Radio broadcast .. (1922-30)

RADIO BROADCAST wants a radio set and the family — What size wire shall 1 use, and should the joints be soldered— ?" In the ferry boat and in the subway trains we hear of wavelengths, frequencies, capacities, tubes, amplifiers, etc. in connection with strange combinations of letters — KYY, KDKA, and what not. The teacher of radio, judging by the number of applicants for membership in his classes, finds that his subject is really just as important as he always thought it was and perhaps even more so. He finally sees the whole world "coming to its senses" just as the phonograph salesman sees the whole world losing its senses in the same process. But to probably no other group of men has this tremendous interest in radio come with more force than to the manufacturers of radio apparatus. Anything they could make, good or poor, could be sold before the varnish was scarcely dry. And speed up the shop processes as much as they could the pace was too fast and they fell behind in filling orders. And when the American manufacturer, in a time of general depression such as has existed for the last two years, owns up to the fact that he cannot keep his output to the demand, it is safe to conclude that the rate of increase in the demand for his apparatus has indeed been phenomenal. The movement is probably not even yet at its height, it is still growing in some kind of geometrical progression. There are to-day probably five hundred thousand receiving stations in the United States, although, of course, any such statement must be based largely on conjecture. It seems quite likely that before the movement has reached its height, before the market for receiving apparatus becomes approximately saturated, there will be at least five million receiving sets in this country. This means that before many years there will be from ten to twenty million people who can be reached by radiophone communication. These millions of people will be dependent upon a few broadcasting stations for their amusement and "up to the minute" news; over the policies and conduct of these transmitting stations this vast army of listeners will have no influence at all, unless some movement for organization is started which is not yet evident. It might well be thought that there is nothing strange in the situation, that in many other activities in which the public has invested a deal of money, and upon which it is very dependent, a similar condition of helplessness exists for those who have invested. But closer examination of the question shows this to be not so. If our surmise as to the number of radio receiving stations in the near future is correct, then the situation, in so far as amount of money invested by the public, the number of persons interested, etc., may be somewhat similar to that of the telephone or phonograph. The telephone subscriber invests perhaps fifty dollars a year for which he gets certain privileges; to get the return on his fifty dollars the company must keep their lines in condition — if they don't the subscriber gets little for his money. But the company does keep up its lines because they expect the subscriber to invest another fifty dollars the next year and so on, so it is to their interest to maintain their service from the standpoint of sales. Also if the lines are not kept in such condition as to render the subscriber satisfactory service, a public utility commission will order them to be so kept. With the lines kept in useable condition the subscriber gets his money's worth; he can telephone when and where he likes. For this privilege the subscriber pays. The man wjio invests in a radio outfit however has no such choice; he can simply listen. Of course it is conceivable that he might also have a transmitting outfit and he would then have the same possibility the telephone subscriber has. Such a possibility is extremely remote; instead of increasing the number of transmitting stations in the future in proportion to the number of receiving stations, it seems likely that there will be but little increase, and this increase will include none but public broadcasting stations. The general public therefore must always play the role of listener merely, when it comes to radio. The man who purchases a phonograph is practically dependent upon the manufacturer to get any good out of his investment. For example, if some new type of phonograph should be produced with records cut in such a special way that no one else could furnish them, then the owner of this phonograph would be entirely dependent upon the manufacturer to make his investment good. In this case the manufacturer will naturally furnish as many good records as possible because there is money in the game for him. But if the records had to be supplied to the owner of the phonograph at cost, so that there was no profit in it for the manufacturer, he would probably cut new records just long enough to sell sufficient phono