“Ladies and gentlemen, we would like to inform you that today the entertainment broadcasting service begins broadcasting music performances wirelessly by telephone.” With these words, the history of broadcasting in Germany began 100 years ago. More precisely: on October 29, 1923.
“This was the date on which a breathtaking technical development began, from the simple detector receiver to tube audio and DAB+,” says radio expert Xaver Lühnen (69) from Paderborn. There are hundreds of patents in a radio, many of them from Germany. In his craft cellar, Lühnen has completely recreated the development history of radio. BILD visited him.
One of his oldest pieces is a detector receiver from the beginning of 1923. “You could already receive the first test transmissions with it,” says Lühnen. “Until regular broadcasting began, the radio was only used by the military and seafarers.”
With the detector receiver, radio fans were able to receive test broadcasts as early as the beginning of 1923
The fascination with radio technology accompanies Lühnen throughout his life. As a young man, he did an apprenticeship as a communications electronics technician with Heinz Nixdorf in the mid-1970s. Later he worked as a lecturer for electronics and quality at Siemens and at the Paderborn Chamber of Industry and Commerce Academy, among others. And ever since he retired, he has been developing and constructing radios in his basement – every evening until the “Tagesschau”.
“My ambition was to recreate the historical technical development through my own replicas and my own circuit developments,” he says. But as he got busy, his respect for the original solutions that his predecessors had found also grew.
The early receivers were still very expensive. Siemens developed the built installment plan: a radio made up of three individual modules. The first element was a local receiver for headphone operation (90 Reichsmarks), then the amplifier for improved local and long-distance reception (80 Reichsmarks), and thirdly the module for playback via horn speakers. This allowed the whole family to experience the exciting new medium.
The so-called “D-Zug” dates back to the same year, 1929, when radio broadcasting only stopped in the evening for the first time. The occasion: a live report from the funeral of Chancellor Gustav Stresemann (1878-1929).
The “Siemens D-Zug” (popular slang), a radio in individual modules – replica by Xaver Lühnen
A technology that brought the world into the living room fascinated many young people and was used by politicians for propaganda purposes (the Nazis’ people’s receiver). The victorious powers of the Second World War banned operations on short, medium and long waves – and the Germans opened up ultra short waves.
Today’s DAB+ radio uses the Internet over large distances to distribute the signal to the respective radio mast. For Lühnen it was pure madness: “There is a good reason why radio communication in aviation still uses amplitude modulation today – analog technology is the safest and simplest form of transmission.”
“The Radio Man”, a legendary handicraft set for a so-called tube audion (1934)
In addition to the classics and milestones in radio history, Lühnen’s collection also includes curiosities such as an emergency radio that runs on a tea light. “The core is a so-called Peltier element, an electrothermal converter that generates a temperature difference when current flows through it or – vice versa – a current flow when there is a temperature difference.”
The model comes from cold Siberia. In order to keep the radio running in summer in this country, a second tea light was needed in the pagoda-like roof structure, which increases the heat even more and thus creates the necessary temperature difference.
This emergency radio gets its power from one tea light – and works even better with the second
So there is a lot to discover for technology fans – in Lühnen’s handicraft cellar, in the around 170 educational films that he has published on his YouTube channel (“Radio Construction Projects”) – and since March 10th also in the Rheda Radio and Telephone Museum -Wiedenbrueck. The museum in the former amplifier office shows the anniversary exhibition “100 years of radio in Germany”.
The concept of the exhibition: the juxtaposition of historical original devices with modern replicas. Of the approximately 2000 exhibits, 50 come from Xaver Lühnen’s cellar.