New Crosley Videos - Cars, Radio

• For radio fans, here's a video about the Crosley Pup single-tube receiver from 1925.
• And here we have close-up video, inside and out, of a 1948 Crosley wagon.
• This video is a tour of a De Forest/Crosley Model 51 receiver, from 1924.
• A Crosley Special, labeled Joe Graves' Crosley, wrecked in 1959, back in action. It has a Cobra-like nose. The engine sounds great!
• Tour of a 1950 Crosley Hotshot, owned by Edgar & Edna Schumann.
• 1952 Crosley Super Sport, was for sale on eBay.
• Crosley Dash Gauges.

The True Origins of the Proximity Fuze - Part 1

Below: 1935 Shell with Proximity Fuze
Quite a bit has been written about the proximity fuze, over 20 million of which were produced in the Crosley Corporation's Cincinnati factory during World War II. However, there's more than a little of the fuze's history that has not been made available to the general public.

To complete the missing info in Crosley, this and ensuing installments will describe the origins and development of the fuze. This includes the details of experiments with the proximity fuze in pre-war England as a "bomb to bomb bombers."

The most-publicized information to date has had to do with the proximity fuze's applications in four different anti-aircraft shells in the Pacific, against Japanese aircraft. Lesser-known are the original aerial types of the proximity fuze, and the use made of it in place of ground-burst shells.

The first proximity fuzes grew out of a British Air Ministry "bomb the bomber" program in 1938, when it was discovered that the only way Britain's obsolescent biplane fighters could successfully attack fast monoplane bombers was to get above them and drop contact-fused bombs. This meant that drops had to made connect with with the target--a rare occurrence. It was decided then that it would be worthwhile to develop other kinds of detonators, able to set off bombs when they reached close-enough proximity to do damage to an aircraft.

Two kinds of proximity fuzes were initially developed: acoustic and photoelectric. The acoustic fuzes were engineered in both high-frequency and low-frequency models. The challenge of course was to create a fuze that would not detonate a bomb because of the ambient noise created by being dropped. Many trials and errors resulted in a bomb with a piezoelectric(PE) microphone in its nose. Sounds at a certain frequency--as created by a large monoplane--would activate the fuze, which would close a circuit to a relay and electrically detonate the bomb. Both high- and low-frequency models were built.

The acoustic fuzes were a bit sensitive to nearby (up to 2,000 feet) airbursts, as well as vibration from their own arming. So work was done on a photoelectric fuze that would detonate in response to a change in ambient light, nearly always the result of the presence of an aircraft.

The photoelectric proximity fuze been developed before the British Air Ministry began its fuze program. In 1935 a Swiss engineer developed and later patented a concept for an antiaircraft shell fuze that would be detonated by sensing the presence of an aerial target through a change in ambient light. Hence, the fuze was far from being an American invention, and was in fact in use in Britain before American authorities knew of it.
--To be continued in a later post--

How the Internet was Monetized: Excerpt from On the Way to the Web

We've talked here before about what sort of machine the Crosley Personal Computer (CPC) might have been. What about the Internet? What would Crosley have made of the Internet--or, more to the point, how would he have made money with it?

I think he would have gone about it the way Dialog and Bunker Ramo did, as detailed in On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders. If you want to see how it was done, or are just curious about Internet and online service history, read about it in this excerpt from On the Way to the Web, which also details the technology transfer from the government ARPAnet to commercial entitites.

Hosted by the DigiBarn Computer Museum, the chapter describes the earliest "monetizing" of the online world. It shows how the first real information superhighway was created (and named), and shows how entreprenuers built enormously profitable online businesses without investing in computers, software, or content. This excerpt also details the earliest commercial online content!

Steam Power in the Radio Age

The 1920s was an age of dichotomies. Almost no indoor plumbing. No mechanical refrigeration for homes--iceboxes, yes, and the ice mostly came from steam-powered ice plants.

