[Hallicrafters] Transcript Of 1983 Speech By Fritz Franke

[Duane Fischer, W8DBF]

Hello All,

What follows is a transcript of the incredible speech made by the late Fritz 
Franke at the Dayton Hamvention circa 1983. This is available in remastered 
audio on a CD, along with several other historic live recordings, in the 
HHRP series - Historic Halligan Radio Project.

I edited the original typewriter done transcript and I hope my many hours of 
tedious work make it easier for you to read. I also hope that the old blind 
dude here is posting the final edited copy and not one somewhere between 
'start' and 'finish'!

There is a lot of previously classified material in his speech! Read it 
carefully, as it is loaded with little known, or never before known, facts!

Dayton 1983

Introduction by Nagle

Fritz Franke graduated from Northwestern University in engineering in 1930 
and he began working for Hallicrafters in December 1940. As chief of their 
systems engineering department he was responsible for the development of the 
SCR-299, 399 mobile communications system of which over 18,000 were built. 
He stayed with Hallicrafters until 1963 when Northtrop disposed of 
Hallicrafters or at least disposed of his engineering group. Since then he 
has retired but in his retirement has gone back to work again and is still 
in electronics. Fritz, we are happy to have you. He was Bill's Halligan 
right hand man and knew what was happening in those days.

*****
FRITZ FRANKE

Thank you very much. The interesting thing is that 50 years and 5 Months ago 
last night (30 April 1983. Max note!), which was New Years eve in 1933, Bill 
Halligan announced that he was starting a Radio Company. LARRY CHAMBERS and 
BURTON BROWN were present in Halligan's small apartment on the North Side on 
New Year's eve. BURTON BROWN was the person that later founded the Playboy 
Club. Now some of you Hallicrafter antique enthusiasts may remember that 
LLOYD BACK was an advertising man, and he was the one that suggested to Bill 
Halligan to create the name "Hallicrafters". Bill had $800 in 1933 which in 
those days was quite a large fortune, but not enough to really start a 
manufacturing company by any means. And Silver Marshall built most of the 
early Hallicrafter receivers until about 1935, when Halligan tied up with a 
company in Indianapolis that was also in financial trouble. The S-l and S-2s 
were never named S-1s and S-2s. Bill doesn't recall when he really started 
to use "S" for a receiver designation. We've gone through that and my 
records show that the first S number that was a true S number marked on the 
receivers was really the S-3. Now the first turning point in Bill's career 
was when he and a very fine gentleman by the name of RAY DURST took over 
Echophone corporation at 26th and Indiana Avenue in Chicago in 1937. 
Echophone was on the verge of bankruptcy. They owed RCA $42,000 on license 
fees, they also owed OHMITE, which was a privately owned resistor company in 
Chicago, quite a few thousand dollars and STANDARD TRANSFORMER quite a few 
thousand dollars. Now to make the deal with Echophone good and sensible, 
Bill got on a railroad train and went down to New York City and saw his old 
friend DAVID SARNOFF at RCA. And he convinced Sarnoff that if Sarnoff would 
say . . . we will wait for our $42,000 providing as soon as you start to 
ship Hallicrafters equipment out of Echophone, that you will pay royalties 
on the equipment. That was good. Halligan also convinced Standard 
Transformer and Ohmite and General Transformer to do the same thing and 
that's how they started out with Echophone and they paid their royalties and 
they paid their past bills and it took them about 2 1/2 or 3 years before 
they cleaned up all the back money that they owed. The results were that 
Hallicrafters had a very very good relationship with RCA. They were some of 
the first high frequency receivers using acorn tubes where all special acorn 
tubes were delivered to Hallicrafters by RCA. And RCA was there working with 
Bert Shure who I'll mention later and be sure that the tubes were good to be 
used at high frequency. It went that way for many many years - our 
relationship with RCA. And also with General Transformer, Ohmite and so 
forth. In Chicago area, any transformer company knew they didn't have a 
chance at Hallicrafters because we used nothing but Stancor - Standard 
Transformer that is, and General Transformer and Ohmite resistors because of 
the relationships of years ago when they helped Bill. Now the Year 1936 was 
really the turnaround for the radio industry. Short waves were booming, 
money was coming back in after the depression and Echophone really began 
to - when I say Echophone it's really Hallicrafters-Echophone - at that time 
the name Echophone was supressed and Hallicrafters was kept at the top of 
the pile.

