuda aboard the Golden Wedding (see Fig. 16). The flyers’ arrival was commemorated on a Bermuda postage stamp many years later (Fig. 17). Mr. J. P. Hand, who had personally been involved in refusing Bouck permission to land in Bermuda, various newsmen, photographers, and others gathered around to gawk at and document the historic spectacle.
Arrests and Celebrations
Amid smiles, handshakes, and slaps on the back, Hand welcomed the crew (see Figs. 18 and 19), and then he proceeded to put them under arrest “for flying over Bermuda without a permit and similar diplomatic necessities.” It wouldn’t be the last time Bouck would be arrested in the course of his adventures. When


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Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
Fig. 16. The Pilot Radio arrives in Bermuda on April 2, 1930. Bouck is sitting atop the plane with “Pilot Radio” showing on his back. (Roddy Williams Collection, Bermuda Archives)
Fig. 18. Another view of the Pilot Radio’s arrival in Bermuda. On the plane: Lewis Yancey, William Alexander, Zeh Bouck, and J. P. Hand. (Roddy Williams Collection, Bermuda Archives)
Fig. 17. Commemorative postage stamp issued by Bermuda in 1983 based on the figure above. (Author’s collection)


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the other boat arrived with the gas, Hand and a Mr. Richardson joined the crew on board the plane as it again went aloft, this time for a quick aerial tour of the islands, after which at last on April 2 at 8 a.m., the plane alighted in Hamilton Harbor (see Fig. 20) in a landing “so smooth that one could not have told that the plane was hitting water.98 When asked if they wanted anything, Yancey replied, “Anything, as long as it’s alcoholic.” Obligingly, a boatload of cocktails and ale from the famous Inverurie Hotel, a favorite of Bouck’s, was brought out to “liven up our brief period of incarceration.” Soon “pratique” was granted, diplomatic rough
Fig. 19. Front: William Alexander, Zeh Bouck (sitting on wing strut), and J. P. Hand. Person on the rear pontoon wearing spats is probably a Mr. Richardson. (Roddy Williams Collection, Bermuda Archives)
Fig. 20. The Pilot Radio arrives in Hamilton and is greeted by officials and spectators. Yancey, Alexander, and Bouck can be seen on the plane near the wing struts. (Roddy Williams Collection, Bermuda Archives)


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spots smoothed over, and the silly arrest forgotten “through a mist of Martini drys.” Later the crew was presented with flowers at the Inverurie Hotel in Hamilton (see Fig. 21). The Bermuda Governor would eventually go on to grant them post hoc landing permission.
Thus began the next phase of their trip, a grueling series of dinners, celebrations, toasts, and speeches. Bouck celebrated his 29th birthday in cocktailladen Bermudian glory. At a dinner in honor of the flyers he was introduced as “outstanding among radio experts
Fig. 21. The flyers are presented with a bouquet of fresh lilies at the Inverurie Hotel in Hamilton on April 2, 1930. Left to right: Miss Kathleen Jones, Lewis Yancey, Zeh Bouck, and William Alexander. (Roddy Williams Collection, Bermuda Archives)


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in the United States, and regarded as the young Fessenden.”99 In fact, Bouck took the occasion to make a pilgrimage to see the real Professor Fessenden and his wife, who were living in Bermuda. She wrote: “We counted it a fine tribute that Mr. Bouck devoted the better part of an afternoon of his short stay on the island to a call at ‘Wistowe’ to pay his respects to the man who had done so much to advance radio. When this call revealed to us the fact of his great physical handicap, it revealed too that the courage which led him to choose his profession must be of a very high order.”100 While the receptions continued in Bermuda, back home the sponsors’ PR machines had sprung to life. Yancey had made a promotional deal with Richfield Oil, which proceeded to praise the aviators for conserving fuel by landing at night rather than trying for the island in the dark. “And the famous Partners in Power, Richfield—California’s famous gasoline and Richlube—100% pure Pennsylvania Motor Oil had scored another triumph.”101 Isidor Goldberg of Pilot Radio, of course, expressed his admiration of the consistency with which the flyers were able to keep in touch at all times using his company’s equipment. Osborn of pontoon-maker Edo was especially pleased with the ocean landings. Pioneer Instruments, manufacturers of the plane’s navigation equipment, noted that the water landing (only one or two were mentioned in American news reports) “served to dispel popular beliefs that sea landings
are always disastrous unless saved by an unusual stroke of luck.”102 The Times in its inimitable way pontificated on lessons learned from the flight, finding the radio signals “remarkable for their clarity all along the 759-mile stretch” and concluding that there should certainly be radio beacons and radio direction finders installed in Bermuda to make flights routine rather than dependent on extraordinary navigation. It found that “what aviation needs is compact, light equipment in the form of receivers, transmitters and radio direction finders.”103 But it said nothing about Pilot Radio equipment—the publicity value of the flight for Pilot was minimal. Most accounts referred to it as “Yancey’s flight” and not “Pilot Radio’s flight”; almost none of them mentioned the Super Wasp. Again, the spotlight had been directed elsewhere. In Bermuda, the flyers met with local U.S. and British officials, which must have been anticlimactic for Yancey after his audiences with Mussolini and the Pope in Rome. Now that the airmen had actually made the journey and lived, the Bermuda Board of Trade, the organization that had earlier offered and then withdrawn the £2,000 Bermuda Safety Prize, voted $1,000 to each of the crewmen to express their gratitude, which must have seemed something like the Bermuda Consolation Prize, but was no doubt still welcomed. Alexander applied for permits to fly local officials around and then fly back home.104 As to how Bermudians viewed the flight, editorials suggest excitement over what it augured for


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eventual connection with North America and Europe by air, but also plenty of caution. “The fact remains that a forced landing happened under favourable conditions and converted what might have been a disaster into a mere unfortunate incident.”105 The extraordinary nature of their flight underscored the need for a radio beacon. “I hope no one else will try this flight until we put in radio beam facilities here, and I believe Captain Yancey would say the same,” Hand concluded.106 Those facilities were a long time in coming, but were in place seven years later when Pan American Airways and Imperial Airways began regular service to Bermuda, employing constant radiotelegraph communications just as Bouck had proposed.
The Heroes Return
The Pilot Radio was inspected by British Navy mechanics, who found a serious problem: the landings at sea had damaged one of the pontoon struts. Lacking the special equipment needed to weld the duralumin alloy they could try fixing it, but couldn’t guarantee that the weld would hold when the again heavilyladen plane took off. There were also other potential problems. No aviationgrade fuel was available in Bermuda, and it would take three weeks to ship some in. The regular gasoline that the plane used for the last few miles would do in a pinch but not for a long flight. And after everything that the Bermudians had already gone through, they were none too keen on the prospect of potentially mounting another search-and-rescue mission, especially for the same flyers.
So the plane was partly dismantled and hauled up onto the deck of the SS Araguaya (see Fig. 22), which sailed for New York with plane and crew. They arrived to a festive reception featuring flyovers by fellow aviators including Emile Burgin, a friend of Yancey’s who had flown the Pilot Radio before and would soon do so again. They shook hands with officials, were photographed, were met by their wives, and feted at the Majestic Theatre that night. Guests of Isidor Goldberg and 200 others at the Biltmore the following evening, they spoke of their overnight ocean experience, which they all agreed was “not bad,” over the NBC radio network via station WJZ. As far as their having made a stop en route (actually, from one to three stops, depending on how you defined the destination), they were satisfied that they had still met their primary but unstated objective, proving conclusively that an air service between New York and Bermuda would be feasible with the proper equipment. When a newspaperman (perhaps the one who laid the unsuccessful curse on Bouck?) tried to spoil the party by telling Alexander of a bootlegger who claimed to have already made regular flights to Bermuda, he dismissed the claim. “I don’t think anyone ever flew there before,” he said.107 A few weeks later Bouck, speaking over WGBS in New York, summarized what their flight had proven: 1) that it was possible to “come down in the middle of the ocean, spend a night, and then take off again,” 2) that it was the first time any plane was able to find


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Bermuda, and 3) that a two-way wireless conversation (in code) could be carried out over the whole route by HF.108 In fact, he was pleasantly surprised that there was no sign of a “skip distance effect,” which at some point (they had estimated 500 miles) would cause the signal to be lost. Quite to the contrary, Bouck had needed to attenuate the overly strong signal at times. In light
of these successful communications, it made little sense to add the weight of a longwave set. He again emphasized that planes making the journey should be in constant contact with a land station.109 When asked whether shortwave communications could be carried out from a plane by “phone” (voice) he said that it could, but would require heavier equipment.110
Fig. 22. Crew and plane returning to the United States aboard the steamer Araguaya. Left to right: Lewis Yancey, William Alexander, and Zeh Bouck. (Collection of Tom Singfield)


