Over a hundred years of journals are available for your reading pleasure on the World Radio History web site. Take a look and enjoy!
Be careful, though. You can get consumed for hours, days, perhaps months reading World Radio History. Almost every aspect of radio broadcasting, experimenting and hobby activities are covered by this amazing collection of magazines and other publications.
Interested in broadcasting? WRH covers trade magazines from United States, Canada, Europe and elsewhere. Are you into music? WRH provides the legendary Billboard and Cash Box coverage of your music industry history.
How about ratings, directories and regulations? You will find it’s all there.
You can read the century old experimenters journals. You will find Popular Electronics, Radio TV Experimenter and Electronics World. Even the early personal computer magazines line Byte, and Don Lancaster’s many cookbooks. You will find every aspect of radio technology covered, as well.
Pretty well all of the Hugo Gernsback publications are online. I really enjoy the stuff from the 1920’s and 1930’s, when everything was just taking off. Ham, shortwave and DX is well covered. You will find magazines like Monitoring Times, 73, Ham Radio and club newsletters. We have a complete library at our fingertips.
World Radio History – Digging Deeper
What makes World Radio History so amazing is that most of the publications have been OCR scanned and are full text searchable. Search by magazine or year. You can even read about how this site is made and maintained.
If you are going to search, I suggest you narrow things down to particular magazines or years, though. Otherwise, even your simplest searches can take a long time to produce results. You will find the database is so big and things can time out.
World Radio History is a labor of love from broadcaster and consultant David Gleason. Not many folks have accomplished something this monumental on the web.
World Radio History – wow what a find! Fascinating site! Cut my pre engineering teeth on many of those publications ….great memories.
Keep up the great work John!
Hi John,
Great link to a treasure trove of old publications.
Brings back many memories of my youth and time lost dreaming about “projects”. I was pretty lucky as our local library had subscriptions for most of the more popular publications. Of particular interest to me was the Ryder Series. The series of publications covered basic electron tubes, power supplies and receivers from regenerative to the superhet. The publications were post war designed and the structure followed very closely the services training techniques.
Our local TV and Radio repair shop also was very generous to lend out to us his subscriptions and repair manuals. Seemed there was more “stuff” to read than I had time or money ha-ha.
Cheers
Mike
Mike, you remind me that back in the day, libraries actually had money for publications rather than just “staff” and “programs”. I used to live in the library. Haven’t been to one in five years as they have nothing I want. Even the E-library services contain little stuff I want! Google does, though.
I have used this site for a few years now
Awesome just begins to describe how great this site is
As mentioned, this is a great website and easy to spend many hours jinking from entry to entry. A fabulous initiative but a pity that one or two publishers have been a little awkward in asking for items to be removed despite this site not being a threat to sales of current publications or the publishers providing access to historical journals themselves. Reading a magazine from the 1960s is not going to stop me from buying a current copy of the same and, in fact, might even encurage me to do so.
A great site, i have been following the actulizations every day since more than 10 years. Amazing site almost every thing about every thing in radio and electronics. RTV news, Radio craft, 73, QST, Megahertz, popular electronics, Electronic illustrated, ARRL handbooks, Radio handbook, and hundred and hundred of many publications. what a huge colection!
The best in the web for hobbyist and radio amateur