Quote:
Originally Posted by decojoe67
Being a fan of early "airplane-luggage" battery only portables. this 1940 Philco 40-504 was the toughest to find. The few that I've seen have been very soiled and tattered. This one was well cared for and electronically restored. The platter is hand-cranked, but it winds very smoothly. i wonder who "CJS" was?  |
"CJS" may have been the initials of the former owner of this radio.
This Philco radio is the first battery set I have ever seen with a wind-up phono turntable. However, I wonder why the turntable is hand-cranked rather than run by a standard synchronous AC phonograph motor; after all, by 1940, I'm sure hand-cranked phonographs were all but obsolete, unless of course synchronous phono motors were not yet available at that time.
Another alternative would have been to use a battery-operated phono motor, but I'm not sure even those were common (or even existed) when this radio was new. The motor would probably exhaust any battery very quickly after only a few plays, so it probably made more sense to use a hand-cranked turntable. Battery-powered turntables probably didn't exist anyway until perhaps the 1960s, at the earliest; even then, however, the battery may not have lasted very long, depending of course on how much the turntable was used. By the sixties, most phonographs had 4-speed turntables which could run at 16, 45, 33 and 78 RPM, but the 16-rpm speed was bound to become obsolete since its original purpose was for the playback of "talking books"; these did become obsolete when cassette tapes became popular.