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“H” is for Heathkits and Hams: Part 1 – Early Days through the 1950s

Late last year, I published a 6-part article series that recounted the history of the Heath Company and its world-famous Heathkits. The series was based on an interview with Chas Gilmore, who joined the Heath Company in 1966 as a design engineer and worked at the Heath Company for more than two decades, eventually becoming VP of product development, marketing, and sales and finally EVP and General Manager. After that initial article series ran, I received several requests for more in-depth information about Heathkits for amateur radio enthusiasts. Hams, your wish is my command.

Fortunately, Gilmore is a Ham (W8IAI) and he had already prepared a lengthy PowerPoint presentation covering the topic. I asked Gilmore to give that presentation to me during a two-hour Zoom call, which he did in December. I was the only person in the audience. As a result, you get another five articles in a new EEJournal series devoted to Heath’s amateur radio kits. However, the information in this series should be of interest to anyone following the Heath Company’s history.

I’ve split Gilmore’s presentation into five parts:

  • Part 1 – Early Days through the 1950s
  • Part 2 – The 1960s
  • Part 3 – The 1970s
  • Part 4 – The 1980s and 1990s
  • Part 5 – Reasons for Heath’s Success in the Ham Market

These five articles are a condensed version of Gilmore’s full presentation. If your Ham group would be interested in a live version of Gilmore’s talk, he’s willing to discuss it with you. You’ll find Gilmore’s contact information at the end of this article.

Chas Gilmore: I’m Chas Gilmore, W8IAI. The first call sign I held was K1KJY. Back then, I was in high school, living in Northern Vermont with my parents. It was the late 1950s. Later, I picked up a second station. This was back when the FCC let you have second and third stations, etc. My second station was W1APH. Then in 1966, when I started working at the Heath Company for my first tour, I picked up the call sign W8IAI. Somewhere between 1966 and 1968, the FCC said, “You know we don’t think we like Hams holding multiple call signs.” So, I had to surrender all but one, and I chose to keep W8IAI, which was its second issue. The original holder of that call sign had died, in the very late nineteen forties, and I picked it up on second issue.

The formal name of the company I joined was “The Heath Company.” Heathkit is a registered trademark of that company, but that’s not the company name.

Now, I have some questions for the audience. Looking for a show of hands. How many have heard of Heath Company and Heathkits.

Steve Leibson: Me! Me!

Chas Gilmore: During my presentations, I’ve seen pretty much a 100 percent raising of hands to this question.

The second question that I ask is, “How many own Heathkit products?” I don’t see 100 percent to that question anymore, still plenty of people.

Next, I ask, “How many of you have built a Heathkit or any kit?” Again, I see about the same number that have built a kit of any brand. For Heathkits, almost the same.

I ask, “How many have homebrewed or designed an electronic product?” The response there tends to drop off, to maybe less than half of the crowd.

This talk is a recap of my time at the Heath Company, or, as I like to say, working in a candy factory, because when you’re a Ham, working in a company that’s a significant producer of amateur radio equipment… it was just neat.

I worked for the Heath Company twice. The first time, I started in 1966 and left the company in 1977 by transferring to another division of Schlumberger, EMR Telemetry. Schlumberger was the parent company by 1977. I started at the Heath Company as a Design Engineer in the Scientific Instruments Group, which was a new group building scientific instruments, mainly electronic instruments to help non-electronic people – such as chemists, etc. – understand how to use electronic instrumentation.

I went from Design Engineer to an Engineering Section Manager where I had responsibility for a whole group of engineers and technicians, again designing electronic instrumentation. I then moved to the marketing side of the business and became a Product Line Manager, where I was responsible for developing product concepts and for managing the product through its life cycle. Again, this was for instrumentation. I also picked up calculators and some automotive products.

I then became the Director of Engineering for Technical Products. There was another Director of Engineering for Consumer Products. The Technical Products included Ham radio and electronic instruments. There were two engineering sections for electronic instruments because it was a very large product line. One of those sections later converted to personal computers. Another section was devoted to automotive products.

