Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host
Speaker 1: job in Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: and I love all things tech. It is time for
Speaker 1: us to continue our stories about Magnavox. So we're picking
Speaker 1: up where we left off from our last episode about
Speaker 1: Magna Vox. Uh. That point was where I rushed to
Speaker 1: explain where the name Magnavox came from. And so, in
Speaker 1: case you missed the first episode, yeah, I taught for
Speaker 1: nearly an hour and didn't even get to the company
Speaker 1: getting its name. I mean, I just kind of squeeze
Speaker 1: that in. In fact, we still have a little ways
Speaker 1: to go before the company officially becomes Magnavox. The too
Speaker 1: long didn't listen version of episode one, though I do
Speaker 1: think you should go back and listen to episode one.
Speaker 1: But the short version is that a much engineer named
Speaker 1: Peter Jansen and an American engineer named Edwin Prittum, previously
Speaker 1: employed by Dutch radio pioneer Valdemar Poulson, had partnered with
Speaker 1: money from Richard O'Connor, a candle and soap maker in
Speaker 1: the San Francisco area in the early ninet hundreds to
Speaker 1: create a radio company operating out of California. Bridham and
Speaker 1: Jansen were the engineers and the R and D department
Speaker 1: for this company, and they had created a voicecoil electro
Speaker 1: dynamic speaker which they hoped to patent, but they ran
Speaker 1: into a bit of a roadblock because it turned out
Speaker 1: there were other inventors who had previously patented similar ideas.
Speaker 1: They were, however, able to secure a patent specifically for
Speaker 1: the voice coil version of their invention. I explained how
Speaker 1: that worked in the previous episode, so don't worry. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to go into it here because I just
Speaker 1: did it earlier this week. But I will remind you
Speaker 1: that their version had a speaker, diaphragm, and an Edison
Speaker 1: phonograph horn, So in other words, you know, it wasn't
Speaker 1: like a speaker the way we see them today. It
Speaker 1: actually had a large physical horn attached to it to
Speaker 1: project the sound outward. Now, the first time they actually
Speaker 1: connected the components, you know, with the speaker and a microphone,
Speaker 1: the receiver and horn contraption let out a terrible noise.
Speaker 1: In fact, Ensign would later write a crack like the
Speaker 1: report from a gun came out of the horn, followed
Speaker 1: by a screaming, howling noise which was ear splitting and terrifying.
Speaker 1: This was, of course feedback, where as sound coming from
Speaker 1: the speaker gets picked up by the microphone and then
Speaker 1: fed back into the speaker you know, amplified, and then
Speaker 1: this goes on and on. It becomes a feedback loop.
Speaker 1: So Britam yelled to disconnect the battery before the whole
Speaker 1: house blew up. By then, the connection was already broken
Speaker 1: and the speaker went silent, and they eventually figured out
Speaker 1: what the problem was, so they mounted the speaker to
Speaker 1: the chimney of the bungalow they had in Napa. This
Speaker 1: was the headquarters for the company that would become Magnavox.
Speaker 1: In fact, according to one account, they even had Jenson's
Speaker 1: younger brother, Carl, up on the roof. Carl and it
Speaker 1: was his job to hold the loud speaker to the
Speaker 1: chimney because they were actually worried that it would vibrate
Speaker 1: so much that the speaker would shake loose and fall
Speaker 1: off the roof of the house. They ran a line
Speaker 1: down into the bungalow so that the transmitter would not
Speaker 1: be close to the speaker, and they pointed the speaker,
Speaker 1: you know, toward NAPA, and they talked into the microphone.
Speaker 1: According to Jenson, when Prindom used the microphone, it sounded
Speaker 1: as though quote, a supernatural colossus was shouting up the
Speaker 1: chimney end quote, and Prindom gave instructions that seemed kind
Speaker 1: of apocalyptic. He asked the residents to light the bonfires
Speaker 1: if they could hear him. Jensen reportedly dashed out the
Speaker 1: bunk below. He ran as far as maybe two kilometers
Speaker 1: according to Predom. He managed to set a personal record
Speaker 1: for fastest run, and Jensen discovered that he could still
Speaker 1: hear and understand Predom even a mile away from the bungalow.
Speaker 1: Predom would experience this as well. He hopped on a
Speaker 1: bicycle and pedaled off while Jensen spoke into the microphone. Suddenly,
Speaker 1: the fact that they originally thought this is a really
Speaker 1: limited use case technology kind of faded away, you know.
Speaker 1: They originally thought that the loudspeaker would be useful for
Speaker 1: public spaces like ballparks. In fact, making announcements at baseball
Speaker 1: games served as the motivation for developing it in the
Speaker 1: first place. They realized that their attempt at creating something
Speaker 1: with limited use was in fact way more powerful than
Speaker 1: they first anticipated, and it could be a real game changer.
Speaker 1: So they contacted Richard O'Connor, you know the money. O'Connor
Speaker 1: was flabbergasted that hearing this news, it actually took some
Speaker 1: convincing to assure him that they weren't just pulling his
Speaker 1: leg and telling him stories or exaggerating, so he finally
Speaker 1: believed them, and then he arranged to have stockholders travel
Speaker 1: out to Napa to see a demonstration of the loudspeakers
Speaker 1: for themselves, and that demonstration was beyond successful. The stockholders,
Speaker 1: amazed by what they heard, were excited, and Pridham and
Speaker 1: Jnston were essentially told that finances would no longer be
Speaker 1: a problem. It was at this point that Jnson and
Speaker 1: pried Um then debated on what to call their invention,
Speaker 1: and they had a few names under consideration. One of
Speaker 1: them was just loudspeaker, but Jansen felt that wasn't a
Speaker 1: very appealing name, even though, as we all know later on,
Speaker 1: that would become the generic term for the invention anyway.
