[decojoe67]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

"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.

Yes, "CJS" was the owners initials. I heard about these many years ago and could never find a good one. The last one I saw was very tattered. The spring-wound platter motor was used to save battery power. It was the only practical option for a battery portable. At least the audio plays though the speaker though instead of acoustical.