Radio Girl: 1925

Whenever I see a lovely young woman in photos of this vintage whose beauty reaches across the decades and excites passions of this nature in me, I always have, in the back of my mind, the sneaking suspicion that she is about 15 years old.

[You two should get together ASAP. - Dave]

She can wind my coil anytime.

In the recent past decades one would come across electronic construction projects with coil winding instructions such as "5-1/2 turns of #24 enameled wire, 1/4" spaced, on a 3/4" o.d. form." It might even specify what material the form was made of. Often any other coils for the same circuit might require different wire sizes so one would need to invest in several spools. If one was going to be doing a lot of this there were some mechanical devices to assist -- most based around what resembled an egg-beater hand drill.

[The box in the photo is an electric motor, which is doing the winding here. - Dave]

There is what looks like an automotive distributor cap setting on the box she is working at with a rag in it. There is also a house hold type fuse setting next to the box and one by the soldering iron. I wonder if these were used in the box she is using.

These circular coils are surely for inter-stage radio frequency transformers, or maybe they are tuning coils. Power transformer windings would not be on tubular formers.

Of course, the people who wind transformers these days are Chinese, but the methods have not changed much.

[I'll bet they work by candlelight. The girl in our 1925 photo is watching an electric motor wind the coils. - Dave]

This little lady certainly is a cutie, but she looks like she should still be in school! It's amazing to think of all the jobs like this that are now done by machines. I never even thought those coils were hand wrapped.

This picture is taken in Atwater Kent's bright new factory on Wissahickon Avenue. Built in mid-1924 at a cost of $2 million, it originally covered 5 acres and eventually covered 32. You can see how fresh and unscarred the tops of the assembly benches are in this excellent picture, taken less than a year after this huge factory opened.