Radio age research, manufacturing, communications, broadcasting, television (1941)

JOHN MAC VANE, NBC WAR REPORTER IN ALGIERS, BROADCASTING TO THE UNITED STATES FROM ALLIED NORTH AFRICAN HEADQUARTERS. something. But in several months of painstaking effort I will swear I never was able to get any story into the paper about the chief without something going wrong. The slug with his name would be accidentally turned, the spacing would be off, or the name would be misspelled, even after the most careful proof-read- ing on my part. Regular news broadcasts from abroad had been the business of radio for several years prior to the Munich crisis of 1938, but that event made them almost a daily ne- cessity from then on. With the devil's brew of Europe thickening day by day, the National Broadcast- ing Company at once multiplied its foreign staff of reporters many times over. Instead of offices only in London, Paris, Geneva and Shanghai, a foreign staff was swiftly recruited in every impor- tant capital in the world, especially those of the likely belligerent nations. Reporters Standing By There were three requisites for membership on this staff—first. knowledge of news; second, a good speaking voice; and third, Amer- ican citizenship. Long before the actual outbreak of war, there were NBC reporters in every European capital and most of those in South America, as well as in Tokyo, Manila. Batavia, Singapore, Syd- ney, Alaska, and scattered through- out Africa from Cairo to Johannes- burg. Today—four years later—• only two of those forty-five report- ers are still at their same posts. They are John MacVane in London and Grant Parr in Cairo. The others have been shifted to other points, or have been recalled home, or are in Japanese internment camps. Their successors are carry- ing on. Today, several important news areas have been eliminated from American loudspeakers, principally Berlin, Tokyo and Rome. In addi- tion to Axis territory, listeners hear only occasionally from the neutral countries in Europe, although NBC is well staffed in every neutral cap- ital there. These reporters are continually standing by for word from New York that they are want- ed in front of their microphones, either for a special program or for the daily NBC roundups of inter- national news at 8:00 a.m. and 7:15 p.m., EWT. Each Thursday, radio- grams go out from New York tell- ing each reporter abroad, to the exact minute and second, just what broadcasting time has been as- signed him for each day of the fol- lowing week. These radiograms may read like this: "ROMAG MOSCOW WANT 1208 1210 TUESDAY THURSDAY SATURDAY ALSO 2319 2321 MONDAY ETTHURSDAY RETURNING NEWYORKWARD CONFIRM" This sounds like nonsense, but the numerals are Greenwich Mean Time. Instead of radioing Henry Cassidy in Moscow that he should be prepared to broadcast from 8:10- 8:12 a.m. EWT, on the following Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, a time is given to him in Greenwich Mean Time. Greenwich Mean Time means ten minutes after noon in Greenwich, England, where the par- allels of longitude begin. All he has to do is consult a chart which tells him what time it is in Moscow when it is 12:10 p.m. in Greenwich, England. That is the time that he goes to the Studio in Radiocenter Moscow, and begins his broadcast. Cassidy has no contact with NBC in New York or anywhere else just be- fore or during his broadcast. He arranges with Radiocenter to broadcast his talk by short wave from Moscow on certain regular frequencies—for instance, 15,750 kilocycles for the 8:00 a.m. show in New York and 11,948 kilocycles for the 7:15 p.m. program. RCA Relays Signal Meanwhile, NBC in New York has given an order to Radio Cor- poration of America to pick up a signal of the Moscow Radio on those assigned frequencies at that exact time. RCA picks up the signal at Riverhead, New York, far out on Long Island, and feeds it over tele- phone lines to the master control desk in NBC. From there, it is fed to the studio where the news pro- gram is being conducted. Then, just ten seconds before Cassidy is due to start broadcasting in Moscow, the "m.c." of the news show—who may be either John W. Vandercook, W. W. Chaplin, or some other well known news commentator—will say something like this: "Our next re- port comes from Henry Cassidy in Moscow. We take you now with the speed of light to the capital of the Russian Soviet. Come in Moscow." Moscow is a "blind" pickup. That is, Cassidy starts on a time basis because Moscow Radio cannot con- tact RCA by short wave, due prin- cipally to the Russian censorship. Even at points where censorship is lenient—such as Chungking and Algiers—we sometimes have diffi- culty contacting them due to sun spots or other atmospheric disturb- ances, depending even on the time of day or night the broadcast is attempted. But if censors and at- mospherics permit, RCA in New York can converse with the foreign broadcast point and arrange final details for the pickup, to the point of telling the pickup point "Go ahead" at exactly the time that the cue is given on the network by the NBC announcer. This calls for perfect conditions and split-second cooperation by half a dozen operating points, including the commentator in the studio, the announcer who is pushing the but- tons on the announcer's panel for his microphone, his production man [12 RADIO AGE]