Radio Nurse: Shoddy Goods 019
3I’m Jason Toon, and one of the things I miss from when my kids were little was shopping for baby stuff. It’s a gentle little alternate consumer universe of soothing colors, simple shapes, and soft corners. As a new parent, you’re immersed in it for a few years, then you forget all about it. But in this issue of Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell, we look at an early example of infant-centered product design that nobody who has seen ever forgets.
When I say “baby monitor”, what do you picture? Something plastic and rounded, probably white with pastel accents, right? Depending on when you spent the most time around little kids, maybe it’s just an audio speaker, or maybe there’s a video screen. But the basic aesthetic has been pretty much set since Fisher-Price birthed their Nursery Monitor in the late 1980s. Like this:
The sound of very very young America
That’s a pretty cool design itself. But the very first baby monitor was a work of art so striking, so original, that it was unveiled at the Whitney Annual in New York. It remains in the permanent collection of institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Zenith Radio Nurse arose from the alchemy of two very different geniuses coming together, and as a commercial product, it was a casualty of World War II. But as a work of industrial art, it has lost none of its power.
Space: 1939
Zenith gets on the case
In our celebrity-saturated age, when the dramas and frailties of the famous are in our faces everywhere all the time, it’s impossible to really understand what a towering figure Charles Lindbergh once was. Stack up Oprah, Lionel Messi, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bill Gates, and you might get a faint whiff of Lindbergh’s celebrity for years after his historic 1927 flight.
Likewise, it’s impossible for us to feel now quite how shocking and disturbing the 1932 kidnapping and murder of Lindbergh’s son, Charles Jr., was. One of the most haunting facts about the Lindbergh kidnapping was that the baby had been snatched from his bedroom while his parents and nurse were home and awake.
Among those stunned and traumatized by the case was one Eugene F. McDonald. Unlike most people, he was in a position to turn that emotion in action: if not to undo this tragedy, to prevent future ones like it.
McDonald was a Chicago salesman who had learned a thing or two about radio during his service in World War I. After the war, McDonald joined up with a couple of other engineers to start a company manufacturing radios, just in time for the broadcast boom of the 1920s. By the end of that decade, their company - Zenith - would be the biggest maker of radios in America.
Around the time his own first child was born in 1937, McDonald went to work on a simple, affordable one-way audio monitoring system that would let you keep an ear on the kids even when they were in another room. The tech was a piece of cake, but McDonald knew it needed a distinctive look. Who would design this thing?
The prodigal sculptor returns
Isamu Noguchi wasn’t happy about being back in the USA. The California-born sculptor had spent the last few years knocking around the world, building a reputation as a stellar portraitist, hobnobbing with the affluent and artistic set who bought his busts and his drinks.
I swear I went to college with this guy
His most recent port of call had been Mexico City, where everything started sunny: he’d won his first public art commission, a relief mural, and had an affair with a little-known artist named Frida Kahlo. But then Noguchi was chased out of her bedroom by her pistol-toting husband, the much better-known Diego Rivera. And the Mexican government stiffed Noguchi for his full fee on the mural. He had to crank out a few busts for wealthy Americans to pay for his ticket back to New York, where he stood the best chance of finding work.
After such colorful adventures, Noguchi can be forgiven for finding Depression-era Manhattan a little on the drab side. What’s more, his attempts to join the federal Works Progress Administration’s program for artists kept getting knocked back. His pitches for monuments to Benjamin Franklin and the American farm went nowhere. So he entered a lot of competitions and kept pounding the pavement.
I don’t know how Isamu Noguchi crossed paths with Eugene McDonald. Noguchi’s autobiography doesn’t mention it, nor do the various biographies of him I was able to rustle up.
What we do know is that Zenith hired Noguchi to design the speaker for the Radio Nurse but not the ‘Guardian Ear’, the part you’d put in the baby’s room. So that latter component turned out as a nondescript, boxy little piece of Art Deco hardware. But the part Noguchi designed can’t be pinned down to any particular time. It could have been designed last week. Many have pointed out how it echoes classical Japanese kendo masks, but then if you wanted to make a Star Wars comparison, you wouldn’t be the first to do that, either.