Speaker 1: So then they thought maybe tele megaphone, which they dismissed
Speaker 1: they would later use that for a product. They also
Speaker 1: thought of a few other names, but ultimately they decided
Speaker 1: that they would use a couple of Latin words at
Speaker 1: to be the inventions name, and they wanted to call
Speaker 1: it a Great Voice, so like you know, as the
Speaker 1: great and powerful, like I said in the last episode.
Speaker 1: So that's why they called it Magna vox Great Voice,
Speaker 1: which we already know because I mentioned all that in
Speaker 1: the last episode, but I had the circle background to it.
Speaker 1: So the company, which at this point was still called
Speaker 1: the Commercial Wireless and Development Company or c w d C,
Speaker 1: got an influx of cash and the incident, Pridom continued
Speaker 1: to refine their design of their loudspeaker all throughout nineteen fifteen.
Speaker 1: They made tweaks to their design to improve the performance.
Speaker 1: They also created an all in one electric turntable with
Speaker 1: an electric toner arm our toning arm, and it had
Speaker 1: a loudspeaker housed in the cabinet of itself, so when
Speaker 1: the record turntable would play, the needle in the in
Speaker 1: the arm would actually create an electrical signal that would
Speaker 1: go to an amplifier that would go to the speaker.
Speaker 1: So this was a very early example of an electronic
Speaker 1: system that could actually play records back electronically, as opposed
Speaker 1: to just being a purely acoustic horn. To amplify sound
Speaker 1: that way, they would also occasionally play music out through
Speaker 1: the loudspeaker that was attached to the chimney of their bungalow,
Speaker 1: thus creating a sort of prerecorded concert experience for the
Speaker 1: area of NAPA. It was a little bit like a
Speaker 1: proto radio station, except of course, you weren't picking up
Speaker 1: radio signals. You weren't using an antenna to pick up radio.
Speaker 1: You were just hearing music that was blasting out of
Speaker 1: a loudspeaker attached to some dude's chimney, which I'm sure
Speaker 1: the time was novel and exciting and interesting. I would
Speaker 1: think of that today as being a gosh darn nuisance.
Speaker 1: Towards the end of nineteen fifteen, Incid and Priedam had
Speaker 1: created a loudspeaker powerful enough that it could be heard
Speaker 1: within a radius of seven miles of the loudspeaker, which
Speaker 1: is pretty darn powerful. But the demonstrations, while effective, were
Speaker 1: kept pretty local. And you know, it was nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 1: so word did not travel around particularly quickly. They actually
Speaker 1: dismissed the idea of exhibiting their loud speaker at the
Speaker 1: Panama Pacific World's Exposition, which was going on in San
Speaker 1: Francisco that year. They were actually they were worried if
Speaker 1: they showed it off at a big exposition before they
Speaker 1: had really started to land, you know, deals with customers,
Speaker 1: someone else might go along and copy their design and
Speaker 1: then beat them to the market. They finally arranged for
Speaker 1: a more formal exhibition of the technology in mid December
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifteen. They wanted to do it at the
Speaker 1: at a stadium that was located in Golden Gate Park,
Speaker 1: and despite the fact that the weather was lousy and
Speaker 1: these ding dang derned kids were in the park play
Speaker 1: in football, the demonstration impressed the invited audience. One journalist,
Speaker 1: Edgar Gleeson wrote about in the San Francisco Bulletin and
Speaker 1: positively gushed about the loudspeakers capabilities. A couple of weeks later,
Speaker 1: Jansen and Pridum set up by a loudspeaker for a
Speaker 1: Christmas event in San Francisco's City Hall. They actually hid
Speaker 1: the loudspeaker on a balcony and they put a flag
Speaker 1: in front of it because they were still worried that
Speaker 1: someone might, you know, get a good look and try
Speaker 1: to copy their design. That event drew a pretty huge
Speaker 1: crowd somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand folks
Speaker 1: by one estimate. And again this demonstration went over really well,
Speaker 1: and after a few more similar demonstrations, the c w
Speaker 1: d C found itself a potential partner. This was the
Speaker 1: distributing arm of a company called the Sonora Phonograph Company.
Speaker 1: This attempted to establish itself in the phonograph slash early
Speaker 1: record player industry, but Sonora had its own challenges, namely
Speaker 1: that the Victor Talking Machine Company was jealously keeping a
Speaker 1: grip on lateral recording of phonographic discs, which forced Sonora
Speaker 1: to go with the alternative vertical cutting of phonographic discs.
Speaker 1: But you might wonder, what the heck does that even mean. Well,
Speaker 1: imagine a modern record. If you've ever seen a vinyl record, right,
Speaker 1: it's got these grooves that are in it. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: this is all about how you record vibrations onto these
Speaker 1: these records, these rotating discs of material. So let's imagine
Speaker 1: the grooves in a record are kind of like a trench.