Now in '37 - '38 the marine field was beginning to boom. Western Electric 
was the only manufacturer of marine radio telephones and Hallicrafters 
entered that field and by the time 1940 rolled around, Hallicrafters was 
producing more marine radio telephones than Western Electric was. The DD-1, 
you have all heard about, which was the worlds first production of dual 
diversity receivers and about the same time the High Frequency bands the 5 
and 10 meters came out. And the DD1s - there were only 500 built. I'll stop 
now and then and tell some little side stories. And Joe (Nagle?), I don't 
want you to reproduce too many of these things - I see you taking notes back 
there - particularly some of these little side issues of what happened at 
Hallicrafters. Somebody, I forgot the name of the company, came out with a 
push button band switch, and Halligan was fascinated by it and MCLAUGHLIN 
and CARL MILES did everything except stand on their heads to convince Bill 
not to put those push buttons - have push buttons put in the DD-1, because 
they weren't good, they wouldn't last. Bill wouldn't listen, they put push 
buttons in it and every darn DD-1 that was shipped out had problems and that 
was part of the reason that only 500 DD-1s were built.

According to my records the SX-23 was the first receiver, that was in 
production, that had an Automatic Noise Limiting system. And now Halligan 
was very exited about that Automatic Noise Limiter because they thought 
maybe they could get a patent on it. But they found out that RCA had gotten 
a patent on a similar circuit 3 months before. 1939 - first wide coverage 
VHF receiver the S-27 from 25 to 143 Mhz. I started with Hallicrafters in 
December 1940. If you look back, that's a long time ago. The EC-1 was seldom 
advertised in ham magazines because we were going after the Short Wave 
listener market, and the Echophone address was around the corner on 26th 
street. It was the address of a barber shop down at the bottom on the first 
floor, and we used the Echophone line for taking the things we developed at 
Hallicrafters, in the economizing, in stripping them down and so forth, to 
get a low cost receiver that we could sell through Wards, Sears, Lord knows 
where, independent marketing organizations etc. A lot of people couldn't 
understand, this other company when they'd come and look for an Echophone in 
the address and they'd see a barber shop! But the barber took all the mail 
in and then we went down and got it and took it upstairs. That was one of 
the stunts that was the low price end of the deal. Now in 1940 (sic), I 
think it was the Spring of the year, FRED STERLING, who was Chief Engineer 
at that time of the FCC called Bill Halligan - they were old friends - and 
said "I want to borrow two SX-28 receivers with minor modifications made 
into them". I made the minor modifications and he borrowed - we got the 
receivers tuned very quickly. We found out later that the FCC had had 
complaints about interference from a powerful short wave station in 
Washington DC. The FCC investigated it and on one frequency they found dots 
and on another frequency they discovered dashes! By using the two SX-28s and 
the audio system that we fixed up in there, they could hear the dot dashes 
coming out on two different frequencies and the commission sat down and 
