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| Modern Radio Laboratories®
and MRL® are registered
trademarks of Paul L. Nelson. Visit the MRL website |
here. |
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In 1915, after
reading a book about a new invention called "Wireless," a 16
year old boy named Elmer G.
Osterhoudt (pronounced OH-sterhowt) made a crystal radio in order to receive
the code
signals that were said to be invisibly traveling through space.
He wound a beautiful coil of 220 turns of wire on a
piece of broom handle, then he painted it with white lead paint
which he had made himself.
Connecting the coil to a crystal, headphones and antenna, he
listened in vain for the wireless signals. He soon came to
the realization that his radio didn't work. The lead in the
paint had ruined the coil. The radio was stone dead; he
couldn't get as much as a click out of the headphones.
Elmer had a neighbor who was also interested in Wireless and who was
also named Elmer. This Elmer also had made a radio that didn't
work. He came by with his radio because Elmer Osterhoudt
"knew all about radio." Elmer put the other Elmer's non-painted coil
into his set and in came a powerful rotary spark signal from
station 6JG!
The magic of this single event influenced
the entire remainder of his life.
During his lifetime Elmer Osterhoudt would (in all
probability) hand-wind more coils and build more crystal
radios than anyone who has ever lived. He outlasted all his
competitors in the mail order crystal
radio business. He, along with his wife Mabel, ran a mail order company
named "Modern Radio Laboratories."
He
sold thousands of kits, coils, crystals and all parts
related to crystal radios, many of
which he made himself. He also wrote many handbooks, "Detail
Prints" and a quarterly magazine called "Radio Builder
and Hobbyist." Along with the catalog, he printed them himself
on a lithograph
printer.
Everything needed for a radio could be found in his catalog;
coils, capacitors, headphones, switches, jacks, binding posts,
sockets, crystal stands, knobs, batteries, wire, all sorts of hardware and
even vacuum tubes and transistors. He manufactured over
FIFTY-FIVE
types of plug-in and solenoid coils!
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A Modern Radio Labs catalog from
April, 1986, one of the last ones ever printed. It
contains 46 pages of closely spaced text and diagrams. This
is the front cover showing the index.
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| In the 1970s the index was five columns wide and the last
column of the index extended all the way to the bottom. The
catalog lost about a page a year. Click on the catalog page
for a full sized one you can read. (Will open in a new tab.) |
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There is very little information about
Elmer available but we
can glean some details from his literature - and there was a
LOT of it. He also included a hand written note with each
order, some of which have survived.
His company, Modern Radio Laboratories,
was established in 1932. It says so, right at the top of the
"EXPERIMENTER'S CATALOG!" Oddly enough, Elmer rarely used
the entire name in any of his handbooks or "Detail Prints."
Even on the catalog it is shortened to "MODERN RADIO LABS."
and everywhere else to simply "MRL."
Every one of his handbooks has this list of accomplishments
printed inside the front cover: |
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"WITH RADIO SINCE 1915."
including:
RADIO Operator, R.C.A. Marine Service.
Radio Mechanic, Maximum, USN.
Technician, Electrical Products Corporation.
Southern California Edison Company.
Majestic Electrical Products.
U.S. Motor Company
Manchester Radio Electric Shop
Modern Radio Laboratories
Amateur and Radio Service
6NW (1919) |
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Elmer was
born in Oregon on October 6, 1899, the son of
William and Alice Osterhoudt. Except for the story of
making the crystal radio in 1915, we know little
else of his youth. He had seven brothers and
sisters, though two sisters died young, one was two
years old and the other was four.
The Osterhoudt family moved to Los Angeles,
California sometime in 1915 or 1916. During WWI
Elmer was stationed at
the Alameda U.S. Naval Base in California. (With the
exception of a brief move to Reno, Nevada in 1971 -
1972, he spent the rest of his life in California.
He and all of his siblings are buried in the Los
Angeles area.)
There was a draft registration (the 3rd one) on
September 12, 1918 for men aged 18 through 45. Prior
to this third draft, the minimum age was 21. Elmer
would have fallen into this new category. There is
no draft registration card in the archives for
Elmer, so he may have volunteered. Whether he
was drafted or volunteered, the war was over on
November 11, 1918.
Escaping both
the war and
the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic with his life, he was
20 years old when he got his Amateur Radio license
in 1919.
1919 was the age of the spark gap transmitter.
Elmer's first transmitter was a spark plug coil from
a Ford automobile that was fed with an AC bell
transformer. The tone changed during transmission as
the points got hot! His second transmitter, which he
called his "handsome homemade rotary spark," was fed
with a 1/2 kilowatt transformer from Sears and
Roebuck. At the first press of the key the spark
jumped to the shaft of the motor. One can imagine
the look on his face as the motor slowly came to a
stop - permanently. Later he "got a new rotary
spark gap" and "proceeded to jam up the air."
