Transcription Mystery Disc #95

I've seen Philco Safety Records before. It's a brand of acetate recording blank.  But all the others I've seen were black.  Phonozoic lists 3 types of Philco blanks, all with black lacquer, all also dated to the very early 1940s. Because of thsi one record I now know that in the early 1940s there was a fourth type of disc used concurrently. It reminds me of the red lacquer Wilcox-Gay Recordio discs that were made in the 1940s. I suspect there may be a reason that both debuted and discontinued the red safety lacquer at about the same time.National manufactured red lacquer blanks in the early 1960s.

This 6.5 inch diameter disc starts at the outer edge, and spins at 78 rpm. It is labeled clearly (a rarity) with the song, artist and date all written legibly. The artist is Billy Heinz who is either a female or prepubescent. The vocals are very clear over the bed noise which I've toned down with a high pass filter.  The song is "Ferry Boat" most notably performed by the Andrews Sisters in the Summer of 1940. This home recording by Billy Heinz was recording about 6 months later.

Jumbo Radio!

Today we can make a radio 10,000 times smaller than a human hair. It's ten carbon atoms wide and only a few hundred nanometers long. But it's hard to make an advertisement for a radio you cant even see. (How do you market a virtually intangible product?) In advertising bigger is better so it is unsurprising that Philco made a series of huge radios in the 1930s to advertise their product.

This succession of radio were all over-sized replicas of their home models. In that era radios were already furniture-sized.  So after that over-sized is already the size of a car. Or bigger as you see above. Philco itself was huge at the time. I'll quote from Philcoradio.com:

"...At one point in the fall, Philco had over 140,000 unfilled orders for Baby Grand sets. Philco would eventually sell over 343,000 of the Model 20 receivers – becoming the nation’s number one radio manufacturer in the process by the end of 1930"

It's completely appropriate then that they used the biggest radios to advertise the biggest radio manufacturer in America.  That Model 20 mentioned above was about the size of a French horn. It was portable, today it'd be considered huge and ungainly but at the time it was very impressive. The jumbo sets were the exact opposite, they were utterly non-portable. Hard to make, hard to transport, hard to assemble Philco only made a few but the exact number is not known.

These jumbo sets that traveled the country attracting attention to their dealers. the earliest one I find noted was displayed In Syracuse, NY at a plaza off Warren street in October of 1929. They made one about 12 feet tall to display at the Lipton Outboard Regatta, a boat race in Philadelphia, their home town. They made another which they posed at Denver University as a publicity photo with Denver University football team, The Pioneers. that unit was even bigger at about 16 feet tall, 8 feet wide and 5 feet deep.  Another was 16 feet tall and 8 feet wide, weighing in at 1,980 lbs. There was one displayed at Finkenberg’s in  in June of 1931. That was at 2279 third ave in New York City. The Boone radio shop in Charleston had one shipped from Indianapolis for a charity drive in April of 1930. Another 16 footer visited the Sigma Theatre in Dayton Ohio to advertise a small local chain of retailers, the M.D. Larkin Company. A leafler described the innards of the unit:

"Inside this huge cabinet is a Philco 95 receiver which picks up programs and rebroadcasts them through amplifiers placed behind the speaker panel of the large set. Records are also played so that a continuous program issues forth to entertain listeners."

Another leaflet claimed the unit could clearly be heard half a mile away. These units were 2:1 and 2.5:1 scale versions of their High Boy models straight out of the catalog. They were all designed by Edward L. Combs, who'd been designing their cabinets since1929. Other Philcos were designed by Normal Bel Geddes, but the cathedral design and the High Boy were both Combs. He also designed the including the 30, 41, and 96 highboy, the 296 lowboy radio-phonograph. You can identify these units by the old style lightning bolt Philco logo. Around 1932 they switched to block lettering. More here.

Hip-Pocket Records

Hip-Pocket Records were just a brief blip in the wild woolly history of music formats. No radio station ever played Hip-Pocket Records. It was a series of very tiny flexi-discs. They sound pretty bad, and they are easily folded permanently rendering them unplayable. But what do you want for 69 cents? More here.The audio quality is surprisingly good considering the plastic is less than paper-thin. The tiny discs were usually two-sided, and each side had a whole three minute single. Hip-Pocket Records were introduced by Philco, the electronics division of the Ford Motor Co. in 1967. early singles included: The Doors. the Beatles, Tommy James & the Shondells, Mitch Ryder, The Buckinghams, Neil Diamond, Etta James, Aretha Franklin... More here.

Primarily they released records by Atlantic, Mercury and Roulette. The company Americom produced it's own Pocket discs which were sold in vending machines for 50 cents creating competition in the narrow marketplace. It was Americom that cut a deal with Apple Records and got the rights to release some Beatles singles. These are worth boku dollars today. The fad died out in the late 1960s after issuing some singles by the Isley brothers.So here we have a shoddy, kitchy piece of media, made by Philco, a company previously known for quality. Most attributed that to the bad influence of Ford. Ford had purchased the company in December of 1961. While making car radios seemed a fine lot for them... these Hip-Pocket Records were demeaning. Ford sold Philco to General Telephone and Electronics in 1974. In 1981 they sold the brand to Phillips who just wanted it to end a long-standing brand name confusion. The continue to the the brand name today for retro electronics. Everyone had forgotten that Philco was the number one seller of radios in the US from 1930 through 1950. What a strange way for them to end.