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This was the summer of 1953 and
the preamp was actually used in the fall of 1953. I wrote an article about this project and sent it in to Audio
Engineering magazine. I heard nothing back until I noticed, “There it
was!”, when I received my September 1954 issue of the magazine. It wasn’t featured on the cover, but was
included as a complete article with the title: “A Transistor Remote
Amplifier”. This was my first
published article on transistors.
When the article came out, I was
a senior in college and decided that this (articles for publication) was
something I could do more often, so I wrote more construction articles
using transistors. At the time, the
literature for hobbyists was basically Audiocraft magazine, Radio and
Television News, and maybe a few others such as QST, which was for radio
amateurs. Radio and TV News was
aimed at hobbyists and service technicians, with about half the articles
for each group. There were very few
people writing articles about transistors – the service technicians didn’t
need it because there were no commercial products using transistors, and,
for hobbyists, it took authors some time to actually understand
transistors. I happened to be the
right person there at the right time and place. I wrote a whole raft of transistor construction articles and
more general articles about how to deal with transistors and what made them
different from tubes.
Go
To Penfield Oral History, Page 4
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