The disappeared School of Radio Maymó

* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
25 May 2023 Thursday 22:51
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The disappeared School of Radio Maymó

* The author is part of the community of readers of La Vanguardia

With the arrival of the radio in Barcelona in mid-1924, listening to it was not only an activity that skyrocketed among the people of Barcelona, ​​but also in other places in the province where the broadcasts could also be heard.

According to information from the time, during the first week after the inauguration of Radio Barcelona, ​​more than 80,000 radio sets were sold in the city.

With the radio, the people of Barcelona no longer had to wait for the edition of the morning newspapers to find out what was happening in the world.

Since the first broadcast of Radio Barcelona was produced, citizens had experienced a great desire to be able to have a device of the new means of communication. This desire quickly spread throughout Spain, thus improving access to information, national and, especially, that of foreigners.

This need was noticed by Fernando Maymó Gomis, born in Llagostera, who had studied physics and pedagogy in his youth, knowledge that helped him create his own pedagogical system for the training of radio technicians.

In 1931 he founded Radio Maymó, in a place located on Calle Alta de San Pedro (now Sant Pere Més Alt). He opened the first face-to-face teaching school to turn the student into a technician of the new gadget and with his knowledge in the matter to be able to benefit from the fever for the radio world, making a profit out of it.

Maymó had created a new teaching system based on a series of theoretical lessons through books written by himself and some practical classes in which the students assembled a radio set, which they took home for free at the end of the course. home. With it they learned a new career and had a device built by themselves.

These courses, which combined theory and practice, quickly captured the interest of young people, since they not only learned a new career, but also got their own device and, at the end of the course, if they found a job, they could set up their own workshop. , with the title of technician and producer of the Maymó radio.

With this teaching method, at the same time, it became the distributor of the parts destined to the manufacture of the new radio devices.

When the installation of Alta de San Pedro became too small, in 1934 he rented a place at 8 Pelayo street, which he had to abandon after the civil war, to move to a new place across the street, which he shared with the administration of the transport company Alsina Graells, located on the ground floor.

The original Radio Maymó became the Radio Maymó School and, not content with giving training classes in the city of Barcelona, ​​it soon opened new offices in Madrid, Valencia and later reached various cities in South America.

Subsequently, and given the fever of citizens to become a communication technician and the problems involved in opening new branches, he created and patented a new teaching modality, which was the creation of teaching through correspondence courses. It was quite a boom in the middle of the last century.

With the establishment of the correspondence courses of which he was the author and editor, in the advertisements inserted in the press and on the radio itself he made the phrase "To success through practice" fashionable, which quickly became famous in the advertising world.

Each student face-to-face or by correspondence four theoretical books (divided two of technical lessons, one with all the formulas known to date and a room dedicated to knowing practical actions).

In order to obtain the diploma of technician, each student (either in the face-to-face classes or in the correspondence courses) received a box with the necessary components of radio circuits to be able to build a receiver with a germanium diode, a feedback, a low frequency and a tube AM/FM superheterodyne, with any power supply (a tester and a frequency signal generator).

All this in order that, at the end of the course, he would have built his own radio set and be able to receive his official title of radio technician.

With the announcement of the arrival of television in the world of communication in 1948, in October 1955 he launched the first theoretical-practical course on television that made him a pioneer in the teaching of radio and television by correspondence in Spain.

In 1956, he created the first closed-circuit television broadcast at the San Carlos hospital in Madrid, in which he demonstrated the advantage represented by the use of this new technique, not only for treatments, but also in the dissemination of new methods. clinical and surgical in medical education and in holding conferences and congresses.

Fernando Maymó died on August 31, 1966, at the age of 69 in Sant Andreu de Llavaneres. He succeeded Miguel Casas in the direction.

The premises, which had been abandoned by the transport company Alsina Graells, closed its doors in 1992 after an uncertain period. They moved to l'Hospitalet de Llobregat on calle Santiago Apóstol, 29-31.

The place was abandoned, becoming a shelter, where homeless people began to live. The building and the garden fell into disrepair, with arson and fights between the inhabitants of the building where the old school was.

After the site was vacated and vacated in 1997, it was acquired by the company Núñez y Navarro, which redeveloped the land. He turned a part into the Hotel Jazz and the rest, into a connecting passage between Calle Pelayo and Ronda de Universidad.