Another member in my (unintentional) clock radio collection, General Electric's 7-4700 model featured a telephone built in alongside the usual clock radio functions. Now you can wake up to music, buzzer or telemarketing!

Shortly after finalizing this video, I discovered a picture online showing one with the original manual. This model was seemingly part of GE's "Advantage Series" and marketed as the "Wake-Up Call".

This one survived the nasty basement flood of 2004, although it has lots of little scuffs and scratches that make it less than perfect. I gave all of the controls a good cleaning with DeOxit, let it have some time to dry and got a nasty surprise. The clock logic locked up shortly after plugging it in, so I tried again. That time the display didn't even come on. I'm not sure what happened. It was fine by the time I brought it upstairs, so I made this video right away. It's still working well. Hopefully it was an isolated incident.

I forgot to mention two very interesting things. First, this radio will actually play from its 9 volt backup battery, although performance is reduced. The clock digits also remain faintly illuminated when running from the battery.

Secondly, I once fired a camera flash at this thing from close range. For reasons completely unknown to me, this caused random portions of the display to blank. They didn't come back until several minutes later. I've never heard of such a thing--unless maybe the LEDs were somehow also capable of acting as photodetectors and caused the display driver circuit to "spin out"? I'd welcome your thoughts on this.

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