I returned to the Heath Company in 1984 as the Vice President of Product Development, where I was responsible both for engineering and the product marketing. From there I assumed more duties and became the Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Heath Company through the balance of my tenure there.

The Early Years

The early years of the Heath Company were 1910 through 1935. The company was founded in 1910, in Chicago. [That’s only seven years after the Wright brothers’ initial powered flight.] The original company name had “aeroplane” in it, and it became the Heath Airplane company when Edward Heath bought it around 1912. He had the idea of making kit airplanes. One of the airplanes that Heath became known for was the Parasol. The photograph below shows Edward Heath in a Parasol. It was a very interesting airplane. The Parasol was sold as a kit, and you needed to buy your own motorcycle engine to complete the build.

 

Edward Heath in a Parasol kit airplane. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

 

In 1935, Ed Heath died during a test flight of another version of the Parasol, and the company went into bankruptcy. Howard Anthony acquired the company and moved it to Michigan in 1935. He first moved the company to Niles, Michigan, and then moved it to Benton Harbor, Michigan. Benton Harbor is adjacent to St. Joseph, Michigan. The two cities are divided by the St. Joseph River, so they’re truly twin cities. Benton Harbor is on the north side and St. Joe is on the south side. 

Howard Anthony was a real entrepreneur. He looked for business anywhere he could get it. Because the Heath Airplane Company was clearly an aircraft company, with “Airplane” in its name, the United States Government became a major customer when World War II came along. The US military was trying to buy equipment anywhere it could, and, if you had “airplane” in the company name, they came looking for you. Very quickly, Anthony had multiple contracts for airplane parts, including landing gear, all kinds of small aircraft items, and some electronics such as aircraft radios and test equipment.

Post War Years

After the war, the Heath Company split. A partner took the aircraft parts business and founded a different company. Howard Anthony kept the electronics business and the Heath name.

Anthony was obviously a very creative person while his wife, Helen, was the disciplined business manager. After the war, the Heath Company was strictly in the mail order business. Bags of mail would come into the company. Staff would dump the bags out on a big circular table and rotate them around. Howard would open the envelopes, take out the orders, and begin thinking about the resources needed to fill the orders. Helen made sure to take out the checks and deposit them.

In 1946, the Anthonys were still trying to figure out what to do. When the war had ended, all the government contracts went away. In fact, the Heath Company was forced to downsize a fair amount at that point. The company focused on selling surplus electronic parts because the government had an awful lot of electronic parts left over from the war. In 1946, the government auctioned off a lot of surplus electronic parts and Howard bid on some of the auction lots.

Somewhere along the line, he bid on a large collection of electronic parts. The story that I heard from one of the older Heath employees who had worked with Howard went like this: Howard had bid on this stack of parts, and then kind of forgot about it. One day, he got a call from the station master at the Benton Harbor train station, who said, “Mr. Anthony, you’ve got five boxcar loads of electronic parts here. The demurrage fee on the boxcars sets in in 10 days. So, you need to get your parts out and get them out quickly.”

That call sent Howard into a scramble because he had no idea that he was getting that many parts. He had lots of friends around town, so he borrowed attic space, barns, garages, etc. He unloaded all these parts into various and sundry buildings around town.

One of the parts that came with this shipment was a very large load of 5BP1 cathode ray tubes. This was a 5-inch tube that you could build an oscilloscope around. And indeed, Howard did just that using a magazine article on how to build an oscilloscope using the 5BP1 CRT that appeared shortly after the war as his reference design. Late In 1947, Heath introduced a kit oscilloscope, model number O-1, selling for $39.50. The O-1 had a whopping bandwidth of 50 KHz. You can see the O-1 oscilloscope and a large collection of military surplus electronics for sale in the advertisement below.

