20.4.11

Old Atwater Kent



In September we had the house repainted. It was a crazy month but fun. Along the way we desided that the antique radio we had in the living-room so long, needed a "facelift" (I need one too, but I will never never do it)


So, we found a nice guy, specializing in restoring old funiture and while he was working on the wooden case of the radio, we found the story of its manufacturer.

http://www.atwaterkent.info/akHistory.html

The one we own is an E412, made in Pennsylvania in 1935,where the Atwater Kent factory -the bigest in the world at that time-was producing 1 million radios a year. The E series were made especially for export to Europe.



What is wonderful, apart from the magical veins of the wood, is that the old thing is still working!! It has Short, Medium and Long waves, however we don't use it .We love to just watch standing there being pretty :)



2 comments:

  1. WOW WOW WOW!!!! OMG Desi, that radio is simply GORGEOUS!!!!! The grain is just so beautiful and I can see that it has chatoyance--having an almost metallic reflective quality (look here! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatoyancy), something very special in wood. And it even works. Astonishing! What you have is a treasure! You lucky girl!

    Steve and I have a wood lathe and though I haven't used it for a while, I "turn" pens and bowls. We adore specialty woods and have lots of yummy pieces of wood saved for projects down the road. Many of those pieces were selected for their chatoyant qualities! I'll have to show you some pictures of some of our pieces at some point! :) Thank you for sharing, I look forward to showing Steve!

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  2. we have one very similar to this...we are in the U.K. its a very rare model by all accounts.

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