Speaker 1: So imagine you're inside a trench with lateral cutting, the
Speaker 1: walls of the trench jut in and out. They you know,
Speaker 1: come further into the trench. Sometimes they go a little
Speaker 1: bit out of the trench. Uh. Sometimes things get a
Speaker 1: little tight. Sometimes it's you know, relatively not tight. This
Speaker 1: makes you know, a needle or stylist that's traveling through
Speaker 1: the trench vibrate laterally as it's moving through the groove,
Speaker 1: like the walls are pressing the needle to go left
Speaker 1: or right, depending on how the walls of the trench
Speaker 1: are shaped. Those vibrations then go to the rest of
Speaker 1: the device to produce sound. And I'm not going to
Speaker 1: go through all of that again because I'm more or
Speaker 1: less covered in the last episode. Now, that is lateral cutting,
Speaker 1: and that's what the Victor Talking Machine Company had a
Speaker 1: tight hold on. So Sonora with vertical cutting. So now
Speaker 1: imagine you're in that same trench. But the walls are
Speaker 1: pretty much smooth, right You've you know, they still curve
Speaker 1: because you're on our you know, around platter, but they're
Speaker 1: smooth walls. It's the floor of the trench that's really
Speaker 1: bumpy and a properly designed needle would move up and
Speaker 1: down as it traveled through the groove, and that's what
Speaker 1: would generate the sound you would hear. Uh. This method
Speaker 1: produced lower quality recordings than lateral cutting, and also it
Speaker 1: would eventually, you know, make the record were out. Actually,
Speaker 1: you typically would have the record were out faster than
Speaker 1: you would if you were using a record that had
Speaker 1: lateral cutting, because the needle is traveling the same up
Speaker 1: and down path over and over again and wearing it
Speaker 1: down over time, so there were disadvantages to it. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the Sonora Phonograph Company had a distribution division in Oakland, California,
Speaker 1: which is in the San Francisco area. The C W
Speaker 1: d C and Sonora discovered that their goals were aligned,
Speaker 1: and so the two companies formed a partnership and they
Speaker 1: would merge together, forming an all new company in nineteen seventeen,
Speaker 1: and that company would of course take on the name Magnavox. Now,
Speaker 1: when I say Sonora and uh C w DC merged,
Speaker 1: keep in mind this was one division of Sonora. It
Speaker 1: wasn't the full Sonora Phonograph Company, but their distribution arm.
Speaker 1: So while you could argue that Magnavox is history stretched
Speaker 1: back to around nineteen o nine or so. The official
Speaker 1: founding of the company named Magnavox would happen nearly a
Speaker 1: decade later. This also means that Magnavox the Loudspeaker is
Speaker 1: actually older than Magnavox the company. The loudspeakers celebrated its
Speaker 1: on birthday. In Magnavox the company was, you know, ninety
Speaker 1: eight years old at that point, if it were still
Speaker 1: its own independent company. But that's just foreshadowing. Richard O'Connor,
Speaker 1: who had headed up the c w d C, would
Speaker 1: become a director of Magnavox. Frank Steers, who came over
Speaker 1: from Sonora, would eventually serve as president for Magnafox. As
Speaker 1: for Priedom and Jenson, they became co chief engineers. And
Speaker 1: that might sound a little bit weird for two people
Speaker 1: to serve in the same executive role. We've seen it
Speaker 1: a few times in tech companies where you had more
Speaker 1: than one person essentially inhabiting what would normally be a
Speaker 1: single person role, and it certainly could lead to problems
Speaker 1: should the two engineers disagree on the direction of development.
Speaker 1: So Jansen and Priedam had come up with a fairly
Speaker 1: clever approach to leadership. They alternated one month Jensen would
Speaker 1: serve as chief engineer and the next month Priedom would
Speaker 1: do it, and then they'd go back and forth. This
Speaker 1: was to avoid issues where a subordinate could potentially get
Speaker 1: conflicting directions from the two leaders. So it was a
Speaker 1: practical solution to a real problem. Now you might remember
Speaker 1: that the year at this point is nineteen seventeen, and
Speaker 1: that's the same year that the United States entered into
Speaker 1: World War One. We didn't call it World War one
Speaker 1: at that point because that would be way too pessimistic. Accurate,
Speaker 1: but pessimistic. One of the things that tends to happen
Speaker 1: in wartime, however, is that companies in nations that are
Speaker 1: embroiled in the conflict will frequently pivot towards creating stuff
Speaker 1: to aid in the war effort, not always by choice,
Speaker 1: sometimes mandated by the governments of those countries. Magnavox would
Speaker 1: be no exception to this trend, and the young company,
Speaker 1: having just branded itself, would find itself producing technology to
Speaker 1: help support the United States military in World War One.
