Archival Images:
Speakers of the Glorious Past
By John Roberts

Click on images below for full size photos

A recent post by Simon Lewis asking for pictures of early speaker systems encouraged me to dig through my father’s old papers and books for something interesting.

This first group of images is from a book “Okay for Sound” by Frederick Thrasher an overview/history of motion pictures published in 1946.

While this first image (Megaphone) is not really a loudspeaker. I think it’s in the spirit of the quest. It certainly suggests a desire to get loud. The megaphone invented by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), is kind of like a horn without a driver. It was probably included in the book because Kircher is also credited with inventing “projection” of images with light.

The next picture (Republican Convention 1920) is of a flying central cluster at the 1920 Republican convention. The author bills it as the “first” successful indoor use of a public address system. They made a similar claim for outdoor public address at President Harding’s inauguration in 1921. They also reported that as early as 1916 Western Electric had experimented with an 18-loudspeaker Public Address system capable of addressing 12,000 people.

Megaphone Theater Speaker

Republican Convention 1920 Horn Front

Around 1920, Western Electric built an experimental 12-foot wooden horn on the roof of their West Street offices and used it to greet notables who sailed in or out of New York with a booming voice.

The last image (Theater Speaker) from the movie book has no date with the caption but is presumably “state of the art” for Theater loudspeakers when the book was published (1946).

The next two images (HornFront & HornBack) are an engineering spec for a horn tower with a flaring (aiming) device. I could not find a date on this sheet but speculate from other pages in the notebook near it, that it dates from around 1930.

An article in the same notebook “What is a good Loud Speaker” May 1929 was a bit confusing until I figured out that they used to call microphones “transmitters” back then. I have included a frequency response graph (Frequency Chart) from the notebook showing where musical instruments and human voice fall. This graph was prepared in the late 20’s but is still pretty interesting for what hasn’t changed since then.

Horn Back Home HiFi '30's/'40's

Frequency Chart Airplane

The next picture (Home HiFi '30's/'40's) is probably what the excessive bachelor’s home hifi speaker looked like in the late 30’s early 40’s (Dad was also into HAM radio, and a drummer in a jazz band). Once again I have no date on this but I recognize the chrome dog (top right in large picture; click to view). The dog was actually a nutcracker. You put a nut in his mouth and crank his tail up and down… The dog survived the wedding, the speaker was long gone by the time I came on the scene.

My final picture of this series (Airplane) is of a loudspeaker array mounted inside a WW II PBY. The picture is from a 1946 Bell Laboratories internal publication article about a high power PA system designed to communicate with combatants on the ground while flying above the range of their machine gun fire. The speaker array was reportedly capable of 131dB at 30 feet, from the 2,000 Watts of amplification.