John F. Rider
American publisher
John Francis Rider (1900–1985) was an American radio engineer best known as publisher and author of over 125 books for radio and television servicing. He founded John F. Rider Publisher Inc. and was responsible for annual volumes of the Perpetual Troubleshooter's Manual from 1931 to 1954.
Early years
Born in 1900 to Austro-Hungarian parents, John Francis Rider immigrated to the United States in 1902 and grew up during the invention of the vacuum tube by John Ambrose Fleming and Lee de Forest and the invention of radio by Guglielmo Marconi. Before getting involved into publishing he served at the rank of Lt. Colonel for the US Signal Corps after military service he became a radio engineer for Alfred H. Grebe a manufacturer of radios. According to Alan Douglas, a noted radio historian, Rider may have been one of the many engineers that worked on Grebe's top-of-the-line Synchrophase 7 Receivers in 1927. He states, "John Rider was a good engineer, aside from his publishing career. I believe he designed the audio system of the 1927 Grebe Synchrophase 7, arguably the first hi-fi radio (response to 8 kHz, way ahead of broadcast standards of the day). He conceived the idea of a tuned analyzer (Chanalyst) and sold the first VTVM using the balanced-bridge circuit that became universal for decades (Voltohmyst).
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This entry incorporates text from “John F. Rider” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.