Quote:
Originally Posted by Electronic M
Home intercom systems were rare to non-existant before the 60's. People did like to build radios and TVs into walls, before then though. I had a 40's AA5 chassis (that supposedly originally had a Catlin face) which was designed to be mounted in a wall....It had hinges on the bottom front, and it's original cord was about 4" long. Heck even the Whitehouse had a built in TV for a while.
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So then if what you say is true then how would you power such a beast? Certainly they had to have some way of powering this radio up (like an outlet built into the inside of the wall behind where the radio was installed into the wall) and where in the heck did they install the speaker(s)? And also there's the question of ventilation of the radio's tubes and making sure the insulation in the wall didn't catch fire due to excessive heat build up in the wall from the tubes...
This is definitely a mystery to me. Also the home intercom system/radio concept isn't completely unheard of back then because I have a friend that lives in a house that was built in the 1940s that had a built-in NuTone home intercom system with a built-in AM Only radio that was in the kitchen of the house and the intercom system was original to the house (it uses miniature tubes like 12BA6, 12BE6, 12AV6, 50C5 and a 35W4 (basically an AA5 hot chassis design) but if course it doesn't work anymore because the breaker for it was either disconnected when the original 100 Amp fuse box was replaced with a 100 amp breaker box or the breaker was wired up for it but was never switched on) although I figure that its more than likely going to have a bad hum to it by now even if it were to be some how enabled again seeing as the filter caps are probably dried out by now seeing as the unit hadn't been used since the previous owners of the house lived in it which was back in the 1980s before my friend and his family moved into the house.