Electric radio!!

[mikelect]

Originally Posted by G4ILN

I expect that most of us use steam powered radios everyday. After all power stations use steam generators to drive the generators.

Going back to primary sources we may be using coal, gas, oil, nuclear, wind or water powered radios.

Graham.

Most of us are using Gas powered radios as it is the prime fuel for power stations the electricity generating guys buy so much of the stuff that they can afford to sell it cheaper to the public than British Gas can hence the combined fuel bills


Mike

[Paul Stenning]

I have just moved this thread to General Vintage Radio as it is about gas radios rather than the inotial eBay item now.

[joe]

I have an article about gas radios that was published in the New Scientist. I'll see if I can fish it out tomorrow and post some info on it, maybe post the whole article if I can find a way of doing so. I vaguely seem to remember that it mentioned a museum in Leicester or Nottingham that has actually got one.
I did offer the article to the Bulletin but I was told that there could be a problem with copyright.

Joe

[Sideband]

Originally Posted by Dave Moll

But it is fascinating to learn that there really was such a thing as a steam radio. I have previously only ever known the term used figuratively in the sense of "antiquated".

I can give an example of one that was made only a few years ago! One of the longest serving employees was retiring and as a joke we built a 'steam radio'. I found an old vintage radio cabinet that cleaned up quite well and fitted a modern transistor radio inside it. This was driven by a small steam engine that powered a generator. It actually worked and younger employees of the company really thought that was how old radio's worked! It looked very strange sitting on the table with steam coming out the back but it was playing radio 1 quite clearly I don't think it would have passed our normal safety tests though!!


Rich.

[joe]

I've found the article & attached a copy.The museum is in Leicester & a phone No is attached.

Joe

[evingar]

Thanks Joe

An interesting read.

Got me wondering, it might be possible to power a small modern tranny with a small paraffin or spirit lamp as a heatsource. Maybe a Peltier device would be a better bet than therocouples there days .

May be marketable as a novelty or to the "survivalist" communities in the USA - don't quite know what they would tune into though in the event of "Armageddon" or whatever they are expecting to happen

[flyingtech55]

I think the gas heated thermo-couple powered radios only used the thermocouples for the HT and used an accumulator for the filaments. An old TV engineer I used to work beside (now sadly deceased) mentioned one. The farm where the radio was used had no electricity, only gas. The farmer used to have to collect a charged accumulator on a kind of exchange basis (I think) when he went to market with his produce. My friend heard the radio working in the early 1960s but he said the volume was pretty low. Wether this was a feature of this sytem or because the radio and/or power supply were pretty old and tired by then, I don't know. He reckoned the radio dated from the 1930s. Even then the farm was pretty run down apparently. The farmer used to pay people with farm produce; vegetables, eggs and so on. That's all I can remember him saying and as I say he is now dead so I obviously can't ask him now. Shame.

The other thing he mentioned was rotary converters which generated HT voltages from 12V or 24V vehicle batteries. Seemingly they were used in WW2 to work the radios in tanks and so on and people out in sticks used them to drive radios after the war.

Tim