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Zeh Bouck, Radio Adventurer
While the dinners and speeches, toasts, interviews, and photos continued, the Pilot Radio was quietly being overhauled. Workers removed her pontoons and gave the plane back her land legs (wheels). She would soon depart on a marathon journey that would make her last adventure seem like a short stroll in the park. To be continued. . . .
Endnotes
1. The South American flight of the Pilot Radio (to be addressed in Part 2) was sponsored by the Hoover administration, and as a member of that party, Bouck was something of an unofficial U.S. ambassador.
2. Thirteenth Census of the United States (1910), Essex County, NJ; Fourteenth Census of the United States (1920), New York, NY; Fifteenth Census of the United States (1930), New York, NY; Enumeration of Inhabitants, New York State (1925), New York City. 3. For general overview, see Bouck White entry in Wikipedia. For writing, see B. White, The Mixing: What the Hillport Neighbors Did (Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1913). For scandals, see New York Times archives. 4. Z. Bouck, “Hamfest,” All-Wave Radio, Mar. 1937, p. 139.
5. Who Was Who Among North American Authors 1921–1939, Volume I (Gale Research Co., Los Angeles, 1976), p. 185. 6. Tewpieye (Zeh Bouck), “A Ham on the Telephone”, QST, Aug. 1920, p. 6. 7. Hundreds of articles by and about Zeh Bouck including many of his regular New York Sun columns are available online at the website Fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html, a valuable resource for this and many other topics.
8. Z. Bouck, Making a Living in Radio (McGrawHill, New York, 1935). 9. “Among Our Authors,” Radio Broadcast, Jun. 1924, p. 188. 10. N. B. Kim, “The Early Radio Days of Harry Kalker,” Antique Radio Classifed, Jul. 1994, p. 8. 11. Radio Design, Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter 1928, p. 132.
12. R. Hertzberg, “Super-Wasp Shortwave Set,” Old Timers Bulletin, Dec. 1970, p. 16.
13. H. Gernsback, “The Old E.I. Co. Days,” Radio News, Mar. 1938, p. 632. 14. “Radio News Publisher in Hands of Receiver,” New York Times, Feb. 21, 1929.
15. R. Hertzberg, “Successful Television Programs Broadcast by Radio News Station WRNY,” Radio News, Nov. 1928, p. 415. 16. Z. Bouck, “Channel Echoes,” All-Wave Radio, May 1937, p. 237.
17. L. Steckler, ed. Hugo Gernsback: A Man Well Ahead of His Time (Poptronix, Inc., Marana, AZ, 2007) p. 327. 18. “Once He Paid to Throw Them Away, Now He Seeks 1928 Vintage Television Sets,” San Bernardino Sun, Apr. 14, 1950.
19. Z. Bouck, “Channel Echoes,” All-Wave Radio, Jan. 1937, p. 19. 20. Robert Hertzberg, “Super-Wasp Short-Wave Set,” Old Timers Bulletin, Vol. 11, No. 3, Dec. 1970, p. 17. 21. D. F. Plant, “Designed for Application: The Story of James Millen, W1HRX,” CQ, Jul. 1967. 22. Quotation from aviation magazine provided by Ed Lyon. My thanks to Ed for this and other valuable insights into early flying and radio communications. 23. A. Earhart, The Fun of It (Harcourt Brace, New York, 1932) p. 91. 24. Z. Bouck, “Making the Air Safe for Traffic,” Radio News, Jun. 1929, p. 1068. 25. A. K. Ross, “Making Radio Easier for Aviators,” Radio News, Sep. 1928, p. 202. 26. S. R. Winters, “Radio Progress,” Popular Aviation, Jul. 1928, p. 36; Z. Bouck, “The Airplane Radio Beacon,” Radio Design, Vol. 1, No. 4, Winter 1928, p. 125; “And NowRadio Guides Airplanes,” Radio News, Feb. 1930, p. 748. 27. S. R. Winters, “Radio Beacons to Guide Planes Across Continent,” Radio Age, Sep. 1926, p. 15. Adopted by the military, the A-N system came to dominate. https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Low-frequency_radio_range. 28. Z. Bouck, “The Problems of Aircraft Radio,” Radio News, Jul. 1929, p. 18. 29. Milton Sleeper, who had trained as a cadet in the Royal Flying Corps, noted that cadets would sometimes break the training transmitter to get out of code practice, which they detested. See A. Perry, “The Flying


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Laboratory,” Popular Aviation & Aeronautics, Feb. 1929, p. 26. 30. See M. F. Eddy, Aircraft Radio (Ronald Press, New York, 1931), Chapter 8.
31. Bouck, Making a Living in Radio, p. 37.
32. A. Lynch, “Radio and Aviation,” Radio News, May 1929, p. 985. 33. See, for example I. M. Philpott, The Birth of the Royal Air Force (Pen and Sword Military, South Yorkshire, UK, 2013), pp. 304–306. For early radio experiments on U.S. Navy planes, see L. S. Howeth, History of CommunicationsElectronics in the United States Navy, chapter XIV, available at http://earlyradiohistory .us/1963hw14.htm. 34. D. Crocker, “Radio and the Historic Flight of the NC-4,” Antique Radio Classified, Jan. 2008, p. 14.
35. S. Bart, Race to the Top of the World: Richard Byrd and the First Flight to the North Pole (Regnery History, Washington, D.C., 2013). 36. For one account of the Commander, a true marketing genius, and the 1925 MacMillan expedition, see J.H. Bryant and H.N. Cones, Dangerous Crossings (Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 2000). 37. D. Crocker, “The Dolphin: Crosley’s Personal Plane,” Antique Radio Classified, Nov. 2005, p. 22. 38. D. Crocker, “Crosley Takes to the Air: The Moonbeam,” Antique Radio Classified, Aug. 2004, p. 9. 39. For a perspective on the state of aircraft radio and the companies involved at the time, see M.F. Eddy, Aircraft Radio, and “Aircraft Radio Communications,” Aero Digest, March 1929, p. 66. 40. Letter from E. Meyer, Secretary to Mr. Goldberg, to Mr. W. L. Hamberger, publisher of the International Cyclopedia of Aviation Biography dated July 28, 1931. Available through Wright State University Special Collections. 41. Ross, Radio News, p. 202; “Flying Radio,” Popular Aviation, Jun. 1928, p. 23. 42. Brooklyn Standard Union, May 15, 1927, p. 12.
43. A. Douglas, Radio Manufacturers of the 1920’s (Sonoran Publishing LLC, Chandler, AZ, 1991), Vol. 3, p. 99. 44. World War One draft registration card for Milton Blake Sleeper, Serial No. 705, Order No. 803, Sep. 12, 1918. 45. Previous editors included Austin Lescarboura
and Carl Dreher. See D. Bart, Comprehensive Index to the Proceedings of the Radio Club of America For 1913-2013, p. xv, available at http://radioclubofamerica.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/07/proceedings-index-opening-pages.pdf. 46. “Sleeper to Be Birdman With the Allies,” Everyday Engineering, Dec. 1917, p. 131; M.B. Sleeper, “Experiences of an R.F.C. Cadet,” Everyday Engineering, Jul. 1918, p. 162; Aug. 1918, p. 201; Oct. 1918, p. 27; and Dec. 1918, p. 125. 47. Neither did Sleeper ever acquire a pilot’s license, as far as a search at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum could determine.
48. Perry, Popular Aviation, p. 26.
49. M. B. Sleeper, “What Price Television?,” QST, Mar. 1929, p. 48. 50. “Stinson Detroiter for Radio Research,” Aviation Week, Jul. 9, 1928. 51. Z. Bouck, “W2XBQ Flies to Bermuda,” Radio News, Jul. 1930, p. 12. 52. H.A . Bruno; W. S. Dutton, “The OceanHopping Bug,” Liberty, May 6, 1933, p. 32. 53. A. Cortesi, “Italians ‘Rush’ Pathfinder,” New York Times, Jul. 11, 1929.
54. M. Maurer, Aviation in the U.S. Army, 19191939 (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C.). Available at http://media. defense.gov/2010/Sep/23/2001330114/-1/1/0/AFD-100923-007.pdf. 55. “Pacific Fliers Led by Radio Beacon,” Science and Invention, Nov. 1927, p. 623. 56. Check out the display inside the Kilauea lighthouse on Kauai, if you can take your eyes off the incredible surrounding landscape and seascape. 57. “The Armstrong Seadrome,” Aero Digest, December 1929, p. 152; Sherwin L., “Seadrome for Atlantic Flyers Will Be Completed in a Year,” New York Evening Post, April 6, 1931. 58. W. Raleigh, “Seadromes,” Flying, February 1930, p. 22. 59. I. I. Sikorsky, “Airplanes of the Future,” Aero Digest, Dec. 1929, p. 54. 60. Unidentified newspaper, “Building of 1st Seadrome Starts Within 90 Days,” Mar. 26, 1931. Available through Wright State University Special Collections. 61. Unidentified newspaper, “Airport at Sea Legal, Inventor Asserts,” Mar. 27, 1931.