Speaking of steam power (the more knowledgeable among you might have thought I was going to write about the Icyball again), it was steam that handled the heavy-duty part of the construction business. Laborers, mules, and horses did most of the hauling and lifting, but steam-power was still required for the heavy jobs. The internal combustion engine hadn't reached the same level of power and, besides, there were thousands steam-powered locomotives and steam shovels still in use.

Which leads to the juxtaposition in the photo: steam building the world's most powerful radio broadcast station. This photo (part of a larger one) was taken in 1928, during the real groundbreaking for WLW's Mason, Ohio transmitter building--the structure that first housed the 50Kw transmitter, and then the half-million-watt unit that would light up the countryside and speak to the world. That's Powel Crosley, Jr. to the right, with the operator and coaler at left. Click for larger image.

The Erie steam shovel (Type B-2) sits in the hole it was digging for the transmitter building's foundation and basement, representative of a fading technology helping make the way for leading-edge tech. (Interestingly, mules played a part in building this WLW site, as well. I'll share some photos of this later.)

--Mike On the Way to the Web

New Ruth Lyons Biography

I've received many questions about the publication date for my biography of Ruth Lyons, titled Before Oprah: Ruth Lyons, the Woman Who Created Talk TV.

The title was originally scheduled for October (I completed the manuscript several months ago). But the publisher has decided to wait until May, in order to allow more time for production and promotion. So, the book will be released on Mother's Day, though you can order it now.

As noted in the past, the book has quite a bit of information about Miss Lyons that has never been published. A good number of photos will be in the book, a number of them not previously published, as well.

My apologies to those of you who had planned on it being published last month. And thanks to those in Cincinnati, Columbus, Dayton, Indianapolis, West Virginia and southern Michigan for your patience!

--Mike http//www.michaelabanks.com

Powel Crosley's Toys

I've a nice photo from the air above Powel Crosley's Seagate mansion around 1938. In it, you can see his Douglas Dolphin seaplane (NC982Y) at anchor, the entire mansion and swimming pool, and in the yacht basin one of this yachts and a few motorboats.

That's a pretty good collection. But this photo is equally interesting. Taken in 1939 at Crosley's Cincinnati estate, Pinecroft, it displays the all-new Crosley automobile, along with Crosley's Fairchild 45-A (which he soon got rid of because he bumped into a center-cabin support too often)--all part of a publicity/advertising photo shoot. It's early spring, and that's Page Crosley standing on the wing root, her friends modeling the latest fashions.

Pinecroft had a grass landing field (standard for those days), but the car and the airplane on on a paved surface. It's probably the loop drive that runs by the main mansion yet today. Click on the image to see a large version.

Crosley Automobile Heir Gone!

The spiritual heir to the Crosley automobile is gone. Yes, the campy little Yugo is going out of production. In a time when nearly everyone wants a small, economic automobile, too! The same car that brought back the Crosley jokes. ("Why does a Crosley need a rear-window defroster? So you can see when you're pushing it.")

The details are in news reports, but one can't help but wonder whether they would be a successful import in America, if properly marketed. It might save GM or Ford to buy Yugo with their coming windfalls.

That sounds good, but when did a mega-corporation ever do anything smart? (Digression: Ford and GM and Chrysler continuing to turn out massive gas hogs for all these years proves something I've been telling people for years: too much money makes you stupid!)

Naturally we think, "Bring back the Crosley!" A Japanese company was ready to close on a deal to license the Crosley design and buy the tools and templates in 1954, but that deal went away. Probably for the same reasons the Crosley went away: few people were interested in the novelty or the high gas mileage. It was no longer the only new car available.

But the basic design could be upgraded. The automotive rights are probably vested in whatever company Aerojet General became (not in some trumpeting descendant). But that won't happen, either; it's easier to draw up a new car from scratch, or buy the Yugo and upgrade it.

Still, what would it take to update the Crosley as we knew it to meet 21st Century safety and performance standards? Brakes, for sure! Any thoughts?

(That's Tom Miller's '48 wagon on the right.)
--Mike http://www.michaelabanks.com