90c - The Radio
Commencing in 1890, first possibilities were explored to deliberately create and receive radio waves. By September 1895, Guglielmo Marconi, a self-taught 21-year-old from Bologna, had already performed simple experiments which had convinced him that it was possible to send signals by using electromagnetic waves to connect a transmitting and a receiving antenna. From 1896 onwards, he was the leading head and whose work lead to wireless telecommunication.
Within the timeline of radio, many people contributed theory and inventions in what became radio. Radio development began as "wireless telegraphy". Later radio history increasingly involves matters of broadcasting.
The earliest 1920s radios did not show any station numbers; instead, their knobs were marked with numbers from 0-100 or sometimes nothing at all. Although there is no precise criterion for a radio being antique, typically a 50-year-old or World War II vacuum tube set, and a pre-1960 transistor set would qualify.
The Cabinet design, and the band and frequency markings on the dial is often a strong indicator of when a radio was made. The Cathedral and tombstone style wooden cabinets were most popular during the 1930s.
130c – Television
Television (TV) is a telecommunication medium used for transmitting moving images in monochrome (black and white), or in color, and in two or three dimensions and sound. The term can refer to a television set, a television program ("TV show"), or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for entertainment, education, news, politics and advertising.
One of the first experimental wireless television transmissions was by the Scottish inventor, engineer John Logie Baird on November 25, 1925, in London. The first color television transmission was on July 3, 1928 using a mechanical process.
The addition of color to broadcast television after 1953 further increased the popularity of television sets in the 1960s, and an outdoor antenna became a common feature of suburban homes.
Although the first television transmission took place in England in 1925, collectors find few sets that pre-date 1946. The first sets had only five channels, but by 1949 the additional UHF channels were included. Cable television was introduced in the 1940s and the first TV remote controller appeared in 1956. The first color television set became available in 1951.
220c – Telegraph machine
Developed in the 1830s and 1840s by Samuel Morse (1791-1872) and other inventors, the telegraph revolutionized long-distance communication. It worked by transmitting electrical signals over a wire laid between stations and it was successfully tested in 1837 but is no longer in use today, its fall did give rise to many other forms of long distance communication. Telegrams were sent by a telegraph machine. They were a fast way to send important news for people without telephones. A telegraph operator tapped the message out in code using a machine called a Morse key. ... This was called a telegram.
305c- Typewriter
The first American patent for what might be called a typewriter was granted to William Austin Burt, of Detroit, in 1829. However, the breakthrough came in 1867 when Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee with the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule invented their first typewriter.
It is a beautifully decorated machine, covered in hand painted floral groupings.
Yet this typewriter, for all its imperfections, would come to shape history. It was the first to utilize the now familiar “QWERTY” keyboard.
The Sholes & Glidden typewriter was the first to be faster than handwriting and with improved carbon paper; antique typewriters could generate multiple copies of the same document.
Collectors today can easily identify vintage typewriters by the brand names that are generally stamped on the fronts of these machines in large letters. The exact age and year can be more difficult to determine, but serial and model numbers are useful starting points.
420c – The Telephone
In 1871 young Alexander Graham Bell a Scot, (1847-1922), son of Alexander Melville Bell, who was the inventor of “visible speech,” an alphabet that used symbols to represent human sounds, moved to Boston, Massachusetts as a teacher to the deaf. He worked on ways to translate the human voice into vibrations, and thus came up with the idea for the telephone. In 1875 Bell began working with his assistant, Thomas Watson, a mechanically-inclined electrician; by 1876 Bell had uttered the first intelligible sentence over the phone: “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.”
It was Alexander Graham Bell that since its invention in 1876 that was given a patent for the first operational telephone. The telephone evolved along with the technology of the time. It was this invention that proved to revolutionize the way people communicate throughout the world.
