Antique 1920s wooden radio variometer tuning component. For Sale

Overstock from Pioneer Village.

Early radio equipment manufacturers in the United States and Europe produced tuning components like variometers in the early decades of the twentieth century. These devices were handcrafted from wood, brass, and copper wire to help radio operators tune into specific frequencies on crystal and vacuum tube receivers. Workshops and home hobbyists assembled them carefully, winding fine wire around wooden spheres and outer frames to create variable inductors.

Amateur radio operators and early broadcast listeners used these instruments in their living rooms to pick up distant voice and Morse code signals. They turned the central dial by hand to adjust the electrical inductance until the desired radio station came through clearly on their headphones. As factory-built superheterodyne receivers with built-in tuning dials became standard household appliances in the late 1920s, these manually tuned wooden components became obsolete.

Harold Warp (December 21, 1903 – April 8, 1994) was an American businessman who invented Flex-O-Glass. He also founded Pioneer Village in Minden, Nebraska. [1] [2] [3]

Harold Warp was born in a sod house on a farm near Minden, Nebraska. He was the youngest of twelve children born to an immigrant family from Norway. When he was three years old, his father died; his mother died when he was eleven. In 1924, he and two of his brothers moved to Chicago with a patent for a plastic window material he had developed. Their business became successful and in time its product line grew to include many other plastic products. Harold Warp was the recipient of numerous awards including the Horatio Alger Award in 1979 and the Distinguished Nebraskalander Award in 1984.[4][5][6]

He opened Pioneer Village in 1953 in Minden, Nebraska. Most of the objects on display were personally collected by him in his lifetime. In 1983, Warp donated the museum to the nonprofit Harold Warp Pioneer Village Foundation.