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Taybern Equipment Company "Mystery Radio" |
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| I suppose you
can consider this device a "radio", but it's just barely that. It
was made by the Taybern Equipment Corporation of New York City, and was
produced just after WW-II.
It is a crystal set, meaning the detector is a crystal diode, which converts the radiated energy from a radio station to an audio signal that can operate an earphone. In the case of this "mystery radio", there is nothing more than the diode and the earphone. There is no tuning adjustment whatsoever. If you were lucky enough to be close to a radio station, you would be able to hear it with this device. Unfortunately, if there happened to be more than one strong station in the area, you would hear all of them at once. Taybern, located in the "radio row" section of lower Manhattan, was one of many companies that sought to profit from the flood of electronic surplus material that hit the market after the war. They modified a military earphone by adding a surplus 1N21 microwave mixer diode which they concealed inside the earphone housing. The external wiring was a length of standard AC line cord, with clips on the end. The hopeful listener would have clipped one wire to an antenna (or any ungrounded metallic structure) and the other wire to an actual ground. There does not appear to have been any clip or other device to hold this unit to the ear. Each of the listeners shown on the front of the box are holding the radio to their ears. The earphone unit is only about 7/8 inch in diameter, and 1 1/4 inch long. A fellow collector was kind enough to send me a scan of an original instruction sheet for the Mystery Radio, which appears below. It's interesting that they suggested that a sixty mile reception was possible with this radio, but weren't willing to guarantee even five mile reception! |
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