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Available through Wright State University Special Collections. 62. “Bermuda Safety Flight Contest,” Aero Digest, Sep. 1927, p. 276.
63. C. A. Pomeroy, The Flying Boats of Bermuda (Colin A. Pomeroy, 2000) p. 10. 64. Lyon was a U.S. Admiral’s son and mariner, and was alleged to also be a bootlegger, gun runner, and many other things besides. See, for example, http://www.mainememory.net/ sitebuilder/site/272/page/531/display?use_ mmn=1. Accessed Jan. 8, 2017. 65. “Putnam and Fliers Hop for Bermuda,” New York Times, Oct. 29, 1928; “Putnam Airplane Arrives at Norfolk,” New York Times, Oct. 30, 1929; “Postpones Flight,” Daily Independent (Murphysboro, Illinois), Nov. 7, 1928. 66. See E. Partridge, T. Singfield, Wings Over Bermuda: 100 Years of Aviation in the West Atlantic (National Museum of Bermuda Press, Old Royal Naval Dockyard, Bermuda, 2014). This meticulously researched, lavishly illustrated volume is the definitive book on Bermudian aviation history, must have been a true labor of love for its authors, and is highly recommended reading. 67. Anyone who thinks that aerial navigation must have been simple in those simpler times is invited to try working out the problems in that book. See L.A. Yancey, Aerial Navigation and Meteorology (Norman H. Henley Publishing, New York, 1929). 68. C. V. Glines, “First Flight to Bermuda,” Aviation History, Jul. 2001. Available at http:// www.historynet.com/aviation-history-firstflight-to-bermuda.htm. Accessed Jan. 8, 2017. 69. See his account of WWI combat, W. Alexander, “Dawn Patrol—A True Story of the R.F.C.,” Aero News and Mechanics, Vol. 2, No. 3, June–July 1930, p. 17. 70. B. Gould, “Yancey Nearing Bermuda on Hop,” New York Evening Post, April 1, 1930. 71. “Pilot of Coney Disaster Hero of Bermuda Flight,” Standard Union (Brooklyn, New York), Apr. 2, 1930, p. 1. 72. “Dinner in Honour of the Fliers,” Royal Gazette and Colonial Daily (Hamilton, Bermuda), Apr. 9, 1930. 73. List of United States Citizens, S.S. Bermuda, sailing from Hamilton to New York, arriving May 3, 1928. 74. Z. Bouck, letter to J.P. Hand, Jan. 9, 1930. Bermuda Archives document CS 3056/8:10.
My thanks to Thomas Singfield who originally unearthed this document. 75. “Zeh Bouck at Summer Home,” The Enterprise (Altamont, New York), May 27, 1932, p. 3. 76. See Z. Bouck, “The First Airplane Reaches Bermuda,” Yachting, Jun. 1930, p. 53, where Bouck says that he could take over for navigator or pilot in an emergency. Also see “Plane Carries Stowaway Back to Maine Home,” Scranton Republican (Scranton, Pennsylvania), Jun. 27, 1929, p. 24, and “Dinner in Honour of Fliers,” Royal Gazette and Colonial Daily. 77. Yancey, who piloted The Pathfinder for most of the flight from Maine to Rome, later admitted to not having a pilot’s license at the time, and later still, in 1931, received his first license. See “Lawyer’s Queries Incense Yancey,” New York Times, May 13, 1930; “Yancey, Rome Flier, Wins Pilot’s License,” unidentified newspaper, Jun. 5, 1931, available from Wright State Special Collections. 78. Attempts to confirm the reason for Bouck’s disability through his own accounts or medical records, or to find descendants or living friends and neighbors who could provide these kinds of details were, sadly, unsuccessful. 79. Quoted in Partridge & Singfield, Wings Over Bermuda, pp. 32–33. 80. Bouck was warned that “no sanction could be given nor assistance offered.” See “The New York-Bermuda Flight,” Royal Gazette and Colonial Daily (Hamilton, Bermuda), Apr. 4, 1930, p. 2. See also Yancey’s statement in “Out of Fuel, Yancey Landed Off St. Georges to Get Gas,” New York Times, Apr. 3, 1930. 81. The only reference to the flight in that journal that this author could find was an editorial by Arthur Lynch crediting Bouck with conceiving of and directing the flight and praising the flyers for their accomplishment. See “The Bermuda Hop,” Aero News and Mechanics, Vol. 2, No. 3, Jun.–Jul. 1930, p. 5. 82. E. Matlack; R. Matlack, “The Paper, the Station, and the Man—A Brief History of the New York Times Radio Stations,” 73, Feb. 1980, p.54. 83. Z. Bouck, “How High is Up?,” Radio Design, Vol. 2, No. 4, Winter 1929, p. 31; “Pilot Radio Firm Acquires Flying Laboratory,” Aero Digest, Sep. 1929, p. 120.


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84. Bouck, Yachting, p. 53. See also Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, 1930, p. 317c.
85. “Yancey Starts Bermuda Flight,” New York Times, Apr. 1, 1930. 86. Bouck, “W2BXQ Flies to Bermuda,” p. 12; Z Bouck, “How the ‘Pilot Radio’ Made the First Bermuda Flight,” Radio Design, Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer 1930, p. 42. 87. Z. Bouck, “The Story of Three Men in a TubOn Wings,” New York Sun, Apr. 10, 1930. 88. J.H. Kimball, “Telling Ocean Flyers When to Hop,” Popular Science, Jul. 1928, p. 16. 89. Bouck, “The Story of Three Men in a Tub—On Wings.” 90. Ibid. 91. “Yancey and His Aides Honored at Dinner,” New York Times, Apr. 12, 1930. 92. Bouck, Yachting, p. 53. 93. Z. Bouck, “The Log of the Seaplane, the Pilot,” New York Times, Apr. 2, 1930.
94. “The New York–Bermuda Flight,” Royal Gazette and Colonial Daily (Hamilton, Bermuda), p. 2. See also “Out of Fuel, Yancey Landed Off St. Georges to Get Gas,” New York Times, Apr. 3, 1930. 95. “Zeh Bouck, Well Known Here, in Plane that Flies to Bermuda,” Schoharie Republican (New York), Apr. 3, 1930 says that WGY programs were interrupted. “Plane Flying New York–Bermuda Comes Down in Calm Sea Sixty Miles North of Here,” Royal Gazette and Colonial Daily (Hamilton, Bermuda), Apr. 2, 1930 lists WEAF among the stations maintaining radio silence. 96. “Plane Flying New York-Bermuda Comes Down in Calm Sea Sixty Miles North of Here,” Royal Gazette and Colonial Daily (Hamilton, Bermuda), Apr. 2, 1930. 97. Zeh Bouck, “W2XBQ Flies to Bermuda;” Bouck, “How the Pilot Radio Made the First Bermuda Flight;” Bouck, “The Story of Three Men in a Tub—On Wings;” and Bouck, “The First Airplane Reaches Bermuda,” all cited above. 98. “Three Aviators Arrive in Nick of Time,” Royal Gazette and Colonial Daily (Hamilton, Bermuda), Apr. 3, 1930. 99. “Dinner in Honour of Fliers,” Royal Gazette and Colonial Daily (Hamilton, Bermuda). 100. H. M. Fessenden, Fessenden—Builder of Tomorrows (Coward-McCann, New York, 1940), p. 337. 101. Richfield Gasoline advertisement, Reading
Times (Reading, Pennsylvania), Apr. 9, 1930, p. 8. 102. “Wives Unworried During Long Vigil,” New York Times, Apr. 3, 1930. 103. “On the Way to Bermuda,” New York Times, Apr. 6, 1930. 104. “Delay Repairs by Yancey,” New York Times, Apr. 5, 1930. 105. “The New York—Bermuda Flight,” Royal Gazette and Colonial Daily.
106. “Dinner in Honour of the Fliers,” Royal Gazette and Colonial Daily.
107. “Bermuda Fliers Return on Liner,” New York Times, Apr. 11, 1930. 108. “Bouck Lauds Yancey,” New York Times, Apr. 19, 1930. 109. “Radio Devices Aid Safety in Flying,” New York Times, May 4, 1930; Bouck, “How the ‘Pilot Radio’ Made the First Bermuda Flight,” Radio Design.
110. “Bouck Lauds Yancey,” New York Times.
Acknowledgments
This paper would not have been possible without the gracious help of the following people: Mike Adams and Bart Lee (California Historical Radio Society); Colleen Ayers (Radio Club of America); Carl Bobrow, Dr. Peter Jakab, Roger Connor, and Elizabeth Borja (National Air and Space Museum); John Guttman and Karl Vonwodtke (Aviation History Magazine); Kieron E. Hall (Bermuda National Library); Karla Ingemann (Bermuda National Archives); Ellen Keith (Chicago History Museum Research Center); Steve and Anne Lamont (Middleburgh Library); Rick Leisenring (Curtiss Museum); Mrs. John McCabe; David Miller (FlightLine Designs, Inc.); Patrizia Nava (U. Texas at Dallas Eugene McDermott Library); Bernd Neumann; Ludwell Sibley; and Bill Stolz (Wright State University Special Collections).