He worked for
a brief time at Southern California Edison Company
as a wireless operator,
then spent the years 1920 to 1923
at sea as a radio operator with RCA. He served
aboard a steam ship named the J. A. Moffett, owned
by Standard Oil of California (it's not clear if he
worked for RCA or Standard Oil, or if these are two
different stories.)
In 1924 he opened the "Manchester Radio Electric
Shop" in Los Angeles, CA. In 1928 he was in a shop
in Oakland, CA on 14th Street. In 1930, after the
stock Market crashed and business got bad, Elmer
decided to go back to sea. When he tried to get a job
on a ship, the Chief Radio Operator laughed. There
were 150 guys on a list waiting for the same job.
Instead of going out to sea, he kept the radio shop
opened and married his girlfriend, Mabel Elizabeth
Smith, whom he had
met in 1929. In 1932 they began Modern Radio Laboratories at
an address on 23rd Avenue in Oakland, California.
The trademark was registered on December 15, 1932.
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Modern Radio Laboratories
was a mail order company. You mailed your order to
MRL and Elmer sent the order through the US mail
back to you. There was no website (obviously), there
was only the MRL catalog and vague two or three line
advertisements in magazines. His "business plan" was
genius and will be explained later.
Long after the crystal radio was
eclipsed by the regen radio, then the TRF receiver
and finally the Superheterodyne, Elmer Osterhoudt
via MRL continued to sell radio parts and plans to
crystal set "fans" who made their own radios.
According to Elmer, the "golden age" of the crystal
radio ended in 1924. As time marched on and
many parts became commercially unavailable, he made them
himself.
Of paramount importance to him was keeping the cost
down for the experimenters who bought from MRL.
Elmer spent 55 years hand-making radio parts. He may
have been an artisan, but he wasn't
was an artist in the ink on paper sense of the word. There are hundreds of drawings in his
catalogs and handbooks but unless you know what the
parts look like, the drawings are hard to fathom. On
the rest of this site we'll compare some actual MRL parts with the drawings.
This is not to criticize Elmer's drawing skills. If
he had taken a drawing class perhaps his catalog and
handbooks wouldn't possess the uniqueness they do.
Instead, the goal is
to show what a fine product you got compared to the
drawing of the same product in the catalog. Those of us still
alive who purchased from MRL will see what they were
actually looking at in the catalog. Unfortunately,
most of the 10,000 MRL customers have already passed away,
along with Elmer and Mabel.
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MRL QRM INTERFERENCE COIL |
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This is a drawing of the MRL QRM coil. It is
used to null strong radio stations on a crystal set. What does it
really look like? |
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| It was shipped wrapped in
Detail Print 18, which describes its construction and use. The
diameter is one inch. |
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| Very nicely constructed. How
long did it take Elmer to make this? How long did it
take just to make the empty coil form with the
riveted eyelets holding the solder lugs? He wound
both coils, covered them with coil cement, printed
and cut out the label, then marked the solder lugs.
In 1986 he
sold this for two bucks. |
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Mr. Osterhoudt even drilled a hole for a
mounting bracket.
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| MRL VARIO-COUPLER |
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| On the same page as the QRM coil
is the MRL VARIO-COUPLER. This is composed of two coils on a
cylindrical coil form with a third coil inside. The user can
turn this coil and vary the "coupling" of the coils. What
does it actually look like? On the right we have zoomed
in, just as though you were reading the catalog and peered
in for a
closer look. Nah, I'm just not seein' it. |
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| The catalog states the vario-coupler
comes with Detail Print 13, or you could buy DP-13
alone for 20 cents. At the top of DP-13 are more drawings of the
vario-coupler. It is still hard to tell what the actual coil
looks like. |
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An attempt has been made here
to emulate the DP-13 drawings above with photos of an actual MRL
vario-coupler.
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The construction of the
vario-couplers seems to have been very labor intensive, as
Elmer built them all by hand. It's not possible to date
these except for the one on the left, which was made in 1979.
Notice that the wire doesn't cover the entire coil form on
the right. That's because he used thinner gauge wire. This
makes the coil tune sharper. None
of the parts are "standard." Every time he changed the wire
or the diameter of the internal coil he had to recalculate
the number of turns. |
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Riveted eyelets hold wires and
solder lugs in
place. It seems he did strive to make a
"factory made" product even if every one was
unique. |
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| This is the work of
an artisan. |
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| Here's the drawing from the MRL
catalog next to the actual coil. Now that we've seen
photographs of the vario-coupler, the drawings are easier
to understand. |
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The quality of this vario-coupler is
outstanding for a product that was just one small item in
the catalog.
Notice the yellowed cellophane tape.
When cellophane tape was invented in 1930 (called at the
time "cello tape"), people thought it was a marvel.
Many magazine articles were printed showing the various uses of
this pressure sensitive transparent tape.
What was unknown then was that millions of photographs,
newspaper clippings, stamps, scrapbooks and basically
anything that was "taped together" would be ruined as the
glue on the tape dried, turned brown and separated from the
cellophane. |
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