1-Transistor Radio

    At age 14, Steve Hines found the schematic for a 1-transistor AM radio in Radio-TV Experimenter magazine, and packaged it to make it practical to carry, worked out the printed circuit pattern to minimize cross overs, and etched a printed circuit by painting the design, using a chemical resist, with a small artist's brush and chemically etching away the copper.  Then holes were drilled, and parts were mounted and inserted into a red plastic cigarette case.  There was no volume adjustment.  Tuning was done by threading the ferrite core in and out of a coil capacitor.  The radio station in Cleveland, referred to in the article below, was 450 miles from Durham, NC.  It was very exciting, as a 14 year old, to tune in a distant radio station on a radio that you made yourself.  The design and parts were crude by today's integrated-circuit standards, but lent themselves to experimenting and learning electronics.