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Gillette "Blue Blades" as a crystal radio detector!

You all better make your crystal radios soon, before AM modulation completely disappears from the spectrum!
 
Something similar... there was a hacker years ago named Captain Crunch. He was so named because he discovered that a whistle that shipped with a box of Captain Crunch cereal emitted the exact tone required to manipulate telephone company switches, allowing him to make calls worldwide for free. The so-called 2600hz signal. He went to jail for his transgressions where organized crime members hurt him to learn his secrets. He's a genius.
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The 2600hz signal was used to clear the trunk. You needed to run DTMF pairs down the line to dial, and these were different than those on touch tone phones. The ones or touch tones phones are in a matrix (pushing a button sends a tow and column tone), but the DTMF pairs for long distance control were not organized by row/column, and unlike the touch tone phone tones, were "round numbers" (700,900,1100,etc.).

Two guys at Bell Labs stepped on their dicks big time in the article they had published in the November 1960 issue of the Bell System Technical Journal, in which they not only mentioned the tones, but also stated that the control tones went over the same line as the voice tones. Mahbell tried to get this article recalled, and there are reports of bell agents going to libraries with razor blades. http://www.historyofphonephreaking.org/docs/breen1960.pdf

Early funding for a certain iGadget company was reportedly obtained from the sale of Blue Boxes built by one of the founders. (Blue Box being the term given to units that generated 2600hz plus the DTMF pairs).

Blue Boxes no longer work, as this form of long distance switching is obsolete, but I do know it worked at least up until the early 80s. One would call an 800 number, bounce off with 2600, then have at it. But, bouncing of an 800 number raised all sorts of billing flags, and regular use would result in a raid (if you were stupid enough to do it from home), or a phone booth (remember them?) stakeout.

Articles in Esquire and Ramparts brought understanding of Blueboxes (and the less exotic other colored boxes) into the mainstream.
 
Skysoldier said:
When I was a kid, my Dad showed me how to build a Crystal Radio using a Gillette "Blue Blade" as the detector. (This was back in 1958, when I was 10 years old.)

He told me that a lot of guy's from his unit, (the 100th Bomb Group) were shot down over Germany and spent the war in POW camps. And they made crystal radios in the POW camps using Gillette razor blades that they got from the Red Cross packages.

I don't know if this is true or not, but my Dad told me that the War Department helped Gillette develop the "Blue Blade" with a special coating that could be used for this purpose.....just to provide the POW's in Germany with a detctor to build Crystal Radios so they could receive news of how the war was progressing, and give them hope.

If you Google "Fox Hole Radios", you get a lot of neat information on this subject.

If this is really true, I would think that Gillette deserves some fantastic recognition for their contribution the war effort in WWII!

But so far, I have Googled the hell out of it...(Who would have thought that "Google" would end up a verb!)......but I can't find anything from Gillette that confirms this!

I am just rambling here, but if this is true, I would think Gillette would have some information on this...........I would really like to know if this is true or not!
Click to expand...

I just learned about this on George's Old Timer's Net on Paxton. It was one of KC1CAR's trivia questions a couple nights ago. I guess you needed the razor and graphite among other simple things.

Very freakin' cool and if Gillette was involved as assumed, yeah, they should own it and make a point of it.
 
Skysoldier,

I've been collecting "foxhole radio" stories for years from WWII vets. I have so many interviews and letters now that I'm putting together a book of them - where they were, what they were listening to etc. Most of them were at Anzio but they were all over really, even in the Pacific. I always suspected some of the POWs built razor blade radios but I never had proof until I read your post about your father. So this is a really big deal! Most of the POW or "camp radios" as they called them seemed to have tubes or whatever else they were able to scrounge / liberate from the Germans.

If you're willing, I'd like to include his story in the book. You can email me bcarusella at gmail dot com if you like.

You might be right about the blue blades being redesigned as detectors but I haven't found a definite link yet. I know Gillette started making blue blades before the war, 1932 I think, but they could have changed the formula. I'm not sure how important the blue is though, some of the soldiers at Anzio were using plain, rusty blades. I was curious and wrote Gillette about it once but the blue formula is still "top secret" so they don't give any information about it and sent me a nice letter telling me that. Which I thought was funny because I don't think they've made the blue blade in years.

They did make a magnetic blade that was sent in Red Cross packages to POWs to be used as a compass needle. There were lots of clever ways to get things into camps like that - maps hidden in playing cards, radios in cribbage boards etc.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Brian
 
richc said:
Something similar... there was a hacker years ago named Captain Crunch. He was so named because he discovered that a whistle that shipped with a box of Captain Crunch cereal emitted the exact tone required to manipulate telephone company switches, allowing him to make calls worldwide for free. The so-called 2600hz signal. He went to jail for his transgressions where organized crime members hurt him to learn his secrets. He's a genius.

His story is fascinating. I met him once. He was a long haired hippy freak and completely nuts. He's a friend of a friend.
Click to expand...
This was back in the day of CCIS (common channel interoffice signalling) when 2600hz would bounce you off a call and onto a trunk. Unlike the tones on a touchtone phone (arranged in an x/y matrix), the signalling tones used combinations that formed a triangle (fewer tones for the digit), added KP (Keypulse) and ST(start). You could do other interesting things like control your routing. The real heros in are story are two fun loving sorts Breen and Dahlbom who published an article in the November, 1960 Bell System Technical Journal that explained all of this. Rumor has it that MaBell sent agents out to libraries with razor blades to extract this article, however, that could have been nerds stealing the issue (I remember there was an original copy one guy in the Prime Computer engineering department had back around 1980).

Apple Computer was reportedly funded in the early days by "Bluebox Venture Capital" (selling completed boxes to generate the tones).

I've never heard the story about organized crime hurting him (they could have just subscribed to 2600 magazine, or looked up the November 1960 Bell System journal in a library), and i have not seen reference to it in the literature (but that does not mean it didn't happen).

He is named Captain Crunch because a toy whistle in Captn Crunch cereal put out a tone close to 2600 that would do the bounce.

This is all obsolete info, as CCIS has been out of service for quite some time in favor of out of band control signalling. The advent of flat rate long distance calling and services like Skype have also made what was once bluebox territory just part of ordinary phone service (except the ability to do strange things)

Dang, just noticed I repeated the bulk of my previous post.
 
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bcarusella said:
Skysoldier,

I've been collecting "foxhole radio" stories for years from WWII vets. I have so many interviews and letters now that I'm putting together a book of them - where they were, what they were listening to etc. Most of them were at Anzio but they were all over really, even in the Pacific. I always suspected some of the POWs built razor blade radios but I never had proof until I read your post about your father. So this is a really big deal! Most of the POW or "camp radios" as they called them seemed to have tubes or whatever else they were able to scrounge / liberate from the Germans.

If you're willing, I'd like to include his story in the book. You can email me bcarusella at gmail dot com if you like.

You might be right about the blue blades being redesigned as detectors but I haven't found a definite link yet. I know Gillette started making blue blades before the war, 1932 I think, but they could have changed the formula. I'm not sure how important the blue is though, some of the soldiers at Anzio were using plain, rusty blades. I was curious and wrote Gillette about it once but the blue formula is still "top secret" so they don't give any information about it and sent me a nice letter telling me that. Which I thought was funny because I don't think they've made the blue blade in years.

They did make a magnetic blade that was sent in Red Cross packages to POWs to be used as a compass needle. There were lots of clever ways to get things into camps like that - maps hidden in playing cards, radios in cribbage boards etc.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Brian
Click to expand...

I wish my Dad was still alive, so we could get more information from him. He told me this back in the late 50's, when helping me build a Crystal Radio as a kid in Hawaii.

The coating on the blade acted like a semiconductor (diode) to perform the Detector function. You had to use a pencil lead (graphite) and move it around the surface of the blade
to find a "sweet spot", much like the safety pin and galena crystal method. The other critical component was a high impedance earphone, which all the crew members had inside their
headgear if they were able to keep them after being captured.

If you ever find more information on Gillette's involvement, I would love to hear it!

You also might want to visit the website of my Dad's unit, The 100th Bomb Group (Heavy). They have a website and forum..
http://100thBG.com

You might find someone there on the forum with more information.
 
When I was a kid, I was really into crystal radios, winding the coil on everything from toilet paper cardboard rolls to round oatmeal boxes. Back then I used to subscribe to a magazine, now defunct I think, called Elementary Electronics....they had articles in there every so many issues on building crystal radios...I remember one about using two razor blades, both with one edge pushed into a piece of soft pine about a quarter inch apart, parallel to each other. you would then lay a lead from a pencil across the exposed edges and was supposed to act as a detector. I replaced the germanium diode on one of my radios with this set up and damned if it didn't work....it wasn't nearly as sensitive as the diode but I was able to hear BBC, Trans World Radio and several other mega shortwave stations on it.....cool stuff
 
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Skysoldier said:
I wish my Dad was still alive, so we could get more information from him. He told me this back in the late 50's, when helping me build a Crystal Radio as a kid in Hawaii.
Click to expand...

I still would like to include him in the book, even if it's just a mention. Name, unit, where he was held etc. It's the only authenticated POW "foxhole" radio story so he should be part of the story!



Skysoldier said:
If you ever find more information on Gillette's involvement, I would love to hear it!
Click to expand...

I'll let you know for sure. Marlin made razor blades then, and they made a blue blade too. Max Rupert, who was at Anzio, built a radio using a Marlin blade and wrote Marlin to tell them about it. Marlin turned it into a big advertising campaign. Mr Rupert told me he wrote Marlin hoping they would send him a real radio.

Skysoldier said:
You also might want to visit the website of my Dad's unit, The 100th Bomb Group (Heavy). They have a website and forum..
http://100thBG.com

You might find someone there on the forum with more information.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip!

Brian
 
timbo said:
I remember one about using two razor blades, both with one edge pushed into a piece of soft pine about a quarter inch apart, parallel to each other. you would then lay a lead from a pencil across the exposed edges and was supposed to act as a detector.
Click to expand...

