Next Very popular among collectors, this is Zenith's very first transistor radio. The Zenith crown logo appears between the round controls. If you're trying to date one of these radios, look at the knobs. The earliest models have a bar across the round knobs, as shown here.
Later models have round knobs without the bars.
If you look at the chassis view, you can clearly see the hand-soldered connections. The hand-wired transistor set occupies an interesting place in the history of radio technology. Yet the hand wiring is reminiscent of earlier tube radios. Along with transistors, printed circuits became commercially feasible during the 1950s, another important step toward making electronic devices smaller and cheaper. It's interesting to compare this radio to my Emerson 888 Pioneer .