The year is 1930. The stock market had crashed the previous October,
but the impact of that event wasn't at all clear. Even as the golden
age of radio was still building momentum toward creating the first
continental scale shared popular culture, the preeminent vendors of
the one-to-many connectivity technology of the epoch, AM radio, led
their pitch with price. Direct from this distant epoch, here is the
1930 Allied
Radio Catalogue. It starts slowly and somewhat
tediously: the initial pages are obviously the same radio chassis sold
in a variety of different cabinets, but it gets better when we get
into the bits and pieces. There's even a half page devoted to
components for bleeding-edge early adopters experimenting with
mechanical scanning disc television!