"Baby Brady"

[oceanlinerfanatic]

Does anyone here have one on the nine ever made "Baby Brady" tinfoil phonographs made by the late Bill Ptacek? If you do can you show a video of it working?

[TinfoilPhono]

I have one, but it is not a working model. The diaphragm is far too small to vibrate. The mandrel turns but it would need a comically oversized speaker to actually record or reproduce.

These were made just as a model. Bill was inspired by a tiny Brady model we found in the archives of the Ford Museum in the late 90s. That one had no known provenance, and was assumed to have been a model made by a student in the scientific school that Ford hosted on the property in the 1930s. It was not painted or striped, and was not perfect in all dimensions, but it still looked good. Bill had already made replicas of the full-size Brady by then, so it was a simple matter for him to scale down his drawings to ⅓ size.

[TinfoilPhono]

A bit more to the story: Bill planned to make about 20, but he soon discovered that these were very tedious to complete. They required as much handwork as the full-size Brady replicas, but of course he couldn't sell them for anywhere near the same price. They turned out to be money-losers so he never finished the remaining models.

After his untimely death, his family kept his commercial machine shop running. A few years ago they found a box of jumbled Baby Brady parts in storage and decided to assemble them. So an additional 10 were produced, almost 20 years after the first run. None of these new models were offered for sale -- all were distributed among Bill's family.

[oceanlinerfanatic]

A bit more to the story: Bill planned to make about 20, but he soon discovered that these were very tedious to complete. They required as much handwork as the full-size Brady replicas, but of course he couldn't sell them for anywhere near the same price. They turned out to be money-losers so he never finished the remaining models.

After his untimely death, his family kept his commercial machine shop running. A few years ago they found a box of jumbled Baby Brady parts in storage and decided to assemble them. So an additional 10 were produced, almost 20 years after the first run. None of these new models were offered for sale -- all were distributed among Bill's family.

That is very interesting Rene! It is a shame that more couldn't be made but be made because of the obvious difficulty with them like you said it just was not worth the time and effort.