More files for the Melco Supreme
Radio Engineering article from November 1924
Here is the text I used when I exhibited my Melco
The original design for the
Telos variometers.
Patent 1,664,513
When Lester Jones filed the patent for his variometer on 23 January 1923, it did not look like the Telos coils used in the MELCO set on display here.
Thanks to Ted Miller, I have here on display a fragment from the original patent design. You can imagine the skill required to form these coils and then laminate them. I do not recall ever having seen a MELCO set with this patent design. If you know of such a set, you can be sure it is one of the first sets built.
MELCO SUPREME
AMSCO PRODUCTS, Inc. Mid – 1923
Lester L. Jones and the Melco
According to Allan Douglas, Lester Israel had worked at the Washington Navy Yard during WW-I along with Priess, Horle and Hazeltine (as a consultant) where the group developed the SE143 receiver. By 1922, Lester Israel changed his name to Jones and had formed the Danziger-Jones Company to market his invention of a tunable RF transformer named the Telos Vario-Transformer. (Patent filed January, 1923)
His Patent # 1,664,513 does not look like the coils seen in the radios I will describe to you. However, Ted Miller has found most of one that is identical to the patent and it is easy to understand why they were apparently quickly modified. The original coils were wound as a single layer flat ‘D’ shape and then coated with cement and laminated between sheets of card stock. To get these coils laminated correctly had to be a extremely tedious task.
Meanwhile, in July, 1922, the Mortimer Radio Company was incorporated and began advertising under the Melco name. By February, 1923, it introduced the Melco Supreme, using Telos Vario-Transformers. In May, 1923, Mortimer merged with Amsco (Advanced Metal Stamping Company) owned by the Price brothers, attorneys who had acted for Mortimer in its incorporation.
Jones, who had been working on neutralized TRF amplifiers at about the same time as Hazeltine, eventually lost most of his patent claims where the transformers were used between vacuum tube stages. He was, however, able to have some success with a circuit called the Technidyne. Here all the tuning was done in a multi-stage passive circuit followed by several cascade RF amplifiers. This was used most notably by the Sparks-Withington Co. (Sparton) but also by AC Dayton and in the, very rare, Atwater Kent Model 50.
The first Melco models used a 4 tube circuit but soon added an additional audio amplifier stage. The claim for the Telos coil is that it could enable high amplification at higher frequencies without oscillation. Under the Telos Radio brand, the Danziger-Jones Company offered kits to build your own outfit.
After Jones began to loose in court, apparently, to stay in business the kits became the only way to keep selling. Some of the kits have survived with engraved panels that say: “Sale if assembled prohibited.” This seems to be similar to the strategy used by designers of superhetrodyne circuits to avoid infringement suits by RCA over the Armstrong superhet patents.
Radio Engineering for November 1924 has a complete write-up on how to assemble the five tube kit version.
The Telos coils are of a very unusual construction. The method of winding the coils results in minimal field leakage. The secondary coils are connected to a ‘compensator’ condenser. This device has two stators and one rotor. One side is used to neutralize the tube capacity at a given frequency, which would have the tendency to detune the circuit, so the other side adds enough capacity to keep the stage in tune.
It looks to me that, while the circuit would have worked pretty good compared to its contemporaries, there was a lot more labor involved in building these sets.
Alan Douglas has another radio using these Telos Coils. It is called the Flex-O-Dyne. One Charles G. Hall of New York advertised this set for about a year starting in December 1923.
A few years ago, Ted Miller acquired a chassis that appears to be identical to the front panel of the Flex-O-Dyne with the exception of having much larger Weston meters installed. However the engraving is completely different. The engraving proclaims “The Pantheon - Crystal Symphony” made by the KAYDEE Co. N.Y.C.
It is not known what the relationship between any of these companies might have been. However, you see the logo of the Melco Supreme change over three years. At times it has the word Acmedyne in smaller letters just above MELCO and sometimes the word Melco is bracketed with a smaller K & D… Like: <K MELCO D>…. Does that have anything to do with Kaydee Co.? --- Who knows at this point.
How clean is clean enough?
Late last year I realized that I had done nothing to my MELCO since I had purchased it from Ed Bell who, at the time, was selling some of Doc Muchow’s collection.
Other than being dirty inside, missing a lot of white filling on the knob markings and having some cabinet glue joints that had broken loose; it was in pretty good shape.
So, how far to go in cleaning this up?
1. Since two cabinet joints had broken free, I decided to clean the joints out and re-glue them.
2. The cabinet was very dark and dull so I cleaned the surfaces with Go-Jo waterless hand cleaner. An amazing amount of coal soot came off and revealed an original finish that was not significantly damaged.
3. The way this set is built, it looks like it would be a real nightmare to take apart the chassis. However, it is only necessary to unsolder two connections. All the other connections are done with thumb nuts. Removing 20 or so nuts has the front panel components separated from the chassis. From there it was easy to remove each chassis part and clean it with Go-Jo.
4. I could have done more aggressive cleaning, but decided that only the thumb nuts could benefit by a quick zap in the ultrasonic cleaner.
5. Almost all the number lettering was gone on the three big tuning knobs but almost all other paint filling on the graduation marks and other knobs was OK. As it turns out, I had an old Elmers wood touch-up crayon of the exact color as the surviving filler lacquer. So I filled in the numbers. I elected not to fill the few missing graduation marks. This way, I think the set still looks more authentic.
P.S. If anyone has the Flex-O-Dyne or Crystal Symphony, Ted would like to have some detailed photos of the chassis and the cabinet. Any set called it the Pantheon (Temple of the Gods) Crystal Symphony deserves to be restored to its full glory.
Robert Lozier – kd4hsh@carolina.rr.com
