Tony Meloche wrote:

Keyboard In The Wilderness wrote:

Hey I can buy A batteries, (AA, and AAA), and C batteries -- right
What happened to the B battery ???

--
Keyboard In the Wilderness

"B" batteries wee a special size used for military/industrial
applications. I don't know if they're still made or not. But there were
never really and consumer items that were designed for the "B" battery,
that's why you never see them.

Tony


"B batteries provided the high voltage to the "plates" of tubes. I
recall 90
volt units.

A batteries provided filament voltage (1.5 volts) to a lot of tubes like
the
1EQ5, where the first digiot indicated the filament voltage, and the
letters
the type of tube characteristics, and the final digit the number of pins
that
were active.
6 AQ 5 was a 6 volt amplifier with two filment connections, a plate
coonection and two grids.
However sometimes there was a cathode too (I'm getting hazy on this
stuff),
maybe the filament didn't count as two."


Ah, I learned something new today. But I stand by the essence of my
original answer - it was very incomplete, though, I see now.

Tony

Tony Meloche ) writes:
Keyboard In The Wilderness wrote:

Hey I can buy A batteries, (AA, and AAA), and C batteries -- right
What happened to the B battery ???

--
Keyboard In the Wilderness


"B" batteries wee a special size used for military/industrial
applications. I don't know if they're still made or not. But there were
never really and consumer items that were designed for the "B" battery,
that's why you never see them.

Tony

In the beginning every radio, or virtually every radio, was battery operated.
They all used B batteries. It was only later that radio ran off AC line
voltage.

Michael

Tis true
This continued for many years as remote farms had no electrical power
Typical was two 45 Volt batteries

--
Keyboard to you


Hey I can buy A batteries, (AA, and AAA), and C batteries -- right
What happened to the B battery ???

--
Keyboard In the Wilderness

Tony

In the beginning every radio, or virtually every radio, was battery
operated.
They all used B batteries. It was only later that radio ran off AC line
voltage.

Michael

In article ,
Tony Meloche wrote:


Keyboard In The Wilderness wrote:

Hey I can buy A batteries, (AA, and AAA), and C batteries -- right
What happened to the B battery ???

--
Keyboard In the Wilderness


"B" batteries wee a special size used for military/industrial
applications. I don't know if they're still made or not. But there were
never really and consumer items that were designed for the "B" battery,
that's why you never see them.


Lots of people listened to radio broadcasts in the 30's and the radios
all used B batteries. There were shoe-box sized "portable" AM radios
than needed B batteries (90v ?). They were in common use until
transisters became practical. I'll guess 1960.


Tony


--
Al Dykes
-----------
adykes at p a n i x . c o m

In the beginning every radio, or virtually every radio, was
battery operated. They all used B batteries. It was only
later that radio ran off AC line voltage.
______________

In the VERY beginning, radios used no batteries at all. Those radios were
all solid-state, using a tuned coil of wire connected to a detector formed
by a piece of galena and a "catwhisker," driving a headphone.

RF

BTW, your question brings up an interesting point.
You slightly mislead us by talking about battery sizes (defined by NEDA?)
A, B, C, D, and AA and AAA

But in the old days, the usage designations were widely used A was for
filament, B for plate supply and C for tube bias. If your tube plates needed 90
volts, the grids might need 45.

You used C batteries because to drop the voltage from a B battery was very
wasteful (resistor heat), and batteries were expensive.
The B batteries were almost always square or box-like, and C and A could be any
shape. The D cells were used for illumination (dial lights and the like).

Batteries could be designed for high current, low voltage, or low current high
voltage, or some variation thereof to suit the purpose.

Even today, if you go into Radio Shack and get the l;ittle coin-sized
batterries used in calculators and the like, you'll have several different
versions of the same shape.

Some have their internal chemistry optimized for low current, long life
(digital clock or memory battery backup in a PC), while others are designed for
infrequent bursts of high current draw (garage door openers). That is why if
you're in a bind, you can probably substitute another battery number for one
that's not in stock, but it won't last as long because it won't be optimized
for the job. But the size has to be the same, of course.

(Radioman390) wrote in message ...
B batteries provided the high voltage to the "plates" of tubes. I recall 90
volt units.

A batteries provided filament voltage (1.5 volts) to a lot of tubes like the
1EQ5, where the first digiot indicated the filament voltage, and the letters
the type of tube characteristics, and the final digit the number of pins that
were active.
6 AQ 5 was a 6 volt amplifier with two filment connections, a plate
coonection and two grids.
However sometimes there was a cathode too (I'm getting hazy on this stuff),
maybe the filament didn't count as two.

And "C" cells provided the bias voltage. This was before cothode resistors
became common. I built such a radio years ago. 3 stage TRF. I used "hearing
aid" vacum tubes, with several hundred turns for a "loop" andtenna around the
edge. It was about the size of a VHS tape, but about a third thicker.
Terry

"Richard Fry" wrote in message
...
In the beginning every radio, or virtually every radio, was
battery operated. They all used B batteries. It was only
later that radio ran off AC line voltage.
______________

In the VERY beginning, radio susednobatteriesatall.Thoseradioswere
all solid-state, using a tuned coil of wire connected to a detector formed
by a piece of galena and a "catwhisker," driving a headphone.

RF



In the very beginning, radio used coherers, which could be described as
"granular state". That is, if you don't count the spark gaps Hertz used in
his experiments.

Frank Dresser

On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 07:41:17 -0700, "Keyboard In The Wilderness"
wrote:

Hey I can buy A batteries, (AA, and AAA), and C batteries -- right
What happened to the B battery ???

They fell out of use after portables requiring a high plate
voltage source were no longer made -- age of the transistor.

I used to have one such radio in the 50s. I believe they pot
out about 90 volts.