Good Grief Mark ... I KNOW I'm a heck of a lot older than you. Geeze, my brother and I built crystal sets in the fourties ... that's NINETEEN fourties, not eighteen fourties! I still remember using the little 'lever' to pick up the contact and place it manualy at another location on the crystal. And yes, the crystal was just a slab of real rock crystal. As I recall, the 'lever' was called a "whisker wire." Does that sound correct? CHEERS, Bob