 

Early Heath Company advertisement with the O-1 oscilloscope kit and a collection of surplus electronic parts. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

 

The kit oscilloscope turned out to be a roaring success. Heath then introduced a kit vacuum tube voltmeter (VTVM), labeled the V-1, and sold it for $24.50. Kit sales soon dwarfed the surplus parts business. People were hungry for electronic products at low costs. At this time, most electronic products had a lot of labor in them. You supplied the labor when building a kit, so the finished product cost less. Heath’s kit products also had very conservative or frugal specifications. The O-1 had a 50-KHz bandwidth. Today, we look at oscilloscopes and think that anything with a bandwidth below 100 MHz is a pretty poor bandwidth.

In the early years of the Heath Company, up to 1952 or so, the business consisted mainly of kitted test equipment. Heath’s surplus parts purchases provided a large quantity of CRTs, plus many transformers, resistors, and capacitors, etc. Every time Heath needed to change parts in a kit product because they ran out of something, they changed the model number of the kit. So, the scope model went from the O-1 to the O-7 in just a few years. The V-1 VTVM became the V-7. By 1952, Heath offered fifteen kit instruments. The company developed these kits fast and furiously. By 1953, there were 44 kits, so you can see that the product growth was very rapid. By then, Heath was an all-kit company with multiple millions of dollars in sales and more than 200 employees, scattered in multiple buildings around Benton Harbor.

 

Howard Anthony working with several early Heathkits. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

 

Heath’s First Amateur Radio Kits

Heath’s first Ham rig, the AT-1 transmitter, was introduced for Christmas of 1951 at $29.50. That’s equivalent to about $390.00 today, which is still a low-priced piece of amateur radio equipment as things go. The AT-1 was a pretty simple radio. There was a 6AG7 oscillator and a 6L6 amplifier. Of course you needed a rectifier, and that was the 5U4, developing a few hundred volts for the 6L6 amplifier and 6AG7 crystal oscillator. The radio covered 80, 40, 20 and 10 meters. It was CW only, with a whopping 12 to 16 watts of output power. It had a socket on the back for a VFO. As you can see from the photograph below, the main source of frequency control was a crystal, housed in the old FT-243 style case. The AT-1 was a very popular product, and its sales certainly sent a message within Heath Company: Ham radio equipment was going to be a big market for kits.

 

Heath’s first kit for the amateur radio market was the AT-1 transmitter, which sold for $29.50. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

 

Heath’s next move in amateur radio products was to start introducing various accessories: the VF-1 VFO, built around a 6AU6, appeared in 1952. It was very popular. I had one of them as a young high school student. The AC-1 antenna coupler (the first of the Heathkit antenna tuners), consisted of a coil with switched taps and a variable capacitor, and it used a neon bulb as a tuning indicator. It sold for a whopping $14.50, so it made a great little Christmas present. Heath also offered a grid-dip meter called the GD-1. That was one of the first kits that I owned, and I still have it somewhere. The GD-1 went from 2 to 250 megacycles, and it would go down to 350 KHz, whoops, kilocycles as it was called in that time, with optional accessory coils. It used a 6AF4 or a 6T4, and I suspect the tube that was shipped in the kit depended on inventory on hand.

In the first two years, Heath sold more than 15,000 of those little grid-dip meters. Very quickly, Heath realized that test equipment for the Ham market was going to be a very good product line. The tube-based grid-dip meter was replaced in 1960 by a grid dipper that used a tunnel diode. Clearly, some of these Ham products lasted a long time, considering that the original grid-dip meter lasted eight years.

Another big and very, very well-known transmitter kit was the DX-100, which Heath introduced in 1955. It sold for $189. I didn’t do a long-term pricing on that one, but it’s got to be up there in the many, many hundreds of equivalent dollars. It covered 160 through 10 meters, including 11 meters. It boasted 100 watts on AM, and 120 watts on CW. This radio represents a very early use of dual 6146 final output tubes. Heath pioneered that area.

