Gilbert Chemistry Set. 56 chemicals including potassium permanganate and ammonium nitrate. Yes, Ammonium nitrate. The same stuff that Timothy McVeigh used to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building
I find this hilarious. My old chemistry set manual tells grades 5-6 how to make hydrogen sulfide, among other things. Of course, there were other potentially lethal things one could learn how to make with one of these, but that generation had something sadly lacking in the currrent tide-pod-eating generation: common sense. Most of us also knew better than to make pipe bombs and firecrackers by beating the ends closed with a hammer, too, and this was also avoided as none of us wanted our dads and moms beating us to death if we failed to kill ourselves making dumb things we really had no constructive use for.
don't forget the plastic kits for boats too. even static models of trains. i remember building costau's calypso, and revel's new york harbour ship assist tug. most were to different scales so the finished model would fit on an ordinary size shelf. cars and military planes and boats were the most common. i remember building that boing707 model, about a year before they went into service as the first commercial civilian jet liner, at least that i had ever heard of. there were other craft that used the word jet as part of their name for romantic promotional reasons, but all of them still had and were propelled by props. and all of these before there were any "super glue" acc adhesives, and the glues that were available, well you'd have to have been more talented then i was, to not get them all over places that weren't intended to be joining surfaces and making an ugly mess of at least parts of them. the paints avail able at the time weren't entirely wonderful either. and water decales, which were a nightmare if you didn't know the secrets that were't common public knowledge yet either.
had an actual record player, a portable about that size, that played all sizes and speeds of records at the time, had to take the top off to play 33s, but it was made that way for doing so. this was, i don't remember what year i got it for christmas or birthday, i was still pre-teen, sometime back in the mid 1950s. had a little compact tube type amplifier inside, with one or two vacuum tubes. monoral of course, stereo didn't exist yet, i remember they used to fake stereo with reverb, reverb units had long skinny springs, well electrically they were coils i think, but they were shaped and looked like springs. i think i still had that thing when we moved to norden after i graduated high school the one i had i mean. that thing in the picture, i don't think existed until i was well into at least my 20s by which time, boom boxes and component stereos had become common. oh i remember all sorts of little music box type things, some of them built into other toys, but plastic had not yet come to totally dominate the consumer market place. i remember there was kind of almost standard little tiny all mechanical record player that played little tiny, inch or two in diameter, actual phono records, that were inside of all of those "talking" things. i specifically remember the talking railroad station. that would announce trains, totally not coordinated or syncronized with anything else just a loop of continual babbling.
Car radios were AM mono only. The hot setup was to put a speaker in the rear seat area with an after market switch under the dash. You could play the front speaker, or the back...or both at the same time! Then reverberaters came along.... Mounted under the dash of course. The springs caused a mechanical delay in the signal from the front to back speaker resulting in an echo sound. The sound was directed through the spring which was inside a box. The sound made the spring wiggle and twist resulting in a distortion of the sound waves which was then picked up by a transducer. Cool! Here's a modern, I believe electronic version, which sounds like the originals. If you drove really fast the springs would slap against the inside of the box and make all kinds of nasty sounds like this guy shows you.
now THIS makes me laugh, and i don't even know why. gumby and pokey i sure remember and them being on tv too. but i mean, you could make them out of clay or dough yourself, so packaged, that seems strange. i guess that was about the time people stopped figuring things out for themselves
Strange how I never made the mental connection between your username, and the series even with every available clue including the picture on display.
