[ARC5] Deforest Tube Question

[Jim Haynes]

> On 1 Jan 2017 at 18:37, Robert  Eleazer wrote:
J>> Ken mentioned finding a replica Deforest Audion in the trash.  That 
led me to wonder.  Were the
>> first tubes employed in radios for detectors or for audio amplifiers?

That's quite a find.  Tom Perera W1TP gave a talk at the 2007 AWA 
conference on "Phil Weingarten's Fabulous Fakes"  which included
replica audions sold as originals.  He said some people have made
replicas and intentionally include marks that identify them as replicas.
But Weingarten made counterfeits and sold them as if they were Real
DeForest tubes.  He didn't have a very good vacuum system, so they
didn't last very long if people tried to use them.

The whole story is something like this.  Weingarten drove a bread truck
in New York City in the 1920s.  Progress in radio was so rapid at the time
that people would put outmoded radio receivers on the curb for trash 
pickup, and Phil would pick them up, take them home, take them apart
and file the parts away.  Tom showed a photo of a radio store in NYC
with a bunch of obsolete radios stacked in the window and a sign saying
"any set, 75 cents".  Or maybe it was 25 cents.  Well years went by and
the old radios started to have value as collector items, so Phil
reassembled some of them and sold them as originals.  Somewhere along
the line he acquired a vacuum apparatus and began making fake audions.
Telegraph keys were another of his specialties.  There was one mounted
on a wooden block with a plaque saying it was presented to some early
radio operator as an award.  Well it turned out that five different
guys owned copies of the same one-of-a-kind key!  There was a supposedly
original Marconi high-power key that was detectable as a fake because it
included a steel bolt where the original would have been brass.
Some engraved nameplates had been reproduced by sand casting.  There
was a supposedly extremely rare "aviation" key which had "Signal Corps"
misspelled and which someone identified as a remodeling of a fairly
common WW-I key.  And there was a man who came to the conference from
Holland, told how he had bought a supposed Fleming valve from Weingarten,
and had then paid a lot more money to import it into Holland, and then
it turned out to be a fake.  (He was pleased to sell the known fake
at the auction for much more than he paid for it - I guess even fakes
are attractive to some collectors because of the notoriety.)