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Special thanks go to Phillip Krejci for incredible photographic restorations involving many hours of work; to Paul Hertzberg, K2DUX, for much useful information on Pilot Radio along with the photo of and schematic hand-drawn by his father, the late Robert Hertzberg; to Ed Lyon (Mid-Atlantic Antique Radio Club) for informative discussions about the challenges of early aircraft radio; to Andrew Pentland for guidance on finding and interpreting Milton Sleeper’s RFC records; to Thomas Singfield, co-author with Ewan Partridge of the outstanding book Wings Over Bermuda, for access to details on the Pilot Radio’s flight that would otherwise be unfindable; and to Bob Winn for help with Zeh Bouck genealogy.
About the Author
Bob Rydzewski, KJ6SBR, is a native of Chicago, Illinois, where his parents had worked at various times for Teletype Corporation, Belmont Radio, and Zenith. One of his earliest memories is of looking up to the eerie green magic eye of a 1930s Zenith console. His interest in electronics as a hobby began about the time he assembled an Eico 460 oscilloscope in a high school physics lab. Around 2000 he developed an interest in collecting and restoring old radios. Inspired by Alan Douglas’s
Radio Manufacturers of the 1920’s, he began searching out the fascinating and often forgotten stories behind the early days of wireless. Bob received an MS in chemistry from DePaul University and went on to a 25-year career in pharmaceutical and biotech R&D, eventually penning a textbook on drug discovery. His writing abilities came to the fore in his current career as a professionally accredited medical writer, helping doctors present clinical trial results through journal articles and congress presentations. Bob and his better half live in the San Francisco Bay Area where he is a proud member of the California Historical Radio Society.
Bob Rydzewski


Volume 30, 2017 71
A Soviet Era Broadcast Receiver System of
the 1950s for Remote Locations
© 2017 Robert Lozier
For nearly 20 years I have taken a special interest in studying how the various national broadcast systems of the world have developed. These variations have often resulted in the development of very different hardware to serve these systems. I was recently given a Russian made thermoelectric generator of the 1950s in very poor condition prompting me to research its significance before investing time in restoration. I was already aware of their existence for powering small broadcast receivers in remote locations of the former USSR and English language Google searches produced links to basic information. Examination of serial numbers found in Google Images searches lead me to believe that these generators were at least made in the tens of thousands and not just a novelty. With little to lose in trying to make my unit presentable, I started preservation and restoration activities. After about 15 to 20 hours work, I concluded that it could be made presentable for exhibition; this prompted me to locate an appropriate radio that would have been powered by these generators. A fellow collector provided me with a fine example that turned out to have one surprising construction method, perhaps making a virtue of necessity, and several other very interesting features that prompted a new round of research. This paper describes my research into this broadcast receiving system, and provides a narrative of how these artifacts were prepared for conservation and exhibition. Many aspects of this receiving system and these artifacts will be largely unfamiliar to American readers.
Introduction
Based on 20 years of study, it became obvious that very different types of hardware were developed to support the various national broadcast systems of the world. I wrote two papers on this subject for the AWA Review describing various aspects of broadcast receiver development outside of the United States, the first treating Italian systems and the second treating radios from a number of other western European countries.1 This paper addresses several
unique broadcast radio systems in the Soviet Union. Beginning in the early 1920s and into the early 1930s, the Soviet Union recognized the value of establishing a broadcast radio system to unite, indoctrinate, and educate the populace. At that time, the primary means of providing radio reception to the populace was accomplished by placing radios in administrative buildings with loudspeakers distributed along city and


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A Soviet Era Broadcast Receiver System of the 1950s for Remote Locations
town streets or by centralized receivers with wire lines going to subscriber apartment buildings, factories, public halls, schools, etc., which were operated much like telephone exchanges. The same type of receiver could be placed in an apartment block, dormitory, factory, or school to drive 50 to 250 small speakers. This distribution from a single receiver to multiple loudspeakers in an area was referred to as “radio-diffusion exchanges,” “cable radio,” or “wired radio.” People paid a small subscription fee for the service. At least from the late 1940s, these wired networks distributed program content from 6 a.m. to midnight. The number of receivers in the Soviet Union reported in census figures during the 1930s are considered to be highly suspect by Western historians. The official claim of 170.6 million people in the 1939 census is believed to be inflated by 10 to 20 million. Reports of Soviet statistics in 1940 claim 1.1 million radios at that time, but that is actually the tally of radios manufactured since 1932.2 According to the research of Alex Inkeles, the whole of the Soviet Union possessed 650,000 receiving sets in 1936; of these, 270,000 were crystal receivers, and about 200,000 were considered outmoded types in need of replacement.3 The Radio Committee was able to claim only 500,000 sets as being “ready” to broadcast Stalin’s address before the Supreme Soviet on November 25, 1936. The number of broadcast receivers in operation as of 1940 was reported to be 760,000, with more than five million wired speakers
of the cable radio systems. After the ravages of World War II, less than 18% of listeners in 1947 were said to be receiving their programming via individual receivers. It should be noted that in the rural areas, only a small percentage of the population heard any radio programming on a regular basis. In any case, the penetration of broadcast radio reception via individual receivers lagged far behind most modern industrialized countries that the Soviets were trying to surpass. The government realized that postwar efforts to manufacture broadcast receivers would have to be dramatically increased, and so design bureaus within ministries, universities, and a few radio factories were tasked to develop new designs for low-cost, mass-produced radios. These designs were reported in detail to the public in the pages of the Soviet magazine Радио (Radio) beginning in the very late 1940s.4 Actual volume production was low and did not begin to increase significantly until after 1953, due in large part to the deemed higher priority of rebuilding the electrical, electronic, and communications resources of the Red Army. It was not until the latter half of 1956 that all radio assembly plants were reportedly operating on a continuous assembly-line basis.5 Rural electrification in the Soviet Union lagged behind that in the United States by some 25 or 30 years, such that there was still a significant need for battery-powered broadcast receivers into the 1970s. Adequate distribution of expensive dry batteries to remote


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locations was at times unreliable and, of course, a continuing expense. Many people remember magazine, newsreel, and television coverage of long lines of Soviet citizens in seeming endless queues for basic goods. Consequently, the Soviet Union began to develop thermoelectric generators as an optional power source. I recently obtained a Russian-made thermoelectric generator of the 1950s in very poor condition, which prompted additional research to determine its significance before investing in a restoration project. English language Google searches for thermoelectric generators that powered small broadcast receivers in remote locations of the former USSR produced links to basic information. Examination of serial numbers found in Google Images searches determined that these generators were made at least in the tens of thousands—not just as a novelty. After 15 to 20 hours
of preservation and restoration work, it became apparent that it could be restored to a condition suitable for presentation. It was obvious that a presentation of the generator would be much enhanced by connecting an appropriate Soviet radio to the generator. A fellow collector provided a fine example of a Soviet radio that turned out to have one surprising feature and several other very interesting features that prompted a new round of research. These features will be described in Part II herein addressing Soviet receivers powered by thermoelectric generators. This paper combines my research into thermoelectric generators in particular and Soviet broadcast receiving systems in general. A description of how these artifacts were prepared for conservation and exhibition is also included. A great deal of this information will be new to most American readers.
PART I. THERMOELECTRIC GENERATORS
Early Thermoelectric Generators
The fact that heated junctions of dissimilar metals can create a magnetic field was discovered by Seebeck in 1821. Seebeck thought that the phenomenon he observed was that of conversion of heat into magnetism. It was left to Ørsted to correct this misperception and properly describe it as creation of an electric current, and in doing so he coined the term “thermoelectricity.” The electrical output of individual dissimilar metallic junctions is very
small, generally seldom more than 3 to 15 millivolts. The first patent for the use of thermoelectricity instead of batteries for useful work in electroplating was by Moses Poole in 1843.6 By the middle 1860s, thermopiles (assemblages of multiple thermocouple junctions to provide useful voltages and currents) were being noted in journals of scientific societies. The junctions were of metals and metallic alloys with junction potentials well under 20 millivolts.


