Platters On Wheels

THE ARTICLE “RADIO HITS THE ROAD” (by Michael Lamm, Spring 2000) briefly touched on the passing use of record players in automobiles. The author mentions 45-rpm records being used with them; my recollection is of 16 2/3-rpm records and players. They were the diameter of 45s but held three selections per side rather than one. I believe the idea was to minimize the number of disks a driver had to try to control in an automobile. The author is certainly correct in describing the difficulties of dealing with these players on the road. The disks liked to slide all around the interior and would pick up scratches that made them unpleasant to the ears or even unusable. And they tended to be destroyed by warping in a hot car in the summer.

Whenever I watch my seventeenyear-old son juggle the CDs in and out of his car player, I’m grateful that his low tolerance for uncooperative mechanical devices is not being tried by a record player.

Armand V. Brandao
Taunton, Mass.

Platters On Wheels

WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, MY father owned a Chrysler 30OB. Neatly fitted beneath the dashboard was a 162/3-rpm record player. The car came with several disks—a Pajama Game soundtrack, a Glenn Miller album, and others I can’t remember except for one titled Romantic Moods . Many a West Texas night a young lady and I would sit under the stars and evaluate wow and flutter.

Harry Howell
College Station, Tex.

Platters On Wheels

CAR RADIOS OFTEN HAD ADVANCED features. They withstood shock, vibration, and extremes of temperature. They had sensitive and selective tuners, often with radio-frequency amplifiers, as well as powerful audio amplifiers to combat wind noise.

As a boy in the early fifties I modified a Motorola console in our living room, I think to install a phonograph. I found the big, handsome cabinet mostly empty, containing only a large speaker and a car radio with the vibrator absent from its socket and a transformer and rectifier substituted to work from household AC. The coil that smoothed the rectifier output also generated the magnetic field for the speaker. (Before the advent of inexpensive permanent magnets, such “dynamic” speakers were a mark of quality.)

A fine radio, with a car at heart.

Samuel R. Phillips
Portola Valley, Calif.

Platters On Wheels

SOON AFTER GRADUATING FROM HIGH school, in 1933,1 was lucky enough to find a bit of employment that enabled me to purchase a 1933 Model B V-8 ragtop Ford roadster. My father, who worked for Philco, had a car radio installed in it. In those days runningboard antennas were common, but as your article pointed out, they had their problems. One was that as you drove around corners, the antenna would end up pointing at the source of the signal instead of being parallel to it, and the radio would fade in and out.

It occurred to me one day that if the antenna was vertically mounted, the fade-out might not be as bad, so I took one of my mother’s old curtain rods, a metal pole about four feet long and three-eighths of an inch in diameter, secured it to a wooden block, and mounted that assembly on the rear bumper of my car. Much to my amazement, the fade-out problem ended, and in spite of the fact that my father thought I was nuts, my curtain-rod antenna was quite successful.

So maybe I was the inventor of the “fishpole” antenna. As time went on, of course, vertical rods became the thing.

Robert D. Harris
Fallon, Nev.

Go Figure

THE ARTICLE IN THE SPRING 2000 issue about pocket calculators ("How the Computer Got Into Your Pocket,” by Mike May) brought back some memories. In about 1969 I started looking around for an electronic calculator to use in our engineering department at Love joy, Inc., in South Haven, Michigan. After going to trade shows and poring through technical articles, I finally decided on a Wang calculator.

For $3,300, this is what I got: a big box about the size of a personalcomputer processor and two keyboards that could be connected to it. Besides the basic arithmetic functions, it could do square roots, and it had two memory banks. That was it for power.

Yet it was miraculous, because I could now quickly calculate very accurate answers, while I was on the phone, to questions that would have taken some time with my slide rule. We were selling variable-speed belt drives and had to calculate belt lengths, centerto-center distances, pitch diameters, and so on. I worked out a program for the equations so I could just plug in the numbers. Customers would ask me how I could do it so fast.

Ray Giegerich
South Haven, Mich.

The View From Above

I ENJOYED READING “EYES IN THE SKIES” as an American expatriate currently living and working in Mannheim, Germany. Both Mannheim and its sister city, Ludwigshafen, across the Rhine, were heavily bombed—destroyed- during World War II because of their industrial importance in supporting the German war effort. Last fall a large unexploded bomb was discovered here using newly declassified aerial photographs taken from actual Allied bombing runs. The bomb was found in a local harbor, and an area of the city had to be evacuated while it was safely transported away.