Let the ear of vigilance never be closed
You can see how its shape is inspired by a nurse’s head, especially when you consider that nurses generally wore wimples back then, a bit like a nun’s habit. A more literal-minded designer might have given in to the temptation to actually give it a human face. But in stripping the form back to its absolute essentials, Noguchi created something much more primal. Is it reassuring or creepy? Protective or menacing? And how often can you ask questions like that about a baby monitor?
But How To Pitch It?
Zenith’s marketing for the Radio Nurse conjured the nightmare visions that had given McDonald the idea. “A helpless little child - left alone for a few minutes. Then a silent household - left alone forever,” ran the copy in one 1938 ad, sure to evoke the Lindbergh tragedy in the minds of its readers. “But now - The Zenith Radio Nurse CAN PREVENT IT!”
Not into the old soft-sell, eh, Zenith?
It wasn’t all sheer terror. Other ads went a little easier on the panic, pointing out how it could help you keep an ear out for your invalid Grandma, or inviting parents to relax and enjoy a game of bridge with the neighbors without worrying about your tots.
It’s hard to say how well the Radio Nurse sold. It was advertised fairly heavily by local appliance dealers in newspapers of the time, usually a sign of a reliable seller. The price of $29.95, or more than $670 in today’s dollars, made the Radio Nurse a substantial expense during the Great Depression. But as another ad put it, “Can you afford to have your loved ones without this health and safety assurance?”
What’s easier to see is that the attention-grabbing design - Time magazine calling it the “most exotic” entry in the 1939 Whitney Annual show- got Noguchi’s drifting career back on track. A spate of new commercial work followed. Ford accepted his proposal for their pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair. The Associated Press commissioned an epic sculptural plaque for the exterior of their headquarters.
He also designed a table for rubber magnate A. Conger Goodyear’s home, which was later modified into the famous Noguchi table. You’ve seen it, even if you don’t know the name. Despite seven months in an internment camp during World War II, Noguchi would go on to enjoy a long, prolific, globally esteemed career as a grand eminence in sculpture, furniture design, theater design, and landscape architecture.
Eugene McDonald, ever restless, would drive the invention of the first portable radio and the first TV remote control, innovations that became standard gear for the American century. He wouldn’t live to see most of it, dying in 1958 at age 72.
As for the Radio Nurse, Zenith stopped making it in 1942, when they pivoted production to the war effort. It wasn’t revived when the war ended. Both of its creators had such illustrious careers that the Radio Nurse isn’t always even mentioned in their biographies.
But its enduring popularity with museums and collectors testifies to Noguchi’s artistry: original Radio Nurses go for upwards of $3,000 at auction. And the explosion in remote monitoring technology proves that McDonald was onto something, too. Every time somebody goes viral for falling in front of a Ring camera, they can give “thanks” (or whatever) to a World War I veteran who liked to tinker with radios.
I never understand why there’s not some modern manufacturer making exact replicas of these amazing older designs with new tech. I definitely would have bought this one over the pastel blues and pinks that were available. What was your most loved (or most hated) baby tech, either from raising a kid or something you remember growing up? Let’s hear about it in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat!
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
OK, maybe you won’t find any of these old Shoddy Goods stories in museums, but we think they’re works of art in their own way:
- 10 comments, 6 replies
- Comment
As a kid, we had a mechanical typewriter. I had no issues with typing tests that came years later in middle school. Also for running out of reading materials, I resorted to atlases and various Thomas Guide map books.
Electronics: one of those Science Fair kits from Radio Shack.
Never got a good enough signal for the AM crystal radio, though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio
Had that too
As a kid, color TV was as fancy as it got. I remember getting my first electric typewriter as I went to college, from KMart I think actually,
From raising a kid? The old Apple ][+
not the ][E
we got a used one for her when she was about 5, used a TV as a monitor. Tubed TV. LOL
never had a game system until she was old enough for like a Sega Genesis. and it was the only one ever. We had (for the time) fancy computers so never went there. Her favorite game was Dungeon Hack.
