Elegant wood-encased tube radios that look like antique furniture. Plastic-encased transistors that mimic cigarette packs, Coke bottles, measuring tapes and spray cans of WD-40 along with so many other form factors.
Collectively, they comprise the Two Ages of Novelty Radios — times that have passed but are not forgotten.
For the record: “A novelty radio is a radio that was designed with a unique theme in mind,” said Kallie Zieman, collections manager at the Pavek Museum in St. Louis Park, Minn. She manages the museum’s electronics communications collection. “A novelty radio can be shaped like another object or used to advertise a product or brand.”
John Ellsworth, founding director of the Vintage Radio and Communications Museum in Windsor, Conn., said, “The history of novelty radios goes back to the beginning of radio. The definition of novelty is anything that’s unusual or different.”
The First Age: Passing for furniture
You might say that the first age of novelty radios occurred in the 1920s and 1930s, when the medium itself was still novel. Receivers were big and bulky, thanks to their use of glass tubes, heavy metal transformers and chassis, and other large components.
To make radios integrate into the home decor of the time, radio manufacturers such as Atwater-Kent, Crosley, Philco and Zenith housed their industrial workings inside elegant wood-veneer cabinets. The goal was to make radios as beautiful to see as they were to hear.
“When radio first hit homes, it was a status symbol to have one,” Ellsworth said. “That’s why the ‘big furniture’ era came about. People would put the radio in their living room in a very prominent point of honor, so that they could invite all their friends over and brag and say, ‘I got a newfangled radio.’”
Not everyone wanted radios to stand out. This is why some radios of that era were designed to blend into their settings unobtrusively, hidden in copies of 17th century “Winthrop desks” and other antique-style furniture.
“Back in the early 1920s in the battery radio era — before Edward Rogers invented an AC tube that allowed radios to be plugged into wall sockets — they were making speakers to look like lamps and lampshades,” said Ellsworth. “But this trend really took off in the 1930s in the form of grandfather clock radios, of which we have about five in the collection. Each one looks just like a grandfather clock — but they have a radio built into them.”
By the 1940s, the home market was saturated by cathedral/consoles and stealth radios’ This motivated some manufacturers to offer eye-catching radios that screamed for attention, like the whimsical 1941 Majestic Melody Cruiser. Found in both the Pavek and Vintage Radio collections, “it is shaped like a ship,” Zieman said. To be precise, the Majestic Melody Cruiser looks like someone’s grandfather took their standard wooden tabletop radio and grafted a bow, stern, three metal masts, metal sails, and aluminum rigging — which doubles as an antenna — onto it. The resultant Melody Cruiser is a bit weird, but it works.
[Related: “The Changing Face of Tabletop Radios“]
Second Age: Endless possibilities
The end of the 1950s ushered in the second age of novelty radios.
“Advances in plastics and the invention of the transistor allowed novelty radios to become smaller, more brightly colored and cheaper to buy,” said Zieman. “I’d say their heyday was the 1960s to the 1980s, when radio was still a common household electronic, and they were easy and cheap to make.”
Thanks to mass production and the far lower cost of their components compared to tube sets, transistor radios had become incredibly cheap to produce. This, plus the ability of creative manufacturers to fit radios into all kinds of custom plastic cases, led to an explosion in novelty radio production.
“They were primarily and widely used for advertising,” Ellsworth said. “This is why we have a whole cabinet full of novelty radios from that era. One looks like a Stanley tape measure, another is a Green Giant Niblets Corn box, and many others are styled to look like Coke bottles, WD-40 spray cans, shampoo bottles and even a giant Champion spark plug.
“And we’ve got three transistor radios that are the same size and appearance as cigarette packs: Chesterfield, Marlboro and Viceroy. The top opens just like a cigarette pack used to, and there’s your controls for the radio.”
Of course, not all novelty radios were devoted to advertising. Some were designed for the sheer fun of it, embedding transistor radios inside model cars, toy guns, mock microphones with radio station flags, characters from Peanuts and Sesame Street, almost anything that people could think up.
The decline and rise of novelty radios
Search the internet today, and one soon finds lots of vintage novelty radios for sale. But companies who make new models are harder to find — although some like EverythingPromo.com do exist.
Both Kallie Zieman and John Ellsworth agree that novelty radios went into decline after the 1980s. So what happened? “I’d say their production dropped when physical radio sales in general majorly declined in the 1990s to the 2000s,” replied Zieman. “Since fewer people were buying radios, there wasn’t an incentive to continue making them at the rate they were before. It also didn’t make sense for a company to advertise their product in novelty radio form if fewer people were using radios.”
Ellsworth said, “There’s so many other modes of communication these days Radio is not the prominent form of communication anymore, especially AM radio. So the overall impact of a novelty radio isn’t there anymore, because it’s not the main focus of communication anymore.”
Yet vintage novelty radios are appealing. “Their designs are so unique,” said Zieman. “And you don’t have to specifically be a radio collector to collect novelty radios — depending on the theme of the radio or the brand it represents, other types of collectors may find them interesting.
“For example, a collector of Coca-Cola products might desire to add a novelty radio shaped like a Coke bottle to their collection, even if they do not listen to the radio. Plus mass-produced novelty radios are cheap to buy today, allowing more people to participate in collecting them.”
Said Ellsworth, “Big console radios are going for a dime a dozen at our swap meets. It’s the smaller tabletops and novelty radios that are hot-button items that sell. In particular, novelty transistor radios are very collectible because they’re colorful, small and often quite clever. For instance, we’ve got a set of binoculars with a built-in radio. It has a very specific purpose: When you go to watch the game live and you don’t like the on-site announcer but you do like the local radio coverage, you can tune it in on your binoculars.”