Speaker 1: So Magnavox, which had been preparing to create a commercial
Speaker 1: version of the electronic phonograph that Printum and Jansen had
Speaker 1: designed a couple of years earlier. Put consumer electronics on
Speaker 1: the back burner. The company participated in trials to see
Speaker 1: if loud speakers could be used to communicate from a
Speaker 1: ground station to a plane flying overhead. After all, early
Speaker 1: tests had shown that the loudspeaker could project sound a
Speaker 1: really long distance, like up to seven miles. But as
Speaker 1: I'm sure you already suspected, it turned out that the
Speaker 1: planes were just way too noisy, and the tests ended
Speaker 1: up proving that loud speakers would not be an effective
Speaker 1: communication tool for ground to air transmissions. However, Jansen and
Speaker 1: pried Um experimented with microphone and speaker technology and found
Speaker 1: one application that would prove to be really useful during
Speaker 1: the war. More on that after we come back from
Speaker 1: this quick break. So what was the invention that Predoman
Speaker 1: Jensen devised that would be a huge help in World
Speaker 1: War One? Well, it was a noise canceling microphone. You see,
Speaker 1: the planes were so loud that it was really hard
Speaker 1: to communicate inside one, whether you were a pilot trying
Speaker 1: to use a radio to talk with ground, or maybe
Speaker 1: you were part of a larger aircraft like a bomber,
Speaker 1: and you're trying to communicate inside a single aircraft. The
Speaker 1: engine and the propeller noises were just too intense for
Speaker 1: easy communication. Also, remember this is World War One. Some
Speaker 1: of these aircraft were open cockpit aircraft. It was just
Speaker 1: really hard to hear one another. So the engineers needed
Speaker 1: to figure out a way to compensate for this, and
Speaker 1: at first they tried to figure out a way to
Speaker 1: isolate and thus exclude the noise, but everything they tried failed.
Speaker 1: The noise was just too powerful and there wasn't any
Speaker 1: way to cancel it out. And then, out of desperation,
Speaker 1: tried something that is at least at first counterintuitive, or
Speaker 1: at least I found it counterintuitive. And what they did
Speaker 1: was they took a microphone and they essentially stripped it down.
Speaker 1: They removed pretty much everything that shielded the microphone, so
Speaker 1: that now the diaphragm of the microphone was exposed on
Speaker 1: all sides. And this worked. Why did it work? Well,
Speaker 1: let's consider a sound for a second. And I know
Speaker 1: I talked about sound a lot on this show, but
Speaker 1: sound is vibration, and typically we're talking about fluctuations and
Speaker 1: air pressure, air molecules, vibrate, and those vibrations propagate outward
Speaker 1: from the source of the sound, and with microphones, we
Speaker 1: usually designed the microphones so that they channel sound from
Speaker 1: a specific direction for the purposes of transmitting that vibration
Speaker 1: to a diaphragm, and then we end up sending that
Speaker 1: signal onto amplifiers and then perhaps a speaker to amplify
Speaker 1: that sound while by removing all the shielding around the diaphragm,
Speaker 1: what the incident printum did was they equalize the air
Speaker 1: pressure from all the noise. The noise from the airplane
Speaker 1: was essentially hitting both sides of the microphone diaphragm, so
Speaker 1: it was canceling out the effect. It would be kind
Speaker 1: of like if you had two people of equal strength
Speaker 1: who were just pushing against each other, they would be
Speaker 1: at a standstill. They wouldn't no one would gain advantage
Speaker 1: over anyone else. Now, if you designed this kind of
Speaker 1: microphone in such a way that a person who was
Speaker 1: speaking into it was only affecting one side of that diaphragm,
Speaker 1: that person's voice would come through right. All the noise
Speaker 1: would be pushing on both sides, so it cancels it
Speaker 1: itself out. But sound coming from your voice. If it's
Speaker 1: only hitting one side, it's causing the diaphragm to actually vibrate.
Speaker 1: Those vibrations get picked up and converted into electric signal
Speaker 1: and there you go. So unlike the airplane noise, the
Speaker 1: vibrations only come from one side when you're talking about
Speaker 1: using it as a microphone. So the micro phones had
Speaker 1: these attachments that would fit onto leather helmets, so you
Speaker 1: you wear it like right in front of your mouth. Um.
Speaker 1: In fact, when you look at pictures of this or
Speaker 1: illustrations of it, uh, they look kind of like like
Speaker 1: something out of a science fiction novel, right, because you've
Speaker 1: got this weird little round microphone position directly in front
Speaker 1: of the mouth of the person wearing the helmet. Um.
Speaker 1: That would allow them to communicate with the ground or
Speaker 1: with each other inside the same plane. Of course, the
Speaker 1: microphones were paired with speakers that were mounted in headphones,
Speaker 1: and these also attached to the leather helmets. So this
Speaker 1: ingenious system, which was taking advantage of physics, allowed greater
Speaker 1: communication inside planes and drastically increase their effectiveness. Now, that
Speaker 1: was not the only thing that Magnavus designed for the
Speaker 1: US military during World War One. The company also created
Speaker 1: public address systems that would be used aboard naval vessels,
Speaker 1: particularly to allow those who are working in very NOI
Speaker 1: easy environments like engine rooms to be able to hear
Speaker 1: announcements and other communications from the bridge. Production increased to
Speaker 1: the point that Magnavox had outgrown the bungalow. The company
Speaker 1: relocated to the San Francisco area sometime around nineteen. Most
Speaker 1: of the employees at this time were women. You know,
Speaker 1: they weren't drafted to go fighting the war, So women
Speaker 1: were the people who were building radio junction boxes and
Speaker 1: working with circuitry. They were the ones building the radio
Speaker 1: systems that pilots in World War One were dependent upon.
