Zenith Table Top Radio Models 1936 - 1942

The US ZENITH radio corporation represented one of the worldwide biggest radio and TV - manufacturers whose radio sets covered a wide variety of circuit and cabinet design.

Although, like many european radio companies, the ZENITH corporation is not present on the international market any more, its radio sets are still very popular in the collectors community for two reasons: Their attractive cabinet designs and their sturdy construction.

Radiomuseum.org flaunts more than 4.300 model pages of ZENTH radios, almost 4000 of which show pictures of the sets.

In most cases radio sets were provided by their maker with either an identification number or a model name or both. This identification is necessary  if one wants to reliably attribute a circuit diagram or characteristic features to a certain set. Apart from that, chassis numbers or other characteristcs can be helpful.

But if you find yourself in the unfortunate situation that your ZENITH radio shows neither a model nor a chassis number, you will find it hard to identify. If nevertheless you are determined to identify your set, you have to crutinize the available pictures, a task that proves rather tedious and time consuming in view of the 4,000 radiomuseum.org model pages.

In order to facilitate this detective work for our fellow radio collectors, I have decided to compose a pictorial survey. For this purpose I subdivided the ZENITH product palette into different catagories.

The first useful subdivision is based on the cabinet material: Wood or plastic.

Since this classification still proved too coarse, I decided to further subdivide these two catagories into:

Table top models, Consoles, Chairsets, and the so-called High- and Low-Boys with long or short cabinet base.

The 11 mosaic picture pages shown hereafter represent the result of the first step of my 'sorting' activities. They depict a survey of all ZENITH table top models including their model numbers, covering the production period 1936  - 1942, that came to my knowlegde as of today.

Some export models that could be identified were included

I wish to emphasize that this list does not claim to be exhaustive. I'll be very grateful to everybody who brings improvements and corrections to my knowledge!

Many pictures have been extracted from internet pages that explicitely allow free download. .

Hoping that this surrvey will be helpful in the attempt of identifying your unknown ZENITH models!

Hans Amberger

Thanks for translate the text by member Harald Giese.

Please click on the pictures for a magnified view!

 

 

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