The fifty year old Talking Clock Radio

behind me here i've got something that really could be quite interesting especially if i could get it to work i bought this in a non-functional state but i think even if i can't get it working properly it might still be interesting just having a poke around inside and having a look at how it was supposed to work because this is the world's first talking alarm clock from 1971. so this is going back before the ages of you sort of digital electronics things that could use voice synthesizer chips to read the time i mean you could get a cheap watch now you press a button it would speak to you i got this little alarm clock the other year which digital alarm clock at a loudspeaker 68 degrees fahrenheit cost very little very cheap to make no doubt but back in 1971 it was a different proposition they couldn't just stick a couple of chips in there to read things out to do things old school and as far as i can tell i think that these use magnetic discs with recordings on them to read out the time similar in a way to how when you'd ring up somewhere and you get the time over the telephone there was various different technologies used for those whether it was records or optical recordings going all the way back to the 1930s but bringing it into the home for the first time must have been quite a challenge and i'll be interested to see how they went about doing it now whenever i've seen these things for sale more often than not they're sold in a state where it says the clock works fine but it doesn't speak anymore and there's so many of those i've seen i've got a feeling that maybe there's just like one particular fault that's affecting them all something that perhaps is quite easy to fix something that gets stuck i don't know we'll find out when we have a look at it i am a little bit concerned though that it might not tell the right time because it's imported from the us so therefore it's expecting a 60hz power supply and in the uk with my step-down power transformers i'll still only be providing it with a 50 hertz one so it might run slow but then again doesn't really matter too much for demonstration purposes i say that's if i could demonstrate it is a good chance that this thing is beyond repair but it's nicely packaged at least so we'll have a look inside and see if we can get it working it's a bit of a museum piece this because i've not only got the original box but all the documentation that came in it as well as the clock there's the earpiece for the radio which is still in its packet and the remote control which is unused this is just a button that you click and it plugs into the side of the clock or into the back and it will speak the time when you press the button but just want to show you this on the box here handle with care use no hook that's a old-fashioned message and then on this side here don't if you can see this it was sent from panasonic to a company called radio equipment under 96 vulcan street buffalo new york that company is no longer there now but they were around long enough to appear on the google street view they showed up all the way up until the 2012 version so sometime between 2012 2015 they disappeared but they had a good long run at it but yeah so that's the stuff from the box um lovely old logos on here but of course you're not really that interested in a box maybe that's just me let's move on so we've got all the original documentation here and i find stuff like this fascinating it's a little window into history for example the panasonic service center list for the us and canada on the other side and they've got abbreviations underneath these and the one for the usa well it's the matt suster or max sushita electronic corporation of america that's abbreviated to mecca and the hawaiian one well that's meh so yeah i probably won't use those nowadays but this this is fascinating this little brochure here it's pretty much the entire panasonic range well for the us anyway so it goes all the way through various different things televisions radios eight track reel to reel onto vacuum cleaners mixers all that kind of stuff and some great little pictures in here just want to show you one thing at the front here though i might show you a couple more pictures as well might scan something so this little black and white television the tr001 i believe this was the smallest television in the world at the time when it was introduced in 1971. but the reason i'm showing you this is because this particular television the guts out of these models were used to create the com lock communication devices used in the television show space 1999 so they'd have the screen inside the prop com lock device attached with a wire to the rest of the electronics and those will be hidden out of sight the wire would travel up perhaps the person's arm or off camera somewhere but yeah the tr001 was the cob lock in space 1999 and talking of tvs the largest color television you could buy from panasonic at this time was this one a 21 inch screen but notice everything in here has a little name i don't know if you spotted that but let's just say we'll look at these televisions here so these are black and white tvs so they've got a model number but they've also got a name so that one is the scottsdale that one's the marietta the morning side the terryville and everything it is got a silly name next to it like clock radios the maywood the new day completely random names really don't really seem to have much relevance to anything that the model does i mean this is a darion record player and that's the k hill and that's the press scott um but yeah somebody must have had to go through every model of product that they made i think what can we call this i'll tell you what we'll call this eight-track player that has some speakers with it we'll call that the scarsdale and this one the collingswood i don't know how long they kept that idea up for but there you go a little bit of history there and as well as that we've got the registration card and the actual instructions for the device itself which are nice to have and they're really nice they're done as well it goes on about there've been many different kinds of clock radios before but never anything like this the engineers have developed a talking clock with a voice inside right so and it all falls out it's really quite nice brochure there's someone using the remote control which is known as the touch and call remote switch for time announcing you can hear the time from a distance i think she just needed to look to her right there she better see it but still and then over here there's something with the optional pillow speaker for listening to the radio but it says you could also use the supplied earphone