Can you figure out what technology is in this 1929 photograph?

He’s got a date tonight, so he’s setting the Part-O-Graph® from “Business” to “Jaunty”.

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Shorpy has that photo directly above this one!

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Perhaps it is a photo of young Wilhelm Reich performing early research into the Orgone. I think that the apparatus above him is an orgone collector and the “bomb” is just a rather large stimulation device.

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Looks like it might be an early simple wave-interference apparatus - in short early radar - pre pulsed radar - which gave a location as well as the presence on an object.
That’s a guess based on the capacitor set and the date.

I don’t know if you understood the intent of my response.

I was saying that what I typed up wasn’t completely silly (especially not when I wrote it at 5 a.m. with no sleep). I was tired enough at that time to not notice the daylight streaming in the windows. You’ve now mentioned twice, in different ways, physical observation of that eclipse. The fact is that people were also checking out the effects of solar activity on radio waves at that time, and that’s all I was saying. (They wouldn’t need to be where it was visible to see how the eclipse affected radio worldwide. “Visible” observation wouldn’t necessarily be a part of such an experiment.) I wasn’t saying I was right, just that you were being a bit harsh - and unnecessarily so.

I even ended by saying that two other explanations, either early radar or the zeppelin news seemed not to be a major problem. I do agree that the lack of headphones makes radio applications much less likely, and I also did see the bomb (dummy or real) in the background, which smacks of military application. I’m with the majority that this most likely was early radar.

Could this be an audio amplifier for a big parabolic microphone? Before radar they used big parabolic sound mics to listen for aircraft, though they generally put someone’s actual noggin at the focus.

This week: another exciting installment of “Gorilla of the Gasbags!”

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There should be more options than simply “like”.

Yo, DJ, drop the bass! Booooo!

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i’m going to go with radio astronomy antenna and receiver…

You’re all wrong, it’s the first prototype of a microwave oven.

Could it be related to Acoustic Mirrors? I have no idea what those alectrical components in the photo are, but the concrete thingie at the top reminded me of something i recently read: they build huge concrete “acoustic mirrors” with lots of microphones in front of them to listen for incoming bomber planes, using the array of microphones to calculate the direction and distance.

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