Times Have Changed

Imagine building a house with this stuff today.
Funny thing is that when I was a kid in the 1940s this material was everywhere and nobody was dying from asbestos contamination.
    Found this add in a 1937 hardware mag.


Anybody remember the meat safe?
We had ours hanging in a tree out the back of the house.



Check out the Crystal Set.



Remember when a radio was a prime piece of furniture but today they look like a piece of test equipment.

One could say that "those were the days" Adrian, for things were built to last. You'd pay an arm and a leg to have the same in quality built products today.
Like smoking cigarettes, who new then what we know now about Asbestos, for both were advertised as the "in thing" safe products.

Kon.

I was a fond collector of the valve radio, at one stage I had 18 floor radios, they were a beautiful piece of furniture.
Alas space was an issue and moving house I decided to sell them onto other collectors for safe keeping
I kept 2 floor radio's and 1 mantle, you gotta love the hum from those valves.


cheers moredeep

Here is an extract from Wiki about the dangers of asbestos.

Note the time period.

In 1899, H. Montague Murray noted the negative health effects of asbestos.[39] The first documented death related to asbestos was in 1906.[40]

In the early 1900s, researchers began to notice a large number of early deaths and lung problems in asbestos-mining towns. The first such study was conducted by Murray at the Charing Cross Hospital, London in 1900, in which a postmortem investigation discovered asbestos traces in the lungs of a young man who had died from pulmonary fibrosis after having worked for 14 years in an asbestos textile factory. Adelaide Anderson, the Inspector of Factories in Britain, included asbestos in a list of harmful industrial substances in 1902. Similar investigations were conducted in France in 1906 and Italy in 1908.[41]

And an extract from the Mesothelioma Hope website https://www.mesotheliomahope.com/products/brake-pads/

Although the dangers of asbestos fiber exposure became well known by the 1980s, asbestos brake installation continued in U.S.-built vehicles well into the 2000s. Brake components made with asbestos are still widely available on foreign, aftermarket products.


Governments and business have a lot to answer for.

moredeep wrote:
I was a fond collector of the valve radio, at one stage I had 18 floor radios, they were a beautiful piece of furniture.
Alas space was an issue and moving house I decided to sell them onto other collectors for safe keeping    
I kept 2 floor radio's and 1 mantle, you gotta love the hum from those valves.


cheers   moredeep

Dad was a radio repairman before the war and I ended up doing the same servicing course (by  correspondence) that dad did. The college closed up in the seventies I think. By that time it had become the "Australian Radio and Television College"
Remember the :Magic Eye Tuning indicator. That fascinated me as a kid. Remember when all of the radio station call  signs were marked on the dial whereas today all you see is a frequency..
If you can hear the mains hum coming from the speakers then it is likely that the power supply electrolytic caps needed replacing. Dad was never happy until all of the hum was eliminated.
Even today you cannot beat a quality valve audio output stage for the best sound reproduction.
   I still have boxes of valves and resistors and caps n trannies and have dads valve and circuit tester that still works fine.



I purchased another one later on that could test the later miniature valves.
They still get a bit of use when fixing up an oldie from the markets.

After many years of collecting radio's I found out that my old man's uncle had a business in Melbourne selling them, in the genes I'm guessing
I discovered this war poster in an old book of his, it was in great condition and I doubt that many would have survived from that era, a beautiful thang.


cheers    moredeep

All of the products advertised in this catalogue dated 1937,were made in England Germany and Australia and are of very high quality.  The variety of goods here is vast and far beyond what you will find  at for example,  Bunnings today, where everything in their listings is made in China and Japan and made from materials that will  wear out and/or fall apart in very short time in order to generate Repeat customers thereby keeping the Chinese manufacturing businesses in operation.