Technology!

[phil]

I dont know what the lighter things I have are. the plugs look like regular line cords.

you cant' transform DC up or down to change the voltage with just a regular transformer. If you apply DC to one winding it will basically be ignored in the other winding. If you pulse that current then the pulses will affect the other winding. you could turn the DC into AC then transform it then rectify it back to DC again but that requires more components.

car radios from around the 50's needed higher than 6 or 12 volts to operate so in order to transform the power to a higher voltage they used a part called a vibrator. it made and broke contact, I guess sort of like a buzzer or bell and made a pulsed current that could then be transformed.
here's what they look like along with more info that you'd probably care to read.. there are solid state equivalents made now for restorations

https://www.vintagecarradio.com/blog/radio-vibrators/

i have a couple of car radios from early cars. one is a philco and the other is in what appears a one off type box that looks like a cookie tin. the philco one has a separate tuner with two knobs and the V8 logo. it has a cable from there to the actual radio and that would be under the dash out of sight.
must be from an early ford because ford owned philco. I guess about 1935 0r so..
Ive got an interesting book its from the 20's and about installing radios in cars. all the cars had things like canvas tops so it shows some pretty early cars.

this thing James has I am not familiar with . I assume if it uses ice then it is probably really just a fan. id try to apply a little power like maybe a six or nine volt battery and see what happens.. if it runs on DC then you can adjust the speed by changing voltage. I wouldn't apply any heavy current like higher voltages but I doubt a moment of 6 volts will harm it.. famous last words I know.. with most DC motors you can change the voltage to change the speed and usually there would be brushes. most AC motors like furnace motors are designed to run at certain speeds like 3600 or 1725 RPM is common.

if you have a ammeter you can put it on amps then measure between the two wires to find the resistance, a dead short is 0 ohms the higher the number , the more resistance. dont plug it into 110 without finding out more.
a quick check to see if a radio is shorted is to check its resistance across the two prongs of the plug. one expects it to not be 0. If the windings are heavy you may see a fairly low resistance so that isn't definite. If it is zero you might have a shorted wire so look deeper.

there is a simple trick for old AC powered things. take a extension cord, cut one wire and insert a light bulb between the wires. then when testing old stuff, plug it in that puts the light bulb in series with your test item.
If it is a dead short the light bulb will burn full brightness. if it does that you should look deeper before trying to apply power. If the thing works at least semi normally then that's a good sign.
you can be sure that way if it is a dead short or not without blowing breakers. changing light bulbs will change the output voltage. the item wont see a full 110 because it is sharing the voltage drop with whatever is plugged in. this is called a dim bulb tester. I sometimes use one in combination with a variable power supply so I can watch carefully and increase power slowly while making observations rather than plugging stuff in to see sparks and smoke and burned compnents. I'll look for smoke or anything funny like the transformer getting hot.

this is so easy to make if you play with old lamps and other old electical things you might make one up. It wont preent electrocution,its just a tool.
for testing radios I use a 1:1 transformer and that limits what curent I can draw through the thing. 110 110out but only so many amps will pass through the transformer, about 3 amps at 110 is plenty for a radio often 1 amp is all it draws.

I have an old zenith "Cube Radio" that has connections for DC the cables are huge like you'd see on jumper cables. that indicates that it has a high amperage current draw at 6 volts.

a standard line cord plugged into 110 can carry a lot of amps. If it is DC power you need thick wire. this is why AC won. in order to power houses and factories with DC they would have needed a lot of copper because the wires would need to be huge.
also it can't be transformed easily.
we now distribute power with less copper and do so because it is transmitted at high voltages. the higher the voltage the more amps the wire can take. to get the same amount of water through a small hose you increase pressure so you can see the similarity between voltage and pressure to help think about how it works.

when it gets close to where it is used it is then transformed to safer voltages. those high voltages can also jump further which is why transmission lines are dangerous to get close to. out on your street you can probably see smaller transformers , they look like 5 gallon buckets. pole pigs. these take higher voltages and transform them to 110 and 220 usually. If your poles have wires higher up then those might be higher voltage.. the substations transform the very high voltages from the transmission lines so they are suitable voltages for transmission through cities.

even in the 50's there were a lot of farmers not on the grid and "farm sets" were common.. If you see one, you can know its a farm set because it has no big transformer, and instead of a line cord it will have a bunch of wires, usually a plug which was standard to supply the A B and C voltages. AC radios had big heavy transformers. the ones that were designed for early power had bigger heavier transformers. I already said you cant' transform DC and while I have lots of radios that were designed to use DC from the grids back then I really have never tried to run one or examine how they did that from DC.. maybe the tubes were happy with DC and some was not transformed.. something not making complete sense here.I'll find out more.

with most tubes of the 50's era , if the tube starts with a 6 that's 6 volt. if it starts with a 12 that's a 12 volt tube. many all american 5 radios ( after the war) have the filaments arranged in series so you will see tubes starting in things like 50 or 35 indicating the voltage of that tube. by then they knew how to apply AC to the filaments and make it work. if you add them all together it will be something close to 110 these are called series string sets.

early radios of the 20's used DC power and needed batteries. Rogers invented the first AC tube in about 1924 and after that radios could usually be plugged in to house current.. battery eliminators are common, they supply the A,B and C voltages by transforming house current so today many who work with them dont use batteries but use a common supply to power all their 1920's radios. the 20's sets usually look like a long box with about 3 knobs with scale markings like 0 to 100 we often refer to them as dog coffins.

each knob is a separate tuning section and you set them to near to the same number then tune by trial and era. they had logbooks so they could return to stations they found. they had to write these numbers in the logbook. later sets had dials with the frequency and one knob for tuning which made them more user friendly. these 3 knob radios are usually battery sets made in about 1920 to 1926 or so, after that only farmers needed DC powered radios. I have seen radios destroyed because people thought they were AC sets and plugged wires in causing catastrophe.. and Ive seen people buy farm sets not realizing they wont work on AC once restored unless they use a separate transformer, that can cause disappointment. ive sen many farm sets from the 40's so that thing may be designed in the same way for a farm and maybe the owner did not volunteer that info?

an exception is the portables. many of those had A,B and C batteries supplying things like 45 volts or 90 volts as well as the lower voltages needed. there was a standard connector that was often used it looks like the pins on a vacuum tube. I think it has 5 pins. I have also seen connectors that look like on a 9 volt battery , but giant sized.

a lot of old farms had their own windmill. I'm not too sure about standard voltages used back then but if you research you might find something like 36 VDC was common.. don't quote me on that voltage though. some of those old windmills are collectable. I think ships might have standards like that too. I have some lights that are I think 36 volts, maybe from a boat or train or streetcar or something. I think a lot of trucks use 24Volts.

maybe someone here has an older car that can say if the lighters were of a different size. I dont recall seeing a car lighter that old.. those old car batteries probably were not as high amperage ( amp hours) as we see today so perhaps a lighter would be a strain for them ? they use quite a bit of current. Not sure if they were really a standard item. maybe auto lighters came into use more after they went to 12 volt.

Id be interested in seeing a pic of the plug on that thing , maybe it can be recognized? if the wires are giant size I would suspect it's DC