@Cerridwyn I’m still rocking a IIe at my desk My daughter’s first console was an Atari 2600. It’s important to teach the classics
@capnjb
/image thumbs up
Wasn’t that much “tech” for kids around at my time, when it was still 50-50 whether a house had a color TV or black & white. Did get a brand new RCA 9V battery-powered transistor radio as a present when i was about 10 or so. Not too much bigger than a boxed deck of poker cards. First i had ever seen in person, though i knew there were such things. Thought it was so cool. Especially that on a car trip i could listen to my own music (through the rinky-dink primitive wired ear bud).
@phendrick I remember those. I took it to school to listen on the bus to goodness gracious maybe the moon landing or some other Apollo launching because they fascinated us all back then. I remember it got stolen from my locker
@phendrick
You forgot to say monaural earbud, although TBH, it was implied.
I was introduced to ‘tech’ by receiving a battery-operated portable cassette recorder for Christmas when I was about 9 or 10, which also TBH was really quite low tech.
@Cerridwyn @phendrick I took my cigarette size Japanese radio (No speaker, just earphone) to school (2nd grade) to listen to a NASA blast off. I got in trouble! (1959-1960)
/image electronic quarterback
Three things that I inherited from my older brother; a Gilbert chemistry set, an American Flyer train set, and two boxes of Erector Set stuff.
@werehatrack
I was the [mid-]older brother, so I inherited late 50’s to 60’s 45 RPM records [from my 16 years older bro] and got the Gilbert, the Erector Set, and a large gauge [the # slips my mind] Lionel train set- my Sis got the portable record player [and The Monkees singles on 45’s], and we all fought/competed over what record to play next.
I had a Speak & Math. Got a lot of work out of the workbooks. (In fact, I had a few Disney books-with-tape – little read-alongs with their old picturebooks: Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Cinderella. And some Bugs Bunny light novels. Even a Ninja Turtles comic with a read-along.)
I remember I had this book with barcodes – you would scan the barcode and it would trigger a specific phrase or sound effect from the soundbox (similar to those “push the cow to hear it moo” toys).
I had a Talk ‘n Play, for which you bought sets of a book and cassette tape that would prompt you to follow the story and answer questions/interact with the character in the book & recording by pressing one of four colored buttons. It would know which color you pushed and play the correct response track. It would even tell you to turn the page! Looking back it was extremely clever and interactive for a cassette player.
When I was in college I worked as a security guard at two buildings in Costa Mesa that had the Noguchi Garden in the center of the buildings. It had just been built, it was finished in 1982. It was extremely unpleasant. There was a bunch of tiny trees and no shade. Extremely hot, like a desert. One of the “sculptures” if you could call it that, was a bunch of rocks piled on top of each other. It was called Spirit of the Lima Bean. It was incredibly pretentious. I thought it was awful.
35 years later my boyfriend worked in that building, so I went to visit the gardens again. I didn’t realize that the tiny trees were redwoods so they became huge. But still, half the park had no shade. But it was better. Isamu Noguchi apparently did have a vision for the future. It still wasn’t a great place to eat lunch, which is what it was for.
https://www.travelcostamesa.com/play/arts-and-museums/visual/california-scenario-noguchi-garden
Noguchi Garden-- ESPECIALLY in the early 1980s-- was an oasis of calm and peaceful reflection in the cutthroat hub-bub that was Segerstromian Reaganism. While I’m pleased to read that it’s now verdant, I used to find its stark desert-like zen an enormous comfort amidst that bastion of greed and ostentation. That I was generally the only person there was just an added bonus.
In a crazy coincidence, The Verge just put out this comic that’s at least partly about the history of baby monitors:
https://www.theverge.com/c/24278723/comic-baby-monitor-surveillance-history-tech