Heath was beginning to do some pretty innovative circuit design in the mid-1950s. The DX-100 had built-in VFOs and four crystal positions. It also weighed a hundred pounds. That was unbelievably heavy when you think of today’s modern transceivers. The original DX-100 had a copper-plated steel chassis. Later Heath introduced an upgraded version with a couple of changes. The copper-clad chassis became a plated-steel chassis. The number of crystal positions was reduced to one, and I think that one crystal may have been internal to the unit because it was becoming very clear that Hams wanted a VFO.

 

Heath introduced the DX-100 transmitter for amateur radio in 1955. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue 

 

By 1956, one Heath flyer had 22 pages of products, and Heath was mailing three or four flyers a year. By now, at least two pages of each flyer were devoted to amateur radio. The key product, the DX-100, was the big headliner. Heath had also introduced a receiver, the AR-3. The VF-1 VFO was still a big seller. You couldn’t put an AC-1 antenna tuner on the DX-100 because it could not handle the DX-100’s output power.

The DX-35 transmitter was aimed at novices. That was my first commercial transmitter. It was crystal-controlled, selling for $56, but you could connect a VFO to it. It was a good novice transmitter. The AM-1 was an antenna meter, which allowed you to measure antenna impedance. You could put the QF-1 Q-Multiplier on a receiver, which allowed you to sharpen the tuning or null interfering signals. And, of course, there was the GD-1 grid dip meter, which went through several small design variations.

Heath offered nine amateur radio products and 42 test equipment kits in 1956. The real focus was on service instruments at that time. Black and white TVs based on vacuum tubes were going into everyone’s home, and their reliability was questionable at best, so there was a huge need for lots of test equipment. Many people were running small service shops, especially part time, out of their homes and basements, and they all needed test equipment.

By now, Heath’s top-of-the-line scope is the O-11. The model numbers have progressed and there are multiple scope kits. The OM-2, a low-priced scope, had a 1-MHz bandwidth. The VTVM Is now the V-7A. By that time, Heath had sold many hundreds of thousands of the V-7 VTVM and its predecessors. It was extremely popular. There were other meters of various and sundry sorts, some portable handy testers, as well as audio voltmeters, etc. There were five different audio generators, but nothing like a function generator. There was a general-purpose lab (RF) generator, a couple of power supplies, and a lot of television servicing, testing, and component-testing equipment.

The V-7 VTVM was Heath’s first use of a printed circuit board in a Heathkit. The board part number was 85-1. Many people at Heath thought that the use of a printed circuit board would be the demise of the kit. Up until this point, all kits used point-to-point wiring. However, the naysayers were wrong, the V-7 was a huge success, and Heathkits used printed circuit boards extensively for the next 40+ years. The V-7A increased the V-7 circuit board’s thickness from one-eighth of an inch to a less fragile three-sixteenths of an inch thick.

Additional Heath Product Lines

Other Heath products at the time included a broadcast receiver, a radiation detector (this was during the Cold War and a lot of people wanted to be able to use a Geiger counter), and a low-cost crystal receiver for the very young kit beginner. Another product that took off was a photographic enlarger timer. There were other photographic support products as well. Meanwhile, the audio line was growing. That line included AM and FM tuners, preamplifiers, many different nicely priced amplifiers, a couple of speakers, electronic crossovers, and several other audio accessories. 

Steve Leibson: Chas, I’ve always wondered about Heathkit speakers, because there’s just not a lot of labor in them. So, did people just want the Heath nameplate?

Chas Gilmore: Audio test chambers had been built into both the facilities at Benton Harbor, and later in St. Joe. A lot of care and design went into building a set of speakers for good fidelity. There is a lot of labor in the building of a good HiFi speaker, so Heathkit speakers did offer a fair savings because you supplied the labor. In some cases, the speaker case would be unfinished. You finished it. So, I think both the quality of the speakers and the fact that there were labor-saving aspects to speaker building really helped the product line. Plus, the speakers complemented the audio line, so you could build a full Heath audio setup.

