Unlike the console radio, the tabletop radio had no design predecessor, and although countless numbers were subsequently made of wood and with traditional styling, there was an opportunity for new ideas in cabinet design, materials, and the target market. Its success is measured by the fact that after 1933 many more tabletop radios were sold than consoles. By 1930, radio had moved from a novelty to a necessity, and, given the number of people out of work and struggling financially during the years of the Great Depression, it is extraordinary how many radios were sold around the world from 1929 to 1935. This was a burgeoning market in an otherwise commercially depressed era. Hundreds of radio manufacturers looked for opportunities to expand their markets, and the confluence of many diverse factors created a unique moment in the evolution of this medium.

The new profession of industrial design engaged people who had come from other disciplines, such as graphic design, theatrical set design, fashion illustration, and architecture. They all had little or no work during the Depression. However, the new tabletop format for radio offered an integrated, more user-friendly apparatus of a portable size, creating potential for multiple units in the home and workplace. In stepping away from the constraints of the large wooden console radio in the living room, the tabletop radio effectively changed the listener from the family to the individual; it also broadened the scope of radio programming and the listening audience. Importantly, the concurrent expansion of electricity in the home underpinned the expansion of radio sales.

Added to this was the utility of the new nonflammable synthetic plastics (Bakelite, Catalin and urea formaldehyde products with brand names such as Plaskon and Beetleware.) These could be mass-produced much more cheaply per unit that wood radio cabinets which required more skill and time for production and finishing. Being nonflammable, the plastic cabinets could closely approximate the chassis and its tubes with infinite possibilities for external design. Here the artisan was replaced by the assembly line.

The new plastics offered scope to incorporate the new Style Moderne design (which today we call Art Deco or Streamlining) and create a whole new type of radio cabinet that reflected modernity and progress. Some radios clearly derive from other streamlined Deco objects; skyscrapers, trains, and rockets, others from the aerodynamic shape of a bullet, a sled or the grille of a car. Reduction in the size of radio tubes in the mid-1930s allowed for small cabinets to be produced and, almost exclusively in the United States and Australia, a wide choice of colors encouraged advertising targeted to women to place radios in all the rooms in the home.

A number of smaller radio companies commissioned industrial designers to create radios that would offer a cost-effective home appliance to be mass-produced and mass-marketed. These designers were all early in their careers, and almost all went on to be founders of Streamlining, luminaries of industrial design, and much more famous for their subsequent commissions. These commissions for inexpensive radio designs were not for major corporations and clearly not considered prestigious, as they were generally ignored in later homages and biographies. But the larger, more complete picture confirms that this was the moment when art met industry, and it was the embedding of electronics into consumer products that gave rise to a radical shift in both design possibilities and people’s relationships with objects. For the first time, a product’s potential behavior and functionality was disconnected from its physical form. Radio became an object consumers chose for their homes, on the basis of not just what they would hear, but how it would look. Radio became a visual as well as aural experience. Companies manufacturing radios were forced to modify their cabinet designs each year (whether or not there were technical advances) as choice and change became synonymous with retail marketing.

The industrial designers were innovators who empowered their successors, creating a benchmark for other radio makers to aspire to quality styling. They used a wide range of materials (mainly plastics, but also glass, metal, and wood), but their coherent bond was the shedding of fussiness in favor of streamlined design. The collateral effect over the next 10 years was significant in the U.S. and all around the world. Australia is a good example of a country with no known radio designers, yet the style of locally made radios in the mid-1930s clearly was influenced by the radios created by American and British industrial designers. A true anomaly is the very rare wooden console, the Pacific Elite, made in New Zealand in 1934, which shows how good design can overcome the inherent limitations of material and a furniture mentality. By 1950, in the U.S. many inexpensive Deco-style radios sold in department stores were made from painted metal. A small quantity were chromed, and today these little gems are highly sought by collectors.