copied it. It was a breakdown of the entire Japanese naval code and 
instructions that had been brought in by the Japanese embassy and delivered 
to the German embassy in Washington DC. And this is one of the stories that 
has puzzled many many people that for that entire breakdown of the Japanese 
code, how was it when Pearl Harbor happend, that we did not know the things 
that were going to really occur? Because the FCC had copied all that 
information and turned it over to various other authorities to follow up on. 
The same time we had a call from a Colonel - a good friend of Bill 
Halligan's from his two years at West Point - for a special 
transmitter-receiver combination for the artillery people. We were 
manufacturing the line of marine two-way radio units. I took an HT-14 marine 
transmitter, that had a 6 channel crystal control transmitter in it as I 
recall, and the receiver had a crystal control unit - I changed some coils 
to meet the military requirement on the prototype - it was given to me over 
the telephone - we painted the cabinet olive drab, we went to another . . . 
company manufacturing our cabinets and had a cabinet built, put it all 
together, and we loaded one in the car and I drove down to Old Point 
Comfort, Virginia and turned it to the Colonel. It was very much of a rush 
problem. That became the SCR-543 - Signal Corps number - and there were some 
25,000 of those built. We couldn't manufacture all of the other units and 
after Pearl Harbor, the Signal Corps said "Well, get rid of the production 
on that because you've got this and one company in the North end of Chicago 
that's out of business was building them went crazy all through the war 
building the SCR-543. Now at this time another interesting thing happened - 
and this you can disclose - we were called in - 3 of us and I've mentioned 
the names of other engineers at Hallicrafters - 3 of us were called in to 
Bill Halligan's office and the University of Chicago men are sitting there 
and they showed us a little box and gave us a circuit diagram. They showed 
us another piece like that and they gave a circuit diagram on that. They 
didn't say what it was but we immediately saw it was a Geiger counter. We 
said yes we could certainly put that into production for you no trouble at 
all - put it in very quick and keep it very quiet! - How did you guys know 
what Geiger counters were? We knew a lot of things that a lot of people 
didn't know we knew! Anyway we built the basic unit at Hallicrafters with no 
name on it, no numbers on it or anything, and the portable unit was built at 
a business of mine that I was trying to sell - where my guys put the tube 
and the three wires on it and the assembly, I'd pick the - when I left 
Hallicrafters, I'd pick up 15, 20 units take them up to Shubert Ave in 
Chicago, pick up tubes and assemblies, take them to my apartment and put 
them together. The University of Chicago would pick them up the following 
morning. Now about 2 years ago a fellow employee of mine told me about - he 
was involved in something I'll explain a little bit later and you'll see the 
story - "the Russians asked him how did Hallicrafters or why did 
Hallicrafters build 150 Geiger counters for the University of Chicago? How 
did the Russians find out that we had built Geiger counters and they were 
our friends and allies?

