Oklahoma is celebrating its centennial as a state this
year.  When it became a state on November 16, 1907, the new
governor gave a speech after being sworn in on the steps of the
State Capital in Guthree. The speech was audiocast, for want of
a better word, to Washington, D.C.

	The vacuum tube hadn't yet been invented or become part
of communications electronics so they set up a water-cooled
carbon microphone like a jumbo version of a telephone
transmitter and hooked up a _LOT_ of batteries in series to try
to punch enough audio down the line to make it to Washington.

	Unfortunately, that's all I know about the event.  It
apparently sort of worked although I hate to think what it must
have sounded like in Washington, D.C.

	I think the audio was also picked off in Oklahoma City
which is about 30-40 miles away and which would become our
Capital in 1910.

	The city of Tulsa which is our second largest city after
Oklahoma City buried a time capsule in 1957 along with a new
1957 Plymouth Belvedere automobile.  They are going to dig it
all up on June 15 and give the car away.  It's going to be
interesting to see what works on the car and what doesn't.

	I am betting the engine will be fine after it is filled
with oil and the gas tank is filled.

	The tires will probably be no good and I bet the radio
won't work or at least won't work properly.

	For those who don't remember that far back or who
weren't around until much more recently, car radios of the
fifties were heavy tube-type monsters that sounded great when
they worked, but that was the challenge.

	The 6-volt electrical system of the car could heat the
tube filaments but one had to chop the DC with an
electromechanical vibrator to be able to step up the DC to 250
or so volts for the plates on the tubes.

	They typically had an OZ4 mercury-vapor rectifier which
could short out from time to time and vaporize the fuse or maybe
the power transformer and then the 50-cent fuse.

	You could hear the low buzz of the vibrator when
switching on the power to the radio and, if you were lucky,
soon the rock-and-roll would slowly fade up as the cathodes
finally heated.

	If the little reed contact spring in the vibrator
finally tired of making and breaking contact, it would make one
last time, weld together, and blow the fuse that way.

	As a small boy, I remember my father working on our car
radio all the time.  This would buy another month or two and
then it was time to replace another tube or the vibrator.

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group
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