The Americans had already established the idea with an advertising campaign entitled 'A radio in every room!' The typical British household of that period, however, had just one centrally placed mains set, perhaps with extension-speakers that broadcast to other rooms. They may have had an extra battery-powered receiver mostly intended for out-of-doors use but which would seldom have been used indoors due to the expense of battery replacements.

The newly imported American midgets came mainly in neat, horizontal wood and bakelite cases of clean-cut designs, although some were more old-fashioned. The fronts were almost entirely taken up with a combination of a large, clear dial and a louvered speaker grille of more or less matching size and shape and were seen to be very attractive. They were copied in a limited way in Britain in the late Thirties although, at that time, Britons seemed to prefer the wooden ones – perhaps because plastics still had connotations of the cheap substitute. But some manufacturers went ahead with designs that began to make use of alternative plastic materials which made possible brighter colors than the generally rather dull opaque blacks, browns, dark reds and greens obtainable with bakelite moulding materials. If these 6rst, rather restrained, examples of American Thirties modernism were a shock to a rather staid British public whose taste in domestic objects was generally thought conservative, they had bigger shocks to come.

Suddenly they were assaulted with the most eye-catching selection of radios ever produced, all in bright, candy-colored. plastic cabinets that made them look more like children's toys, or gaudy ornaments, than boxes to house electronic technology. In modern times these small sets, produced for a comparatively short period, have become the rare and valuable jewels of a period which many collectors and students of industrial art regard as the artistic culmination of the golden age of cabinet design.

What gave new life to these radios was the use of plastic materials entirely new to radio but widely used from the late Twenties to make enormously popular costume jewelry, fancy boxes, tableware and all sorts of other decorative items. These special materials had been suitable only for casting small objects, but now that radios had become midgets, their use for cabinets became feasible. The material used for the most attractive of the American sets, available shortly before and after the Second World War, was called catalin often confused with bakelite, which was a trade name that became a generic term for a group of plastic moulding materials. Bakelite comes as a powder which is mixed with color and filler material and then formed in moulds under tremendous heat and pressure, producing castings which are necessarily in dull colors that are quite opaque.

By contrast, plastics like catalin begin as translucent liquids which are poured into moulds by hand, allowed to set and then individually hand-polished to a very high gloss. Although they might have looked like products of the Machine Age, the sets were actually little works of art, no two of them exactly alike. They were produced by skilled craftsmen who could create marvelous marbled and mottled effects of jewel-like transparency, in a myriad of startlingly bright colors, by adding dyes of rainbow colors into the casting mix and swirling it into abstract patterns before pouring. The individuality of each cabinet was further enhanced by the technique of casting it in sections of contrasting or complementary colors that could be clipped together. This trick also enabled manufacturers to create many different variations on a basic theme, a cheap way to keep up with fashion trends and to offer the potential customer a range of choices while getting the same radio each time; a neat variation of Henry Ford's offer, 'You can have any color you like so long as it's black'.

These classic little radios represented the high point in the history of radio art; a chapter never likely to be repeated. They were industrial objects possible only in a situation where the economics of production allow the employment of skilled craftspeople using outdated techniques and their individual artistic input. Art historians would probably place the design of these radios in the late American art deco period, although that has come to be a vague classification with many offshoots. The umbrella term 'art deco' seems first to have been used after a 1966 Paris exhibition called Les Annees '25 which recalled the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes. ......."