From Dave Hawkes
Your piece about the Italian company that charges batteries contained a serious historical inaccuracy (Feedback, 5 July). This obviously reflects your tender years and therefore can be forgiven.
You did not take your radio to be recharged, just the low-tension (LT) battery. Back in 1952, when I was 10, all the houses in the street where I lived had mains electricity, except for one, owned by an elderly lady, that only had gas. I earned pocket money by taking her LT battery to the local charging station (Abel & Smith’s electrical shop), where I would leave the flat cell and return later to collect a fully charged one.
The lady owned a valve radio that ran off batteries – note the plural. There was the rechargeable LT battery that heated the filaments of the valves, usually a single-cell, lead-acid accumulator with screw terminals. The other two batteries were non-rechargeable zinc chloride.
This same lady introduced me to electronics by giving me a very early radio (from around 1925) with four valves, crystal detector and headphone audio. It never worked so I dismantled it for the parts. To this day I still have the valves in stock, waiting for a suitable project.
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Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, UK