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These early thermopiles were said to have been unsuccessful for continuous work because of oxidation of the metals and junctions as well as stress fracturing of constituent metals during cooling or heating. By 1874, a gas fired commercial version of the Clamond Thermopile was reported to be in operation at the printing works of the Banque de France, presumably for electroplating copper in the electrotyping print process.7 In 1876 the (British) Government Telegraph Service under the direction of Sir W. H. Preece issued a contract to the Thermo Generator Company to supply thermopiles as a replacement for the usual system of electrochemical batteries, but the project was in short order declared a failure. Preece indicated it was his opinion that the faults could be corrected, but the company collapsed before they were able to complete the contract.8 There were a number of investigators in the last quarter of the 19th Century that attempted to overcome the deterioration of junctions and improve efficiency, but the development of practical small dynamos for electroplating virtually eliminated the primary market for thermopiles. In 1909, engineer Edmund Altenkirch is credited with expressing a mathematic relationship between physical properties of thermoelectric materials and the efficiency of a simplified thermopile.9
Thermoelectric Generator Applications to Wireless Sets
The Science Museum in London has exhibited a Thermattaix gas-fired ther
mopile designed circa 1925 for charging “wireless set accumulators” (vacuum tube radio receiver filament supply batteries) over the range of 2 to 10 volts (see Fig. 1). The magazine Amateur Wireless for April 1929 carried an ad for a Thermattaix, claiming that it could work your wireless set by gas, petrol, steam, or electricity. . . . Electricity? On the surface, this claim to operate a radio by electricity seems to be an oxymoron, but it is one way to convert high-voltage alternating mains to the low-voltage direct current required for charging accumulators. Or, if the high voltage mains came from a jittery onecylinder motor/generator outfit, it could act as a voltage stabilizer. The ad goes on to claim that amongst their customers were gas companies, the Italian Air Force, architects of note, and guides for big game expeditions in Africa and India. It is not known how many units were manufactured, but very few, if any, are in the hands of collectors.
Fig. 1. Thermattaix gas powered generator for charging filament batteries. (Science Museum, London)


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In the mid-1930s, the Cardiff Gas Light & Coke Company (South Wales, UK) placed the ad shown in Fig. 2 that advertised “THE THERMO-ELECTRIC GENERATOR which makes your Battery Set Independent of Batteries of any kind.” There were mentions of this outfit in Wireless World, and the son of a dealer reports his father having sold a number of these. The advertisement shows a radio of a style that would leave us to presume the thermopiles must have produced 2 volts at 0.5 amps for the valve filaments and 90 to 120 volts at 10 milliamperes for the plate circuits. But again, neither the actual number placed in service nor the cost is known, and there appear to be no surviving examples. Four articles on thermoelectric generators to power radio receivers and radiotelephones have been found in the Russian language magazine Radio (Радио), which began publication in 1946. The February 1952 issue states that under the direction of the prominent Soviet physicist and academician Abram F. Ioffe, investigations in the 1930s turned towards a search for semiconductor materials such as a zinc–antimony alloy (SbZn) bonded to a copper–nickel alloy (constantan) that could produce significantly greater potentials (55 mV in production devices) at higher thermal efficiencies (still, well under 4%). It was stated that the first claimed Soviet use of thermocouples using semiconductors was in “The Great Patriotic War” (WW II) to power small—presumably headphone-only—radio receivers used by partisan forces. One very small line
drawing shows a hanging cast metal pot with a flat bottom. The thermocouples are bonded to the bottom of the pot, and the pot is suspended over an open campfire. Water boiling in the pot becomes the “cold” side for this primitive thermopile.
TGK Series of Soviet Thermoelectric Generators
Later, in 1949–1956, Ioffe derived a “ZT” value parameter as a figure of merit to indicate how efficiently a material converts heat into electricity. He
Fig. 2. Dating from circa 1934, this thermo-electric generator may have been the first product to supply all the power needs of a conventional battery powered broadcast receiver. It was built only in very small quantities. (http://www .douglas-self.com/MUSEUM/POWER/thermo electric/thermoelectric.htm#ca)


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A Soviet Era Broadcast Receiver System of the 1950s for Remote Locations
used the new parameter to calculate the practical efficiency of thermoelectric generators.10 A team of engineers then developed a thermoelectric generator powered by a kerosene lamp burner that was capable of delivering 3 watts—enough to power a low-power vacuum tube radio with loudspeaker (see Fig. 3). These generators were made at the Metallamp factory in Moscow. A TGK-3 version of the generator described in the February 1954 issue had two thermopile circuits; one circuit supplied 2 volts at 2 amperes to a synchronous, mechanical, vibrator-type of DC-to-DC converter. It provided 90 VDC for the plate circuits of the radio and -9 VDC for grid bias. The other
thermopile circuit provided 1.2 VDC at a nominal load of 300 mA for lighting the vacuum tube filaments. No storage battery was used in this power system. The February 1956 issue of Radio announced an improved generator, TZGK-2-2, that eliminated the need for a vibrator power supply with its inherent RFI emissions.11 This was a matter of considerable importance because many of these generator-powered radios were in weak signal areas at considerable distances from broadcast transmitter sites. This new generator provided the 90 VDC for plate circuits and -9 VDC for grid bias directly from a series string of approximately 2600 pairs of hot and cold junctions. In the same year, another low-voltage version of the generator, designated TGK-10, was announced in the September issue of Radio (see Fig. 4). This unit did not serve the double purpose of providing room lighting in addition to radio power. This somewhat higher power version, 10–12 watts, was only for battery charging service. A vibrator type power supply sourced by a storage battery was still needed to deliver the peak power requirements of the KRU-2 “cooperative radio center,” which used a multi-band broadcast receiver designed to drive up to 50 low-power loudspeakers in apartment buildings, dormitories, etc. This was for the “cable radio” scheme of distributing broadcast programming in “off-the-grid” communities or collectives. This generator was also employed to power the “Vintage U-2” and “Harvest-1” low-power, 2–3 MHz, AM radio
Fig. 3. The TGK-3 generator powered a DC-toDC mechanical converter to provide +90 and -9 volts for a vacuum tube receiver. (TGK-3 Instruction Manual)


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telephones used on large agricultural collectives, etc. An article published on the www.radionic.ru web site states that 20,000 of the Harvest radio telephones would be manufactured in 1956, with another 25,000 scheduled to be built in following years. The article states that 70,000 radiotelephone stations will be in service.12 It is unknown if those production goals were ever achieved, and there are no comments on how many were powered from the thermoelectric generators.
Small Thermoelectric Generators to Power Broadcast Receivers
The thermoelectric generator in my possession is stamped ТЭГК-2-2 (1958), which translates to TZGK-2-2 in English (see Fig. 5). The “2-2” of the part number is the guaranteed minimum power output of the generator (i.e., 2.2 watts). This generator seems to have the same outward appearance as the one described in the February 1956 issue of Radio. Web searches of images indicate that the 1958 in parenthesis
Fig. 4. This TGK-10 generator was used to charge batteries in “Harvest-1” low-power HF radio telephones. (Radio, No. 8, 1956, p. 7)
Fig. 5. A TZGK-2-2 (1958) Thermoelectric Generator. (Author’s collection)


