A ‘hornless’ Table Gramophone, c. 1925-1926?

This machine was acquired quite cheaply a few weeks ago. It is quite anonymous, having no transfer or any sign of any maker’s or dealer’s plaque. It is a curious thing, to me at least, that while many people will pay quite large sums for red, grey, green or blue &c. HMV Model 101 and 102 portable gramophones (and sometimes even for the usual black ones), they will totally ignore anonymous machines like this which I find equally interesting. Certainly, a machine like this is far more scarce than a 101 or 102. I have seen scores, hundreds even, of 101s & 102s, but never a table-top quite like this. (Of course, it doesn’t sound anywhere as near as good as a 101 or 102 – I dare say that has a lot to do with it! 8^)

Here is the front view. There are no doors, louvres or slats. The wooden horn proceeds, dispassionately, back into the box. By the way, did you know that the doors to be found on many 1920s gramophones were a U.S. Victor Company patent? Still, you will find that there are lots of 1920s British gramophones with doors. That is because Victor – for whatever reason – did not enforce their patent in the U.K. But they did so in the U.S.A… at least until the patent expired, whenever that was. Anyhow, that does not affect our nice little gramophone here in any way. What’s inside its box?

Having removed the motor board, the answer is, a small wooden horn of rectangular section. It is a closed horn, unlike that in the 1919/20 Zonophone illustrated on a nearby web-page. This is because the Zonophone had a deep motor that required a lot of space under the motor board. The motor of this machine is quite small, so it could fit in the hollow in the middle of the horn. What is the motor like?

Here is the motor as first removed. The white discs are the rubber suspension washers that help absorb any mechanical vibration that might be transmitted to the motor board. They are quite perished & hardened; indeed the upper one at the left rear has broken in two. This is not a problem: a selection of rubber tap-washers, obtainable very cheaply from a DIY supermarket, will serve as replacements!

The motor from the side. We apologise for the fact that some of these photos. have been taken in natural light, and some with flash. The darker evenings were creeping in! From the right comes the winding shaft, which turns the big spiral gear on the upper left. This engages on a large disc gear on top of the spring drum. The coil spring in the upper centre of the photo. prevents the winding shaft ‘going the wrong way’ and allowing the spring to unwind back through the handle. This was a delightful invention, so simple and efficient in its action. (In the previous, earlier, Zonophone motor we illustrated, there was a ratchet and pawl mechanism, which worked perfectly well, but was much more tedious & expensive to manufacture.) The disc gear on the bottom of the spring drum drives the intermediate shaft, which has a small gear and a larger one at its lower end. The larger of these drives the main shaft – that’s the vertical shaft on the right. It has a small gear at the bottom; a striking red gear a third of the way up, and the top end of the shaft goes up through the motor frame. Of course, the turntable sits on the top of this. What does the red-coloured gear do?

It drives the governor. That is the little shaft with the three brass weights mounted on the blue steel springs. Like all well-designed motors, as we have learned while looking inside these old gramophones, you can take the motor apart for servicing without disturbing the governor in its bearings. This is because the governor has to be set very accurately, so there is no point in taking it out and then having to re-set it again, assuming it is already OK, as is the case here.

The bottom plate has been removed, and the motor is now seen from the underside. With one exception, it is in excellent condition, and apart from a little light cleaning and re-lubrication, nothing else had to be done.

The motor frame was cleaned up a little. The flat arm at the upper left is the speed control. A vertical screw on the motor board adjusts the position of the felt pad which limits the travel of the governor disc.

This is the spring drum. Normally, we should open it and (very carefully and slowly) remove the spring inside, cleaning it of the old stiffened graphite grease that has been inside it for 80-odd years. But to do this we have to hammer the drum with a rubber hammer; and in view of the fact that both sides of this drum have gears, we did not do so, for fear of bending them. True, it would be unlikely that we would bend the one on top; as you can see, it is very thick. The lower one is actually cut into a turned-out flange on the drum itself. This is the open end of the drum, so we would not hammer that end… In the event, we left it all alone, and forced some oil into the bottom, hoping that this would soften up the grease inside, which worked OK.

This is the main shaft. The red angle-cut gear that drives the governor is not metal, but made from some hard pressed-fibre like material. Oddly enough, while being of a ‘vulnerable’ material, it is in perfect condition. But alas the small gear at the bottom of the shaft is not in good condition at all!

In fact, its condition is quite deplorable, as you can easily see! It’s terribly worn. This is a shame, because everything else in the motor is very good, as is equally apparent. Oh, the motor still works fine. But… it is this gear that, pretty soon, will fail, and as soon as the big gear driving it starts ‘jumping its teeth’, it will simply be wrecked. So, we just have to enjoy this little gramophone for whatever life-span is left to it. So we carefully put it back together. We ought also to mention the sound-box, which is of the ‘continental fitting’ (see below). As usual, the rubber gaskets were perished, and so were replaced with new fresh rubber kindly supplied by a generous friend.

It is not possible to know whether this was the original sound-box. It is certainly a plausible one, and that being the case, the issue is of no consequence. It says: ‘Will play any needle-cut record’. This would tend to indicate a rather earlier date; by the mid 1920s only Pathé were selling phono-cut discs in the U.K., and they soon ceased. Edison Diamond Discs were of course phono-cut, but that is a separate issue of no relevance here.

Lastly, one feature of this gramophone I particularly like, is that the brass screws which hold down the motor board rest in little brass cups, or ‘inset washers’ – I don’t know what they are called. This is a delightful feature, not found on many more expensive machines. So: who made this gramophone, and when? We will probably never know. The style of turntable brake and vertical screw speed adjustment speak to me (in my modest knowledge) of the mid-to-late 1920s. There were many gramophone shops who imported ‘metalwork kits’ into the U.K., from Germany, Switzerland or Austria &c., and got the wooden boxes made up locally. Quite often, they had water-slide transfers made, and applied them to the side (or top) of the wooden box. The names given to them were endless and usually romantic and fanciful: ‘The Supreme’; ‘The Nonpareil’; ‘The Tone-Master’; ‘The Euphonic’; ‘The Silvertone’ - &c. Actually, I’ve just made all those up, so you see how easy it is! But nobody bothered to have a water-slide transfer made for this gramophone, so it will almost certainly remain for ever, just…. ‘The Unknown’. If you would like to see it in action, click the link below to a short video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoMLpYut-FA

Page written 27th October 2009.