I've been thinking about Jean Shepherd's 1973 description of the homebrew TV receiver built by his friend Johnny Anderson W9YEI in (probably) 1939. Shep said Johnny got the info on this receiver from the IRE Journal. But I was thinking that there had to have been "how to build" articles in circulation around that time, and -- if located -- these articles might provide some insight on what Johnny Anderson built.
Asked for info on early TV's Google will send you to lots of sites about early commercial sets. But you have to dig a bit and refine your search to find articles about the kind of receiver that Shep described as having been built by Johnny Anderson.
The picture above shows one such possibility. It comes from an article in the October 1939 issue of Radio and Television magazine. The author was Peter Scozzari.
The picture tube seems to be about the size that Shep described; Shep said it was a 1 inch tube, and this schematic shows a 2 inch tube, but the image must have been smaller, so this seems consistent with Shep's recollection. The article presents this as a "Low Cost" project -- that would have been what Shep's teenage friends were looking for. And we KNOW that Anderson was capable of building something like this: we have a QSL card from him from the same time period in which he notes that he was using a "9 tube superhet." Someone who could build a 9 tube superhet in 1938 could certainly build this TV receiver.
Can anyone find more of these kind of articles from the late 1930's?
Three cheers for Johnny Anderson and for Peter Scozzari.
More Googling revealed that a Californian named Jack Neitz more recently built the receiver described in Scozzari's 1939 article. Here is Neitz's build:
This is really amazing. We need more info on Jack Neitz! The only info I have is from:
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