Speaker 1: After the war, Magnavox continued to create technology for ships
Speaker 1: with the design of watertight telephone systems. And it looked
Speaker 1: for the moment like the loudspeaker, which was the thing
Speaker 1: that launched the company in the first place, wasn't really
Speaker 1: gonna go anywhere. But that was about to change. See
Speaker 1: leading up to the US ratification of the Treaty of
Speaker 1: Versailles and the formation of the lead Egue of Nations,
Speaker 1: US President Woodrow Wilson had to conduct a campaign, a
Speaker 1: national campaign to promote the post war peace effort and
Speaker 1: to get support for the Treaty of Versailles. He was
Speaker 1: encountering resistance to the US signing or ratifying the Treaty
Speaker 1: of Versailles out of Congress. So his idea was, well,
Speaker 1: let's go to the American people and if they support
Speaker 1: these efforts, then Congress is going to have to go
Speaker 1: along with it, or else they're going to find themselves
Speaker 1: voted out of office. So he needed to get this
Speaker 1: groundswell of support for the ratification process, and he was
Speaker 1: supposed to travel to San Diego and make an address
Speaker 1: in what was called City Stadium it was later known
Speaker 1: as Balboa Stadium. But Wilson's health was in serious decline
Speaker 1: and his doctors were advising him not to be outside
Speaker 1: for long periods, and so it looked like the President
Speaker 1: was going to have to cancel his appearance because he
Speaker 1: was going to just show up and speak inside a
Speaker 1: stadium that was, you know, exposed to the elements. Well,
Speaker 1: the city leaders of San Diego weren't too keen on
Speaker 1: the idea of, you know, Wilson canceling, so they wanted
Speaker 1: to find a work around. The notion was that Magnavox
Speaker 1: would design a loud speaker system and they would install
Speaker 1: it in the stadium, and Wilson would appear, but he
Speaker 1: would be inside a glass booth while a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot of sources actually called it a large glass cage,
Speaker 1: which seems a bit ominous to me. And so he
Speaker 1: would be standing in there, looking out through the glass,
Speaker 1: but addressing the crowd through a microphone system. The incident
Speaker 1: was actually across the country in Washington, d C. At
Speaker 1: this point he was attending meetings with various government officials
Speaker 1: regarding you know, Magnafox as other projects, and so it
Speaker 1: kind of filled a printum to create and install the
Speaker 1: system in Balboa Park. So he used a pair of microphones.
Speaker 1: They looked kind of like loud speakers. They each had
Speaker 1: a horn. So in this case, the horn's purpose was
Speaker 1: to funnel sound into the microphone, you know, towards the diaphragm,
Speaker 1: rather than propel or splify sound outward. He mounted loudspeakers
Speaker 1: on top of the glass booth that pointed towards the audience.
Speaker 1: At this point, vacuum tubes were used in amplifiers. So
Speaker 1: it's a good time to remind ourselves how vacuum tubes
Speaker 1: work and how amplifiers work. So a vacuum tube looks
Speaker 1: and somewhat behaves a bit like a light bulb, doesn't
Speaker 1: incandescent light bulb. So they are glass tubes, and inside
Speaker 1: these glass tubes you have components that look a bit
Speaker 1: like the filament you would find in an incandescent bulb.
Speaker 1: But rather than you know, a filament that lights up,
Speaker 1: what you have are you've got a cathode and an
Speaker 1: anode that are separated by a gap inside the tube.
Speaker 1: And again there's no air inside this tube. That's the
Speaker 1: whole vacuum part of vacuum tubes. So when you supply
Speaker 1: an electric signal to the cathode, the cathode begins to
Speaker 1: heat up, and as that happens, the metal in the
Speaker 1: cathode begins to release electrons. This is a process. It's
Speaker 1: called thermionic emission, and in fact another name for vacuum
Speaker 1: tubes would be thermionic valves. If you then apply a
Speaker 1: positive electric charge to the anode side of the vacuum tube,
Speaker 1: the negative electrons from the cathode side are attracted to
Speaker 1: the anode because opposite charges attract, so the electrodes will
Speaker 1: then travel from the cathode to the anode, and this
Speaker 1: creates a current. This is a basic diode vacuum tube,
Speaker 1: and it allows current to flow only in one direction,
Speaker 1: from the cathode side to the anode side. You can't
Speaker 1: reverse it, so this is a way of creating direct
Speaker 1: current in that In that sense, amplifiers will have a
Speaker 1: third electrode. So you still have the cathode which is
Speaker 1: emitting electrons because it's heating up. You still have the anode, which,
Speaker 1: once you apply a positive voltage to it, will attract
Speaker 1: those electrons. But between these two you have your third electrode,
Speaker 1: and you've got what is called a control grid. So
Speaker 1: unlike the end ode, which is typically shaped like a plate,
Speaker 1: the control grid is like a mesh or a net,
Speaker 1: and by applying a voltage to the grid, you can
Speaker 1: control the flow of electrons from the cathode to the anode.
Speaker 1: So if you were to apply a negative voltage to
Speaker 1: this grid, it would act like a repellent, right because
Speaker 1: electrons are negatively charged, So if the if the net
Speaker 1: between the cathode and the anode also has a negative charge,
Speaker 1: that's going to repel electrons. Only a few electrons might
Speaker 1: make it through, you would dampen the signal. But if
Speaker 1: you were to apply a positive charge to the control unit,
Speaker 1: then you would increase the flow of electrons from cathode
Speaker 1: to anote. You would amplify that signal that was coming
Speaker 1: from the cathode. So if you were to feed an
Speaker 1: electric signal from say a microphone, to the cathode side
Speaker 1: in a normal diode vacuum tube, the current would form
Speaker 1: between cathode and anode, and the signal you would get
Speaker 1: out would be pretty much the same signal that you
Speaker 1: put into it slightly less because you would lose some
Speaker 1: some energy in this case. But if you were to
Speaker 1: use a tryode, if you were to use a vacuum
Speaker 1: tube that had a control grid, you could apply a
Speaker 1: strong positive charge to the control grid. This would create
Speaker 1: a stronger flow of electrons from cathode to anode and
Speaker 1: thus amplify the incoming electric signals. So what you would
Speaker 1: get out would be stronger than what you put in. Now,
Speaker 1: I should clarify that, I mean the signal, the base
Speaker 1: signal that is coming out would be stronger. It's not
Speaker 1: like there's some magical way where we just boost the
Speaker 1: amount of electricity, and we didn't put forth any more effort.