By 1956, sales were now up around five million dollars, which would be $58 million in today’s dollars, and Heath had only recently entered the kit business. Heathkits were barely nine years old, and the company had gone from nothing to the equivalent of $58 million in a pretty short amount of time.  

Heath’s transition years were 1954 to 1962. The lead news item from that period was another airplane crash. Howard Anthony had purchased a $60,000 de Havilland Dove. It was a premier airplane at the time. During a test flight with one of the de Havilland test pilots in July of 1954, somewhere over West Virginia, they hit a terrible storm and the plane went down. About five people were on board, and they were all killed, including Howard Anthony. Of course, he was the Heath Company.

After Howard’s death, the company went to Helen Anthony. She shopped around for an appropriate buyer and found Daystrom, which was a holding company. Daystrom owned a furniture business that made chrome-legged tables and chairs, Weston instruments, and other businesses. Daystrom bought the Heath Company in 1955 and moved the company to a new building in St. Joseph, Michigan in 1958, just south of Benton Harbor. However, even though Heath had moved to St. Joe, Michigan, the company retained its mailing address in Benton Harbor, Michigan. By then, the Heath Company of Benton Harbor, Michigan was famous, and nobody wanted to tamper with that address.

 

Daystrom moved the Heath Company into a new building in 1958. Image credit: Chas Gilmore, Chuck Penson, and Terry Perdue

 

The new building was unique. It was designed in the shape of an “H,” and it was a large plant at 150,000 square feet. With its acquisition by Daystrom and move into a new and expansive plant, Heath was well-positioned for explosive growth in the 1960s.

Chas Gilmore (W8IAI) has given his full presentation about Heath’s kits and the company’s other contributions to amateur radio to several Ham groups and clubs. If your organization is within a reasonable travel distance from Akron, Ohio and you’re interested in a live presentation, you can contact him at cgilmore@groupgilmore.com.

Chuck Penson (WA7ZZE) self-published a massive, well-illustrated, encyclopedic book titled “Heathkit, A Guide to the Amateur Radio Products” in 2021. Many of the photos in this article series and some details came from Penson’s book. The book is now out of print after three editions. However, Penson is considering another printing. If you are interested in a copy of this book, you can contact Penson at wa7zze@gmail.com.

Terry Perdue (K8TP) was a design engineer at the Heath Company from 1973 to 1991. Among other products, he designed the Heath Intellirotor, a computerized controller used for pointing Ham antennas. In 1992, Perdue self-published a book titled “Heath Nostalgia,” which is now out of print. He also published a CD of photos titled “Heathkit – The Early Years,” which was also out of print. However, Perdue is offering the $15 CD to EEJournal readers. The CD includes JPG page scans of Perdue’s book, “Heath Nostalgia,” and about 900 high-resolution photos of the Heathkit plant, catalogs, fliers, in-house publications, newspaper clippings, selected product photos (mostly vintage Ham products), and a 30-minute audio file of Heath’s first Director of Engineering Gene Fiebich’s memories, which include how he came to join Heath and events he attended, including trade shows, Heath’s Christmas parties and picnics, etc. Contact Perdue at k8tp@comcast.net for more information.

References

Chas Gilmore, “Heathkit and Ham Radio, 2024 Edition,” PowerPoint presentation

Chuck Penson, “Heathkit: A Guide to the Amateur Radio Products,” self published, 2021

Terry Perdue, “Heath Nostalgia,” self published, 1992

 

 

EEJournal’s original Heathkit history series:

The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 1: Early Days

The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 2: The 1960s through the mid-1970s

The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 3: The Microcomputer Kit Era

The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 4: The Demise of Heathkit

The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 5: Final Thoughts

The Rise and Fall of Heathkit – Part 6: And Yet More Final Thoughts

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