Looks like a take-yer-pick situation we got going here. RCA also made similar portables. I'll bet we'd tap into "name trails" whichever we chose. That's the way the game is played don't-cha-know.
My best guess would be Hallicrafters, somewhere within or a spin-off from the TW-1000 or TW-2000 series. These were top of the line portable SW receivers manufactured and sold in the mid-50' by Hallicrafters radio , a Chicago company which was eventually merged into Northrup Aviation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallicrafters
Since TTB's "set" was special it wouldn't likely appear exactly as these radios are shown, but that would be "close" to the image. The number of letters on the TTB image is lengthy, and the first letter looks to me to be acapital H:
http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~postr/bapix/TW2000.htm
http://www.radiomuseum.org/r/hallicraft ... w1000.html
http://www.qsl.net/la5ki/tw.htm
OTOH, the Zenith Transoceanics were very popular:
http://www.antiqueradio.org/transoceanics.htm
But I have a feeling it was the transoceanic clones that Hallicrafters made in the mid to late 50's that were the template for TTB "sets". for several reasons. You know that I have this thingy with names. The founder of Hallicrafters was Wm. Halligan, a Boston native who went west to Chicago to seek his fortune. Here's a fairly good bio:
Facts about the Hallicrafters Founder and Company
William (Bill) J. Halligan, founder of Hallicrafters, was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1899. He got his first ham license as a teenager. Even at that age he considered himself a radio experimenter and bulit an early spark-gap transmitter. Bill's first job, at age 16, was as a wireless operator on excursion ships between Boston and other coastal cities. When World War I began, he put his skills to good use by serving his country as a wireless radio operator on the battleship Illinois. After the war was over he attended engineering school at Tufts College and West Point, but left when he married in 1922. He took a job as a newspaper reporter, and then left journalism in 1924 to sell radio parts. In 1928 he decided to start his own company, and moved to Chicago, Illinois. This salesman had ideas for improving the short-wave radios he had been selling. It was a brave venture, with almost no capital, manufacturing license problems and then the depression, but in 1933 Bill founded the Hallicrafters company that made him a legend.
Hallicrafters built handcrafted receivers with state-of-the-art features at an affordable price. By 1938, Hallicrafters was considered one of the "Big Three" manufacturers of amateur receivers (Hallicrafters, National and Hammarlund) and was selling not only in the U.S. but 89 other countries. He had 23 different models of transceivers and was ready to start producing transmitters, beginning with the HT-1. Instead of putting a lot into expensive cabinets, Halligan believed in providing every nickel's worth into the performance of the chassis and the latest in circuit design. His greatest salesmen were those who used his equipment and praised it to others over the air.
When World War II began, there was a tremendous shortage of military radio equipment. Hallicrafters geared up for wartime production, and perhaps the best known new design is the HT-4 (BC-610) which was used extensively during the war. After the war, focus was again on consumer electronics, including radio phonographs, AM/FM receivers, clock radios and televisions.
The 1950s were the most successful years for the company. In 1952 Hallicrafters' main plant in Chicago housed general offices and the factory and was a block long. In addition to the main plant was a 3-story building of 72,000 square feet two blocks away, a 1-story coil plant of 12,000 square feet on Chicago's north side, and 150,000 square feet of production and storage space in three other buildings within a five-mail radius of the main plant. The company employed 2,500 people. Many of the radio products became classics, e.g. the HT-32 and the SX 101. Much of this equipment is still used today and collected by nostalgia buffs.
In 1966 Northrop Corporation bought Hallicrafters and moved the company to a new plant in Rolling Madows, Illinois. The company's main function was to produce para-military equipment and electronic countermeasures systems. Hallicrafters produced a few ham radios through 1972 and a few accessories through 1974.
From 1933 until the company was sold to Northrop, Bill Halligan, W9AC, always supported the ham radio hobby. He died on July 14th, 1992 at the age of 93.
The history information came from the following sources:
1) History of Hallicrafters from Chuck Dachis
http://ww1.photomicrographics.com/webpa ... istory.htm
2) Newsline Radio - CBBS Edition #56 - posted 9/20/92
http://www.arnewsline.org/newsline_archives/Cbbs056.txt
3) Hallicrafters
http://www.aa9tt.com/Hallicrafters.html
4) Hallicrafters Founder Dead at Age 93 (W5YI Report)
http://www.amfone.net/AMPX/101.htm
5) ARRL 1952 The Radio Amateur's Handbook, 29th Edition
Wm.Halligan's time at Tufts would have put him there at about the era that Vannevar Bush was there. Raytheon Corporation was started at Tufts and magnetrons were turned out there during WW II.
