NBC Transmitter (Jan-Nov 1942)

JULY 1942 7 f RADIO'S GREAT POST-WAR FUTURE 0. B. Hanson Sees Tremendous Engineering Gains After Victory I #Just about everybody in radio, or int terested in radio, is wondering what will |l happen to the industry when the last bomb 4 has fallen and the quiet of peace returns to a harassed world. 0. B. Hanson, NBC vice-president and I chief engineer, foresees the stringent conI ditions of wartime operation followed by a post-war period of intense technical innovation and development. The reason, he finds with the engineer’s logic, lies in the , fevered pace of radio development for war. All applied science, he says, takes tremendous forward steps under the relentless pressure of a battle for existence. “Let’s see if we can find a parallel in past experience,” he said the other day at Radio City. “We went into the last war with wireless telegraphy; came out with wireless telephony. That’s where radio broadcasting got its start, just about two years after the Armistice in 1918. “Now we’re at war again. We’ve gone into it with some aspects of radio at a pretty high level of development. More important for the future, however, are the little-developed projects, even ideas, of science. Radio, like every other industry, had a lot of these before Pearl Harbor. I'bey were going forward at normal, peacetime rates of progress, finding gradual application to operations. “But war doesn’t allow for normal living and working. Men pool ideas, experience and laboratories. Every sera]) of technical knowledge is searched for its possible use in carrying the nation to victory. As long as we are at war all this will be the exclusive property of the armed forces; but when peace comes again all the ingenious devices, all the wealth of intense wartime research and most of the men who now are busy in the nation’s laboratories will revert to civilian life.” No secret is the fact that radio figures in practically every movement of men and motors, ships and planes in World War II. But hidden from the public and from prying enemy agents alike are the designs and devices created on drawing boards and laboratory work benches to make America’s military the mightiest the world has ever seen. Until peace returns, as Hanson pointed out, the civilian will know little or nothing of the immense treasures of research and development being piled up in wartime. But if they are in proportion to the vastness of science’s application to war in 1942, the forward surge of radio, once the Nazi scourge has been cleared from the earth, shouhl be almost beyond calculation. Consider what came out of the first World War after the (iernian threat had been turned back in I ranee. I'he world went into that holocaust with a horseand-buggy civilization. .Men’s minds traveled the dusty roads of tradition. Out of the war came a new world; new -scale industries— motor car, radio, aviation. And new men to pilot these industries to greatness. Hanson was one of tho.se young men. British-born, he was a gangling kid up in Hartford, Connecticut, when Germany’s Ublans swept through Belgium into northern France. He was working in a typewriter factory, but he already had some ideas about radio. A couple of years before that the ill-fated Titanic had rammed an iceberg with appalling results, but the spectacular rescues effected through radio — it was wireless then — made the world sit up and take notice. Hanson was one of the kids who rigged up “ham,” or amateur, stations, as a result. He went to sea as Marconi operator on British liners after completing a course in wireless at New York. One of his ships, the Stephano, was sunk off Nantucket Light in 1916 by the famous U-53, the submarine that started the business of torpedoing vessels on this side of the Atlantic. Hanson came ashore early in 1917, went to work at the Marconi company’s plant at Aldene, N. J. The factory hummed with war work. But the war ended and business fell off. Hanson took another turn at sea. this time on South American runs, before returning to Hartford to set up an electrical business. He sold out in 1921. He was soon back in radio, this time in broadcasting. His work at Station WAAM, Newark, where Hanson was practically the entire staff, attracted the attention of officials at {Continued on page 15) NBC BEPOBTERS HOME FROM ENEMY LANDS Paul Fisher (left) and David Colin returned to the United States recently after internment in Axis countries. Fisher, former Berlin correspondent, and Colin, who reported from Italy, revealed many startling facts regarding life behind enemy borders.