weird radio device on ebay

[stusnyder]

Found this on ebay, appears to be some sort of tuner???

http://cgi.ebay.com/Antique-Tesla-Co...45280575622273

[bob91343]

It's a crystal radio with an audio amplifier stage. Only good for historical value.

[leadlike]

It's a homebrew set-really crude in that it seems they made as many parts from scratch as possible. The picture of Tesla is one of him in his later years-say, mid 1930s (he died in '43). Most of the value in this one comes from how well it displays with the glued on Tesla photo.

[Reece]

I suspect some kid made this in the fifties out of old twenties parts he scrounged and others he made, like the multipoint switch. That's an old Cunningham C-301A, it looks like, with a lot of engraving on the base not like the later ones. The reason I suspect the set was built in the fifties is that he includes on the schematic a diode, "if used," which only became available to the experimenter during the early fifties. Also, the lower schematic "looks" like a blueprint but could just be drawn on paper...how would he have access to making a blueprint? The upper schematic is a copy of the lower one looking as if it had been made on a photocopy machine so made much later when copiers became available to the public, maybe in the seventies or eighties? Bugs had longer to eat the lower schematic.

That concludes my two cents' worth of urban archaeology.