Very early ham radio

A recurring article that you might find of interest while looking through those old Radio & Television New mags warns readers of an alleged "tube rebranding racket". Supposedly, "fraudsters" were grabbing up all the used tubes they could find and reselling them by mail-order at discount prices. The crusaders for morality and honesty were urging everyone to gather up all their used tubes that happened to be lying around and sending them to a certain address, where they would be promptly destroyed to make sure they didn't fall into the hands of "crooks".

I don't recall whether or not the crusaders offered any money for the tubes they collected, but I wouldn't have been surprised to discover that those people were "rebranders" themselves, looking for a cheap supply of tubes to add to their stock. If they really did destroy the tubes as promised, that must have taken many a good used and new old stock tube out of circulation, which I suspect was the real motive behind the movement, in order to boost the sales of new tubes by the major manufacturers. What a shame that perfectly good tubes, many already on the unobtainium list, might have gone to the crusher at the urging of those jerks.

The "rebranders" were merely resellers of used tubes. I used to see their ads in magazines like Popular Electronics, and had ordered from them myself. They offered tubes, guaranteed to be good, at a fraction of the retail price of new ones. I remember one company that sold their tubes in new boxes adorned with the logo "Standard Brand". The original company logo (RCA, Sylvania, etc) stamped on the tubes, was not removed, but left intact. Those vendors weren't charlatans out to rip anybody off. They simply were in the business of reselling surplus tubes, no different from the tube vendors that we find in business to-day. The major manufacturers just didn't want the competition, so they were urging radio/TV service technicians to remove surplus tubes off the market for them.

A similar campaign was run in the same magazine to rid America of the evil of carbon filament light bulbs! Supposedly, those old bulbs, which were known to sometimes run daily for a half century or longer without burning out, caused TVI due to a negative resistance effect with the carbon filament, which caused them to go into self oscillation in the VHF range. The crusaders in this cause offered to exchange, free of charge, one-for-one, any carbon filament bulb with a brand new tungsten filament bulb of modern (short-lived) design. TV repairmen nationwide were urged to collect the bulbs from their customers. They promised to put all the carbon filament bulbs they received into a crusher, to make sure they would never interfere with another television, ever again.

That must have taken many of the antique pear-shaped bulbs from the early 1900's with the evacuation tit at the end of the glass envelope out of circulation to be needlessly destroyed. A few years ago a vendor at Dayton was selling those old bulbs as collectors' items. Bulbs with good filaments were going for about $30 each.

If anyone runs across one of those articles, please scan it and post it here, or send me an e-mail copy.