Canadian General Electric Model M-42 – Info Wanted

[Ed Stone]

The SPARC radio museum in Coquitlam BC was recently contacted by someone looking for information on a CGE Model M-42. The owner thought it may be a pre-production prototype. He wrote:

“I own an unusual Canadian General Electric radio from the Depression. It is a cathedral, desktop radio built in 1932, that was a pre-production prototype, intended as a 1933 model. This radio, a four vacuum tube M-42, serial number 0407, never went into production. Whoever designed its chassis made a serious blunder, by unwittingly combining a proprietary 1-V radiotron, with three generic ones. This was right around the time when the industry, at the peak of The Great Depression, was desperate to cut costs, and generic vacuum tubes built in massive numbers that everyone could use, helped the companies to survive. Thus a new model that included a proprietary GE radiotron that was already being phased out, made no sense. No wonder the M-42 model never saw the day of light as a production radio….” but after further research, in subsequent correspondence the owner noted:

“There is an American GE M-42 model from the same exact era, but it is quite a bit different in appearance, although it has the identical frequency dial and four decorative “flower” pattern brass screws on the outside, that hold the speaker on the inside. Mine is a pure cathedral design, and the American variant was already moving away from that design. The top of the American one has a little bit of curvature, but is mainly tombstone and with straight lines where the wooden columns are over the grille cloth. To make a long story short, I have contacted radio societies and done all-out Internet searches…all to no avail…with one exception. A fellow called Ken in Cape Breton e-mailed me a page from a 1942 CGE repair manual, which mentions the model and replacement parts for it. However, this is the only tidbit of concrete information I have ever had. Back in 1998 I took the radio to Dann’s Electronics in Cloverdale, and the elderly technician (a gentleman in his eighties at the time), was perplexed by the radio. He had never seen one before, so he looked it up in his complete set of CGE catalogues, from 1929 to 1936, and they revealed no such model! I too took the trouble to spend two to three hours there, going over the catalogues myself, as I had speculated that perhaps there had been missing pages…but there weren’t! I remember the elderly technician saying: “Your radio seems to be a phantom radio. The catalogues say it didn’t exist, yet yours does and has a serial number…” His only theory was that it may have been a prototype that never went into production. However, as Ken in Cape Breton points out, and backs up with his repair manual page, the radio did obviously exist as a production model, because as late as 1942 it was listed in the service/repair manual.”

So, can anyone provide any further insight into this model? (unfortunately the owner is not tech-savvy, so I cannot post a photo of the actual set).

Ed

[Frank van de Ven]

Hi Ed, or more appropriately Eddy

The revamped forum prompted me to look around and I came across this question. It was partially answered on the Antique radio Forum. Searching Google Books a few references are found stating the CGE M-41 shares a chassis with the RCA 100 and RCA M-101.
So definitively a production model.

Frank

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