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does not represent the year of manufacture; instead, it is an indication of a new model. I have not been able to determine what changes were made internally that would have caused the model number to change. The operating instructions give specific requirements for placement of the generator in a room. It must be near a window and hang from its supplied chains at a minimum distance of 10 cm from the ceiling and at least 1.5 m from any wall. The generator provides 1.2 volts to light the filaments of 7-pin miniature tubes, which are in many ways electrically and dimensionally interchangeable with the miniature tubes introduced by RCA in 1939 and first used in the RCA Victor BP-10 pocket portable radio of 1940 (see sidebar). Another bank of thermocouples provides a nominal 9 volts for grid bias, and a third bank produces 90 volts at a maximum of 10 mA for the plate circuits. These thermopiles are built around a cast aluminum core with six prismaticcross-section channels at the center for the hot gasses to pass through. A sheet metal flue at the top improves draft.
The thermopile is heated by a kerosene lamp burner of the Argand type to raise the temperature of the hot junctions to about 400°C.13 In the case of the TGK-3 and TZGK-2-2, the clear glass globe allows it to serve double duty as room lighting that should produce something approaching 200 lumens. The font holds enough kerosene for about eight hours of operation. Russian language publications provide extensive analyses of various thermocouple materials and thermocouple theory but provide no information on how the thermocouples are actually fabricated for these generators. English language Google Images searches produced no internal construction photographs of these generators. Eventually, I was able to use Google Translate to craft Russian language queries that produced links to a number of dissected generator photographs made by a former Soviet region vintage radio enthusiast in 2009. Even these photographs shed little light on how these junction slabs were fabricated. It is apparent from inspection that the thermocouples were fabricated in many multi-layer monolithic slabs,
How Did the Soviets Develop Their “Finger Lamp” Technology?
How the Soviets acquired the vacuum tube technology described here is an interesting question. Was it acquired directly from RCA or via Lend-Lease agreements with the Soviets during World War II. RCA had indeed entered
into contracts with the Soviets during the 1930s but they were completed by 1938. Most notable was the contract providing a complete electronic TV broadcast system in Moscow. There were attempts to renew agreements


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during the war and shortly thereafter, but deteriorating government relations ended cooperation by 1949. The LendLease policy enacted in March 1941 did not have in its scope the transfer of technology—only goods. Alex Magoun of the IEEE History Center commented to me in a 2016 e-mail: “American officials were puzzled and frustrated by Soviet refusal to let them observe the use of equipment on the Eastern Front so that they could ensure the Soviets were getting the right goods or using them effectively. I suspect that you’ll know better than me if these tubes were in standard military radios and other electronic combat devices. If the U.S. didn’t ship tubes separately and the glass-based tube was not part of the RCA contract, it certainly would not have been hard for the Soviets to remove tubes from the radio equipment shipped under Lend-Lease and reverse engineer it.” In 2009, the RKK Radio Museum of Veleriy Gromov in Moscow exhibited radios identified as having been provided to the Soviets via various Lend-Lease agreements. One showcase holds a BC-611-B handy-talkie containing the 7-pin miniature tubes developed by RCA. Close examination of Soviet made miniature tubes do show different internal construction details, although by the 1950s, a number of the tubes were carrying dual part numbers that include 1R5, 1T4, 1S5, etc. However, some tubes they made do not have electrically identical specifications to U.S. tubes. Therefore, it seems likely that their “finger lamps” are indeed the
product of reverse engineering. The same could be said for the immediate post-war agreements between RCA and the Soviets, as outlined in a speech by Alex Magoun in 2004: “This [agreement] was apparently signed, and new Russian engineers appeared at RCA’s factories. They gained access to the licensing bulletins and craft knowledge behind RCA’s electron microscope, a device championed by Zworykin as another, more beneficial means of “distant vision;” the latest in cathode-ray tube technologies for radar and television displays; radio-frequency heating for various industrial processes; the beginnings of electronic computer memory; and RCA’s image orthicon, developed for guided missiles during the war and converted to commercial cameras 100 to 1,000 times more sensitive than the pre-war iconoscope. The sale of information and technology came to a halt when the U.S. Commerce Department established an export control system in 1949 to go into effect by midnight, Monday. Between the announcement Saturday and the deadline, an American Amtorg official located a cargo ship and arranged for the loading of $5 million of machinery. This included RCA cameras and electron microscopes, useful in the processing of materials for nuclear weapons. By the time the FBI arrived to impound the goods, the ship was already in international waters.” (Alex Magoun, “Adding Sight to Sound in Stalin’s Russia,” speech presented at the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), Amsterdam, October 8, 2004).


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but without having slabs to dissect, the method of fabrication could not be determined. A small line drawing appearing in several contemporary articles purports to show a side face of an assembly, but it does not look anything like the photographed assemblies (see Fig. 6). The outside of the cast aluminum core has 14 flats. Each surface is covered by a mica insulating sheet, and one edge of the junction strip is in contact with the mica. This becomes the HOT side of the junctions. Another mica sheet covers the outer face of the junction strip and is in contact with a dual-fin soft aluminum radiator, thus becoming the COLD junctions. A heavy gauge steel U-channel bar clamps the dual-wing radiator fin to the core end caps. There is no evidence of any type of “thermal grease”; that
type of material did not enter the market until the early 1960s. The bottom junction strip pictured in Fig. 6 is part of the 1.2-volt, 300-mA circuit to light the tube filaments. Each junction strip has 18 pairs of hot and cold junctions, and these are mounted to 5 of the 14 flats of the thermopile core. The top junction strip pictured is actually four smaller scale 50-pair junction strips bonded together and connected in series to form the 9-volt bias supply circuit (see Fig. 7). The 90-volt plate circuit supply is made of the same small-scale, 50-junction pairs as the 9-volt bias supply but they are bonded in groups of six and mounted to the eight remaining faces of the thermopile core in the same fashion. There are wedges of corrugated asbestos between each bank of thermocouple slabs. The area between each bank of junctions is
Fig. 6. The two configurations of thermocouples for low- and high-voltage circuits. (Author’s collection)


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topped off with an asbestos-filled caulk. By the nature of this construction, the asbestos is well protected from any possible abrasion. Note the void highlighted by the arrow in Fig. 6. There is a space of about 4 mm between the aluminum central core casting and the bottom heavygauge steel end plate of the thermopile, which forms a necessary thermal break. There was evidence of random gaps in the caulking of the thermal break that would allow flue gasses to condense onto the end connections of the junction slabs. Heavy corrosion is evident at these gaps. It would be interesting to know if this was a common defect such that few or none of these generators actually put into general service are still operational. An article in Radio for September 1956 describing the TGK-10 version of these generators designed to charge the batteries of the KRU-2 “cooperative radio center” states that the thermocouples last for about 4,000 hours
before the internal resistance of the thermopile becomes too high to service the load.14 This referenced 4000 hours would suggest that the generators may have had a practical lifetime of 3 years or less if in continuous service, but that is not necessarily the case. The KRU-2 was initially designed to accept power from a wind generator to charge the batteries, in which case the thermoelectric generator would have been a backup device. An article found on the Internet states that the TZGK-2-2 generator was rated for 5,000-hour service life.15 The article also describes a lower-power generator designated TZGK-9 (9-volt output at 300 mA) with a service life of 10,000 hours, which was developed to power transistor radios. It may not have been produced in significant quantities since rural electrification had grown considerably by the time Soviet transistor radios reached significant production levels. No other references to the TZGK-9 have been found.
Fig. 7. Bundles of TC slabs in groups of 4 and 6. (www.mobipower.ru)


