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Welcome to Quilt the Walls, Etc.
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Ceres Gallery Exhibition
Details of the Fish Radio:
The Fish radios have no radio tubes in them; they are all basically
crystal sets. Crystal sets date back to over 100 years ago at the very beginning of radio. At that time is was necessary to
poke at a real crystal with a probe that looked sort of like a safety pin to find a spot that worked to detect radio waves.
The Fish radios are ready-made crystals, germanium diodes, that
are about 50 years old. Crystal radios are not very loud and need headphones, but the Fish radios have speakers. The Fish
radios merge old and new technology, in that the crystal radio is amplified by an integrated circuit to operate the small
speaker in the bottom of the fish.
Although crystal radios are often thought of as inconvenient affairs,
with wires hooked up as an antenna & grounded to a water pipe, it is possible to make them with a wire wound around a
circular form that takes the place of a long antenna & ground wire. This is not as sensitve to radio stations, but modern
radio stations are so powerful, that in an urban area the Fish radios can receive several stations & be portable.
For the technically minded, the Fish radios use 1N69 germanium crystal
diodes & an LM386 integrated circuit amplifier chip running on a 9 volt battery.
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Details of the "What Is It?" pictured below....
It's a radio based upon a copy of a 100 year old radio tube design;
called an "Audion". It was not a high vacuum device like most modern radio tubes. The Audion was the first of the radio tubes
in the modern sense because it had a "grid". Because it was not a high vacuum device it required adjustments so that it would
not glow a blue color, which meant it wasn't working properly. All modern radios trace their ancestry to the Audion. It was
a seminal development in the history of electrical engineering that quite literally changed the world.
The antenna for the radio surrounds the quilt and the radio has adjustments
for the Audion copy. Visible is the round turning knob, the larger knob and and next to it is the smaller "plate" voltage
adjustment knob. On the side of the radio is the "fliament" voltage adjustment and not visible is the power switch for the
speaker amplifier. The black horn-like part to the left is the speaker which is a copy of a 1920's-type "horn speaker". The
Audion copy is the round glass bulb on the top of the wooden box that has the adjustment knobs on it.
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