Some of the foxhole radios were like that! It's an old-style detector, like pre-20s. They called it a "microphone" detector. It worked great, but sometimes it acted like a microphone and picked up ambient noise. Some of the soldiers at Anzio used that kind of detector and shared an antenna wire between foxholes. The microphones acted like microphones instead of detectors and the soldiers accidentally had a foxhole to foxhole intercom.
 
Here's a soldier at Anzio in 1944 with a "foxhole radio" he built. This was taken for "YANK" but apparently never used and the original doesn't give the name of the soldier.

ID.jpg
 
This is a cool thread. Always wanting to try to build a diode only radio. A razor blade as a rectifier takes this one step further. Amazing.
I might just have to get one of the kits cockpitbob found on ebay.
 
Here's what started it all, sort of. Max Rupert's radio, as it was written up in the New York Times by their radio editor, Jack Gould in 1944.

You would think there would have been some of these built by American POWs during WWII but I've never found a reference to one. Most of their sets had tubes etc. That's what makes Skysoldier's original post so interesting!

rupert_zpsfbaliocx.jpg
 
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vicorjh said:
This is a cool thread. Always wanting to try to build a diode only radio. A razor blade as a rectifier takes this one step further. Amazing.
I might just have to get one of the kits cockpitbob found on ebay.
Click to expand...
One thing to remember is you'll need a high impedance earphone. The usual earbuds are low impedance and will load down the radio. Lots on Amazon and eBay for <$10.
 
bcarusella said:
I remember reading about radios hidden in cribbage boards and sent in care packages to American POWs - maybe in The Escape Factory? Just found this article about them: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93640350
Click to expand...

Too cool. A cribbage board with radio embedded and the contacts are the peg holes. It looks like you select the frequency by which hole you plug the antenna into(?). I think the only way you could tell it was more than a cribbage board is if you could see down the peg holes.

X-ray pictures of cribbage board receivers
xraycribbage200-e72ce947f6531b6218b7d4a3d5f5790c97791b94-s400-c85_zpsygkba8tg.jpg
 
Skysoldier said:
I am just rambling here, but if this is true, I would think Gillette would have some information on this...........I would really like to know if this is true or not!
Click to expand...
I wrote Gillette last week and they wrote me back today. Unfortunately they didn't have any information about their WWII activity. They may have lost track of it after merging with P&G. Hopefully some library out there or maybe the National Archives ended up with the information but so far no luck.
 
strangenh said:
Pretty good site generally on the topic here too:
Click to expand...

Good find! He says "Gillette manufactured these blades and then voluntarily magnetized them for use by POW’s as a field-expedient magnetic compass. When suspended by a thread, the arrow pointed North. (“The Escape Factory”, Reference 6)." "The Escape Factory" was exactly the book I was looking for (and didn't find) on my shelf before I came back to the computer and read this. I thought it might mention Gillette blue blades being made for radios but I did remember the compass part. I'm on a quest to find this now!
 
bcarusella said:


Good find! He says "Gillette manufactured these blades and then voluntarily magnetized them for use by POW’s as a field-expedient magnetic compass. When suspended by a thread, the arrow pointed North. (“The Escape Factory”, Reference 6)." "The Escape Factory" was exactly the book I was looking for (and didn't find) on my shelf before I came back to the computer and read this. I thought it might mention Gillette blue blades being made for radios but I did remember the compass part. I'm on a quest to find this now!
Click to expand...

Yeah nothing much out there about whether the blue was intentional for radio either, though this PDF: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/RBDiode.pdf notes a modern stainless bade only will work as a diode on the etched part (no oxide, no diode). Got to wonder if sending the blue blades had more to do with knowing they would be in a lot of harsh conditions requiring blueing to hold off rapid rusting, than a deal with the War Dept. to help make foxhole radios. The blue blade predated the US war entry and was even sold as their higher-end blade for a time (https://books.google.com/books?id=j...ved=0ahUKEwjz_6SfytDQAhXG8CYKHbQKChkQ6AEIGTAB).
 
strangenh said:
The blue blade predated the US war entry and was even sold as their higher-end blade for a time
Click to expand...
There's some good research happening in this thread! If I remember correctly Gillette introduced the blue blade in the early 30s. Their sales were down and they had been producing some crummy blades and this was their attempt to get their market share back, along with a lot of advertising. It worked.

They weren't the only ones with a blue blade. Pal and Marlin (the same Marlin that makes rifles - they were in the blade business for a number of years) both had blue blades and maybe a few others. I've looked at some of the war era blades and the bluing looks different on different brands. Gillette looks more like a coating on the blade, some look to me more like they're heat treated. Either way I think a rusty regular blade worked as well as a blue blade. Both were available to the troops. I have a photo of a war era PX and there are all sort of blades there. The Marlin and Gillette blades had special "camo" brown wrappers. I assume what actually went in to Red Cross packages was more limited.
 
Gillette (not blue, I was surprised!) WWII blades in "camo" wrappers. These probably weren't the blades that went into the Red Cross packages.


1944%20(O3)%20Gillette%20Blade.jpg
 

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