Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 9 hours ago
It looked a little more like 1940 than 1960. But this is how Sears Roebuck got into the pocket transistor radio game.
This was their smallest transistor radio to date, though it's hardly small. And this is their first shirt-pocket radio, though it would hardly fit in a shirt pocket. Ah, Sears. I go all into Sears and the Searsness of its products in other videos, so I don't want to repeat here, but their radios have a kind of clunky charm to them. And this one, to me, is pretty irresistable. It's tapered and rounded and altogether a unique piece of work. We're never going to know, but I'm always going to wonder how much of the size and styling of this radio is Sears, and how much is Arvin, the company who actually made this radio for Sears. Either way, it has what I guess we could call "midwestern" styling through and through. Actually, we can identify the styling better than that. In these mid-century styling examples we can see where this radio has much more in common with the streamform and taperform styles of the 1930s and '40s than anything newer, and I guess that parallels the feeling I have that this radio's look has more in common with 1940 than 1960. Now if you know anything at all about what this channel stands for, you'll know that that is NOT a criticism. Just an observation. We love old stuff. Old stuff that looks like the future... and old stuff that looks even older than it is. Both are fine with us.
This is a FOUR transistor radio. By the time it appeared, most transistor radios employed six or more transistors. The Sears catalog says that the radio "outperforms most 5-transistor sets we've seen." Well, there weren't many of those so that's not much of a boast. How it stacks up against the average 6 transistor would be a more useful measure, but... they don't say. How it stacks up, styling wise, against this much smaller Sony 6-transistor from the same year, 1960, I'll let you decide.
Here is the Silvertone next to Arvin's 1961 shirt-pocket model, which was none too small itself. You can see the Silvertone is a plus size for sure. And for comparison, again next to the Arvin, here's Silvertone's next entry in the shirt-pocket field, the 1960 model 1203... which is a radio considerably slimmed down from the 1201.
The box is all about shipping and not at all about display... so it's not much to look at. Because of that, few were saved. That makes them rare. Not particularly valuable, but rare.
Looking twenty years older than it is, the Silvertone 1201... in the only color it came in, which they call "gray" and which the catalog calls "smoke gray" and which I would call putty, or... meh.
It looked a little more like 1940 than 1960. But this is how Sears Roebuck got into the pocket transistor radio game.
This was their smallest transistor radio to date, though it's hardly small. And this is their first shirt-pocket radio, though it would hardly fit in a shirt pocket. Ah, Sears. I go all into Sears and the Searsness of its products in other videos, so I don't want to repeat here, but their radios have a kind of clunky charm to them. And this one, to me, is pretty irresistable. It's tapered and rounded and altogether a unique piece of work. We're never going to know, but I'm always going to wonder how much of the size and styling of this radio is Sears, and how much is Arvin, the company who actually made this radio for Sears. Either way, it has what I guess we could call "midwestern" styling through and through. Actually, we can identify the styling better than that. In these mid-century styling examples we can see where this radio has much more in common with the streamform and taperform styles of the 1930s and '40s than anything newer, and I guess that parallels the feeling I have that this radio's look has more in common with 1940 than 1960. Now if you know anything at all about what this channel stands for, you'll know that that is NOT a criticism. Just an observation. We love old stuff. Old stuff that looks like the future... and old stuff that looks even older than it is. Both are fine with us.
This is a FOUR transistor radio. By the time it appeared, most transistor radios employed six or more transistors. The Sears catalog says that the radio "outperforms most 5-transistor sets we've seen." Well, there weren't many of those so that's not much of a boast. How it stacks up against the average 6 transistor would be a more useful measure, but... they don't say. How it stacks up, styling wise, against this much smaller Sony 6-transistor from the same year, 1960, I'll let you decide.
Here is the Silvertone next to Arvin's 1961 shirt-pocket model, which was none too small itself. You can see the Silvertone is a plus size for sure. And for comparison, again next to the Arvin, here's Silvertone's next entry in the shirt-pocket field, the 1960 model 1203... which is a radio considerably slimmed down from the 1201.
The box is all about shipping and not at all about display... so it's not much to look at. Because of that, few were saved. That makes them rare. Not particularly valuable, but rare.
Looking twenty years older than it is, the Silvertone 1201... in the only color it came in, which they call "gray" and which the catalog calls "smoke gray" and which I would call putty, or... meh.