Speaker 1: More effort is being put forth. It's just being put
Speaker 1: forth at the control grid part of the vacuum tube.
Speaker 1: But in a way, you could just think of this
Speaker 1: as just it's a way to boost the energy of
Speaker 1: an electric signal. So the vacuum tube and its applications
Speaker 1: pretty much place the old arc transmitters that Jansen and
Speaker 1: Pritam had been working on a decade earlier, and they
Speaker 1: were really effective as amplifiers. And there are musicians who
Speaker 1: to this day swear by vacuum tube amplifiers. They will
Speaker 1: only use those with their equipment. They'll hook up their
Speaker 1: musical instruments to vacuum tube amplifiers, even though we now
Speaker 1: have transistor based amplifiers. And I'm not saying that the
Speaker 1: musicians are wrong, but there are a lot of different
Speaker 1: factors that go into whether or not the sound you
Speaker 1: get out of an amplifier is good, and it's not
Speaker 1: just whether it's vacuum tube versus transistor. But anyway, let's
Speaker 1: get back to, you know, the Magna vox system. Around
Speaker 1: fifty thousand people attended President Wilson's address. Pridam warmed up
Speaker 1: the crowd by playing some recorded music through the system
Speaker 1: before Wilson's arrival, and the whole thing was, you know,
Speaker 1: nearly a shambles because Printam noticed that just as the
Speaker 1: President was getting ready to speak, smoke was starting to
Speaker 1: come out of the amplifier. So him took a look
Speaker 1: in the amplifier and he noticed that one of the
Speaker 1: two vacuum tubes was severely overheating. It was apparently red hot,
Speaker 1: so he very quickly removed that one, and fortunately the
Speaker 1: other tube was sufficient to amplify the signal and send
Speaker 1: it to the loudspeakers. The speech reportedly went over very well. Wilson,
Speaker 1: despite being visibly weak with his frail health, found the
Speaker 1: crowd receptive to his speech, so much so that he
Speaker 1: reportedly had to pause several times for applause, and the
Speaker 1: experience drew national attention. Reporters waxed poetic about how the
Speaker 1: loudspeaker system allowed almost everyone in attendance to be able
Speaker 1: to hear and understand the speech, which was a pretty
Speaker 1: big feat for the time. Breadham, however, observed a few
Speaker 1: things that he wanted to fix in future attempts. For one,
Speaker 1: he noted that the President's voice sounded kind of hollow,
Speaker 1: and he figured out that part of this problem was
Speaker 1: that Wilson was in this big, old glass box. Uh.
Speaker 1: And when I say big, I mean pretty big. The
Speaker 1: booth was large enough to hold several dozen people, up
Speaker 1: to fifty I think. According to one source, Predam surmised
Speaker 1: that the sound of Wilson's voice was bouncing off the
Speaker 1: walls inside the booth and thus creating an echoe effect.
Speaker 1: And he later wrote, quote, it was a long time
Speaker 1: before a solution was found for this trouble, and that
Speaker 1: solution was never to have any surfaces near the microphone
Speaker 1: that would permit echoes end quote. And this is kind
Speaker 1: of similar to Predam learning the hard way about microphones
Speaker 1: and speakers and feedback. Also, this is something that the
Speaker 1: audio business pays very careful attention to to this day,
Speaker 1: making sure not to record in areas that have a
Speaker 1: lot of hard surfaces that could, you know, sound could
Speaker 1: just bounce off of. This is also why my producer
Speaker 1: Tari really wants me to hang up blankets all in
Speaker 1: my office at home to dampen sound, because my desk
Speaker 1: is near a corner of the room and she wants
Speaker 1: to get rid of the little teeny tiny bit of
Speaker 1: echo that manages to come through the recording Hey Tari. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Wilson's speech when which took place on September nine, nineteen nineteen,
Speaker 1: would be the event that would propel Magnavox into fame.
Speaker 1: Magnavox would also play a part in other notable public
Speaker 1: speeches and performances. When the future Edward the Eighth visited
Speaker 1: San Diego, he too went to the stadium and gave
Speaker 1: a short speech over the Magnavox loud speaker system, this
Speaker 1: time with Jansen there to run things. And when William G.
Speaker 1: Harding ran for president, he used the Magnavox loud speaker
Speaker 1: system to deliver speeches to crowds h though he did
Speaker 1: later switch allegiances and used A T and T S
Speaker 1: loud speakers during his inauguration. In fact, A T and
Speaker 1: T was really putting a hurt on Magnavox because it
Speaker 1: turns out that incident prinom were pretty right to worry
Speaker 1: about folks copying their invention, and A T and D
Speaker 1: was not just producing loudspeakers and securing contracts to large
Speaker 1: public events. They were all also in the business of
Speaker 1: producing vacuum tubes, which Magnavox at that point was not doing.
