Grebe Synchrophase

Alfred H.Grebe was a radio man to the core, he manufactured radios, he founded radio stations (ex. WAHG, WBOQ) and he invented radios. His Synchrophase was a type of TRF-Neutrodyne radio receiver. Today it remains highly collectible. A working restored unit can sell for thousands of dollars. WAHG later became WABC and later WCBS. More here.

Grebe was born in 1895 in Queens, NY. His father, Henry bought him a small wireless set when he was 9 year old. His interest grew so quickly that he was more knowledgeable than his own high school teachers on the subject. He got licensed as a commercial operator at the age of 15 and became a ships radio operator.He returned 3 years later and became a radio operator at the famous Telefunken wireless station in Sayville, NY on Long Island.

He began selling amateur radio gear before WWI. He printed his first catalog in 1914. They were popular enough that he incorporated H. Grebe & Company, Inc. in January of 1920 and he opened a factory 2 years later.  The problem began when he started selling the Synchrophase in 1924. He didn't have a license to sell a unit with a Neutrodyne tuner. but Grebe had sold 150,000 radios before he was dragged into court in 1927. The Neutrodyne circuit was designed by Louis Hazeltine, and owned by Independent Radio Manufacturers. Production was halted in April of that year. More here.


Over three years Grebe had released several models with numerous improvements between redesigns. [Source here] But behind it all there was still a Neutrodyne patent violation and he lost the suit. His company weathered the ordeal. But Alfred did not. He died suddenly following stomach surgery in 1935. His company survived his passing, and by WWII they were selling a "submarine  receiver" to the US Navy.

WAAM is Radiosonic

I was reading about the recovery of a Pallophone recording, and the preservation and digitization of a broadcast by Edison on WGY-AM. [Link here.] It's fascinating, but more to the point he is not an inventor of the radio era. For all of the amazing creations on his resume (1093 patents total), most were at best, component parts by the time broadcasting was born. But late in his life, at the age of 81 he entered the radio business for the first time.

In the year 1929 the Edison Company purchased the Splitdorf-Bethlehem Electrical Company of Newark. His son Charles Edison was elected president. In that era his diamond discs had lost out big to the Berliner style discs and he'd taken a bath. Taking over Splitdorf-Bethlehem meant that Edison Co. now could produce radio-phonographs. Splitdorf-Bethlehem had working products in the pipeline and patent licenses from RCA and Hazeltine which he needed to make a competitive product. By March they were shipping new products. The first line of Edison neutrodyne radios was introduced around March 1929.

The Company was renamed "Edison Radio." The first three model numbers under that name were: R-1, R-2, C-2 and C-1. These played both lateral cut and diamond disc records. (I confirmed that in the Encyclopedia Of Recorded Sound by Frank W. Hoffmann.)  But two things were happening here. First Edison was expanding into making consumer radios. But despite his effort to make his players backwards compatible with his unpopular diamond discs The Edison Radio Co. would be out of the record business by the end of October.

It's all the more strange that in the 8 months between March and October they were still making programs for radio on long-playing discs. Radio station 1250 WAAM-AM of Newark, New Jersey, had previously agreed to use his  new "Rayediphonic" Reproducing Machine and Radiosonic records.  These special diamond discs spun at about 30 rpm. In some ways it predicted the later dominance of the vinyl LP, but it was also rooted in the old vertical cut technology that had been already doomed for 2 decades.

The first Rayediphonic broadcast was aired on WAAM April 4 1929. More here. More strangely some of these programs were saved by Edison and are were re-broadcast on WFMU on Thomas Edison's Attic. For example, WAAM's Happy Hour group had their 1928 Edison program re-aired in November of 2003. More here. I don't know how many more of these are in the archives at the Edison National Historic Site. There's one on Archive.org here.  After all that effort to maintain his empire, he died in West Orange on October 18th 1931. WAAM later merged with WODA-AM in 1934 and became WNEW-AM, a station that survives to this day.

The Neutrodyne Radio

The Neutrodyne was a special kind of radio receiver that pre-dated the superheterodyne. they innovated a small antiphase signal from the addition of small windings on tuned anode coils. These neutralized the inter-electrode capacitance of the old triode tubes.

It's inventor, Louis Alan Hazeltine was born in 1886 in Morristown, NJ. He graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1906 and went off to Schenectady, NY for a job at General Electric. GE wasnt destioned to contain him and he returned to acedemia. In 1907 he went back to steven's to teach electrical engineering becoming department head 10 years later. In a collegiate enviornment he had time to do the research he wanted. He read up on research on vacuum-tube circuits and other innovations of Edwin H. Armstong. He wrote a text book and became a radio consultant to the U.S. Navy in 1918. More here.

The Hazeltine-Neutrodyne receivers all but ended the high-pitched squealing noises that were indigenous to AM radios of the era. More importantly it also ended the RCA dominace over the commercial radio industry. You might have assumed by now that this was a predecessor to the Superheterodyne but actually it was a low cost contemporary. The Neutrodyne was cheaper to build and cheaper to buy. More importantly it was easier to operate. it took more than 5 years for the price of vacuum tubes to drop enough to make the Superheterodyne practical domestically.

The circuit design made a comback in the 1950s in TV receivers. they were integrated into the RF amplifiers of tube VHF TV tuners to do the job 10 million Neutrodyne radios already did so well. He later advised the U.S. government on regulation of radio broadcasting, in somewhays setting the boundaries for the FCC for decades to come. During World War II he served on the National Defense Research Committee. Later in lafe that same clever bastard invented the Hazeltine-Fremodyne Superregenerative circuit reducing noise in even FM radios. he died May 24th, 1964.