The crystal set is still running affer all there years

About 5 years ago, I was talking to one of the neighborhood kids about stuff I used to do when I was a kid. I mentioned making a radio out of a razor blade, a safety pin, a pencil lead, a toilet paper tube a length of wire and an old telephone handset.

He seemed fascinated and really didn’t believe me, so I told him to drop by the next day and we’d do it together.

I started racking my brain, and drew a mental picture from forty years earlier and then drove down to a place that makes electric motors and asked the guy there for wire to make a crystal set with.

He laughed and told me he hadn’t had that request in about 20 years and went into the shop and came out with a coil of wire big enough to make three of them.

“No charge if you’re going to show some kid how it was done back in the day,” he laughed.

I took the wire and went home and found an old razor blade somewhere and dug a safety pin out of a drawer somewhere.

Next, I filled a pail full of water and grabbed an old bayonet and removed the earpiece from an old phone receiver.



Then I went into the basement and snagged a couple of nails, a small square of plywood and took the remaining paper towels off of a nearly empty roll and waited for the kid to show up.


He did, and we went out to the driveway. It was a nice day, if I recall and the pair of us built a simple ‘foxhole’ radio. It only took about twenty minutes or so, including stringing a makeshift antenna. Then I poured the water into the ground, affixed a wire from the radio to the bayonet and stuck it into the wet ground.

The kid put the earpiece to his ear, and the look on his face was one to behold as he heard the news on KDKA radio.

It was pretty ironic, really. The oldest commercial radio station in the country was being listened to on a very primitive radio set.

I learned to make radios like this from a guy that had been an aerial ginner with the 8th Air Force and had been shot down over Europe. He had spent a year in a Prisoner of War camp until he was freed by ground forces.

While he was in the camp, he was the ‘camp radio builder’ and as a scout leader, he taught us a lot of little tricks here and there that he had learned as a POW.

I brought the radio inside and put it in my bedroom and used an antenna that I had run through the attic and a water pipe as a ground, tuned it in and left it there.

It’s been running 24/7 for about 5 years now and hasn’t cost a cent in electricity. When I sleep in the room on quiet nights I can hear a soft tinny little noise coming from the corner of the room. I grin and doze off.

Sometimes I pick up the headset and put it to my ear and marvel at the utile and simplicity of such a device.

Then I remember showing the kid how to build it.

When I was growing up, it was the duty of men to teach boys things, and I don’t hear of men doing things like this any more. Hell, failure to do stuff like that for the neighborhood kids was considered unmanly and made the guy subject to sanctions against his man card.

We watched guys fix cars, paint boats, repair stuff and learned from them. When we got older, they let us help.

Sometimes the men would listen to our problems and give us advice. More than once, I got lectured for doing something dumb, but never got ratted out to my parents.

I don’t see this happening any more.

I wonder what happened?