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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.
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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.