Subminiature vacuum tubes. Developed during the 1940s, these little tubes were quickly supplanted by transistors in electronics devices. But they did appear in a few, rare devices highly prized by collectors for their rarity and their quirky technology.

They appeared in this, the Belmont Boulevard radio from 1947. That's a good looker and there is a video on this channel all about it. And those little tubes appeared in this Emerson 747 model as shown in this striking ad for it that ran in the earlytomid 1950s.

And they appear in this, the cute, strange, delightful "Tiny Tooner" radio.

The date on this is unknown but it is clearly somewhere in the early 1950s. It says on the back "Manufactured by Acousticraft Corp., Chicago, USA, Patents applied for." It was held together by melted plastic. Really. Where other devices might have screws holding it together, this one had plastic pins. In final assembly, the back was placed over these three pins and the end of those pins melted down to hold it together. Cheeeesy!

Anyway, somewhere along the way those melted ends fell off and the thing is open. It doesn't want to stay together at all, like one of those "crashup cars" I had as a kid. So let's look inside. Well, first, on the back there's a pocket clip. Handy. Inside the back? Nothing. And here's the circuit board. Wow. Almost nothing was made in those days with actual printed circuit boards. And this is one of them. One of the nothing. One of none. You know what I mean. Primitive.

As you can see, the rest of this just comes apart and we can look over the chassis up close. The tuning coil and the cute little dial pointer is seen here. The subminiature tubes, one stacked over the other. It looks like one of the tubes leads is just hanging loose. It wouldn't surprise me if that's all it ever did. And the battery compartment. Like all tube radios, it needs one power source to power the radio and another one for the tube filaments. The radio uses a 221/2 volt battery. This is the same battery as used in the Regency TR1, the world's first transistor radio.

And the other battery, for the tube filaments, well, they call for a "miniture" flashlight battery, which looks like it would be a AA penlite battery. Schoolteachers and book editors may wish to note that "miniature" is spelled wrong.

But now, smart guy, we come to a problem with this explanation. If this radio is supposed to be held together moreorless permanently with melted plastic pins, how are you supposed to change the batteries? Nowadays things ARE THAT disposable, where there are singleuse products made with batteries permanently installed where the whole thing is thrown out when the batteries die. Back in the 1950s we weren't yet that cavalier with our environment, so there is no way this was permanently put together so you couldn't change the batteries.

So getting it back together, I see that the pins hold it all together, but not this top part where the batteries go. There's a a lip on the part we will now call the battery cover and that cover has a bit of friction there that would hold it on. Not much, but I think that explains how this thing is supposed to hang together.

Here's the on/off switch. A simple lever switch. On/off. No volume control, just on or off.

Acousticraft, the maker of this little gizmo, made earphones and hearing aids and it would be one of their earphones that would plug in the side here so you could hear this little radio. Into the two pin jacks labeled "phones." In case you haven't noticed by now, there is no speaker in this thing. Nor was there a speaker in that Belmont Boulevard I showed you. The other pin jack on the side is labeled "Ant." for antenna and you aren't going to hear much out of a radio like this without an external antenna. This little bunch of wire came with this radio and that served as the antenna. There's no alligator clip on that wire for attaching it to a bed frame or water pipe in order to improve reception as was done on crystal radios but there may have been one at that time. Or a short length of wire like this may have been sufficient for this little guy, since it does have two tubes in it.

The nameplate on this little radio is a piece of foil. Cheesy and wonderful at the same time! It's got a great Tiny Tooner logo design on it and this shows this isn't just some product they issued out of the back of the engineering department like some items you see seem to have been. No, they had the art department in on it too, with obvious high commercial hopes for this little gizmo.

The Tiny Tooner. One of the odd and interesting little detours on the journey from this... to the pocket radio.