They are too noisy, or don’t amplify enough. The vast majority of the transistors they manufacture work, but they are not good enough for hearing aids.

Transistors have been used in hearing aids for a while now, and Raytheon, the principle maker of the little devices is having a devil of a time with quality control. Many of us are already building transistor radios in our basements or on kitchen tables by 1953. In 1952 Western Electric engineers made a four-transistor wrist radio as a gift for Dick Tracy creator Chester Gould.Ī few more commercial portables surface in 1951, 1952 and 1953 but the real commercial evolution of portable sets won’t begin until 1954. Another in the kitchen, and the forth was the focal point of dad's workbench. Polarized plugs and wall outlets evolved to minimize this risk.

If you plugged one of these in the wrong way and then touched its metal chassis and ground you became part of a potentially lethal circuit. A/C-powered five-tube superheterodyne radios were the most common household radios.

Mostly mom and dad were buying plug-in clock radios and kitchen radios, and new cars with dashboard radios, all of them containing tubes. Most radios sold in 1950 were A/C powered tabletop sets, although there were exceptions like the lunchbox-size battery portables made by RCA, Emerson and others.

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