HeyBub wrote:

IIRC, back when the first RCA portable radios hit the market in the
1950's, they had a 90V battery in them. I'm sure it is possible to
make a 120V battery, but may not be practical.

Even before then.

Tube-type radios (i.e., think WW2 portables) needed plate voltage, typically
90v, from a type "B" battery. Some sets needed as much as 300v and used
several "B" batteries in series.

I think our "utility" (WW2 economy standard) radio in UK used a
humongous 120V battery for the "anodes" (AmE="plates"), but it's
possible that it had some lower-voltage taps as well. I think we used a
2V lead-acid cell for the filament voltage. I recall that some of those
humongous batteries I saw (but not ours) had -ve connections as well,
for the radios that needed a separate bias supply. We used ours for
years after the war had ended, because we lived out in the country and
had no connection to the public electricity supply. In fact we lived so
close to a BBC monitoring station that we were not allowed to have
overhead power lines, and to lay cable underground was horrendously
expensive. For a while we had a 32V DC generator with a bank of
humongous wet cells, then we graduated to a diesel-powered 2KVA (!)
alternator system. I was well into my teens before we had a connection
to the public supply.

Perce