so yeah don't put it on top of your telly like that don't put it on top of a book don't put a book on top of it and um that's like don't use it in a kitchen perhaps maybe it doesn't like um humid environments but there you go so all this is all great and you're probably thinking why would taking as long to talk about all this kind of stuff and the reason is it doesn't really work properly so let's just see what it does do at the moment okay the first thing you've probably noticed is that it's a little bit dark on the front and i do have it switched on at the moment but on the top here you can see we've got the illuminated button that says touch and call and i have noticed a light down the side here but maybe that's just uh bleeding through from the top but yeah it is rather dark let me press the button and we'll hear what it sounds like now you can't hear anything there at all neither can i well i can hear something moving inside it's definitely not speaking the time though but what i'm going to do i'm going to put my microphone up to it and then you'll better hear what that sounds like but let's put the lights back up right so i'll put my lavalier on the top here and just have a listen to this yeah there's definitely something going on in there now as far as the other functions go other than speaking the time the radio works this switch is a little bit tough to turn but i'll turn it on congratulations jacob yes of course you can have cake oh no there it is it's one big pile on them here we've got a switch which is labeled hour call so that would announce the time every hour on the hour if that's depressed and along the bottom here volume tone fm or am and tuning for the radio around the back oh on the side here notice that it says english well the h is peeled off but that's to show this is an english version so the soldiers in different countries with different languages built into it right on the back here that's to set the time we've got the sockets for the external remote control or the earphone speaker that's to adjust the volume of the announcements that's to attach up to an internal fm antenna and that's if you wanted to attach an external one so that's the single speaker and then again those sockets from the back are repeated on the side here just for convenience sake now i've noticed i can get this thing to speak initially nothing was working at all and i pressed this but loads of times started to hear that mechanism going inside so it must have been really gunged up but still nothing was coming out to the speaker and then i notice if i press the button whilst the radio is on the audio comes through on the speaker very quiet but you should be able to just about hear it so let's try that now right so we've got two things going on there first of untuned the radio so just listening to static and therefore not worrying about content matches but then the speech comes in it's very muffled but also there's a regular click on it and a click is nothing to do with the mechanism inside here it's just picking up electrical interference from other devices in this room but let's just have another listen to it so what's this time going to be now it's going to be um 4 41 perhaps so let's just see if it sounds like 441 3 40 3 40. to me that sounded like it was saying 340. that was pretty clear 5 o'clock of course it's 6 o'clock but still we're not going to split hairs now i'll just mention a couple of things there should be a panasonic badge there that's fallen off i've seen quite a few of them for sale with the badge that fell off so that seems to be a common thing but the main issue is that as i suspected at the beginning this is not going to tell the right time in the uk it's basing its time on the electricity frequency so it's designed for use in the us using it in the uk on 50hz means that it runs slow yes you can see the sweep second hand here a minute on this takes quite a bit longer than a minute to happen which means that it's always falling behind now there's a slim possibility that inside here there's a switch to change the gears to choose between 50 or 60 hertz you might remember a tape recorder i featured a while ago with a flip clock in it that had a lever in it to switch between 50 and 60 hertz but we'll see when we get inside it i'd need to open this thing up now but the first job is to unplug it yeah i'm not too sure how it comes apart i think this rear section might come off i don't know how much access that's going to give us we've got four screws in here and looking at those screws it definitely seems like someone's beaded here before they're a little bit stripped and then underneath on the base there's another set of screws and more likely than not we're gonna have to take those out and those and perhaps the whole inside will slide out but i think we'll start off at the back we'll take these four off and see where we get with that oh there we go we're in okay so i'm quite happy with the axis i've got here we've got our magnetic disc there we've got the little playback head there a little tape head so that's going to be popping down on the disc at the right point the disc looks a little bit damaged there he has a there's a break in it it's torn at that point which is a shame let's turn it on and see if we can get it to revolve to cut down this clicky i'm just going to put a metal shield underneath this and see if that helps you know you hear about all those people wearing tin foil hats to block out alien transmissions i'm wondering if they're onto anything i'm going to put some tinfoil on top of that well underneath there and see if that cuts out the clicking let's have a listen or five it seems that the tinfoil hat wearers are actually onto something let's just have a look how the time set on this okay so on the back here i've got the wheel to set the time so if i push this in and turn it we can see that's actually turning the disc okay now i don't know if you can see this but there's these tracks here let's start on that one there runs all the way from the center and goes out like a crescent shape to the outside here so this is what the head is going along when it's playing the audio now the trouble is with that it would have to have 720 tracks to have one for each minute of the day because of course it's going to repeat them for am and pm it's not got a separate one for each of those so i don't think that would fit 720 tracks on now i've just realized there are two discs here where this metal arms pushing down that's where they join so this section is the outer disc which is reading off the minutes and then the inner disc is the one for the hours and as i set the time you might be able to see them revolve at different speeds let's just spin