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New old-stock (NOS) TZGK-2-2 generators have been found in South America, Africa and Eastern Europe. These were most likely used at Industrial Trade Shows, available for retail sale and maybe also for distribution as aid to Communist Party affiliated activities. They rarely show up for sale on eBay, but when they do, asking prices are well above $800 and shipping to the United States can add another $250. However, they don’t seem to attract many bids. The TZGK-2-2 and TGK-3 generators are stamped with serial numbers. Images found on the Internet have shown numbers ranging from 43,000 to 84,000. There were also three examples that use a letter plus a 5-digit number. Therefore, something around 50,000 may have been manufactured over a ten-year period. (This does not include other models.)
Conservation and Restoration of the Generator
The TZGK-2-2 generator was in very poor condition when it was acquired, and there was little expectation of being able to make it presentable for exhibition. Resistance measurements revealed that the 9-volt bias-circuit thermocouples were almost open circuited. The 90-volt circuit measured an erratic 20kΩ to 50kΩ and the 1.2-volt circuit measured a few hundred ohms. In order to determine if it was possible to generate an electric current, the 1.2-volt and 90-volt circuits were connected in series, and heat was applied to the core with a 1,100-watt heat gun. After 5 or
10 minutes of blowing heat through the core, the open circuit voltage climbed to about 15 volts. At that point a single white LED was connected to the circuit and the LED did light! But not very brightly. The series resistance of the circuit was simply too high, perhaps due to the heavy corrosion at the ends of the thermocouple slabs. It was clear that restoring the electrical connections would require the total disassembly of a thermopile filled with asbestos sheeting and asbestos filled caulking. The generator certainly appeared to have been in service for a considerable period of time, so that the thermocouples were probably nearing their end of life anyway. Since there was no point in trying to make it service as a practical source of current, the goal changed to preserving the unit as a historical artifact. At the time of acquisition, the lamp burner was heavily rusted with the nickel plating almost completely gone from some parts (see Fig. 8). The rusted kerosene font had a 2mm pin hole rusted in the bottom. The original flue had been replaced by a scrap length of aluminum pipe. The original nickelplated “sash chain” from which the generator hangs was missing and replaced with incorrect welded-link chain. The lamp burner is made of four stampings that are swaged together. Some of the rust could be scraped off to the point that it could be re-plated with nickel, but other parts of the same swaged assembly were so heavily rusted that virtually no good metal existed on which to plate. Consequently, the assembly was scraped and wire brushed,


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cleaned with a solvent in an ultrasonic cleaner, sprayed with a zinc-rich cold galvanize paint, and finished off with a coat of decorative nickel lacquer. The metal around the pin-hole in the bottom of the font was sound enough to scrape down to bare steel, insert a fragment of copper braid into the hole, and flare the braid on the inside by fashioning a steel-rod tool that could be worked from the kerosene filler opening. The braid was then flooded with low-temperature silver solder and the bump was filed down to an almost flush surface. There was no point in filling the lamp since electrical tests indicate that the generator thermocouple connections have corroded to the point it surely cannot deliver the minimum of approximately 1.6 watts to operate the 4 to 6 tube radios intended to be powered by the generator. One can find two versions of the kerosene font on the Internet. One is
silver colored and the other is green. Fortunately there were traces of the original paint visible on perhaps 5% of the font and a few small spots where the remaining paint was thick enough to scrape with a razor knife to reveal the true color. It is a spruce-green enamel that is easy to match with commonly available spray lacquers. There was very heavy rusting on both the nickel-plated steel thermopile end caps and most of the U-channel steel clamp bars holding the radiator fins in place. After soaking the clamp bar screws overnight with Liquid Wrench penetrating oil and using light hammer blows, the screws came loose. Two of the clamp bars still had more than 95% of the original nickel plate, so after cleaning, they were given a coating of high-temperature clear lacquer to attest to the fact that these were indeed originally nickel plated. The other clamp bars were so heavily rusted that they were simply cleaned in an ultrasonic cleaner, sanded level, sprayed with a coat of the cold galvanized paint, and finished with a coat of the decorative nickel colored lacquer. Because of their placement at the bottom of the radiator fins, the difference between the original nickel plate and the nickel colored lacquer is only noticeable under critical inspection. The screws and lock washers were cleaned in the ultrasonic cleaner as well, but as an added step, the parts were then soaked in a Sunbelt Chemicals Corp. SMART #3000 “Rust Converter & Metal Treatment.” This was necessary because the very fine metric threads could not
Fig. 8. Burner made of four swaged stampings, some too rusted to be re-plated. (Author’s collection)


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be cleaned effectively with a wire brush. This phosphate conversion solution produces an excellent bonding surface for primers and paints. The fasteners were coated with a high-temperature clear lacquer before installing the screws, and the screws were then painted with a clear lacquer as they were screwed into the tapped holes of the thermopile end caps. Afterwards, the threads were painted again with the clear lacquer to maximize delay in new rusting. The top of the glass globe was sealed and cushioned by a thick but soft asbestos gasket that was missing. A replacement was fabricated of ceramic fiber matting engineered to replace asbestos in just such applications. Fortunately small sheets are available on e-Bay at low cost. Had the original asbestos gasket remained, it would have to be removed for safety reasons because it is positioned so as to be subject to considerable abrasion every time the generator is disassembled for transport or cleaning—unlike the protected asbestos on the generator radiator fins. The pure aluminum radiator fins were first cleaned in solvent to remove cooking grease and then sprayed with a full strength caustic cleaner named SuperClean “Cleaner-Degreaser.” After a rinse, it was washed down with a cloth saturated in a weak acid solution of sodium bisulphate in water, followed immediately with a hot rinse in tap water and a quick force-dry with a hot air gun. This produces a clear matte finish that must be protected by spraying with high-temperature clear lacquer. Sodium bisulfate in granular form is
added to spas and swimming pools to increase the acidity (lower ph); therefore, it is widely available in retail stores and very inexpensive. While the correct 60-cm top suspension chains were missing, the lower chains, springs, spiral wire rings, and flat rings were present, and although very grimy with cooking grease and rust, they cleaned up well enough. Exact duplicate rings were made for the top suspension chains using a scrap piece of steel salvaged from the cabinet of an old microwave oven and then nickel plated to match the originals. I searched for chain that I eventually learned is called “sash chain.” It comes in three different metal gauge thicknesses. This lamp requires the lightest gauge but is apparently only available in 160 foot long bulk reels at about $95. I opted to spend $24 for a 10-foot length of much heavier gauge chain but of the same pattern and scale. The original sheet metal flue was missing. Photos on the Internet indicate that there were two variations of the flue. One is a rolled sheet of steel riveted closed at one end only, and the other is brass, or possibly steel, thin-wall tubing that is nickel plated. Both styles of flue have rolled beads at each end. Finding the correct metric specification tubing would be difficult here in the United States. Fortunately, a local sheet metal shop had an old bead-rolling tool small enough to do the job with rolled sheet steel. The precise length of the flue is only a guess. There appears to be a variation in length from picture to picture in photos found on the Internet.


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The more than four-meter-long power cord and the termination box are original, but they were in a sorry state requiring radical cleaning, filling of rusted metal with glazing putty, and spray painting (see Fig. 9). The original vinyl insulated wires were filthy, but the vinyl insulation was able to withstand cleaning with the SuperClean brand caustic cleaner. The cable was completely unwrapped to gain access for cleaning. The careful cleaning and application of paints and clear coatings will preserve the appearance for a very long time if exhibited in controlled environments.
More Recent Thermoelectric Generators From time to time in the age of transistor-equipped radios, and in other parts of the world, there have been attempts to make kerosene lantern-powered thermoelectric generators. The argument for this power source is the continuing expense of batteries for radios receiving educational instruction in
areas of extreme poverty. With transistor radios, the generator need only deliver a half a watt of power. From the 1960s onward, developers attempted to use semiconductor base junctions because of their higher efficiencies, but in practice they were apparently not able to develop a cost-effective means of limiting the maximum temperature to which the junctions could be subjected in such lanterns. In bringing these generators to market, there has been little indication that the developers received significant government-sponsored engineering support, subsidized manufacturing, or assistance in distribution, all of which occurred in the former USSR. The net result is that none of the products to date have proved reliable enough or cheap enough to sell into the marketplace. One can search for consumer-grade thermoelectric generators today on the Internet and find a number of products designed to charge cell phones, but in
Fig. 9. The generator termination box duplicates receptacles of standard dry batteries. (Author’s collection)


