I was delighted to come across this little guide in a US magazine called Popular Mechanics. Publications with variations on this name proliferated across the world from the 1930s onwards, reflecting a huge growing fascination with radio, telecommunications and science amongst so-called amateurs (often extremely ingenious, skilled and technically innovative enthusiasts).
Unlike many of the super nerdy instructions for DIY science accompanied by complex technical diagrams, this guide is cool - you can do it in your living room, with your boyfriend girlfriend, whilst looking stylish.
A comparison would be the instructions from Radiofront - the very popular Soviet magazine, which also occasionally had useful intstructions on how to turn a balalaika into an electic guitar and how to build your own theremin (alongside some pretty heavy duty technical projects)
The first guide on the process of making a record on an x-ray I have come across is in a wonderful little book self-published by the Hungarian audio enginner and innovator Istvhan Makai in the late 1930s.
I have speculated that Makai may have been the ‘inventor’, (or at least the discoverer) of the technique - he certainly experimented with a lot of different materials when the commercially produced Decelith discs he had previously used became difficult to obtain - but it may be that, like many innovations, the idea arose simultaneously in several places when the time was right.
A few years back, when we held an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in Tel Aviv (in happier times), we produced our own guide