Radio age (Jan 1927-Jan 1928)

RADIO AGE for January, 1927 The Magazine of the Hour 11 What's Wrong With Broadcasting? By ROBERT J. CASEY WHEN Thomas Edison sounded off some weeks ago on the subject of Radio and its manifold deficiencies, he stirred up more typographical conversation than could be found in the national output of alphabet soup. "Radio," said Mr. Edison — interrupt me if I quote him incorrectly— "Radio has ceased to be a novelty and is now an affliction. It is consecrated to the dissemination of blah and symptoms of adenoids. I would much rather listen to a phonograph." Mr. Edison must have known what he was getting into when he made this pronouncement. At any rate he got into it. Every official of every set factory in the country ignoring the publicity it might entail, took his stenographer in hand to answer Mr. Edison. Every soprano who ever got tuned out of a receiving set observed loudly but with becoming modesty that the sage of East Orange knew nothing at all about music. Every broadcaster in the country quit reading applause telegrams long enough to put Mr. Edison in his place and the great American indignation boiled and seethed for days and nights on end. Of course Mr. Edison was wrong. It is true that the phonograph at its worst moments never brought one the current news. There never was a record built that would deliver at one winding the first sixty-five ballots of a democratic convention or the play-by-play account of a world's series baseball game. On the other hand the most skillful engineers in the phonograph business have failed utterly to reproduce in wax the overtones of a simple but lovely heterodyne whistle. Some of the sounds of radio are the peculiar property of radio and will remain an object of continuing wonder until the ears of the coming generation grow calloused and unappreciative. | That Was No j Laon, That l ^~l WAS m \iJ\FE If Mr. Edison were to ask what has been the agency most responsible for the rise of radio to its present high state of efficiency, any city dweller could tell him off-hand. The credit is due entirely to the broadcasters. In England, where government control has put a curb bit on small town tenors, egg-beater salesmen, harmonica players, and surplus announcers, the benighted populace is still listening to stations a thousand miles away through aboriginal receivers such as the one-couplertwo-variometer thing that America discarded years ago. The ignorant broadcast listener thinks that a circuit is selective if it will separate stations a couple of hundred meters apart. And he has never given any thought or time to the solution of the so-called "interference problem." The fact that he is totally unacquainted with interference is, of course, a minor point. The poor blighter probably never will know how badly off he is and that is most distressing. In America, the land of the free hot air, development has been much more encouraging. Government invasion of public rights to the ether has been definitely stopped and at last we are beginning to get enough broadcasting stations to make things interesting. There is at least one station on every possible wave-length and generally two or three. What need to comment on the result? If Joe Bozo, leading coldin-the-head of the Hokeholm church choir, desires to make himself better known, he no longer has to journey to Europe for years of vocal culture or camp on the front steps of the impresarios of the Metropolitan opera company. Not Joe ! He gets himself a brace of fiftywatt bottles and starts a broadcasting station. The station may not be large — but then there is always a chance that some gent with insomnia in New Zealand may hear him some night when conditions are favorable — and posibly thereafter commit suicide. The talent may not be so good, but on the other hand this deficiency is always compensated for by the modulation which isn't very good either. Joe cracks his merry quips into his microphone every night and so gets a lot of publicity within a radius of twenty-five miles at an expense far less than that which would have been entailed had he decided to reach the populace of the same territory by postal card. HOKEHOLM gets to know Joe very well — so well indeed that when he is mysteriously murdered, which ought