Now another side thing - Pearl Harbor - well, the summer of 1941 - as you 
all probably know by now - the Signal Corp tested the HT-4 along with a 
Collins unit and an RCA unit and a 3rd transmitter down at Fort Monmouth, 
and the HT-4 stood the shaking and all the rest of the stuff and they said 
"we want you to build this assembly" and they drove an ambulance, a 4 wheel 
drive Chevrolet ambulance vehicle, in which they had installed the 
transmitter and two military receivers and a crazy antenna tuner, and said 
they wanted 50 of these things built. This was about October. First of all 
the transmitter was so set up that you flipped 3 switches instead of push 
buttons for voice operation, and the antenna tuner needed a whole lot of 
redesign work, and we said yes. Strangely enough, the delivery date of the 
first prototype was set for December 15. I'd always like to set my targets. 
If the 15th was the time we were going to have something done, I would like 
to get it finished about 7 days beforehand to have a little leeway in case 
we needed time. I was in charge of this program and my guys complained loud 
and long on Saturday that I expected them to put in a full day of work 'till 
5 o'clock instead of noon and also come in on Sunday to get the damn thing 
done that we had to get done so we could put the whole final garbage 
together in the unit on Monday. Well they were complaining all of the time. 
All of a sudden we heard on the radio "Pearl Harbor". We finished the job! 
Over 18,000 mobile radio stations were built by Hallicrafters. They went all 
over the world. Later, when I started to travel around the world, no matter 
where I went, people knew Hallicrafters. In 1967 I was a guest of the Shah 
of Iran and a General in charge of all the Iranian communications 
equipment - the first thing he wanted to know was where could he get spare 
parts for 10 HT-4 transmitters. They were still using them and I was able to 
get them very quick and very fast which is another tale and we became very 
close buddies. The SX-28's, about 25,000 were built. The S-29 was another 
receiver that was built for the Army, that was somewhere in excess of 18,000 
units and the EC-l was also built for the military, those were entertainment 
receivers they had short waves bands on it so that various military posts 
could listen to American short wave broadcasting. Now I am going to tell you 
another little story that has never been published. I have told it to a few 
people and I'm hoping, Joe (Nagle?), you won't write this one up because I 
still insist I'm going to sit down and write it for Readers Digest because 
now is the time to come out with it. But I'll tell you ladies and gentlemen 
the story. In the Summer of 1942, the Spring of 1942, the US Government gave 
50 SCR-299s to the Russian Government. They were our friends and allies. One 
morning I got a telephone call from the Signal Corps - "two Russian 
civilians are going to come to Chicago in 3 days. We want you to show them 
the engineering department, production department and sit down and work with 
them, translating the instruction manuals and all the technical 
information - answer all their questions that they ask as they translate 
into Russion. They're civilians". Certainly. It was an order from the Signal 
Corps. About an hour or two later I got a telephone call from Bill Halligan 
Senior to come down to his office immediately. I walked in, there was a Navy 
captain, Naval security, three FBI men and they said "under no circumstances 
are you to allow the Russians in the plant. They can't put a foot in the 
front door. We have reserved a hotel room for you at the Palmer House and 
this 3rd FBI man Mr. so-and-so speaks, reads and writes Russian fluently. 
He, Mr. Franke is going to be your assistant. However he knows very little 
about radio and I said to the FBI, I said Gentlemen, I don't need a Russian 
translator, because I have an assistant engineer working for me by the name 
of BILL BUENOFF and he reads, writes and speaks Russian. We brought Bill 
BUENOFF in and Bill was floored when the FBI guy rattled off some Russian to 
him but BUENOFF came right back. So that was it. BUENOFF and I were going to 
handle the situation. We met the Russians at the Palmer House and we sat in 
the reserved room and explained and we stayed right to the point, only the 
manual, we didn't say anything else - only the manual - and then every night 
we were debriefed by the FBI and we got madder and madder and the FBI said 
"your turn is coming" . . . about three days later - two days later it was 
over with, they said now it is your turn the night before. They said "this 
afternoon when you finish, you will see this gentleman at the far end on the 
west side of the bar in the Palmer house on Wabash Avenue. When you get 
there Mr. Franke ask him for ice-cold Vodka. He will have bottles there". I 
knew the name "vodka" - I had never tasted it - "and Buenoff you talk in 
Russian". The older man was a Colonel in the Russian Army. The second man 
was a Captain in the KGB we call it now. Well if you ever saw two fellows 
ready to collapse, when I came to the bar and said ice-cold Vodka, 4 glasses 
please, picked up a bottle, filled it half full and said "Na zda-ró-vye 
Colonel!" in Russian. Buenoff, Joe (Nagle?) knows him, Buenoff started to 
talk Russian - those Russians, our friends and allies, worked on Bill 
Buenoff for about 6 months trying to find out, trying to convince him to 
come over on their side and give them more information from Hallicrafters. 
And Bill Buenoff kept it a secret from me that the second part of the 
Russians had been after the Geiger counters after this encounter with the 
first Russians that I told you about earlier. Lets get back to the - The 
Battle of Britain - The S-36 and the S-37 were used for listening to German 
information. Now one thing more that happened in the early part of '42, was 
the Navy came to us and wanted us to convert an SX-28, to make minor changes 
to take panadaptors and a 27 and put four units together in a crash program. 
6 months later we found out that these units with the panadaptor were used 
in a Navy cruiser that went on a high speed cruise on the coast of Japan 
trying to detect any Japanese radar equipment. The answers were there wasn't 
any of them.

