Hallicrafters

» see hallicrafters.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

RCA sued it in its first year. The company had opened at 417 North State Street in Chicago in late 1932, built out of a pun on its founder's name, Halli(gan) plus (hand)crafters, and it was assembling radio sets without an RCA patent license. The fix was to buy a failing concern called Silver-Marshall Inc. in 1933, whose most valuable asset was the license itself. The pattern was set right there. William J. Halligan wanted to build a handcrafted receiver for amateur operators, and the industry he was walking into had been fenced off by patents before he arrived.

To pay for the fence he built radios under other manufacturers' names until there was money for a line of his own. The first was the SX-9 Super Skyrider, late 1935, with a large German silver tuning dial and the new all-metal vacuum tubes. By 1938 the sets were going out to eighty-nine countries and the company had added transmitters.

Then the war took the factory. The HT-4 transmitter of 1938 was redesignated the BC-610 and became the loud half of the SCR-299, the mobile communications package the US Army drove around Europe and North Africa, and the plant collected Army-Navy E Awards for it. Civilian production stopped until 1945 and came back into a different market, one that wanted a television set in a mahogany cabinet with a record player inside it. The Science Museum Group holds one of the 1948 televisions and a 1951 console that cost $550 new.

Consumer production ended in 1975, which is nine years ahead of my own birth certificate, so I know this brand the way anyone knows one from a decade they missed: through photographs of front panels. What the company actually sold was distance. A box on a desk in Illinois that could pull a voice out of Europe after dark is not far off what a 14.4k modem and a Turkish phone line were for in 1998. The equipment has no parts in common. The appetite is the same one.

~ the record ~

~ the s-38, and who drew it ~

The model that actually mattered was the cheap one. The S-38, from 1947, was a beginner's receiver, simple and inexpensive, and it is the set that introduced shortwave listening to more people than any of the expensive ones did. Its case was restyled by Raymond Loewy, the industrial designer behind the Lucky Strike pack and the Studebaker, hired to draw a cabinet for a radio aimed at fourteen-year-olds.

That was the trick the company got right twice. Build something a serious operator would respect, then build a stripped version a kid could afford, and let the kid grow into the catalog. The S-38 went through revision after revision into the 1950s and the earlier Sky Buddy had done the same job in 1938. Collectors chase neither of them. The set they want is the Skyrider Diversity, two complete receivers bolted side by side so an operator could run two antennas against fading.

~ the other half of the building ~

By 1952 the Chicago operation ran a block long, with a three-story building of 72,000 square feet two blocks away and another 150,000 square feet scattered across three more buildings inside a five-mile radius. There were 2,500 people on the payroll. Half the output was never meant for hobbyists: countermeasures gear for B-52 and EB-66 aircraft, penetration aids for intercontinental ballistic missiles, and a quantity of work nobody was allowed to describe.

The company advertised this out loud. Its own copy said it supported "America's defense umbrella", and that sentence explains everything after it. A radio brand with a classified division has two different kinds of customer, and in 1966 only one of them was growing.

~ the name afterward ~

Halligan sold out to Northrop in 1966 and his family's involvement ended there. Northrop ran the company into the early 1970s while Japanese imports took the floor out of American consumer electronics, and in 1975 it sold the Hallicrafters name and held on to the plant, which had moved to Rolling Meadows in the Chicago suburbs. Non-military production ended with that sale. The building became Northrop's Defense Systems Division and kept working.

The name went on being traded for years with nothing attached to it. One 1980s product is known to exist under the badge, a four-line telephone with an intercom, sold into offices rather than to operators. Since roughly 1988 the rights to the name and the logos have sat with court-appointed trustees, and hallicrafters.com today answers with a 302 into an affiliate redirect chain, which is what a trademark looks like when nobody has a use for it and nobody will let it go.

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