Radio Nurse: Shoddy Goods 019

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I’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: