What's this thing do?

[frenchy]

http://cgi.ebay.com/ATR-American-Tel...QQcmdZViewItem

[RetroHacker]

It looks like some device that would go between the radio and the wall socket - maybe a varistor or something to limit the inrush current, or make the thing warm up more slowly? Probably only good for things like series string radio sets then. I dunno. It might tear a hole in the fabric of space-time, allowing your tubes to exist in a quantum out-of-phase state so that they won't age at the normal rate. But that's rather unlikely.

-Ian

[bgadow]

I could enlist the help of that old joke about the guy pushing the button marked 'ATR' but...

[Sandy G]

I think its a later version of a Hydrostatic Gonkulator that Col. Hogan & co. developed back in dubya-dubya too...-Sandy G.

[Filmboydoug]

Might this be the earliest example of audio snake oil?

[bgadow]

Seriously, I bet its a varistor of some sort.

[pilotprose]

Beats heck out of me and I grew up repairing tube stuff. Looks more like a "gimmic" that was typical of the cons that were on the market when tubes were in use. I never had seen one of these, but sure replaced a lot of tubes in consumer equipment.

[Pete Deksnis]

Originally Posted by pilotprose

Looks more like a "gimmic" that was typical of the cons that were on the market when tubes were in use.

Sorta like, remember "...turn the wiring in your whole house into a giant TV antenna...!"

[Chad Hauris]

I concur that this device is a varistor...it probably has greatest advantage in series filament sets which use tubes not all having controlled warmup time. You can sometimes see certain tubes surge in lighting up very brightly for a few seconds at turn on in series sets and the varistor device may help control the current surge into the cold tube filaments.

[HWF1]

Defintely a Horse Shoe. Nail up over your main entrance for good luck.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by pilotprose

Beats heck out of me and I grew up repairing tube stuff. Looks more like a "gimmic" that was typical of the cons that were on the market when tubes were in use. I never had seen one of these, but sure replaced a lot of tubes in consumer equipment.

Like yourself, I grew up working on tube TVs/radios/stereo. However, that ATR unit looks like an inrush current limiter to extend the life of series-wired TV/radio tubes; it was inserted between the AC outlet into which the device is plugged and the device itself. I have a Zenith table radio with a pilot lamp which serves the same purpose; in fact, I have been advised that, if that lamp burns out for any reason, it should be replaced ASAP, otherwise, the rectifier tube, not to mention the filament string itself, could be overloaded.

Also, in the '50s-'60s a company called Wuerth came out with a device it called a Surgistor. This worked on the same principle as the ATR unit under discussion here; it was also designed to limit inrush current to series filament strings. It was meant for use mostly with television sets, although it could probably be used with series-wired filament strings in old AC/DC radios as well.

BTW, ATR (and another company called Terado) also manufactured power inverters in the '50s to allow use of 115-volt appliances in automobiles. These inverters may have done a passable job given their crude (by today's standards) design, but the output was often a square wave rather than a pure sine wave. This usually caused television sets powered from them to produce a picture that did not fill the screen. The manufacturers also warned users of these inverters not to use them to power motorized devices such as tape recorders, etc. because of the square-wave output. There was also the danger, IIRC, of damaging certain types of appliances, again due to the non-standard output waveform.

[Richard D]

I had one of those Terado inverters as akid and thought it was so neat to hook it up to a 6 volt battery and plug in an up to 50 watt light bulb. I remember it used a vibrator for the oscillator. 50 whole watts!

[pallophotophone]

When I was around 11 years old, around 1961, After promising to be carefull, I was given permission from the building wreckers who were tearing down my old grammar school to go on in and help myself to 4 large crates of No. 6 Burgess batteries from the 1930's located in the ceiling of the cellar area.( (Picture that happening today) There must have been over 100 of them in total. The adrenalin was running that day !
It NEVER occured to me that they might all be dead.

I took all of them home in my wagon and tested them- only one of them was no good . I hooked them up in series and ran movie lights, table radios- anything that would work on DC.

I was in heaven !! Such Power !!

They lasted about a month or two before they started to leak. Never found such a hoard again.

Thanks For The Memories !!

Bob

[Richard D]

Bob, I have a relative who will remain un-named had a motor home back in the 1960s and had an avionics shop at a south florida airport and there was one of the largest airplanes Lockheed ever built, only the C-5 was bigger and had a fire in it before it was supposed to fly to south america, as I remember, but it was so well built there was no burn through of the roof and the fire was put out. It was a double decker aircraft and the aft section by the aft spiral staircase and main Galley was not burned. A friend of his bought the hulk, (later sold it, so it could be made into a restaurant, it had the wings and engines removed so it could be towed off the airport then the money ran out) anyway for about a year as a kid I had free run of the aircraft, opening the pressure door at the wings and crawling out to the engines on a catwalk. I found a large rotary 1 to 1 inverter, 120 volts dc in, 120 voltac 60 cycles out. My relative found a source for large sonotone ni-cads, I think they were 1.2 volts @ 100 amp hours each. So of course he put 50 in each side of the motorhome, took the 120 vdc. fed the inverter and could run the AC and TV at night without running the generator all night. The big problem was recharging them, to the poor 4 KW Onan it looked like a short for a few seconds, He built his own rectifer with a bunch of huge press fit diodes. Sorry for the rant, but when I read 100 batteries I lost my mind. It's back now, I think.
Richard.

[electronjohn]

RichardD, you were one lucky kid!!! You had the good fortune to be crawling thru one of only 2 Lockeed "Constitutions" ever built! A BIG bird...156' long, 189' wingspan, 50' tall at the tail. When you crawled out into the wing, you were at the back of one of 4 Pratt & Whitney Wasp Major engines...28 cylinders, 4360 cubic inches...3,000 HP for takeoff. The design was laid out in 1942 as a high-capacity transport for the Navy, and PanAm was interested as a postwar airliner. But, even with 12,000 HP available, cruise speed was too low to be practical for airline use, the Navy lost interest...thus only 2 prototypes being built. And, sadly, neither survive. The Wasp Major and Wright's R3350 TurboCompound engines were the pinnacle of piston power. The Boeing Stratocruiser used 4 Wasp Majors, was a little smaller thus having a higher cruise, but, even then, only 55 went into airline use. The only larger piston-powered planes constructed were, of course, the "Spruce Goose" (8!!! Wasp Majors, 320' wingspan, and Convair's XC-99 (a double-deck adaptation of the B36 bomber sporting 6 of the big "corncob" engines) It's sad that so few of the historic piston transports have been preserved. Of course, DC3's are in regular use all over the world, but not many of the big four-engine airliners survive. You can see one of them this summer at Oshkosh...the Airline History Foundation's Lockheed L1049G "Super Constellation". Meticulously restored, it's flying sculpture powered by 4 Turbo Compounds. A sound you will never, ever, ever forget.