The war is over. Toward the end of the war I injured my back and had to take 
time off for spinal surgery. When I came back to Hallicrafters, Bill 
Halligan and Ray Durst had decided that the war was practically over - we 
better start to think about what's going to come next. So I was set up as a 
secret research and development group - picked up some engineers from the 
plant, I had also recommended that we go to industrial designers to give the 
proper look on the equipment, shape, colors and all of those things to 
really get good design quality. Raymond Loewe was finally - the company - 
was finally selected industrial designers, they came up with the SX-42. 
Raymond Loewe did the outside design of the unit, the green colors on the 
dials, the shapes, the curved cabinets and all the rest of the details and 
the SX-42 was the first electronic device that won an international design 
award at the New York Museum of Art. The S-38 also won a design award.

Business boomed - Short wave listening was going on more and more. In 1947, 
I think you'll all remember Attilo Gatti, the trip to the Mountains of the 
Moon and the DXpedition of that. There was quite a story about it - a book 
was published. That was more and more as our business was booming we had 
more and more money to spend on various promotional things and help QST and 
so forth. Danny Weil 1952, when Danny came out of England - about 1951 Danny 
Weil came down from England in a sailboat and got lost at sea, started out 
another one - finally got to United States. But I think the best one of all 
was at Clipperton Island with Bob Denniston (W0DX, 1954). Bob called up and 
he talked to me, he wanted to go to Clipperton Island, told us all about it 
and I said "alright, come on in, what we'll do, we'll loan you some 
equipment and if you work 2500 stations, we'll give you the equipment. But 
we'll send out the QSL cards for you". They put up all the money, the four 
Iowa farm boys, they put up all the money to go down there and rent their 
boat. They get down to Acapulco, they get on the boat and they get half way 
out in the Atlantic, (sic) the navigator drops his sextant overboard, they 
can't find the island so they turn around - the captain says to hell with 
you, I'm not going to take you to Clipperton Island. It was a Saturday 
morning, I got a phone patch from Bob Denniston and he says "Fritz, we're 
stuck, we can't get to Clipperton Island. We don't have any more money and 
the only boat we can find is going to cost us - say it was $1800 - to 
charter". I said "sit tight and I'll get hold of Halligan". I got hold of 
Halligan, he said "call JOE FRINERHEISEN??? the treasurer of the company, 
he'll talk to somebody at the First National Bank in Chicago and they've got 
a code they'll send out by telegraph down to the bank at Clipperton Island 
(sic). This is about an hour later, it is all set up, I called them to tell 
them the word - "use this code number" and about 2 hours later I got another 
phone patch - "we got the money, we're on the way, we're out to Clipperton 
Island". They started to sail out to Clipperton Island - they got about 100, 
200 miles from Clipperton Island - there is no wind and the diesel on the 
cruiser blows up. Then the telephone calls started. The telephone rang 
almost constantly - phone patches in - "What are we going to do?" It started 
on the west coast now - I was listening on the short wave bands - it started 
on the west coast - that some pilot found the thing for the diesel engine up 
in Seattle, another pilot was going to pick it up but I got it to Clipperton 
Island. A General in the Air Force in San Diego said get the damn thing down 
here and I'll fly it by my men and drop it to them so they can get the boys 
to Clipperton Island. Everything is all set. I'm relaxing. 7:30 or 8:00 
o'clock that night I got a telephone call from the Captain, the Naval 
Attache in the American Embassy in Mexico City. He says "if you don't 
believe me, just simply call the Embassy number down here and you will find 
that what I'm telling you is perfectly correct". He said "stop that damn 
airdrop out there. The Mexican government is wild. They've heard about it, 
they're going to send their own Mexican naval vessels out to tow that boat 
to Clipperton Island". He said "I can't call the General in the Air Force 
and tell him because I have to go through Washington". He says "You call him 
and tell him". So I call the General out there and he said "well if they 
don't get the hell out there damn quick, I'm going to drop it anyway". Now, 
George Schrader was with the Chicago Tribune. He was a ham in Chicago, and I 
got the bright idea about 10:00 o'clock that night to tell him about this 
story. What happened? It hit the Chicago Tribune, it hit all of the 
international news services including Reuters, and I didn't get any sleep 
Sunday night, I got telephone calls from all over the United States on the 
story of the four Iowa farm boys lost in the pacific and now going to the 
island. Never in the world up until that time did ham radio get as much 
international coverage when something happened as the four Iowa farm boys.

