There are so many things I take for granted here on the verge of 2025. When I turn on the faucet, water comes out. When I flip the light switch, there’s illumination. And when I press one of countless buttons during the day, the thing that corresponds to that button generally happens.

But there are times when I’m snapped out of this mindset. Oddly, this doesn’t happen when something fails to work. In that case, I just get frustrated and try to make it “work” without much thought behind the invisible process happening behind the action. The times that I am most snapped out of taking these modern contrivances for granted are when I’m reading old media and get a reminder that just about everything I interact with on a daily basis was designed in a specific way and could have been designed differently.

Exactly this happened to me as I was reading an article in the September 1937 issue of Radio-Craft magazine. I have a number of issues from the 1930s and ‘40s and they’re absolutely fascinating to flip through. The article promoted the “new” technology of push-buttons for radios. And while the patent for push-buttons for tuning radios to the proper station was a decade old at this point, the mid-1930s was indeed the era when buttons started to become popularized in radio.

Electric push-buttons for the home first emerged in the late 19th century and exploded in the first two decades of the 20th century as American homes became electrified. But the button as a default input device wasn’t a given. The article that really made me step back and reconsider other design choices is below. And while it’s not revolutionary in the ideas it’s presenting, it just serves as a great reminder that technology doesn’t come out fully formed.

Radio existed for many years before the push-button became a dominant form of finding the station you wanted to hear. And even after it became commonplace, there were still plenty of radios that required spinning to find your channel, as many of us old folks can probably attest to.

Radio-Craft

September 1937 (Article uncredited)

Engineers of the RCA Victor laboratories have perfected a new electric tuning system, which has been incorporated in many of their new radio and radio-phonograph instruments, by means of which one need merely press a button and his favorite radio station is tuned-in instantly and more precisely than he could do it manually. It is as easy as all that and there doesn’t seem to be any catch to it.

There are 8 of these buttons. Each of them can be pre-set to different radio stations and these stations precisely tuned-in by pressing their respective button. The development of automatic frequency control, more than anything else, is responsible for this new electric tuning feature.

Reduced to its simplest terms, this means that, in automatic operation, the radio circuit will actually adjust itself to compensate for any variation in the mechanical system so that the station is precisely tuned to its most resonant point. Pressing any of the buttons sets a motor into operation, which turns the tuning condenser to the approximate position of the station wanted. The action of the automatic frequency control circuit then adjusts the frequency of the oscillator to bring the station exactly to resonance.

As an added luxury, a remote tuning "arm-chair control" is available. This control consists of an attractive but unobtrusive little box on the face of which is duplicated the push-button arrangement of the radio receiver. This control box may be inconspicuously placed on the arm of a chair or on an end table and connected to the radio set by a thin cable that lies flat under a rug or along the wall molding.

Another interesting feature is the "overseas dial," which tends to simplify the tuning of short-wave stations. The four most important short-wave bands have been spread out in a straight line across the dial in front of the radio set. For instance, the popular 25-meter band, which formerly occupied a space on tuning dials never more than ½ inch in length, has been spread out to 9½ inches, and the important foreign stations are marked by name on the dial. The same arrangement holds true for the 49-, 39-, and 19-meter bands.

Another development, Magic Voice tone quality, which attracted a great deal of attention last year, has this year been brought to an even higher state of perfection. The space immediately surrounding the loudspeaker unit has been scientifically sealed in a chamber shaped like an arc. The back waves from the speaker are thus controlled, directed, and released through a number of measured openings to blend with the sound coming out of the front of the set and create a truly “natural tone” quality. This new “Sonic-Arc Magic Voice” eliminates the boominess and overemphasis of the low tones found in many other receivers.

Added to all of these new developments are innumerable other features, such as the Magic Brain and Magic Eye, which with almost human intelligence direct and control the functions of the radio set.