Crystal Radio --Radio History

Had a semi-serious play with these years ago, never used a diode always a crystal, I was fortunate to stumble across a quality crystal set radio when I was clearing out a old house and it had a crystal with it. It did come with a aerial/ground isolator which I have shown below. The only task I had to do was to find a earphone of a suitable impedance. It worked OK and I used to have a tune late at night when it was quite in the house and the un-amplified signal could be better heard.  There is a Crystal Set Society on the web and some other good crystal radio web sites that have articles such as build a crystal set in 10 minutes with things you have at home.

The Crystal Set is live and well

This ancient piece of homebrew works. Connect a aerial, headphones and a crystal  and  I was listening on 606 mw.  The condenser (capacitor) attached to the front at the bottom gives the radio a degree of tuning.


Excuse the dust

This aerial "isolator" came with the crystal set above and is a simple "double pole knife arrangement" switch. The two modern nuts and bolts are my handy work. The gap is 10mm


I will polish this one day

One of my favourite bits of brassware, the crystal-cats whisker holder. This brass masterpiece has plenty of adjustments and is the better type when it comes to mounting crystals. The very best practice was to solder them in but this was fiddly. The crystals should also be handled with tweezers

Two pieces of Ivalek brand crystal and the cats whisker. As this crystal comes supplied with a silver cats whisker I presume that the crystal is Galena which is a common ore of lead and is the type of crystal that needs a metallic contact.

High spec

A top end Crystal Radio....The C F ELWELL   approved by the postmaster general , serial no 0765

C.F.Elwell was a chap that studied at Stanford University USA went to Europe and came back after a year with the option to use the Poulson Arc Converter (this is worth Googling). He was a early experimenter of telegraphy and achieved numerous firsts in distant communications. He set up various companies and making Crystal Radios was one of them.
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While surfing the world wide web I came across a article about a chap called Arthur Haddy who won the Emile Berliner Award  in 1970 for his pioneering and development work with recording heads and for the international adoption of 45-45 stereo disc recordings. This chap worked for the company C F Elwell and in 1922  worked on the Leafield Transmitter which was the first link in the Imperial wireless chain.
The next year there was a few tragic deaths in and around the transmitter and Haddy.commented....

" the only reason I am alive to day is because I walked round with my hands in my pockets"

ah! the good old days
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If you like to see absolute quality visit the Crystal Radio Club website (the link is in the side bar).BOOK NO 5929...LAT 51.480 LONG 0.125
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This is old

Not sure exactly how old this is, but I would say 70-80 years. This side is stations A to K and on the reverse side J to Z.