Back in 1952, Hallicrafters became deeply involved in electronic 
counter-measures for the Air Force and other agencies. It was very top 
secret - we kept it quiet. But you will find now that every B-52 aircraft 
that's ever flown has had Hallicrafters counter-measures equipment. And of 
course that has been changed now. With the FPM-200 solid state came out. BUD 
DROBISH went around the world by air - W9QVA. Hallicrafter products were 
being sold in 189 foreign countries. The reason why Hallicrafters was bought 
by Northtrop was because of our advanced counter-measures technique we 
started in '52. Also, I am not going to go into it, but we were the first 
people that came out with simple T-NOTCH filter. We were the first people 
that used RIT - Receiver Incremental Tuning control. Another thing that is 
overlooked a great deal is that we were the first people that put High 
Frequency quartz filters in production for receivers. Broad Band RF filters 
for receivers and transmitters were developed by Hallicrafters. Another 
thing that we talked about at supper last night was a Hallicrafter frequency 
synthesizer. We took over a company called MANSON in Connecticut - they were 
in financial troubles - they had some engineering problems - it looked like 
a good business deal and with some of our engineering thoughts and things we 
got the first Frequency Synthesizer that met Naval standards into production 
and accepted by the United States Navy. There is also another long side 
story I told these guys last night at supper about the very stable quartz 
crystal filters and now that we're running out of time I will skip that.

Now some of the names of people that played a great deal of influence on the 
success at Hallicrafters: First of all there is RAY DURST- Bill's partner. 
Ray was a very, very fine gentleman in every possible way and unfortunately 
he had a major heart attack when he found out about . . . oh lets skip it. 
JOE FRINERHEISEN??? our financial manager. One year after the war was over 
we had a beautiful financial report of all the money and all the things that 
Hallicrafters accounted for, but there was only $13.50 cash in the bank and 
we did about - I think our gross sales that year were over 6 million 
dollars! BERT SHURE ? was not a ham. Bert Shure was one of the outstanding - 
is still one of the outstanding receiver engineers particularly with Very 
Very High frequency tunable receivers. The -27 and all the high frequency 
receivers were Bert's responsibility - he cleaned up the SX-28 also. BOB 
SAMUELSON, left Hallicrafters shortly after the war, went to Motorola. He 
was the transmitter designer, that designed most of the transmitters up to 
the HT-4. LOREN TOOGOOD was another engineer that started building Short 
Wave receivers down in Southern Illinois, and he couldn't sell them because 
RCA got after him on patent rights and started to work for Bill. CARL MYLES, 
JIM MCLAUGHLIN were DD-l people - both worked for Bill. There were hundreds 
of other names of people - now these are not on my notes but I had worked 
for Bendix Radio prior to Hallicrafters. The production department at 
Hallicrafters was really run by the women. They were the producers in the 
company. When the war years came it was absolutely unbelievable what these 
girls could turn out and the way they wanted to build quality. They did not 
know what a resistor was but they knew it went there. And we had good 
quality control - the right resistor always got in the right spot. And the 
resistors lasted if we had good quality control. The girls did the work. 
During the war years we won so many awards for production excellence, it was 
just unbelievable. I've got literally hundreds of pictures at home taken. 
Now after the war we moved out to a larger plant. I remember this instance 
very well. We had a sort of a critical situation in getting a product, I 
don't remember what the products were, produced on schedule - to make money. 
Under the Illinois law, I don't know if its changed or not, but girls 
couldn't work more than 5 days a week, 8 hours a day. They couldn't work 
Saturday, they couldn't work overtime. So we asked our girls if they could 
find some 50 or 60 extra women to bring in the plant for 6 weeks or whatever 
it was to get this job done. They said well, we'll think - and then they 
came back and said look here's the way to do it - we know the job, we don't 
have to teach them, we are going to punch out at 4 o'clock every night and 
then we'll go back to the line and we'll work til 6, now we won't punch in 
on Saturday morning but you keep a record of it. In that way we got the 
extra time, and they didn't work til 6 they worked til 7 and when Bill came 
out one time he saw these girls working like hell out there and they hadn't 
had anything to eat. We began to bring in food to feed the girls and they 
were working until 9 o'clock. Anything to get the job done. And they did it. 
And the same thing, when the HT-36 (sic) was on the production line at 26th 
and Indiana Ave. We had 2 men testing the HT-32 at the end of the line and 
we had nine girls on that line. The percentage of mistakes were so few it 
was unbelievable and the rate that they produced HT-32s was fantastic.(end 
of tape)




Duane Fischer, W8DBF - WPE8CXO
E-Mail: dfischer at usol.com
Hallicrafters web site: www.w9wze.net
HHRP web site: hhrp.w9wze.net