Radio Broadcast (May-Oct 1922)

RADIO BROADCAST 157 tude and the rest gradually die away while the undamped waves have every wave at maximum value. For this reason, the energy of each undamped wave is in this case about five times the average energy of the damped wave, providing the maximum amplitude of the damped wave has the same value as the undamped wave's amplitude. Thus the energy in a dot carried by the undamped wave is 25 times the energy in a dot carried by the damped waves. This is a great advantage, especially as it does not take much more power to generate the undamped waves than it does to generate the damped waves. It is because of the above reason that practically all long-distance radio telegraphy is carried on by undamped waves. These waves also permit of a method of reception which greatly enhances their value over damped waves, though it is more difficult and requires more apparatus. There are other advantages of undamped waves which will be considered as more is learned about the radio art. The Pacific Coast Is "On the Air! By WILBUR HALL THIRTY years a Californian, I can remember three "crazes" that have swept the state and with it Oregon, Washington, and the contiguous mountain states, like measles in a boarding school. Twenty years ago we went mad over Belgian hares. We paid as high as ^2,500 for a buck, and some of the gold cups presented to "best young does" and "best Imp. sires" were big enough to float a yacht in. To-day the Belgian hare is worth just what he'll bring for frying, and no more. Ten years ago (or such a matter) we went dippy over roller skating. It was being done, and the liniment market was extremely bullish, while fortunes were made by the manufacturers of ball bearings, electric pianos, and court plaster. To-day roller skating is practised exclusively on the front sidewalk, and the only doctor's bills are paid by stout gentlemen who can't get out of the way quickly enough. The third period or era of the Far West may come to be called the " loose coupler-detectorand-one-stage-of -amplification age." Instead of their symptoms, elderly women on our boats and trains and in our sewing societies discuss the number of stages of amplification necessary for DX reception. Women's clubs have abandoned the question of whether or not Bacon wrote Shakespeare, and are forming cliques over the dispute: "Who should be eliminated from the short wave-lengths?" Business men ruin their digestions at noon, not with politics or financial rows, but with deep discussions involving the Heising constant current system of modulating the oscillator tube output. As for the boys (and a good many of the girls) their cry is: "Hey, Skin-nay; c'mon over! I'm getting the band concert at Catalina!" Despite the fact that in the neighborhood of San Francisco there are located two or three of the earliest and most important radio telephony laboratories of the country, and the further fact that it was from here that several of the most vital improvements in the new service originally came, especially during the war, the average man on the street had never more than vaguely heard of radio until two months ago. Amateur operators, mostly boys, had been dabbling with wave-lengths and detectors and all the other mysterious factors and agencies; perhaps a hundred men were working at it — experimenting, testing, inventing, installing, improving, and looking forward to the big rush that was to come. But the layman gave it the same attention as he did the newspaper stories that the Akooned of Swat was to take unto himself another wife. All of a sudden it hit us ! The first most of us saw of it, beyond random and rather dull newspaper and magazine accounts of developments, was in first-page, firstcolumn headlines from New York, not over two months ago, proclaiming that the East had gone mad over radio. Within twelve hours the interest swept the Coast.