Speaker 1: And because Magnavox was reliant upon vacuum tubes for amplification,
Speaker 1: that got a little testy. So Magnavox shifted its focus
Speaker 1: and really got into the consumer electronics market. And what
Speaker 1: would help it would be the birth of the broadcast
Speaker 1: radio station. And that's because radios, as in the consumer
Speaker 1: product that you would use to receive and play radio broadcasts,
Speaker 1: needed loudspeakers, as did phonographs and other sound devices. And
Speaker 1: so Magnavox, after a bit of a delay because of
Speaker 1: World War One, began to develop consumer products, or at
Speaker 1: least components that would go into consumer products. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about it more after this quick break. All right, we're
Speaker 1: now in the early nineteen twenties, a period that would
Speaker 1: be transformative for Magnavox. The company was performing pretty well,
Speaker 1: is generating a good deal of revenue. The emerging market
Speaker 1: of radio would make radio sets. They must have home appliance,
Speaker 1: positioning Magnifux well for that market, or at least it
Speaker 1: would appear to I should also add that initially radio
Speaker 1: sets were extravagantly expensive. In fact, if you were to
Speaker 1: look at the marketing materials from around that time, you
Speaker 1: would see ads for radio sets that appeared to be
Speaker 1: targeting the wealthy, complete with illustrations of people in formal
Speaker 1: attire dancing elegantly next to our radio receiver. And the
Speaker 1: radio receivers also looked a lot different from the radios
Speaker 1: of today. I mean, we have transistors in our radios today,
Speaker 1: so they were much larger. But they also incorporated those
Speaker 1: acoustic horns that were attached to the actual speaker, and
Speaker 1: this was sort of like the old gramophones or the
Speaker 1: old phonograph horns, and thus they looked a lot like
Speaker 1: those older pieces of technology. In Magnifux introduced the t
Speaker 1: r F five. It was claimed to be the first
Speaker 1: single dial radio, as in the first radio to use
Speaker 1: a single dial in order to tune the radio to
Speaker 1: a specific frequency. And I say claimed to be because
Speaker 1: there are several companies that all argue that they were
Speaker 1: the first to introduce the first single dial tuner, but
Speaker 1: we can at least say that Magnavox's version was one
Speaker 1: of the earliest and possibly the first one. The TRF
Speaker 1: and t r F five actually means tuned radio frequency,
Speaker 1: and the reason the single dial. Thing is important is
Speaker 1: that earlier TRF radio sets typically had two or even
Speaker 1: three dials that you need to use to tune the
Speaker 1: radio to pick up specific frequencies. In other words, to
Speaker 1: tune the radio to the right station. So to get
Speaker 1: a radio station to come in clearly, you had to
Speaker 1: make sure that each dial was tuned just right. The
Speaker 1: Magnavox introduced a set that connected all the stage tuning
Speaker 1: capacitors to a single dial. And I think it's a
Speaker 1: cool idea to talk about the basic components of a
Speaker 1: TRF radio set. All Right, so you got a radio receiver.
Speaker 1: What do you need in order to actually, you know,
Speaker 1: like grab radio waves out of the air and then
Speaker 1: play them on a speaker. What are the components you need? Well,
Speaker 1: first you kind of need an antenna. The antenna is
Speaker 1: what picks up the radio wave radiation. So the electromagnetic radiation, well,
Speaker 1: hit the antenna and it causes electrons and the antenna
Speaker 1: to start to vibrate. Essentially, you're creating a current to
Speaker 1: flow through the antenna up and down the antenna. Now,
Speaker 1: lots of stuff makes radio waves, and so how do
Speaker 1: you select what you want to listen to? You don't
Speaker 1: want to just open up the floodgates and listen to
Speaker 1: every single radio frequency. It would just be noise. You
Speaker 1: need to use a tuner or a tuned circuit. This
Speaker 1: is a way for your radio to zero in on
Speaker 1: the specific radio transmission and ignore everything else. If you
Speaker 1: take the A M frequency band that ranges from around
Speaker 1: Hurts up to sixteen fifty killer Hurts, and each channel
Speaker 1: of radio transmission has a bandwidth that's ten killer Hurts wide.
Speaker 1: So you need a way to say, I want you
Speaker 1: to play the signals transmitted at this frequency. Let's say
Speaker 1: it's killer Hurts and ignore everything else in the A
Speaker 1: M spectrum. Otherwise, again, you would just get everything it
Speaker 1: would it would be incomprehensible. If you remember from our
Speaker 1: last episode, we talked about how spark gap transmitters are
Speaker 1: kind of like a shotgun blast of radio frequency radiation,
Speaker 1: and the reason they're illegal today is because if you
Speaker 1: know you had one operating near you and it had
Speaker 1: a sufficient amount of power behind it, it wouldn't matter
Speaker 1: if you tuned your radio properly. A spark gap transmitter
Speaker 1: could overpower the signal and you would just get blasted
Speaker 1: by you know, it's almost like jamming your radio, although
Speaker 1: it wouldn't necessarily be the reason why someone was using
Speaker 1: a spark gap transmitter in the first place. Anyway, tuners
Speaker 1: work on the principle of resonance. Tuners will resonate with
Speaker 1: and thus amplify signals that they get tuned to, and
Speaker 1: they use capacitors and inductors in order to achieve this. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to go into all the details around that.
