Radio hat

The company was a leading supplier of party hats, noise makers and other novelty items.

An inventor and gadgeteer,[2][3][4] Hoeflich continued to develop and even sell machinery that manufactured paper novelty items.

[7][8] In March 1949, Victor Hoeflich held a press conference to introduce the "Man from Mars, Radio Hat".

Hoeflich knew a picture would tell the story so he had several teenagers modeling the radio hats for the reporters and photographers.

[9][10] The articles typically included a photo of a young lady wearing the hat and a six-paragraph story.

[1] A Van Nuys, California service station chain sold the hats as a promotion item to customers who purchased gasoline.

She was nominated for the 1957 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Selena Cross in the film Peyton Place.

The technological advances in World War II for mobile radios produced inexpensive low power vacuum tubes.

The regenerative detector in the radio hat had adequate sensitivity to receive stations much more distant than the stipulated twenty-mile range, but distant stations would not have had a strong enough carrier to block the oscillations and so would be received with an objectionable heterodyne, audible as an astable squealing noise.

The June 1949 issue of Radio-Electronics showing the "Man-from-Mars, Radio Hat," modeled by a 15-year-old Hope Lange
The radio hat interior; the headphone could be on either side.
The circuit was on a flexible liner that fit inside the hat.
The 1S5 vacuum tube converted the radio signal to audio and the 3V4 amplified the audio for the headphone.