Monarchy Obsession: Queen Transistor Radio--America's obsession with British Monarchy

The FIRST commercially-available transistor radio went on the market in the fall of 1954--the Regency TR-1. As happens, soon every electronics company in the world wanted to produce a transistor radio, and many did. Did these copycats copy the Regency's circuitry? No. Its chassis construction? Its styling? No, not so much. The Regency TR-1 was not very influential in those ways. But there is one way in which it was VERY influential.
For a country founded on democratic rule and an absolute rejection of monarchy, the United States has a warped fascination with princesses and queens and kings and dukes and such. Especially English ones. Women who can't stay awake for their husband's retelling of a sporting event will stay up all night to watch an English royal wedding on television. Thanks to Disney and all the other peddlars of fantasy and distraction, little girls all seem to want to be a princess. What does it all mean?! And how the devil does this relate to the tech collectibles we try to cover on this channel?
Well, I'm glad you asked. It all starts here with the Regency. You don't get much more English-monarchy sounding than that. Subsequent years saw the introduction of scads of radio brand names, influenced by the Regency TR-1, that traded on this fascination with monarchy and all things English to the point of absurdity. Crown, King, Englishtown, Royal, Royal-Tone, Commodore, Coronet, Windsor, Empire, Imperial, Invicta, Kent, Kensington, Majestic, Monarch, Nobility, Oxford, Raleigh, Saxony, Sovereign, Victoria, Wales, York, and Viscount. Are you convinced yet?
And this one. It's the Queen two-transistor boy's radio. Model number MTR-103. It's a good-looker and it even has an underpainted dial--but just barely. That dial plate is flat and not undercarved at all, so it has no texture and there's little sense of depth to it like you see on the truly great underpainted radios.
A lot of boy's radios have a sort of zig-zag side to them--where the front and back halves meet. This Queen has the straighter, simpler lines of a conventional transistor radio. Often these inexpensive little 2-transistors are rather beat up before they are rescued by collectors, but I was able to get ahold of this one before the previous owner was able to do much damage to it other than a little wear to the coin slot. This radio obviously saw little use--and I speculate that that would have been for one of two reasons. Number One: As a 2-transistor, it didn't pull in stations very well and from that I conclude that the owner lived out in the country somewhere and not in the city. Now, Sherlock Holmes could tell you exactly what county he lived in and what was his favorite song he heard on this radio but, well, I'm not that good. I can only speculate. My Number Two speculation for why this radio was so little used is that the little boy who owned this boy's radio was embarrassed by it. Or teased by his stupid little friends for having a radio with the name "Queen" on it. A name like "Ranger" or "Trailblazer" would have been a better marketing choice for the radio's maker, but they were so obsessed with naming things with English monarchy names that they couldn't see what was obviously right before their eyes.
As influential as the Regency name was with subsequent transistor radio brands, Regency itself may well have been influenced by another, earlier radio maker. At the time of Regency's founding, a popular slogan was in use by one of the largest radio makers then in existence. I'm talking about Zenith Radio--from that English colony called Chicago. They used a slogan calling themselves "The Royalty of Radio."
As to the actual ENGLISH in actual ENGLAND, they made transistor radios too. With names like Pam, Pye, Bush, Roberts, and Perdio. It seems they were less enthralled--or obsessed--with monarchy--at least in the naming of things--than their former subjects across the pond in America.
As to princesses, our culture hasn't made much progress since I was a kid. I've got a grandaughter who, when she grows up, wants to be scientist. Just kidding. We could USE scientists. No. The culture has other plans for her...and she already has her tiara.