TECHNOLOGY in communication & entertainment
Perhaps my earliest awareness of technology developing was when plastic toys no longer broke almost as son as we got them. Almost all of those had "Hong Kong" embossed on them. I was amazed to see plastic tricyles at the annual Round Table Hobbies Exhibition.
Telephones & communications
Elsewhere I mention trunk phone calls to Aunt Daisy in London. These were booked ahead and we all had turns to speak, each sentence needing a few seconds to get through and be answered. This was of course all done via undersea cables - satelites still in the future.
Country districts had share lines for several farms or homes. One had to use a simple code such as 2 or 3 rings from the switch board to know who had to answer. Naturally this caused some confusion sometimes and eavesdropping. My mother's friends down near Chalumna River would often suspect eaves dropping and to test it talk funny or make a joke to get a reaction. Or she would say something like "Oh, I am pregnant again". She was beyond middle age at that time and everyone knew each other in the district.
As a pre-teen I had my personal museum in the basement of our Nahoon house : shells, a wooden net mending needle found when the Orient Beach Theatre and complex was being excavated. And the handset of an antique windup phone. This was donated by one of my maternal grandmothers bridge playing friends (not an heirloom).
My father belonged to the Round Table and each year we went to the Hobbies Exhibition in the wool warehouses down town. At least to my young eyes this was an enormous event - not just hobbies, but many trade exhibitions, society displays, even a temporary ice rink with a show. I remember seeing video for the first time, operated somehow off an LP record. But the first time I saw TV was the closed circuit one that sort of worked on the ship I was on in the navy.
Looking back at our office is interesting too. See TECHNOLOGY in architecture I describe our fax machine there, but our phones are also of note. We had a small switch board on the reception counter. Each of us had a phone. These had dials back then, push buttons still becoming popular.
"CB" or citizen band radios were common for farm communications but restricted by the government for general use as they could interfere with emergency service radio contact. Remember that this was way before mobile / smart phones. In time they became less restricted.
Once when still a student in Port Elizabeth I was driving down the esplanade with the radio on when a car came alongside at the lights. The voice on the radio was of someone talking to his mother about what he wanted for supper. I realised that he was on a CB car radio and his voice had overlapped with that of the programme I was listening to. This was probably excepotional as he was so close, but it did show how it could interfere.
Radio mics were becoming popular on live shows. I remember one with Sandy Shaw with Leapy Lee in East London when the taxis drivers came accross the show's loud speakers.
Another possible reason for the restrictions on CB radios for so long was the Red Threat, ie communist infiltration and revolt. An almost blanket ban on such radios was thought to reduce the possibility of planning anything.
Car phones were a natural progression from this and became available about this time, but were not common.
I write under POLITICS & SECURITY about my peripheral involvement in politics and in chairing the local branch of the South African Institute of Race Relations. It was about this time that people that I was in contact felt that their phone calls were being tapped and, perhaps somewhat nervously, suspected that ours was too. Quite how one could tell is hard to put ones finger on. A few years later we did some workshops for the Ciskei Government. Initially this was still paid for and controlled from Pretoria so we met SA national Department of Public Works officials. One casually said that his department had been used as a front by the Security Police to tap suspect phone calls around the country.
When we moved our architectural office to new premises in Devereux Avenue in Vincent, my father went into a partnership with a builder and the next door garage proprietor. That became "Treble B". The result was our offices on the top floor and some shops on the ground floor. The builder used one and the others were let out. For a while Vodacom leased one, but quickly moved into the new larger Vincent Shopping Centre.
This was the era when a mobile / cell phone could be about the same size as a brick. Yes really. The size was cumbersome by todays standards, but it was also flashy! We didn't get tempted.
Watch older movies and you may see one. James Bond was probably the first to talk through his watch or cufflinks, but the realities took a while to really become feasible. There was some excitement when a James Bond phone became available on the market. Remember the one that combined a calculator with a phone? It came in a snaz oval fold-open case. Oh wow!
Cell phones began to get a bit smaller. But they were still a bit of a gimmick. Drinks and food orders were being made accross pubs and restaurants by phone - to the irritation of the staff.
By the time we had emmigrated to Scotland they were more recognisable as mobile phones - small enough for a handbag or pocket. I spent one of my first pay packets on getting the family one each. Open faced, then flip phones or sliding face.
