There's a world of difference in the design flair applied to different brands of Australian vintage radios. Collectors will have different tastes, but I think most would agree for example that Kriesler designs were generally pretty basic (except the Beehive perhaps?), and Tecnico in the '50s were nearly always at the edge of design trends - one reason they are so collectable these days. Philips was pretty unimaginative, with the occasional exception probably imported from Europe.

As another generalisation, I would venture that Sydney-based manufacturers seemed to pay more attention to cabinet design than Melbourne-based ones (I am from Melbourne).

There are lots of histories about the technical development of radios, but does anybody know of any studies of cabinet styling, that name and credit individual designers? I have a feeling that cabinet designers were generally not given enough recognition in an industry dominated by engineers.

Maven

I can't recall seeing anything dedicated to cabinet styling, however there may be articles and mentions in the design industry trade magazines of the day.

Kriesler, Airzone and Philips seemed to move with design trends whereas AWA and Astor tended to hang on to their classic art-deco look for long after just about everything else dispensed with this look. Because of this, in many cases AWA cabinets can be a chore to clean, with their thin protruding strips and Astor cabinets can be a tad on the delicate side, bucking a trend they set in the 1940s where so much Bakelite was used you could almost use an Astor cabinet as a step ladder.

That an interesting point on design...

Really in the time of floor models it was really a piece of furniture...I remember B&W TVs as a kid were very much that idea too.

One thing I was told when servicing gear, was make sure you clean it up and make it look pretty...people cant see inside to see what you have done but what they can see will be the impression of you they get..so when ever I fix anything I always make sure it looks good.

Really a psychological ploy I suppose but at lest they think you cared enough to make it look like new (and actually I do care), a long with honesty... you need that if you expect people to come back to you.

There was a program on the ABC about design and looks
and why its so important...dealt a lot with Technology Design...cant recall the name of it now

Really found it interesting it did refer to this place BAUHAUS about industrial design:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus.

Yes a history of who designed the cases would be a good idea but now maybe all that is lost to history...too

Really at the end of the Day thats what a lot of people would have bought a radio on... the looks... as well as price

Those days I guess shopping for a radio & TV was bit like shopping for a car...not an off the cuff purchase
A lot of ways it was a furniture shop really to Match your lounge room decor

Would be interesting to know if anyone has done some research into how the designs came to be and who the designers actually were in Oz...or did we just clone US UK designs to some extent.

Many practices existed.

Philips cabinets were used in each country they sold radios in. Often, a cabinet would start life in Holland and then get exported to the rest of Europe and then a set of dies/moulds would be sent to Australia so that the same cabinet could be made here. Philips would then use a locally designed and manufactured chassis.

Over the last year or so Silicon Chip vintage radio articles have featured comparisons between Australian and Dutch Philips radios - in each case an identical cabinet but localised innards.

Stromberg Carlson was an American company though they chose to make radios for the Australian market that were unique. One reason for this may be because it may not necessarily have been cheaper to simply adjust US circuits for 240 volt operation. Then again, this won't explain why most of the cabinets they used for their Australian radios were also unique to this country.

A few cases where foreign companies simply had badge-engineering operations going. GE's local arm, AGE, sold radios made by AWA under the AGE Bandmaster name. AEI sold AWA Radiolas under the AEI Hotpoint brand. Philco, at the time a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company, sold Airzone receivers badged as Philcos. Mullard also sold rebadged Airzone Cubs until the late 1940s when Philips took over the manufacture of Mullard-badged sets. Airzone also rebadged some of their receivers under the Malvern Star and Peal brands. Astor rebadged their 1940s Mickey receivers under the Kingsley and Monarch brands.

The reason that badge-engineering was so common was because there was a lot of work to be done to design and then tool up to manufacture a Bakelite cabinet. It was a very costly process due to the huge heat and pressure requirements to cause Bakelite to form. The huge presses used to make these cabinets would have cost millions in today's money.

There was an article by Neville Coffill who was one of the designers of AWA radios between 1942-1965 in the July 2013 Radio Waves. He refers to a 'team of industrial design personnel'. He goes on to describe the development of a new model.

Sales Dept advises Engineering of what they wanted. An engineer is assigned the job and oversees all stages into production. The Engineer developed a circuit, draftsman designs the chassis. Industrial design people would design a suitable cabinet and control knobs and have samples made. A working sample was made and if signed off by the engineer and chief engineer would be costed and sent to the sales department.

From that I gather no one person designed the cabinets at AWA, rather a team did the design. It'd be interesting to get in touch with Neville to find out more info. I estimate he'd be well into his 80's if he's still with us.

Another guy that's full of AWA info is John McIlwaine, the president of the NSW HRSA and the Archivist of the AWA Veterans Association.

Thanks Brad & Scraps

I wouldn't have thought it was one up show per say

Still the idea of how they come to be is an interesting one I think...one that should be documented

I dont know how far the tariff thing goes back but that probably did make it worth while for the manufacturing to be done here By OS companies (or Aust devisions of such)...guess too wages weren't so high in Oz

Neville Coffill... sounds like he would defiantly be a bloke to talk to

Brad, sounds like you've done some research on this..to me... its nice to know the history behind things

Thanks for the info

I should also point out that it is widely believed that only around ten manufacturers had the necessary equipment for making Bakelite cabinets. These would have included AWA, EMMCO/Email, Radio Corporation, Kriesler, Philips, HMV, STC and perhaps Breville and Stromberg Carlson. RCS Radio may have also had a smaller press for making parts such as insulators, control knobs and dial escutcheons.

Other manufacturers would have resorted to getting their cabinets made by the larger companies listed above or using a specialist Bakelite maker.