that round now so there you go you can see the center one just about it's hard to show on camera perhaps a bit easier to see from this angle there you go so that's the outer disc which is a bit torn up in places and the very center part that's going to read the hours off i managed to remove this bar from the back it gives us a bit of a better view of the mechanism inside so let's just press it again what you're looking at here is the back of the clock mechanism if you look at that sticker you'll see on the top right of it it says 60 hertz so this mechanism is solely designed to be used in a 60hz zone and therefore will never keep the right time in the uk now while i've got it apart we've done pretty much everything we can with it i'll see if taking the screws out of the base enables me to get the whole chassis out of the inside of the case so we can have a look at the bottom of it right that's all the screws out so let's see if this thing comes apart yep that's loose there right so that should now slide out with any look okay so we're getting to look at the uninteresting side of the circuit board here to get to the other side i'd need to unstring the radio tuner take out some screws here but when we get there all we would see if i was to do it would be a radio tuner for am and fm as well as a circuit board similar to what you get in a cassette player i'm just going to turn the lights off to see exactly what's illuminated on this dial right so the lights coming from behind it these are illuminous hands no don't forget my geiger counter it'll probably tell me i shouldn't be going near those let's just see where that bulb is on the inside though well there's the back light for the tuning dial it's really sandwiched all the way in the middle of there not that easy to get to i imagine if that blows you'd have to take all that circuit board out from beneath it let's see if we can get a bit of an angle to have a look at what's on that circuit board though so there you go that's what you're missing basically looks like the inside of any typical transistor radio cassette player from the early 1970s now once the case is put together these five pads on the front of the device push up against these five connectors on the inside front of the case which in turn lead off to wires which then go off to the earphone and remote control devices since those aren't present at the moment it seems like the audio is deactivated but still we could get a bit of a better look at the motor mechanism whilst the case is off do you recall earlier on when i mentioned that the wear to the screws on the back made it look like someone had already been in this case before well one of the repairs appears to have been to the magnetic disk it looks like some splicing tape has been applied to repair a tear in the disk and back in the days when electrical repair places were common this is definitely a piece of equipment you'd try to get fixed given how much it originally cost to buy when it was launched in the us the retail price was approximately 130 now accounting for inflation that's worth around 850 nowadays that's a lot to pay for a radio alarm clock so if it did start playing up out of warranty it's definitely something you try to get fixed rather than just chucking it in the bin so there you go that's the panasonic rc 6900 a little bit the worse for wear now but at least we were able to get it semi-functional so we could see how it was supposed to work and i'm always fascinated by devices like this electro mechanical technology that's performing a function that really would be a lot easier with integrated circuits but it predated it by quite a few years this first came out in 1971 so we're looking at a 50 year old talking clock so you know you've got to give it a little bit of leeway it's not going to be perfect after all these years there are some other things in this video that are now 50 years old as well and they're not quite functioning as they once did but anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] i'm taking the unusual steps of adding an addendum onto this video and i'll explain why i tend to put my videos out a week or so early on patreon it enables me to get some feedback on them see if there's things i need to add to them or change things i didn't explain very well or things that i glossed over well in this case i got a couple of people asking the same question which usually means that that question's then going to get asked a hundred times or so on youtube once the thing goes live so it's best to address it now and that question was did i try cleaning the tape head and did i try cleaning the magnetic disc and the answer to both those things is yes although i cut all that footage out of the video because it didn't make any difference to the sound quality you can rest assured though that if you ever see one of my videos and there's a magnetic tape head in it i have cleaned it at some point with isopropyl alcohol even if it isn't necessarily shown on screen there's a lot of things that don't get shown i mean i've probably got like eight hours worth of video for this one but a lot of it is things not happening and overall the reason that this thing doesn't sound so good is because it's just plain knackered that discs all crumpled up there's parts of it where the sounds just faded away entirely i don't know how but it's somehow got demagnetized or whatever over the years and there's no sound on certain parts then other parts it doesn't light up properly the head travels between two tracks and it mumbles whatever it's supposed to say [Music] uh really it is pretty worn out but it wasn't about the device as it stands now this video was more about the ingenuity of panasonic and how 50 years ago they managed to manufacture a talking radio alarm clock for the first time in the days before they could use voice synthesizer chips and how they went about doing that and i thought that was fascinating so yeah don't worry too much about the fact that my machine is completely knackered that's just how it is now we're really thinking more about the 1971 side of things i hope you enjoyed having a look inside this one even if it wasn't functioning perfectly i still thought it was a fascinating thing to show anyway that really is it for the moment as always thanks for watching 20. you

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 407,883

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Panasonic, RC-6900, Talking Clock Radio, Radio Alarm Clock, Talking, Vintage, Tech, Retrotech, Electro Mechanical, Magnetic Disc, Disc recording, talking clock, first, 1971, tear-down, teardown

Id: etl_bSIy-p0

Length: 21min 59sec (1319 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021