LATEST IN RADIO

Hokitika Guardian, 29 October 1931, Page 8

LATEST IN RADIO

CONCEALED IN FURNITURE. NEWEST IMPROVEMENTS AND FADS. SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 30. Under an artificial azure sky and a bellowing loud-speaker, the eighth annual Radio Electrical World’s Fair was going full blast in Madison Square Garden in New York, and the show revealed that the latest fashion is to conceal the radio in the furniture. Thyere ■ were radios in grandfather clocks, in Louis XV. bureaus, in lows and in bookcases and under the kitchen sink.

In fact,, as one exhibitor explained enthusiastically, the really modern house should have a built-in radio equipment, with the master receiver in the attic and loud-speakers in every room. By pressing a button the busy housewife can male© a jazz come out of Uncle Abner’s picture on the wall and dinner music from under the dining table. The button is on the end or a, long wire, so that the radio enthusiast can take it to bed and hear music in the pillow.

Another fad this year is for shortwave receivers that will pick up not only international broadcasts, but also police broadcasts, commercial messages and'new varieties of static. They come in a little box which hooks on to the regular set in the house. The new phonographs were in evidence. They will do everything but wash the dishes and put out the cat. They change their own records without refilling, play all of them on one side, either side or both sides, and they never drop a record, that is, almost never. A new machine designed to play a record lasting half an hour was inhibited. It will play either variety of refcord. Throwing a switch cut the motor speed from 78 to 33, or vice versa. Downstairs in the basement were displayed a- marvellous variety of gadgets, including television and vacuum cleaners. There were also three boy scout tinkering with radio sets, and a gin called the Queen of the' Radio Fair, who was sitting on a table powdering her nose. Lured by an invitation to listen to a broadcast from Europe through the world’s largest radio receiving set, one correspondent put on the head phones. The broadcast, it seemed, wa s coming from France. “Yurra, Yu era! Un, deux, trois, et quatre. Yurra, yurra. Un moment.” Thg. newspaperman left the announcer to his yurras and went to play with the gadgets labeled “marvels of electricity,” exhibited by the New York Museum of Science and Industry. They provided lots of fun. .