You know how I am about the name thingy as per tracing developments through time. In this case, while I cannot make a direct connection, a C.W Halligan pops up on the military industrial scene at about the same time that Hallicrafters was making big waves in SW radio development and manufacturing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MITRE
http://www.mitre.org/about/history.html
Mitre Corp. Profile
The MITRE Corporation is a not-for-profit organization developing technology for the federal government for national defense and other applications. Projects MITRE is involved in include Global Positioning Systems and air traffic control technology.
MITRE manages three Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs): one for the Department of Defense (known as the DOD Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence FFRDC), one for the Federal Aviation Administration (the Center for Advanced Aviation System Development), and one for the Internal Revenue Service (the Center for Enterprise Modernization). MITRE also has its own independent research and development program that explores new technologies and new uses of technologies to solve our sponsors' problems in the near-term and in the future.
MITRE has headquarters in Bedford, MA, and McLean, VA, with more than 60 sites around the world, enabling our staff to work closely with our customers.
MITRE has 5,700 scientists, engineers and support specialists-65 percent of whom have Masters or Ph.D. degrees. Staff members work on hundreds of different projects across the company, demanding a high level of technical, operational, and domain knowledge.
MITRE had $870.7 million in revenues in 2004 and net revenues of $80.2 million. It was named among The Best Companies to Work for in America for the fourth straight year and Best Companies for Working Mothers for the second straight year.
History
In July of 1958, MITRE was founded as a private, not-for-profit corporation to provide engineering and technical services to the federal government. In doing so, it fulfilled a request by Secretary of the Air Force James Douglas for a specialized services group to provide the system engineering and ongoing support for the massive, multi-billion dollar, continental air defense system called SAGE. SAGE, or Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, was developed for the United States Air Force from 1950 to 1957 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Digital Computer Laboratory, the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratory, and MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. MITRE was incorporated one month following the installation of the first of 23 national SAGE centers at McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey. MITRE first settled in the Boston area.
The company's first president was C.W. "Hap" Halligan (1958-1966), formerly of Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories and responsible for the development of SAGE's vast telephone communications network. "MITRE's mission," announced Halligan, "is to provide the objectivity and high technical competence necessary in the long-range planning, integration and design of electronic command and control systems."
Less than a year after its founding, the need to locate near the Pentagon dictated the establishment of an office in Virginia. MITRE expanded again in 1963 after the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave the company system engineering responsibility for the National Airspace System (NAS). As work continued to grow, MITRE established two headquarters, one in Bedford, MA, and one in McLean, VA. MITRE also began moving staff to sites around the world in an effort to work closely with customers.
This information doesen't say anything about C.W Halligan's background, but I'd wager that he might have been a son or younger brother of Wm. Halligan. The timing and career path seem to fit. If he grew up in a radio engineer's family back then, elecrical/electronic engineering concentration on his part might not have been his chosen path. His father's/brother's proximity to the early roots of military technology and Vannevar Bush likely primed him for CEO status automatically early on the the post WWII military Industrial buildup.
The materials suggest that he had education in political science and cost accounting and was prominently published in each prior to WW II. Prior to founding Mitre Corp, he worked at Western Electric in Cicero, Il and then at Bell Labs in NJ. Mitre was founded in 1958 by CW Halligan and among the stuff listed above it is the umbrella corporation that provides the framework under the DOD 's funding, for the Jason Consulting Group on advanced technologies wiich we have already discussed here.
The name base diagram for CW Halligan is one of the most unusual I've run across, all solid blue/high density connections that go nowhere else.
http://www.namebase.org/cgi-bin/nb06/13 ... LLIGAN_C_W
*someone has already diddled this link for my machine to require a registration. I suggest googling 'halligan,namebase' and get there that way if you have any trouble linking.*
All of the names listed relate to something called NACLA. Something that looks quite shady and having to do with covert and overt US activities in Latin America
Collins radio was also a possibility here, and they eventually were acquired by Rockwell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_Collins
But to my knowledge they never manufactured portable SW equipment. They specialized , at that time, in big time SW stuff, and especially were involved with aircraft communications gear, especially avionics.
That's about it folks.
What does the successful contestant win anyway, a signed first edition...or something ?
flow....