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evaluating the literature it appears that all these products have the same high vulnerability to excess heat damage. Also, the price of these devices can easily exceed that of a cheap cell phone. Thus, the generators remain more of a novelty for “gadgeteers” with disposable income than a practical solution
for the needy and isolated of the world. However, there are still viable applications for thermoelectric generators. Generators using radioisotopes as a heat source power all deep-space satellites, and there are highly specialized applications for powering remote instrumentation here on earth today.
PART II. SOVIET BROADCAST RECEIVERS POWERED BY THERMOELECTRIC GENERATORS
The second part of this article addresses receivers that could be powered by thermoelectric generators in lieu of a set of non-rechargeable dry batteries. According to the book Reference Broadcasting Receivers, there are at least 12 Soviet battery-powered receivers that were “plug compatible” with the receptacles of the TGK-3 or TZGK-2-2 generators (see Table 1).16 One of these radios now in my collection is a 4-tube Iskra (Искрa)
radio made in 1958 (see Fig. 10), which presents a proper load for the thermoelectric generator described in Part I. The word Iskra translates to Spark, and Spark (1958) is the designation that will be used for this model in the remainder of the paper. Other than having no tubes, this radio is in very good condition with no obvious modifications. Fortunately, the correct Soviet-made tubes were available at a modest cost.
Table 1. Twelve Soviet battery powered receivers that were “plug compatible” with the TGK-3 or TZGK-2-2 generators.
Radio Model a.k.a. Description
Iskra 49 Spark 49 Stamped metal cabinet
Iskra-53 Spark-53 Molded resin cabinet table model
Iskra (1958) Spark (1958) Molded resin cabinet table model
Nov Molded resin midget mantel set
Voronezh Molded resin cabinet portable
Voronezh Molded resin cabinet table model;
3 and 4 button versions
Rodina Wood cabinet table model:
52, 52A, 52M, 52U, 58


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This Spark (1958) receiver released for mass production in 1958 is the second update to the ARZ-49 reference design released for production as the Spark 49. The first radio series designed to be equipped with Soviet-made, battery-powered, 7-pin miniature, all-glass envelope vacuum tubes commonly referred in Russian slang as “finger lamps.” The reference design identified as “ARZ-49” came from engineers and designers at the Alexandrov Radio Factory of the Ministry of Communications Industry of the USSR under the direction of A. K. Kulesheva with the
help of the Institute of Broadcasting and Acoustics, also known as the IRPA (see Fig. 11).17 The ARZ-49 reference design was released for limited production as the Spark 49, the first entry in Table 1. A detailed description of the Spark 49 and a follow-on description of circuit changes made for the Spark-53 update appear in the Russian magazine Radio.18 At the same time, a new set of standardized batteries with an unusual configuration was developed to provide the most efficient powering of the radio for 1,000 hours, then considered
Fig. 10. This Spark battery-powered receiver was made in 1958. Note plugs for connection to standard batteries. (Author’s collection)


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to be about a year of typical use. A few years later, another standardized set of batteries is configured to power these “finger lamp” sets for 300 hours. These were designated as a “holiday pack.”19
The Spark 49 Receiver
The Spark 49 has a three-piece sheet metal cabinet. The front and rear panel were die stamped, and a single folded sheet formed the top, bottom, and sides. Spot welds are used to attach the front panel to the folded sides and small welded brackets support the chassis. For better acoustic properties a thick wood baffle board provides mounting for the loudspeaker. The cabinet is painted in
a textured lacquer to hide sheet metal blemishes. The four-tube superheterodyne circuit uses a 1A1P (1R5) for the mixer frequency changer, 1K1P (1T4) for the intermediate amplifier, 1B1P (1S5) for the detector, AGC and first audio, and a 2P1P for audio power output. (There is no direct U.S. equivalent for the 2P1P.) The tuning range is in two bands: long wave—150 to 410 kHz (2000 to 732 meters) and medium wave—520 to 1600 kHz (577 to 187 m). The performance of the receiver generally meets the electric and acoustic parameters for battery operated broadcast receivers of the 3rd class (the State standard for broadcast receivers GOST 5651-51 effective January 1, 1952).20 In this classification scheme, the “1st Class” receivers were the best with the most features, usually made in limited quantities and often exported to raise hard currency. The 4th Class receivers were the absolute basic 1- to 3-tube “local” receivers and the only ones not using some form of superheterodyne circuit.
Key Spark 49 Receiver Parameters
■ Sensitivity: better than 400 μV. Selectivity at detuning at 10 kHz: 15-20 dB. Image rejection: 20 dB. ■ Rated power to the speaker: 0.15 watt. ■ Acoustic frequency response of the entire receiver path allows the passage of frequencies between 200 and 3000 Hz at no more than 15 dB variation. ■ Harmonic measured sound pressure is not higher than 15%.
Fig. 11. From left to right: V. M. Khakharev, Chief Designer of Alexander radio factory and Stalin Prize winner; I. A. Averin, chief designer; and A. K. Kuleshov, chief designer of the “Iskra” receiver. (Radio, No. 12, 1950)


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■ The AGC allows the output voltage to change by no more than 10 dB when the input voltage changes 26 dB. ■ Filament current: 0.3 A. Anode current: 6 mA with no signal; average: 12 mA.
Spark 49 Schematic
When choosing a receiver circuit, the main focus was on simplicity and reliability of design as well as obtaining sufficiently high electrical parameters and power efficiency. The receiver is a superheterodyne with a rather low intermediate frequency (IF) of 110 kHz. The IF amplifier has the usual dualcircuit input filter and a single-circuit output filter with aperiodic coupling to the detector. A series resonant circuit is connected to the antenna input to suppress the IF frequency. The local oscillator and IF coils have carbonyl iron cores. Surely the most significant functional feature of this receiver circuit is the provision for a “creeping point” bias voltage for the audio output tube. This is achieved by using a copper oxide diode that rectifies a portion of the audio output obtained from the plate circuit of the output tube. The loudness-dependent audio voltage subtracts from the nominal negative 9-volt “C” bias from the battery pack, allowing maximum amplification while significantly reducing the quiescent plate current of the audio output vacuum tube at low volume. This action significantly reduces the perception of background noise in the receiver because, at low audio signal
levels, the gain of the output tube is reduced. The RC time constant of the circuit is such that distortion caused by having the audio abruptly increase without optimum bias is limited to about 10 milliseconds which is said not to be objectionable. The receiver gives undistorted output power of 0.15 W at rated nominal power supply of 90 volts and 1.2 volts. However, to use the pair of “B” batteries to a final voltage of 60 volts and the filament “A” battery to 0.95 volts at the end of its service life, the listener must be content with much lower power of 80 mW. Therefore, the receiver circuit employs a particularly sensitive dynamic speaker, 1GD-2, which develops an average sound pressure of at least 4 bars at a distance of 1 meter with input power of 0.1 W.21
Design Revisions Made for the Introduction of the Spark 53
According to articles in Radio, the metal cabinet of the Spark 49 was replaced by a compression-molded, single-piece cabinet made of a thermosetting resin similar to Bakelite. This same cabinet was also used for the AC-powered Moskovich and again circa 1956 in a demonstration model of a broadcast receiver using Soviet-made transistors.22 The dial scale previously tilted upwards by about 15 degrees was then mounted in the plane of the cabinet front face. Metal tube shields were eliminated, and a two-pin receptacle was added for connection to the “Cable Radio” local network so that the radio loudspeaker could be used to play the


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network audio. There was no switching arrangement within the radio for this input; the listener simply plugged in or unplugged from the receptacle. The “creeping point” bias circuit was revised to employ a third winding on the output transformer to create a bias voltage dependent on the audio signal level that subtracts from the fixed -9 volt bias supply in a presumably more effective manner (see Fig. 12). There were few other electrical circuit
changes made between the two models. However, between 1956 and 1958, the chassis layout and general construction for the Spark-53 was radically revised. This new chassis version was then simply called Spark (again). While the Spark 49 and Spark-53 used traditional coil formers for the RF and oscillator coils, the new mechanical design made use of self-supporting bobbins wound onto thin plastic spools with an internal thread to accept screwdriver-adjustable,
Fig. 12. In the Spark-53 version, a third winding on the output transformer provides the voltage to control quiescent plate current. Also, note primary winding connections for “cable radio” service. (Spark users manual from author’s collection)


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carbonyl-powdered iron cores. These bobbins are cemented on one side to a die-punched, phenol resin-impregnated, paper board sheet about 1.5mm thick that also serves to hold the wave change switch contacts. The same type of self-supporting coil structure is used for the input and output IF transformers.
Observations of My Spark (1958) Manufactured in 1958
Cabinet
The molded phenol resin cabinet is very similar to the Spark-53 but different in that a top-center, front face crest feature
has been eliminated. Examination of this receiver from the opened back shows little that is very surprising to the American eye other than the apparent uncommon structure of the IF transformer and the lack of a metal shell to contain it (Fig. 13).
Welding of Joints – a Surprising Discovery
What really caught my eye is the underside of the chassis. In order to remove the cotton braid that covers the battery supply cable for cleaning, it was necessary to unsolder the connections on the underside of the chassis. I was surprised to find that the (presumed)
Fig. 13. Back cover removed on 1958 version of Spark receiver. (Author’s collection)