General thread of obscure old tech

[metasonix]

What was a World War 1 "aircraft radio" like? It was like this SCR68.
Imagine flying a plane, being shot at, and having to also communicate via radio. Using Morse code.
Why are the transmitting tubes inside the main tank coil? There must have been a reason--however insane. it's generally a bad idea. Also note the small generator/prop that had to be mounted on the plane's exterior, because batteries were too heavy, apparently....

[EPTC]

scr68overall.jpg
scr68inside2.JPGscr68schematic.JPG

This is insanely cool.

[metasonix]

Tube and radio collectors know the name Blue Bird very well. Two well-known radios carried the name. Less well known was the Blue Bird tube company, who made their own offbeat types and went out of business in 1931. (Note the typo on the box, and don't bother Googling this.)

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[Flounderguts]

Typo 402!

[Yes Powder]

I assume there was supposed to be a decimal point somewhere in that current rating

[metasonix]

The Pingen Detector. A tube so obscure it's not listed in Tyne, Stokes, or any other book about early electronics that I can find. Made in Toledo, Ohio, by a company that apparently lasted less than a year (1922). People yammer about the "big hits" but no one keeps track of the misses.

[metasonix]

I put this on Facebook but it's too funny not to share here.....

Ever wonder where all those subminiature tubes were used? In monstrosities like the AN/ARC-65 aircraft radio. This is only the radio "chassis", in its sealed and pressurized canister. There was also a big ugly control box, an antenna tuner, and a massive power supply with THREE dynamotors. This "airborne" radio weighed more than 140 pounds (NOT counting the power supply, controller, etc. etc.). It contains 88 tubes, mostly subminiatures. 1950s lol.

And what kind of airplane carries this giant hunk of crap?
http://www.alternatewars.com/SAC/RB-47H ... y_1964.pdf

[metasonix]

once you're locked into a serious VT-11 collection, you're gone to the world

[metasonix]

Mercury "arc" rectifiers, or Cooper-Hewitt rectifiers, or whatever, were expensive. Thus some industrial equipment companies made their own. This one has a mechanism to tilt the glass part in order to ignite the arc. And the "tank" appears to be made from a large tin can--as in food.

[metasonix]

the cheapest oscilloscope on the market, but $11 was still a lot of money in 1936
(Also: god damn that thing is ugly)

[WarpHead]

What a beautiful, beautiful thread. Best read in a while!

[metasonix]

and here we have a stupid, stupid, and deeply offensive old ad. The 1940s were a very different time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You can't complain to anyone either, Sangamo Electric went out of business in 1978.

the funniest part is: despite all the hype for these capacitors, they were like most other molded-paper caps fron that time period. They do NOT age well. Moisture gets into them, ad claims be damned. If you see these in an old radio or TV it's almost guaranteed they will be shorted out, or ready to short out, and will always have to be replaced.

[metasonix]

Jim Cross:

While I often receive pretty mundane shipments from sellers, every once in a while nice things appear. Today UPS dropped off a couple of boxes that must have been from someones collection. There were several things that I had seen before, but did not have in my collection, including these Sonatron blue and red UX-199-oids. I’ve had a NIB “white” one for a long time, but had never seen these to purchase until now.
The other interesting tube is a Cleartron CT-199 with a large brass UV base. A lot of Cleartron brass bases seem to suffer from splitting, so I am happy this one is solid.

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Cleartron.jpeg (39.71 KiB) Viewed 248 times

[metasonix]

CUSTOM-MADE rectifier tubes for big industrial equipment. Ther Electric was later absorbed by IPR Systems, which still exists. Google is useless here.

[metasonix]

this is a VERY early tube tester, like 1930 or so. Only has sockets for 4-pin triodes and 5-pin type 24 tetrodes.

[metasonix]

yet another un-googleable mystery. A T0-3 power transistor in a steel can filled with glycol. It still would have needed a heatsink. No one has any idea if it was even manufactured or what the intended market was.

[metasonix]

Well, ran into this one in digging around on the shelves looking for something else. Thought you guys might like to see it. It’s a Bomac BLW015A. Appears to be what ( I think ) is a giant TR/ATR tube in a large aluminum slide in cartridge. The whole assembly is 22 inches long. The front with handle is 7 ½ inches in diameter. There is a single pin mil connector on the front and what looks to be a plastic view window. The tube itself is built like an evacuated thermos jug and in itself is about 19 inches long. The single connection goes to a wire into the evacuated portion of the cylinder.

Turned out to be a quartz "pre-TR cell" for a VERY large radar. Extremely rare and obscure--too obscure to be worth anything. CSF made a similar one. http://lampes-et-tubes.info/mwtr/mw133.php?l=e

[metasonix]

All the 100TS triodes I've ever seen had a plain glass bottom with two pins for the filament. This must have been a very early version. Used as a ring-oscillator transmitter in the USA's first military radar, the SCR-268. (Crazy people hoard 100TS tubes because some of the later production had platinum wire in the grid. Not a lot but enough to make crazy people extra-paranoid.)