We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
7/7/39
other factual information and material necessary to determine the social and economic effects of power in excess of 50 kilowatts and that in so doing the Federal Communications Commission shall not be restrained from licensing one or more than one station or stations to operate on power of more than 50 kilowatts for such experimental operation as may be thus necessary. ”
Explaining the resolution to the House, Representative Larrabee said:
"It is a strange paradox that the very people to whom radio can mean the most and to whom radio offers most are the same people ^0 receive its benefits least satisfactorily. With city reception having been improved year in and year out for many years, has not the time come when we should consider meeting this issue squarely and fairly rather than attempting to solve the problem by ignoring it? We are certainly glad and delighted that even a lowsalaried wage earner in many medium and largesized cities can secure the best in radio by going to the comer drug store and buying a set at ^9.99, but the day will come when those of us who have been chosen to represent the people will have to explain why we have fostered rules and regulations on the part of an administrative body which forces our country and small-town people to pay $50 and $100 for receivers needlessly when by the sii^le expedient of providing them, as is done in other countries, with a signal somewhat stronger, the expense is placed squarely on the shoulders of the broadcaster, where it belongs, and not on the already overburdened pocketbooks of our citizens. There are many parts of the country where even the most expensive sets cannot be substituted for an inadequate signal.
"Despite the Commission’s finding of fact that from a technical and economic standpoint high power is not a Franken¬ stein, the Commission has arbitrarily refused to relax its regula¬ tions and permit progressive American broadcasting stations to compete with stations in Mexico, Cuba, France, Germany, England, and Soviet Russia which now operate with power not fixed at 50 kilowatts, but running even beyond 850 kilowatts. Some of these countries which use power in excess of 50 kilowatts cover less area on the map than the State of Indiana, yet the whole United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, is denied this type of radio reception,
"That high-power stations would not create a monopoly in the air has ably been demonstrated by facts which were part of the records and have been at the Federal Communications Commission since 1922. In those years, when existing radio stations made an attempt to increase their power from 20 to 50 vatts, competitor stations raised a cry of "super-power". The same cry spread when stations were generally advanced from 500 watts to 1 kilowatt. Again, when station owners prepared to increase power to 5 kilo¬ watts, it was generally pointed out that this would create a monopoly of the air. Of course no such thing occurred, and will not occur in the event the Commission decides to permit the use of power in excess of 50 kilowatts. The term * superpower' is only
3