The international network was growing apace. I sorted some of my last South African financial policies by phone while standing in Kelvingrove Park during lunch breaks.
Smart phones now do almost anything. Their impact on social behaviour, on each and everyone one of us, is phenomenal. Watch a crowd anywhere at any time and most will be doing something with their phone.
From radios to Spotify
My father's mother Maud told me of how they could make their own sound recordings. Cylinders of a hard waxy material could be bought specifically for this. One then spoke or sang into the horn while it rotated and this produced a continuous profiled groove against which a needle could be laid when played back. While the shape would have been very different, this was in fact very similar in principle to the discs that were also available at the time and the records that came later. Wiki tells us: Beginning in 1889, prerecorded wax cylinders were marketed. These have professionally made recordings of songs, instrumental music or humorous monologues in their grooves.....Cylinder machines of the late 1880s and the 1890s were usually sold with recording attachments. The ability to record as well as play back sound was an advantage of cylinder phonographs over the competition from cheaper disc record phonographs, which began to be mass-marketed at the end of the 1890s, as the disc system machines could be used only to play back prerecorded sound [Wiki]. 
An example from Wiki
I have inherited a small record. It is a little smaller than a 7-single and is alluminium. It appears to have been a souvenir demo one from an exhibition in the UK and was made for my maternal grandmother and a sister. It needs a wooden needle to be played. A metal one would destroy the surface. Not having a wooden needle I have tried a rose thorn on the turntable. I can't make out the voices, but you can hear perhaps two talking and laughing.
My father bought a radiogram in the 60's. In British English, a radiogram is a piece of furniture that combined a radio and a record player. The word "radiogram" is a portmanteau of radio and gramophone. The corresponding term in American English is console. [Wiki]. It operated with "valves" much like light bulbs and these grew very very hot. Opening up the back to check them was a risky business. He used to play the most attrocious LPs (by our tastes), but I did like some of the LPs we got through our LP mail order club. It was a stereo player and I heard this newish audio technology for the first time on it - music that featured a steam train that seemed to travel around the room. The radiogram as a unit though was quite smart. Fabric covered speakers each side. The radio which included FM, short and medium wave options had turn dials for band selection and volume. My father spent many hours fiddling with it to find interesting stations and even the beep beep beep of satelites. A fold-down door opened the gramaphone / record player and there was some space below that in a shallow shelf for LPs. On top my mother placed a vase with flower etc.
Something like this one (Google image).
As valve radio development ended in the late 1960s and transistors began to take over, radiograms started to become obsolete. By the late 1970s, they had been replaced by more compact equipment, such as the hi-fi and the music centre [Wiki].
Typical valves. Pic from Google.
Size and science though meant that the transistor soon followed. That led to portable radios. At one extreme were the bulky ghetto blaster radios taken to parties and picnics. In the middle were more recognisable transistor radios. But at the smaller end were very small transistor radios that could be carried in our pockets. Earphones came in about now and ensured a reasonable sound quality, the main speakers being somewhat tinny. As kids we would ride around the neighbourhood with music, well not exactly blaring, but certainly audible. We used to shock the maids chatting on the pavements with music coming mysteriously from somewhere secret in our clothes. They may have been rather naive about such technical developments then, but perhaps we were too with them simply being patronising.
I was never one to really get excited about the latest hits although I did enjoy them on the radio. I had a few 7-singles and began to collect LPs; my first one being one of Led Zeppelin's that I bought with my navy discharge pay.
Between us we have built up quite a collection of LPs and also the early 78s and still have most of them.
When at primary school someone brought it his fathers tape recorder - a large box of a thing with two reels. It created quite a stir. By the time I was a student tape cassettes were all the vogue and available in cars. You could even get a type with 8 tracks. We could save money on records by taping off the radio. The tapes themselves would inevitably jam and many a time needed rewinding using a pencil in the little cog wheel. If they really got completely jammed or damaged they were discarded. Having them in cars meant that many a tape ended up glittering in the trees along country roads.
When CDs came it was an exciting breakthrough. And we could now also have those in our cars. At first the CD would jump if we went over a bump, but that was eventually sorted. CDs still meant that you could buy a complete album and they came with attractive boxes complete with printed details of the band etc.
