Americans love to improve on technology. The latest involves making an amplifier for a smart phone from a potato chip can. With it, folks can better hear music on the phone.
When my dad was a kid he did something similar. Back then radio was in its infancy and not many could afford the day’s expensive sets. My dad included.
What he did instead was build a rudimentary radio called a crystal set. He said he found the plans for it in the Boy Scout handbook. It involved a salt box, a coil of copper wire and a small crystal rock.
Once the crystal radio was completed, you needed a set of headphones to hear. At first, he said, he and his friends took turns with the headphones. Then he got an idea. He went into the kitchen and came back with a large mixing bowl, set the bowl on the table and put the headphones inside.
Viola! The bowl became an amplifier. Everyone could hear. Dad said that after that everybody kept a mixing bowl on the coffee table.
By the time I was born in the mid-1930s, radio was better established and Mom and Dad had purchased a big console Zenith. It was a thing of beauty with a polished wooden cabinet, a glowing luminous dial and two speakers. You could get dozens of stations on it including short wave. Once we tuned in to the war news on the BBC in London.
I never built a crystal set, and transistor radios quickly ushered the big Zenith into obscurity. Today, it’s all about smart phones, MP3 players and iPads. Still, you never know when you might need a potato chip can or a salt box to improve on the latest technology.