[NJARC] Early military radio - need info on it@

[Alex Magoun]

Sal,

This is not so much a "military radio" as a radio made by a company,
Neutrowound, founded by an ex-Navy man in 1921-22. The company was
based in Homewood, IL, where it also operated WOK. This undated but c.
1926 PDF'ed booklet,
www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Station-Albums/WOK-Chicago-1922.pdf,
is very informative on the Super 6 receiver once you get past the
details of the radio station (go to p. 19 of the PDF file). It appears
to be the only receiver that the company manufactured.

The relevant military patent may be Louis Hazeltine's, although the
earliest patent listed for him, for neutralizing capacity coupling,
was applied for in 1919 and awarded to him, not the US Navy:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US1450080A/. Eric Wenaas writes that
Hazeltine's work was embodied in its very successful SE-1420,
goo.gl/bqfPca, and Mike Molnar's fine article on Hazeltine,
www.academia.edu/20593621/Hazeltine_AWA_REVIEW, relates how he and
others organized the Independent Radio Manufacturers, Inc., to license
Hazeltine's patents and draw on his small group of engineers as
consultants. They developed a second generation of Neutrodyne
improvements in 1925-26 that the Neutrowound might embody, shortly
before RCA won a patent infringement decision that forced
cross-licensing and before the introduction of screen-grid tubes that
made Neutrodyne circuits redundant. That might explain why Neutrowound
only offered one receiver for a year or two, along with the lack of
advertising beyond broadcasts; the company's only references on
www.americanradiohistory.com/ are in Talking Machine World, of all
places, from this period.

best, Alex