Radio age (Jan-Dec 1924)

RADIO AGE for May, 1924 The Magazine of the Hour 25 T IWO years ago we printed the first issue of RADIO AGE. As an experiment we planned to run off a thousand magazines with which to test public interest in the then very youthful diversion. We asked newsdealers if they could use such a publication and their answer caused us to make that first issue ten thousand, instead of one thousand. Since then we have grown steadily until last month's total issue, if laid one magazine upon the other, would make a pile of paper approximately as high as the tip of the Woolworth Building tower. With this number we celebrate our second anni versary. We have found radio fans to be pleasant company in these two busy years. They are an earnest, good-natured lot. They have determination and they are thorough. Many of our readers have mastered every circuit from the crystal set up to the multiple-tube receivers and the radio knowledge of the average fan as revealed by canny questions and criticisms is something to be marvelled at. Only by sitting at the editorial desk and reading the vast volume of correspondence from all parts of the United States and Canada, not to mention the letters from places beyond seas, may one realize how firmly radio has taken hold of the world. The editor's aerial, which once enjoyed a dignified solitude upon the editorial roof, now has so many companions that when we gaze upon the maze of v/ire we are reminded of certain places on the West front whence the Germans had withdrawn, leaving their entanglements behind them. In our first issue, May, 1922, we mentioned the fact that there were 600 radio fans in Cincinnati. It was intended as a statement which would prove the popularity of the art. At the present writing the Crosley Radio Corporation in Cincinnati is endeavoring to bring its production of only one of its various types of receivers to a total of 1,000 sets a day! Chicago had one broadcasting station and it now has eight. The boy who was rigging up a coil and a crystal is now building one of the super-sets and is not satisfied with anything less than coast to coast reception. We took the liberty, a year ago, of making a predic tion as to the future growth of radio. We were optimists then and so are we on this birthday anniversary. And so are about seven million operators of receiving sets in our forty-eight states. In short, RADIO AGE is glad it was born at about the time broadcasting was beginning. The progress of popularized radio is something worth while having been associated with DCJ a MORE and more is radio to lose its seasonal aspects and, like the automobile, it will be a year-round necessity. Early in the life of the industry it was taken for granted that the public would not carry receiving sets with them when they fared forth on summer travels. But the portable out fit has changed the situation. Nowadays a radio enthusiast may carry his or her receiver in a compact case and whether the journey is to be by automobile or boat it will be easy to take one's music and other entertainment and enjoy them in camp or at the summer resort hotel or cottage. In this number we offer a variety of suggestions for making and installing receivers particularly adaptable for the outing season. Manufacturers are preparing to supply the demand for compact portable outfits. We predict that the trade will be agreeably surprised at the way radio holds up from now until autumn. This is to be radio's greatest year. Broadcasting will not be interrupted. On the contrary all stations will be on the alert for best means of responding to the national interest in the approaching election. Sports, as never before, will receive attention of the fans. Many a cigar store and corner pharmacy will have a receiver installed with which to get earliest intelligence as to whether the Red Sox scored on the White Sox. The ear phones and the loud speaker will supplant the newspaper scoreboard in many instances. Radio's lightning speed will not be overlooked when the public is interested, and it will become the universal servant of the great American curiosity. □ a a no ac a RADIO has called out the landswehr. As in the war the younger recruits first answered the call to the colors, then those more mature, then the middle-aged and finally the elders. Grandfather is one of us. He has been through the various phases, including the buying of a crystal set for the grandson, the giving of a tube outfit to his daughter, and now he has his own distance-getter installed in the living room or the library and he rolls his own when it comes to tuning in. He isn't going to miss any political' speeches this summer — not if the tubes and batteries stand up! And if some of the baseball scores are announced when he is listening in he is not going to resent it. A few minutes of stock quotations or grain market figures will not annoy him. And, later on in the evening, if some studio songster sings "Silver Threads Among the Gold'" or "When I Think of the Days That Are Gone, Maggie," well, the Old Boy is not going to miss his erstwhile game of cribbage or his editorial page very, very much. Granddad probably will not devote so much time to winding coils and hooking up a circuit as some of the rest of us, but the radio set has taken its permanent place beside the big easy chair and Grandma is there near him. Mr. Announcer and Mr. Program Director will do well not to forget them. Bedtime stories and jazz music, if you will, but let us give them in full measure the best that youthful radio has for the old 'uns.