Hi Brach, I agree with you about the degree of love and determination--as well as enginuity--of earlier pioneers in the electronics field that went into the engineering of some of the earlier receivers. Before the television you are watching there was the "radiovisor" and Nipkow's disk. Before that was merely wireless transmission of audio over a 360 degree sweep--to wit: radio. Before that it was telegraph, which led to radio through the works of Marconi, and through such ideas as the Branley coherer. Before that it was hand-written letters delivered by couriers that either made their destination--or not....
Today's people are so far detached from this early progress in history as they take for granted all that goes on today with iPods, cellphones, text messaging, etc... Such "institutions" such as Heathkit have dried up, since nobody thinks of building a radio is something to carry on about any more. When I built stuff from scratch back in the '60s and '70s it was a big deal, and people were very impressed.
Not so these days. To impress your fellow man nowadays you need to have opened a successful business, and then amassed great fortunes with it, gaining among other things pleasure craft in the water, and two or more villas away from your main strongholdings within ivory-colored stuccoed walls and wrought-iron gates with a sentry booth at the end of the mile-long drive to the mansion's portico that opens into a large central hall....etc....
I live in a rambling old farmhouse built back in George Washington's time, in a town that is still under 700 strong. In between two adjacent windows in my living room there are two strips of woodwork interrupting the column of horsehair plaster that goes up between the portals of fenestration--and spaced about 16 inches apart to form a neat rectangle of plaster between the windows at about face height. It was only a while later that I learned that there was once a
mirror placed in the frame. Reason: there was no convenient source of light back in the day this old place was erected, and to place a mirror between two south-facing windows was the only way to light up both sides of one's face for viewing in a looking glass--as we do today with wall sconce lighting to either side of a mirror in a bathroom or lavatory today.
Before I finally built a power plant here to supply electric when the grid is unable, I still would mill about the darkened-except-for-candlelight house in search of something, and stupidly flip on a switch as I entered another room... Oh! And additionally, I had puzzled about the lack of evidence of "knob-and-tube" wiring about this old house as a teenager, as I knew from working with an electrician uncle that such prevailed before Bronx or Rome wiring. There are no porcelain knobs or sleeves anywhere here, nor any residual evidence. The answer came later when an older neighbor and long-time resident of our town recalled being assigned by her parents to look after her younger sibs, and keep them from knobbing with the newfangled and fascinating switches and electric lighting apparata installed in their house back in the day when electricity finally reached my town here. The year: 1942.
We all take so much for granted these days....
