Bonner Smog Hog - 60 years later
For some time now I have been planning to build a authentic Smog Hog, as close as possible to the original designed and built for the 1956 Nationals in Dallas by Howard Bonner. To the best I can do, this includes the radio system he used as well as the engine.
It was a very different time than today. Most RC was either on ham frequencies or 27.255 Mc, though there was an early system at 455 Mc. On the electronics, amplifier gain was quite costly in terms of size, heat, weight, and battery life. Which is why early multifunction control systems were either compound escapements or reed receivers that responded to tones generated by the transmitter.
A man named Ed Rockwood is thought to be the first to invent, design and build such a system in the late 1940's sized for hobby use. He shared this technology with magazine articles and helped many in the Bay Area in northern California build radio systems of their own. His system was built with five reeds, which gave left and right rudder, up and down elevator, and could control an escapement for throttle control.
While the early RC was quite expensive and technically challenging, after a period of a few years it started to become more commercial. Certainly the FCC opened up to the pent up demand when in 1952 they allowed the non ham radio operators to use the 27.255 frequency. Just pay a fee, with no Morse code or radio theory test that had limited access. Anyway, suddenly there was a market for commercial RC equipment and companies like Bramco, Citizenship, and CG started producing hardware for the masses.
Meanwhile, Howard Bonner found his market segment in actuators, selling many thousands of escapements, from the simple S/N (self neutralizing), to the compound escapements where one push on the transmitter gave right rudder, and two gave left. You could also add a second or even third escapement to blip the elevator or throttle, but you had to have a good sense of timing and an accurate thumb unless you used a pulser. Eventually he started building servos to work with reed systems. These earliest worked with relays switching the high currents, because a tube amplifier was out of the question, and transistors were of poor quality and very expensive.