Radio broadcast .. (1922-30)

504 Radio Broadcast must make the sets valuable to purchasers. Hence the broadcasting. Hence, too, the excellence of the broadcasted programmes, for the better the entertainment the larger the audience. In arranging for the opening of their Chicago station the Westinghouse radio men found a willing ally in Miss Mary Garden, then director general of the Chicago Opera Company. Efforts were being made to enlist the public generally in support of opera. Wealthy guarantors were wearying of paying the bills. Miss Garden and her associates in the management of the company were appealing to all Chicago to back the enterprise out of civic pride. The suggestion that opera be broadcasted by radio was] welcomed. Grand opera isanexoticdish. Taste for it is not instinctive, but acquired. Miss Garden saw in the broadcasting plan a chance to instill a liking for good music A FAMILY PARTY Some boys get the radio fever when very young in thousands of minds outside the range of any other appeal, and so the plan was adopted. The story of the amazing manner in which the Chicago Opera Company obtained a nightly audience hundreds of times greater than the capacity of any theater in the world has been told so often that to repeat it here would be useless. It is enough to say that every opera given by the company in the winter season was broadcasted by Station KYW so that the ears, at least, of all the Middle West were in the Auditorium Opera House six nights a week. The consequences were amazing. In Chicago at the opening of the opera season were approximately 1,300 radio sets. Announcement of the fact that opera was to be broadcasted started a clamor for equipment. As the season advanced and professional critics added their praises of radio transmission to the ecstatic comments of radio enthusiasts the clamor in creased. To "listen in" on the opera became the most fashionable and popular of winter sports. Home, it seemed, couldn't be home without a radio set. But no radio sets were on the market ! Manufacturers and dealers had not foreseen such a demand. Who could have forseen it? Until the fall of 1920, radio sets were not very ssleable. Only industrial users and a comparatively few "experimenters" wanted them. As well have tried putting turbine engines in the household furnishing field. After the first rush nothing was left for the hundreds of frantic radio customers save "bootleg stuff" — sets rebuilt or manufactured in defiance of patent restrictions. And all the while the finest opera in America literally was wasting its fragrance on the desert air. Came then the small boy to the rescue. He is the hero of Chicago's radio drama, the small boy is. Frank Conrad, who began the broadcasting, and H. P. Davis, who established the "granddaddy station" at East Pittsburgh, and Miss Mary Garden, who made broadcasting of opera possible, have their places in the cast, but the fellow in the spotlight is the American boy. The normal Yankee youngster's insatiable desire to "see what makes it go" always has been a stimulant to mechanical progress. Every American invention from the cotton gin to the airplane has felt the boy's influence. Tinkering in their impromptu backyard workshops, young Whitneys and Edisons and Wrights have done important things in mechanics, simply out of boyish curiosity about what's inside the darn thing. Just as their grandfathers fiddled with bicycles and their fathers with automobiles, the young Chicagoans of 1921 began fiddling with the radiophone. And presently the number of radio sets in KYW's field had tripled, although the dealers in electrical supplies had only one