Michael Poehlman
Mannheim, Germany

The View From Above

I ENJOYED READING “EYES IN THE SKIES” as an American expatriate currently living and working in Mannheim, Germany. Both Mannheim and its sister city, Ludwigshafen, across the Rhine, were heavily bombed—destroyed- during World War II because of their industrial importance in supporting the German war effort. Last fall a large unexploded bomb was discovered here using newly declassified aerial photographs taken from actual Allied bombing runs. The bomb was found in a local harbor, and an area of the city had to be evacuated while it was safely transported away.

Michael Poehlman
Mannheim, Germany

The View From Above

YOUR “EYES IN THE SKIES” PIECE ON aerial reconnaissance (by T. A. Heppenheimer, Spring 2000) suffered from a mild dose of Americentrism. The first organized use of aerial observation in the military arena predated the Civil War efforts of Wise, LaMountain, and Lowe by more than half a century. According to Gunther E. Rothenberg in his book The Art of Warfare in the Age of Napoleon , the first uses of observation balloons by the French military were at the sieges of Valenciennes and Condé in 1793. They used the kind of hot-air balloon pioneered by the Montgolfier brothers.

After that the Committee of Public Safety established the first organized military balloon company, on April 2, 1794. The unit was made up of 26 officers and men, who used silk balloons filled with hydrogen, which gave better lift than hot air. Their first field deployment was at the Battle of Fleurus in June 1794. A second company was subsequently formed, and at least one balloon was deployed by the up-andcoming General Bonaparte during his 1796 Italian campaign. A balloon company was even utilized in Egypt during his 1798 campaign there.

Ultimately, Bonaparte disbanded the balloon companies, probably because of the lack of adequate communication with the observers in the balloons (it all went one way, from balloon to ground via dropped messages and primitive flag signals) and because the low-pressure hydrogen apparatus of the day took two to three days to fully inflate. The fact that most of the balloons sent to Egypt were captured by the Royal Navy while still at sea may also have had some bearing on the decision. Nonetheless, what did get accomplished was done a long time before the American Civil War, and by an established military force, not by independent contractors like Lowe.

Terry Stibal
Pearland, Tex.

Secrets Of The Strad

YOUR ARTICLE ON VIOEIN TECHNOLOGY (“The Mysterious Technology of the Violin,” by Steven L. Shepherd, Spring 2000) discusses how the dimensions and construction of a Strad can be duplicated without achieving the same tonal qualities. Many have suspected that the secret was in the varnish and have spent years trying to duplicate it. I would like to suggest that the secret may lie in the wood used in construction. It has been said that Stradivari used lumber obtained by salvaging logs lying in a coastal lagoon. These logs had fallen into a river and been soaked in freshwater for several years as they made their way down to the sea. On the coast they had soaked for several more years in salt water before Stradivari got them. The effect of extended freshwater and saltwater soaking on the wood used for violins should be explored.

Daniel Newman
Sedona, Ariz.

Dialing For Dollars

CURT WOHLEBER’S OVERVIEW OF THE telephone answering machine (“Object Lessons,” Spring 2000) doesn’t mention how telephone companies have profited from the mass adoption of the insidious gadget. Before cheap answering machines, people didn’t pay for a call nobody answered. Now the moment the answering machine clicks on, no matter what type it is, someone will have to pay for the call, whether or not an actual message is left.

Albert Mroz
Menlo Park, Calif.

Plug And Play

MY WIFE AND I ONCE STAYED IN A motel room furnished with a Magic Fingers vibrating bed (“Postfix,” by John Grossmann, Spring 2000). Curious, but unwilling to invest 25 cents, I examined the bed and found it to have been refitted just as the article described. Although I was not an electrical engineer, I was able to discern that the unit was plugged into a generic coin box that was plugged into a wall outlet. The simple task of plugging the unit directly into the wall would provide unlimited massaging. We used probably a minute of it, but retelling this story over the years has provided me with countless hours of enjoyment. Thank you, Mr. Houghtaling.