Speaker 1: It's a lot of tech and a lot of science
Speaker 1: that I think goes beyond our our podcast episode, but
Speaker 1: it's what you know, the dials on the TRF radio
Speaker 1: set we're all meant to do. You were to set
Speaker 1: the inductors and capacitors to specific levels in order to
Speaker 1: tune into a particular frequency. Well, the signal coming from
Speaker 1: the antenna typically is pretty weak, so the tunor circuit
Speaker 1: often is paired within our f amplifier. And you know
Speaker 1: I just described how amplifiers work. It's essentially the same thing.
Speaker 1: You've got this incoming signal, but it's really weak, so
Speaker 1: you use an amplifier to boost the strength of that signal,
Speaker 1: and you then take that signal and pass it to
Speaker 1: the X component, which is typically a demodulator, or sometimes
Speaker 1: it's called a detector. Now, the purpose of this component
Speaker 1: is to separate out the actual audio signal from the
Speaker 1: carrier wave that the audio signal was traveling on. So
Speaker 1: with a M we program sound onto a carrier wave
Speaker 1: by changing the amplitude of that wave and the change
Speaker 1: of that of that amplitude of that wave over time.
Speaker 1: That's the encoding of the audio we're putting over the signal.
Speaker 1: So AM actually stands for amplitude modulation. So this is
Speaker 1: kind of like, you know, decoding a coded signal. That's
Speaker 1: the purpose of the demodulator to reverse the process that
Speaker 1: we used in order to kind of imprint an audio
Speaker 1: signal onto a carrier wave. Next, you've got a couple
Speaker 1: of audio amplifiers in order to again boost the power
Speaker 1: of the outgoing signal. Uh, the outgoing in this case
Speaker 1: is outgoing to a speaker. So you've at your radio
Speaker 1: signal that comes in. We boost that we demodulated. Now
Speaker 1: we have the audio signal, we need to boost that
Speaker 1: before we send it to the speakers. Otherwise the signal
Speaker 1: might be too weak to make the speaker work and
Speaker 1: you would either end up with a very quiet transmission
Speaker 1: even if you turn the volume all the way up,
Speaker 1: just because the signal would be so weak, or you
Speaker 1: might not even be able to hear anything at all.
Speaker 1: The earlier TRF radios were pretty complicated with all those dials,
Speaker 1: and it restricted radio mostly to hobbyists, so they were
Speaker 1: the ones who were willing to put in the work
Speaker 1: to understand how to tune a radio and get a signal.
Speaker 1: But your average person doesn't want to sit there and
Speaker 1: fiddle with dials for thirty minutes just so that they
Speaker 1: can listen to their stories. So Magnavox's invention of a
Speaker 1: single dial radio reduced the complexity and became one of
Speaker 1: the reasons that the radio receiver could become a household appliance.
Speaker 1: So it was a pretty big success for Magna Vox
Speaker 1: on that level. But as we'll learn, the radio set
Speaker 1: business would be a different matter for Magnavox, and in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty four, Richard O'Connor, the candle and soapmaker who
Speaker 1: had funded the original C W d C company that
Speaker 1: had turned into Magnavox, passed away. O'Connor had been acting
Speaker 1: sort of as a mediator between the engineers Jensen and
Speaker 1: Pridum and the executives who were in charge of Magnavox.
Speaker 1: But with him gone, there was no one to protect
Speaker 1: the engineers, and because of that, in nine Peter Jensen
Speaker 1: handed in his resignation. He had bristled under the directives
Speaker 1: of the business leaders. He felt that they were uh,
Speaker 1: they didn't have a full understanding of what he did,
Speaker 1: and that they were making dumb decisions, so he decided
Speaker 1: to part ways. That meant the partnership of Jensen and Pridum,
Speaker 1: which had spanned a decade and a half, came to
Speaker 1: an end. Jensen would go on to found his own
Speaker 1: radio manufacturing company. He would stick with that until nineteen
Speaker 1: forty two, and then he sold off his ownership of
Speaker 1: that business. He had other issues with stakeholders, kind of
Speaker 1: similar to what was going on at Magnavox. Like it
Speaker 1: was a constant struggle between leadership and his vision as
Speaker 1: an engineer. So once he sold off his interest in
Speaker 1: that company, he went on to found another company called
Speaker 1: Jensen Industries, and he would run that until nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: when he passed away. He also received a knighthood from
Speaker 1: the King of Denmark in nineteen fifty three. Now In
Speaker 1: our next episode, we'll go back to Magnavox and we'll
Speaker 1: talk more about some of the missteps the company made
Speaker 1: that would end up putting it in a pretty precarious position.
Speaker 1: And that was even before the stock market in general
Speaker 1: took a total nose dive. As as you know, if
Speaker 1: you've been paying attention like we've been creeping up the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, uh, that means that pretty soon we're gonna
Speaker 1: hit the stock market crash and the Great Depression, and
Speaker 1: that would have a pretty profound effect on many companies,
Speaker 1: including Magna Vox. But we will explore that in the
Speaker 1: next episode. For now, we're going to put the lid
Speaker 1: on this. We'll be back next week we list some
Speaker 1: more Hope you're enjoying the series so far. If you
Speaker 1: have any suggestions for topics I should cover in future
Speaker 1: episodes of tech Stuff, feel free to reach out to me.
Speaker 1: The best way to do that is to send me
Speaker 1: a tweet, and the handle for the show is text
Speaker 1: Stuffs hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more
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