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Old 09-30-2012, 06:31 AM
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Reece Reece is offline
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Location: Cleona, PA
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AC power was certainly available in most urban homes in the twenties; Edison's bulb was from about forty years previous. Juice didn't get to all of the outlying areas until later, some even after WWII. Witness the farm sets sold during the thirties that worked on batteries or wind chargers, or 32-volt generator farm systems. As teevee wrote, the problem was trying to use filamentary tubes on AC, and the necessity to devise good rectifiers.

In the early to middle late twenties, the typical multi-tube set ran on B-batteries and a rechargeable 6-volt lead/acid cell essentially the same as a car battery. The little Radiola III was probably used with a few 1.5 volt dry cells and a B-battery, on which it would run a long time, being of low drain.
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