Skip to main content

Radios: The Golden Age

March 2023
1min read

by Philip Collins; Chronicle Books; 119 pages.

You might have thought the golden age of radios was the 1920s, when Atwater Kent sold gleaming High Gothic burled-wood consoles the size of parlor organs, but the English aficionado Philip Collins isn’t interested in such musty classicism. For him, the best radios are the plastic ones manufactured from the 1930s to the 1950s, and this engaging book makes a good case for his point of view. During these years some six hundred manufacturers were struggling to make their radios look special. They drew on the talents of industrial designers like Raymond Loewy and Russell Wright, and more than a hundred of the results are marshaled here in a regular little 1939 World’s Fair of globes and ziggurats, their candy colors all glowing deliriously. Here is the definitively Moderne Air King of 1935—take away the lighted dial, and you have a swell Miami Beach hotel; here is the 1947 Porto Products Smokerette, with pipe rests hollowed out next to the dial; here is the 1940 Belmont Model 534, with the rounded snout of the streamlined locomotives of the day; here is the Mickey Mouse Model 411, made out of “Syroco wood”; here are a blazing blue-and-crimson 1947 Belmont and the 1940 Lumitone, which also serves as a lamp. The book isn’t heavy on text—there are just two pages—and yet the radios succeed so well at being objets d’art that the reader doesn’t miss it.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "March 1988"

Authored by: Ivan E. Prall

You probably haven’t seen it, but it’s out by the tracks of the Chicago & North Western

Authored by: The Editors

The nation’s first subway system was launched here in 1897.

Authored by: Oliver Jensen

A man who has spent his life helping transform old photos from agreeable curiosities into a vital historical tool explains their magical power to bring the past into the present

Authored by: Hiller B. Zobel

Every one of the Founding Fathers was a historian—a historian who believed that only history could protect us from tyranny and coercion. In their reactions to the long, bloody pageant of the English past, we can see mirrored the framers’ intent.

Authored by: Richard C. Ryder

It was discovered in New Jersey in 1858, was made into full-size copies sent as far away as Edinburgh, and had a violent run-in with Boss Tweed in 1871. Now, after fifty years out of view, the ugly brute can be seen in Philadelphia.

Authored by: Benjamin Franklin

Only one man would have had the wit, the audacity, and the self-confidence to make the case

Authored by: Walter Karp

The early critics of television predicted the new medium would make Americans passively obedient to the powers that be. But they badly underestimated us.

Authored by: Jack Rudolph

On their weathered stone battlements can
be read the whole history of the three-century
struggle for supremacy in the New World

Authored by: Daniel Aaron

George Templeton Strong was not a public man, and he is not widely known today. But for forty years he kept the best diary—in both historic and literary terms—ever written by an American.

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.