By the time that MP3 players came all the visual side, the tangible aspects of collections disappeared. We, my wife and I, never went down that route, but our daughters did and missed out on those aspects. Of course alongside this came CD-ROMS and the ability to both store data on them and burn one's own "CDs".
Spotify, amongst others, came out in 2006. It took me all the way into 2025 to begin using it and this was because I needed to get a newer car and that came with a proper screen for Sat-Nav etc. I still prefer live radio, but listen to Spotify on weekends when the stations are full of naf music and sport.
A box of nik naks
My father had inherited some niknaks from a family member that had been made my a cousin. The box contained items from a hobby that included a small steam engine, a barometer and a crystal set. Unfortunately these were all just bits so we couldn't try them out and they were discarded.
You can now buy crystal sets. (Try Amazon). Back then they would have been made from scrap and possibly formed school projects. There is a link to pdf instructions below. A crystal radio receiver, also called a crystal set, is a simple radio receiver, popular in the early days of radio. It uses only the power of the received radio signal to produce sound, needing no external power. It is named for its most important component, a crystal detector, originally made from a piece of crystalline mineral such as galena This component is now called a diode. [Wiki].
I never had my own, but did see those others had built.
Television
While kids in the UK and elsewhere were enjoying iconic childrens stories on TV and teenagers were enjoying pop videos and the latest hits, South African children did not.
TV in South Africa had been banned by the government. The prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd is reputed to have likened television with destructive elements such as poison gas and atomic bombs, stating:
‘…they are modern things, but that does not mean they are desirable. The government has to watch for any dangers to the people, both spiritual and physical.’ [Hirsh's blog].
Wikipedia adds : Dr. Albert Hertzog, the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs at the time, argued that "the effect of wrong pictures on children, the less developed, and other races can be destructive." Declaring that television would come to South Africa "over [his] dead body," Hertzog denounced it as "only a miniature bioscope which is being carried into the house and over which parents have no control." He also claimed that "South Africa would have to import films showing race mixing, and advertising would make Africans dissatisfied with their lot." [Wiki].
Another escuse was the cost of setting up a nation-wide infrastructure. This was true, but you need to see this in the context of a perceived need to have full control. In other words we needed to produce all our own content.
TV did eventually come. Ironically this was in 1976 – the same year as the Soweto uprising. I was at university and used to go across to the Elizabeth Hotel over the road to watch such shows as Rich Man Poor Man and the World at War in the lounge with an Appletizer in hand. My boarding house digs run by the Starbuck family got a set and let us watch it, but their choice of content was certainly not mine.
With a limited range of programmes, a morning start time and an evening stop time came the test pattern. You could tune in and adjust your set, but comparing the colour patterns. To make it a little more interesting, they sometimes showed viewers photos. One that I would have liked to have seen, but missed was of my father in his scouting uniform taken by someone at a scoutmaster and regional scouter forum.
I had been in the navy with technicians well trained in fitting and servicing radio, radar and sonar. Many of these seemed to attracted to the expanding aerial and tv fitting contractor companies.
The department stores naturally filled their large windows with TVs and left them on to attract customers. Not everyone could afford one straight away and it became common to see families "window shopping" and watching a sports match, news or soap drama standing there on the pavement. Some even came specially by taxi.
My father bought a tv which incorporated a good sized screen and a good loud speaker. Remember that screens then were chunky cathode ray tubes so were chunky, The whole elegant wooden fitting was about 1.2m high.
Many people hesitated on getting one; not just cost, but also the risk of negatively impacting on their childrens' outlook,distraction from homework, anticipated propaganda and perhaps waiting until the service and programmes improved. It became common to have people around to watch together, perhaps with dinner.
We all know of the distractive impact today of computer games and smart phones, but back then it was TV. This was still way before there was choice of stations, let alone programmes, but it was very addictive for many. Surges in power network supplies became a problem when household rushed to put the kettle on during adverts.
Few families could be bothered cooking dinner anymore and "TV Dinners" and other fast food instant dinners became ever more popular.
CRYSTAL SET : https://www.mikeselectronicparts.com/pdf/building-a-crystal-radio.pdf
HIRSH'S blog re SA tv : https://blog.hirschs.co.za/2020/12/10/the-history-of-tv-in-south-africa/
WIKIPEDIA crystal radio : https://www.mikeselectronicparts.com/pdf/building-a-crystal-radio.pdf
Recording cylinders : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph_cylinder
