"Have you seen the new iPod?" That's what I tell my kids when I show them a crystal or transistor radio like this. "It's got a bigger playlist than any previous iPod--unlimited, in fact! And you don't have to choose the tracks you want, it does it for you, automatically! It's called radio."

Here's a great little crystal radio from 1959. As you may know, crystal sets were the earliest of all radios, and used no batteries or sources of power other than that provided by the radio stations themselves. Beginning in the 1920s, amplifiers were added to radios to make them loud enough to power speakers. But the crystal set survived, mainly as a toy, in the ’30s and beyond. These toys included pocket models like this that attempted to look like transistor radios, rockets & space related figures, and many other “novelty” shapes such as radio pens, radio watches, radio airplanes, radio guns, etc.