The people behind many of the much loved Australian brands is a not an area that has received much attention. It is an area I've found to be quite interesting the more I have looked into it.

I'd divide it into three main groups:
- The management team
- The industrial design team
- The engineering team

I'd say all three groups have had their fair share of historical neglect. How many readers can name any of the key people from an Australian manufacturer without resorting to looking up an obscure article?
With the rare exception, very little physical documentation survives about the various companies and the key personnel involved. The only way to salvage any factual company history is to talk to people who were there at the time. This is something that should have been done 20 years ago, as time has been steadily working against us. The number of senior level employees still around who can give us an account of events that occurred over 40 years ago is rapidly shrinking.

The original post made some generalisations that would seem at first valid but may be unfair when thought about in some more depth. The era in question has a big bearing on this. As an example, many of Kriesler's designs from the late 50's onwards were anything but basic, with American influences in their product design. The consumer market was also probably made up of people who preferred tasteful yet conservative styling. It's no use having a full range of modern leading edge designs if sales fail to match expectations. Off the top of my head, there were also a lot more larger NSW based companies compared to VIC or the other states so there is a much smaller group of products for comparison. Aside from Electronic Industries (Astor, Peter Pan, Eclipse etc) there were not that many other big players in Victoria. Healing is about the only other one I can think off. In NSW there was Admiral, AWA, HMV, STC, Stromberg Carlson etc.

I've been able to talk to a couple of people from Astor and Philips in an attempt to answer some of these very questions. In the case of Philips during the late 60's, a single person was usually responsible for a specific model design. An example of this process, would be a designer would sketch up a concept drawing for a proposed new model. This would be presented to the design team and discussed. If the design had merit it would then be further developed into a full design by the original designer.

RMIT in Melbourne is setting up a museum of local industrial design that aims to preserve some of this design history. However from what I've seen, it is being done purely from a design viewpoint with no wider context of the company history or electronic engineering involved.

It makes me wonder what ever happened to all the machinery and the documentation that the radio companies possessed in their heydays.

When AWA turned their Ashfield works over to Exicom to manufacture telephones for Telstra (then Telecom Australia) they wouldn't have needed about 90% of the gear they used when building radio receivers and transmitters. After Exicom lost the telephone production contract to Alcatel STC, the Ashfield plant pretty much lied in ruins until a property developer razed the whole site and built blocks of flats on it.

AWA had numerous other factories around Sydney, building everything from totalisator machines to traffic signals. Somewhere, surely, someone has in their possession the intel, photographs and some of the manufacturing equipment. It wouldn't have all gone to the tip. I imagine the same would apply to the same material no longer needed or wanted by other major manufacturers.

It wouldn't have all gone to the tip.

Sadly, that's exactly where a lot of it has ended up. Some documentation was kept by employees only to be thrown out by relatives once they passed away.
There is some documentation surviving though. I've chased down a few leads to get in contact with ex-employees and in the process I have been able to provide a new home for material that was facing an uncertain future.
Being a local firm I've been concentrating on Astor and Philips. Virtually nothing of Astor survives anywhere except for service documentation. I'm even struggling to find an image of the main factory at Grant St Sth Melbourne. I've spoken to an ex-employee and of the six or so other Astor people he knows, none have kept any material aside from the odd photo or two.
I had a lot more luck with Philips. The company itself has no archive material from Astor or Philips Australia apparently. However I did end up getting in contact with the retired head of industrial design at Philips and he had an amazing collection of material he had collected over the years. It is amongst this collection that a few bits of 1960's and early 1970's Astor material has been discovered.
As for equipment, a few bits and pieces have turned up on Ebay. When the Astor-Philips Clayton factory closed in 1987 everything was sold off at auction. Parts of the closed circuit TV transmitter turned up for sale a couple of years back and after buying some of it I found the factory inventory labels on the equipment. I've also obtained some equipment from the National-Panasonic factory in Penrith the same way.

As far as badge engineering goes, I wouldn't be surprised if was the sales/marketing dept specifies what radios are to be sold, and asks OEM manufacturers what they have. "I need a small AM MW radio for kitchens, an AM MW clock radio for the bedroom, oh, and a console with AM MW radio and record player. What do you have? ... That looks nice, but a bit pricy ... And put my company logo here and here".

Where radios became particularly cheap and nasty was in 1940s consoles. Nameless models spat out of production lines like clone soldiers in Star Wars were not strongly built, had boring looks and despite being in large cabinets only had six inch loudspeakers. For some reason they often sported a picture of an old sailing ship in the middle of the tuning dial but little else to show where it was manufactured.

These radios were built down to a price rather than up to a standard though they did perform adequately considering what they would have been sold for. In this case the cabinet would have been made by a specialist cabinet maker such as Ricketts & Thorpe and the innards by a radio manufacturer that was probably on the verge of bankruptcy if not provided with this work.

Agree about '40s console designs - but to be fair there was a lot of disruption with wartime production priorities, shortage of materials, and later reorganisation as the economy staggered back to a civilian model.

A few horrible 40s consoles and radiograms turn up at our local tip, but I leave them there with their ugly veneers peeling off.

As to design museums - the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney has a big collection of vintage radios selected for design quality - but not living there I haven't explored whether they have documentation or not.

If anybody knows people who have collections from their old workplaces, please encourage them to donate their archives to their local State Library, or to the National Library in Canberra, which does keep a lot of material relevant to Australian industries.

Maven

If anybody knows people who have collections from their old workplaces...

I have the piped music system from the Royal Ryde Rehabilitation Hospital, rescued from a skip in 1994. It is an STC rack cabinet with three six valve radios, monitor speaker and headphone socket. It worked when I collared it - I used to run it in my garage - though it requires a complete restoration at the moment.